In this week’s edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look at a new pan-European open data portal by the European Commission, WordPress.com going open source, and more!

Open source news roundup for November 21 – 27, 2015

Portal brings together open data from across Europe

Matthew Broersma wrote for TechWeek Europe about a new pan-European open data portal launched by the European Commission. This portal is designed to make open data sets more accessible, and to encourage the wider use of the data. This new portal is currently in beta testing and already includes 240,000 datasets from 34 European countries. Read the full article by Broersma, or news by the European Commission on this new portal.

WordPress.com goes open source

TechCrunch and many other news sites covered the news on a major update of WordPress.com. Codenamed Calypso, WordPress.com has been completely rewritten and is available as open source on GitHub. Fully separated from WordPress Core, it is built using JavaScript and API calls.

Open source powers South Tyrol eGovernment forms

The Italian province of South Tyrol is using an open source e-government forms system based on Orbeon, running on CentOS Linux. South Tyrol will be adding about 100 government forms per year over a period of three years to the new Orbeon forms engine. Davide Montesin, a software engineer helping the South Tyrol government, says “open source code has made easier the interoperability with local systems.” The open source forms system will also be made available to municipalities and other public administrations in the province. Read the full story by Gijs Hillenius on the open source observatory.

New Linux Foundation video highlights role of open source in 3D movies

The Linux Foundation has released another video in its “World without Linux” series. Christopher Tozzi wrote about this fourth video for The VAR Guy. In one of his other articles, a Q&A with Jennifer Cloer, vice president of communications at The Linux Foundation, you can read more about the background of the series.

In other news

Thanks, as always, to Opensource.com staff members and moderators for their help this week. Make sure to check out our event calendar, to see what’s happening next week in open source.