Hi, everyone. We are getting started right now. This upcoming keynote is called Celebrating
25 Years of Open Source. Our speaker is going to be Nick Vidal.
Thank you. Good morning. Bonjour. J.O.'s anniversary. Happy birthday, Open Source. 25 years. Yeah.
So, I had a pleasure to work with the OSI five years ago, together with the board of directors,
and it was a huge success. We organized 100 activities across 40 events worldwide, all the major
Open Source conferences, and we plan to do this again this year. 25 years is a huge milestone
for the Open Source community, and we need you to help celebrate this.
So, I'm going to tell a bit about the history of Open Source. That's 25 years, but before then,
we also have the history of free software, and I'm going to attempt to give a talk about this
in about 30 minutes. Let's see how that goes. I have a couple of milestones, a couple of timelines,
and let's see. So, I've created a timeline here. I'm going to give three talks, three timelines,
actually three acts. I'm going to first talk about the past of Open Source. Later, I'm going to talk
about the future of Open Source, and finally, I'm going to talk about the present of Open Source.
For the past of Open Source, I'm going to be covering 12 timelines, but mostly I'll be focusing on the
Open Source timeline and on the free software timeline. So, let's get started. So, I'm going to...
So, let's go... Before talking about Open Source, let's go to the free software timeline.
You can actually access this. It's aniv.co, and let's go here, and let's go back to 1955.
So, this is a long time ago, and in 1955, we had the share user group. So, this was part of IBM way
back then, and people were starting to share source codes, and this is how these mindsets of sharing
codes, and there was no Open Source back then. There was no free software back then, but these mindsets
was already there. This is akin to the human. They always shared knowledge, and so they started
sharing codes with the share user group, and later we can see here that this is a funny one.
If anyone remember the Open Letter to Hobbits, so Bill Gates was not very keen to people sharing
his codes, and he was very angry about that. So, everyone shared their codes before, and with Bill Gates
coming and other companies, they started making the source codes proprietary, and looking at that,
Richard Stallman, he didn't like it. A lot of developers didn't like this, and they created a movement
to go back to how it was before, about sharing knowledge, about sharing codes, about just making
progress, and so he started GNU in 1983. 1985, he founded the Free Software Foundation, and also
the next year, the definition of free software, so I'm going to go over this, and this is really
important, probably most of you know, but it's always good to repeat this. So, the definition
of free software is the freedom to run the program as you wish. That's the definition zero.
One, the freedom to study how the program works and change it. Number two, the freedom to redistribute
copies to your neighbors, and the third one, the freedom to distribute copies of modified
versions to others. So, these are the basics. This is the basic definition of free software.
In 89, there was created the GPL. A lot of people use GPL still today. It's one of the main
licenses. We have the software in public interest. This was very important for Debian projects,
and as you see in the open source timeline, the Debian projects shares a lot of similarities
with the OSI, because Bruce Perlens was there, and he was fundamental on that. So, we have
the software freedom conservancy that was created in 2006. The GPL version three released in
2007, and that's the timeline for the free software. Of course, this is an overview. If
I miss something, please, this is available on GitHub, and you can propose a milestone to be
added. Now, let's go back and go to the open source timeline. So, open source is not actually
something that came out of nowhere. It has always been inspired by the free software
movements, and those two are not different. The open source is a continuation of the free
software movements. So, one of the key books that was very relevant at the time was the
Cathedral and the Bazaar that was published by Eric Raymond, and this book compared how
software was developed on systems like Linux, which was very chaotic sometimes, but it worked,
and how it was developed in proprietary software. It was a very, it was a waterfall model, and
it was comparing those two models and explaining how building together in this distributed
manner still works, even for complex systems like Linux or Sand Mayo. So, this book inspired
a Netscape to make it open source. They wanted to attract global developers to help with their
software. And finally, Christine Peterson, she created the open source label. So, this is
really interesting to highlight. How many of you knew that a woman was responsible for
coining the term open source? Please raise your hands. You see, I only saw a few hands raised,
and this is really important. The reason why we're here today talking about open source is
because of a woman, so that's really special. And so, Christine, she wanted to, the reason why
she created the label open source is that she wanted to make it really friendly for business to
realize the importance of free software. But the free software label was not very well
accepted. It was kind of, it didn't work out, but with the open source label, it was really
magical, and everything just went really well. So, the open source initiative was founded in
February with Eric Raymond and Bruce Perence from the Debian Project. The definition was
created based on the Debian free software guidelines. So, as you can see, the Debian
Project and the OSI has a very strong relationship since the very beginning. We had the open
source summits happening that year. As you can see, Tim O'Reilly, he started promoting this as
well, a very good marketing just from the beginning, with a lot of people, like Linus from
the Linux, Larry Wall from Pearl, Brian from Apache, Eric from Sand Mail, Guido from
Python. So, a lot of very, very well-known developers got together to promote open source and
this new label. Of course, not everyone was happy about this popularity of open source,
and one example is Microsoft. So, they started spreading a lot of fuzz, and we have the famous
Halloween documents as well that was leaked, and they really wanted, they had a strategy
to kill open source and free software, which was the idea of, extends the software and
create proprietary things that they wouldn't share back and to break open source. And they
really did try to kill open source at the beginning. So, in 1999, we had the OSI lessons list,
and the OSI logo, the keyhole, was created as well in 1999, and it's this one here.
At the time, there were a lot of lessons that were coming out, and this was challenging
from a legal perspective, because this created a lot of confusion. So, one of the very important
roles from the OSI was an attempt to bring all those lessons together, to see which ones
were compatible or not, and to highlight only the main ones, so we wouldn't have a proliferation
of several lessons, which would be just very confusing. So, the main ones, the most popular
ones, are the Apache, the BST, the GPL, and MIT, and they're still very popular today.
And five years ago, while we were celebrating the 20 years of open source, I'm not sure
if you remember the Commons clause and other lessons that came at that year, they were
trying to really say, hey, we're open source, but you can't share this, you can't distribute
this. So, this is a case of open source, it's not really open source, and the OSI board
and everyone involved, while we were celebrating the anniversary, we were really fighting to
defend the open source definition, and I think we have succeeded. So, I attempted to give
you an overview of the history of free software and of open source, and it's not just that.
This was inspired, and has inspired a lot of movements. We have the free culture movements
as well, highlighted by the Wikipedia. Wikipedia is about sharing knowledge, about sharing contents,
about creating encyclopedia that everyone can help and everyone can edit.
We can also discuss the role of open source in business, and how this has helped. So,
this is a huge timeline. Susie, for example, is a very important company here in Germany,
and it was founded in 1992. Red Hat is celebrating 30 years this year, and it was an example
that you can actually create a billion-dollar business using only free and open source
software. So, this was really important, and if you want to check out, there are so many
stories here. So, we have Susie, Red Hat, Ubuntu, and Droids. I think it's important
to highlight also Automatic, the company behind WordPress. So, today we have several people
who use WordPress and develop WordPress and provide services using free and open source
software, and there's a whole bunch of examples here on this timeline. If you want to check
out, that's great. We also have open governments, how open source has influenced how governments
are run, trying to make the government as transparent as possible to publish those
documents and to allow citizens to help with the city, with the states, with the country,
by really looking and making the government more transparent and more engaging. Open
knowledge as well. So, the Internet Archive is trying to create a collection of everything
digital, making books, digital games, music, and there's a lot of movements around open
knowledge as well. We have open hardware as well, which is essential. How open source
and free software has influenced open education as well. We have OERs, which allows people
to share contents around education. The open web, this is, of course, one of the main ones.
We follow an open web, it's very challenging. So, the web has to be open, right? Linux,
of course, one of the main applications. Free software, we already saw this timeline.
The importance of open access and open science and having reproducible science, right? And
lastly, open data, the importance of open data. Especially right now, with AI, we have
to have open data sets to help this and for people to collaborate. So, this is about the
past. Now, we're going to jump to the future. And I'm just going to highlight a few projects
which I'm really interested in. And I think this is the future of open source. Of course,
there are many other areas of interest, but we have the software build materials. This
was especially due to the vulnerability that has been happening recently. And the White House
in the US, they brought everyone together to discuss the role of open source in business
and in government and everywhere. And how it's important for us to have mechanisms that
can protect those software. So, one of them is software build materials. And this is being
championed by the open SSF and other organizations. This is really important. And basically, as
bombs, they allow developers to track the penises and vulnerabilities in software packages to
make sure that they are reliable. We also have SiegStore. And SiegStore is really important to
make sure they have a package that is authentic. So, it allows developers to assign those packages.
And so, nobody can tamper or compromise those packages. We finally have WebAssembly as well,
which is coming along. So, there's WebAssembly on the browser side, but there's also WebAssembly
on the server side, which is gaining a lot of importance. And one of the reasons why WebAssembly
is important is because of portability, security, and also performance. And WebAssembly has a huge
potential to allow open source to grow. Something that I'm really keen to working with as well
with Confidential Computing. We have a dev room that's happening here at FOSDOM around
Confidential Computing. And Confidential Computing is about encrypting data in use, in memory,
in the CPU. So, this will impact how we use the cloud today. When we use the cloud, there are
a lot of security issues. And by using Confidential Computing, we allow this to be more secure.
Finally, regarding AI, we have Bloom. So, people here probably have heard of Shats GPT, but
that's not open source. And one of the issues of not being open source is that we don't
allow researchers or anyone, any individual to look into the algorithm or look into the
models, the data sets. And Bloom is an attempt to do that. It's an European project, mostly,
but it has researchers from all over the world as well, attempting to create something on
open source AI. And this is really worth checking as well. And finally, we also have Stable
Diffusion. This is a project, a deep learning project that you can enter a field description
and it will generate an image for you. Again, the reason why it's important for you to have
something that's open is because you want to see what are the models, what are the data sets,
and research around that. And we want to have control over this. So, this, for me, is the
future of open source, some really interesting projects. And now I'm going to talk about the
presence of open source. So, this is the moment for you to celebrate open source. And I really
want you to celebrate here at FOSM. So, it's who here came alone? You don't have a colleague.
Please raise your hands. Did you come with a friend or are you alone? Okay, we have quite a few
hands. So, go to someone by your side and ask, what's your open source journey? How did you
get started with open source? Try to break the ice and share those stories. What are you
interested in? What's the future of open source for you? What are the projects that you're
working on? So, celebrate here at FOSM together with your colleagues. I would also like to
invite you to go to the State of OpenCon. This is a conference that's happening right after
FOSM in London. And there are 200 free tickets. If you want to attend this conference, usually the
ticket is 199 pounds. But if you go to the table of Open UK here at FOSM, you can get a free
ticket. And the conference is going to be very close to FOSM and it's nearby. You can take the
train and be there and just celebrate the 25 years of open source. And also, celebrate the
open source by creating your own personal timeline. You can fork this timeline and you can
share your story. Also, you can share the story of your projects. If you don't have an open
source project, you can look at other projects and create a story about your projects. Organize a
party at your organization, at your company, bring some cupcakes and share those photos with the
OSI. We'll be sharing that with others as well. So, you can share this. You can either tag the OSI
on Twitter, but preferably on Macedon as well. So, this one here is a nice picture of a celebration
in Japan, where they were celebrating the 20 years of open source. So, they just created, they
have a cake from the tux and they just shared the photos and the OSI shared those again. And
finally, I want to invite the OSI board of directors here for a special announcement to
celebrate the 25 years of open source. And so, thank you, everyone, and Jugos University.
Well, thank you. Thank you so much, Nick, for sharing this opportunity. Hello, everyone. I'm
Stefano Maffulio. I'm the executive director of the open source initiative. And it's a privilege to
be here to celebrate 25 years in February 1998. The open source initiative has been focusing a lot
in shaping with the open source definition. We've been shaping the conversations around
technology for the past 20 years. And the definition itself, the community that we have
created has influenced every technology that we have seen from the start of the internet,
cryptography, content right management, the software patents debate. We've been at the
center of everything that happened in technology in our society. But this is not about only
talking about the past. We are the stewards of the open source definition. As an organization,
we have maintained it for the community. And the community itself changes all the time. The
technology also changes. And we have to pay attention to these changes in order to adapt.
In the past year, the organization has been looking at AI and how the new technology is
making different from what we've seen before. This week and the next weeks, we're going to
have a few announcements. We're going to publish a report of the findings of the deep dive on
AI that we've done last year where we have interviewed experts in many different fields
on academia, practitioners of AI, developers, hackers, corporations doing artificial
intelligence, civil society, politicians, policymakers. And we have collected all the
thoughts, all the findings into one document that you can look at. And I can share with
you today just the very, the most important things that I've learned from this experience.
One is that artificial intelligence and AI systems, machine learning, reinforcement
learning, all these new modern systems, they require a huge amount of data. And that is
interesting to me because it clashes a lot with the thoughts that we already had with
privacy, for example. Collecting large amounts of data requires, to some extent, making
compromises about privacy and rights of the authors. Like the concept of copyright that
we always thought of, something that I've created, I have rights on. There is a new
right in town that is also being regulated. We have the right to data mining, which is
fairly new. And we have to try to find the strike a balance between these new rights,
personal rights, authors rights, and availability of data because the other side of the
spectrum is that large amounts of data can be amassed with large amounts of money and
resources. So hackers may not have the availability of creating suitable AI systems if we put
too many restrictions on data mining. That's one of the aspects that is going to be
highlighted in the report. The second one is that the legal systems, or actually
policymakers, are extremely interested in regulating this new field because it comes
with, it's extremely powerful. The systems we've seen running are very powerful and they
can create damage. Therefore, policymakers are paying attention and they want to
regulate it. We need to find a balance between having too much regulation and allowing
innovation. And the community needs to pay attention to this as it's happening. The
third and last piece in this, it's very tip of the iceberg is that the practitioners
of AI, developers of AI systems, researchers, professors, the academia levels are very
aware of the ethical aspects, the use of AI systems. They are aware of the fact that
they can be misused and they can create really bad damages to people and therefore
they are thinking very hard about regulating the use of systems. This is something
that the open source community has never really paid attention to. It's always
allowed for very freely use of software. It's part of the open source definition,
part of the free software definition, that you cannot stop, you cannot regulate
the use. But AI practitioners seem to be quite interested in doing just the opposite.
So we have to help them and talk to them a lot to understand their needs and to find
with them social norms, social rules that allow for collaboration that limit the amount
of damages that AI systems can do at the same time allow for the collaboration to
happen in a frictionless and permissionless way. So with that said, I really recommend
you to follow deepdive.opensource.org, go and listen to the podcasts if you have
not heard them already, listen to them. And we have also the report coming up so
you will be notified when it comes out. We have two more announcements to make.
One, we are reviewing the process that reviews the licenses. And we're going to
have a conversation in the legal dev room later today at one o'clock. And we also
have an announcement to make for which Deb, our director of policy, will talk more
about. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thanks again, Nick. I'm going to do a
three-minute announcement. So I'm Deb Bryant. I'm policy director for the U.S.
and I have also been involved with the United Nations over the last couple of
years helping them as they were developing registry for digital public goods.
Well, I'm very excited. You're the first to know, so you can socialize this, that
OSI is joining as an official member of the digital public goods alliance.
The DGBA is the initiative that has created a strategy to support the U.N.
sustainable goals through the use of open source software and open infrastructure.
If you're around tomorrow, there's a dev room that the foundation for public
code and the digital public goods alliance are co-hosting. They also have a stand
here so you can hear more about it. But as a public charity, we think it's important
for OSI to support those goals. We're very excited that there's a recognition of
the strong ingredient of open source and creating a more equitable world.
So thanks for letting us share that here. And I'm going to hand it back to Nick
to wrap up the session. Thanks, everybody.
All right. And to conclude, every celebration, every birthday needs sweets and desserts.
So we have a box here of Belgian chocolates. Of course. And stickers.
There are some special stickers from the OSI. So please pass it around and enjoy it.
Thank you.