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FOSS in Holland

An overview of people and groups involved with FOSS in Holland can be found in the who-is-who (Dutch). This is a wiki, thus everybody can add themselves and groups they know of.

Finding FOSS

A nice overview of FOSS can be found on the www.ossl.nl site (Dutch).
Specifically for education here (Dutch).

Another place to look is Freshmeat. This is a comprehensive listing, more oriented at being complete than being useful at quickly finding commonly used software. Good for finding more obscore items and for keeping informed about new releases.

Yet another place to look is SourceForge. Although this lists many projects it's easy to get lost. Quite a few projects are only starting up or dead.

Finding a place for your project

If you are starting a project in your spare time, you probably don't want to pay $$$ for a website and developers facilities. Fortunately, most of this can be obtained for free. Many projects use SourceForge. They provide space for your website, maillists, downloads, a CVS server, etc. A similar, but smaller, site is Savannah, with GNU and non-GNU software.

Funding FOSS development

Developing software takes a lot of time and may require buying hardware. If you somehow can find a way to make money from the software you make, you can spend more time on developing it.

Bram Moolenaar has written an article on making money with FOSS. It is only available in Dutch! You can find a PDF here

In addition: A new way to make money with your website is sponsored links. These are small, hardly noticable and intended to raise the Google rating. Companies are interested in paying you around 100 euro per month if your website has a high Google rating. Much better than annoying advertisements. Look at the bottom of www.vim.org for example.

Legal assistance

If you need help with law related issues, you might find help at the Software Freedom Law Center. Their service was mentioned to be free.

FOSS in the Netherlands

These are organisations in the Netherlands that promote FOSS and coordinate use and development of FOSS.

VOSN   Vereniging Open Source Nederland. Concentrates on use and development of FOSS in companies.
opensource.nl   Dutch Open Source group. Has passed on most of their work to VOSN. The site is still useful though, since VOSN concentrates on companies. This could become the Dutch overall FOSS site if someone takes the effort to do it.
Stichting NLnet   Funds internet related FOSS development.
ISOC.nl   Internet Society. For everything related to internet. Sometimes funds FOSS projects.
OSOSS   Coordinates and promotes use of FOSS within the dutch governement.
OSSL   Open Source Software Labs. Promotes the use of FOSS. Has a website with useful information. Related to the local governement in Amsterdam through Cyburg.
OpenSource Nieuws   FOSS related news site.
OpenSource Ervaringen congres   Yearly congres about experiences with Open Source.
Ematic   Open Source Magazine. Has news items on their website.

Something wrong or missing? Please send a message to < Bram AT nluug.nl >.           Last modified: Mon Sep 13 2004 16:57:46 UTC +0200