After a call from Viviane Redding in november for a European strategy, the European Commission quietly published a document about .
In a big change from its usual neutral position, the document states that " For all new development, where deployment and usage is foreseen by parties outside of the Commission infrastructure, Open Source Software will be the preferred development and deployment platform".

A nice overview of the document can be found at The 451 Group.

Viviane Reding has called for a European strategy "that will allow the industry to develop a global leadership position in the on-line service economy". The advantages that Europe has to use include "the fact that 70% of open source developers worldwide are of European origin", even though "90% of the economic benefits of open source are being won by US companies". Her remarks were made during a presentation at the European Commission by Truffle Capital and Syntec informatique.