Today, I have a meeting with IPA to hear explanation of 2004 Open Source Software Base Consolidation Project, in an hour.

Result of 2004 activities:

• Enrich OSS assets
  • public offering: 13 projects (6+7)
    • http://www.ipa.go.jp/software/open/2004/result.html
  • priority theme
    • OSS performance/reliability evaluation and development of problem analysis tool
  • misc
    • IPA fonts
• Promotion of OSS usage
  • OSS performance/reliability evaluation and development of problem analysis tool
  • Publicity
  • Evidence Expreiment at School
• Forum
  • Japan OSS Promotion Forum
• International Cooperation
  • Northeast Asia OSS Promotion Forum
• Misc
  • OSS Room at IPA; for committee meetings, Working Groups

I claimed that IPA fonts would not be so good for OSS community, because IPA fonts itself were not considered as open source (in debian term, "non-free") and very ambigous about its license statements, thus we're trouble in adoption of IPA fonts in free distribution such as Debian.

I found some uncertain graphs in some reports in OSS performance/reliability evaluation and development of problem analysis tool, that is, no measure on axis, no explanation of the measure or so. It is not scientific graph, but would be marketic graph. I doubt these graphs are meaningful...

Anyway, most activities are focus on industry and/or government not on OSS community. I agree that OSS promotion to industry and/or government would be good, because it would be a way for free software community to get some power. However, I'm not sure that these activities are really effective for us. Based on IPA's explanation, I have to write evaluation summary report of the project by June 3rd.