C5.119 Report on Sustainability of the Software in the EDIT Platform for Cybertaxonomy

The EDIT contract and consortium agreement specify that software produced in the project will be put under a public license and be distributed as open source. Sustaining the EDIT Platform thus means supporting the open source environment that allows maintenance and further development of the Platform. All partners involved in Platform software development are committed to attracting further project funding to improve the Platform, and some such projects are already in place (PESI, SYNTH¬ESYS II, BHL-Europe) and an increasing number of applications are being submitted. Some partners have already declared their intention to make core staff time available to support Platform services or tools. In JPA5, with the core Platform software reaching maturity, a campaign is being conducted to both popularise and test the usability of Platform software. First results of this can already be seen, for example, some institutions have identified the Platform as the most suitable software for e-Flora development, and the partner hosting the Fauna Europaea Database has declared the intention to move that major checklist into the Platform environment.