I am going to talk today about, when I wrote the talk, I said open source collaboration,
but I think open collaboration more in general is maybe more appropriate.
And I think we have, as developers, don't allow me to touch code anymore, but you have
an amazing potential to make the world a better place.
So today I'd like to talk about, first of all, how, why open source is eating the world.
And I want to start with a bit of my personal journey that hopefully makes you understand
sort of the background that I'm coming from.
I started about 15 years ago in open source, and I had a lot more hair.
And I guess at the cost of aging myself, how many people know something called Apache
Cocoon?
Exactly.
I figured.
Exactly.
So I started in open source really because it was fun, because it was, I gotta say, also
a way for me to accelerate my career.
The opportunity to collaborate on the left side, you got my best friend, who still is
my best friend.
I made some of the, you know, my best friendships in open source, but the day that I got my
Apache email address, I still remember it.
I was so proud about, you know, being in the, you know, in between so many smart guys, effectively
much smarter than me, because I've been pretty much mainly release manager at that time.
I never really wrote super hardcore code, but that's where I started.
Really as a personal motivator.
Then I moved into, I had the luck to move to Holland, let's say in Italy, didn't really
have such a lively technology ecosystem in 2006.
And I had the luck of starting to get paid to do my open source work, whether it was
community open source, building SDKs, whether it is, you know, actually as part of my day
job, being able to be first a developer, then a product manager for the developer platform.
And not sure what I'm doing up there, but I guess clearly I was having a lot of fun
in Munich, or thereabouts.
Then I moved to the US.
I never really grew up with the American dream, let's just say that, but both for work and
for personal reasons, I moved to the United States and I entered this magic world of foundations.
A foundation in a pretty conservative and regulated industry.
This was 2015 when I got called to run, well, at the time it was called the Symphony Software
Foundation and now it's Finos, the FinTech open source foundation.
I tried to take, you know, the Apache way, my sort of open source upbringing and throw
it at banks, it didn't really stick.
I started saying, hey, if it doesn't happen on the list, it doesn't happen.
You guys should, you know, collaborate openly.
It didn't work.
I really had to switch gears and start talking to them about what was the value for them
to collaborate in the open.
Not undermining the principles and the transparency and the governance of open source, but I found
much more success in bringing all different constituents together, whether it is financial
institutions, whether it is technology vendors, whether it is individual contributors of course
that make still the largest part of our community and I think very interestingly regulators
and that's, I think, a theme that you're going to hear quite recurring during the presentation.
There is something there in having active public sector collaboration in industries,
in open source projects.
You know, there's still a long way to go, I wouldn't say that banks are first class
citizens of the open source community, but we were able to make some of the largest firms
in the US and in Europe and in the UK, I guess, extended Europe collaborate and that's, I
think, the beginning of something quite interesting because they have some pretty powerful technology
that they're now, you know, making available and trying to be good citizens that to maintain,
not just, you know, dump and run.
And then it got personal.
You've probably seen on my desktop the picture of my kid, this is Leonardo, his special needs
kid, pretty heavily fragile as a kid and I started seeing the, yeah, he was born like
a lion, no, no, this disability, but I started seeing how open source, again, really is close
to my heart, there are plenty of efforts out there that are trying to use the either open
data or open source truly open collaboration approach to solve things that, you know, for
which there's no commercial viability, big pharma is, you know, much more encouraged
to work on, you know, cancer, you know, vaccines, things that have a massive applicability
and therefore massive commercial potential rather than solving very rare genetic diseases
where you have, you know, 10 people in the world having that specific gene that is, you
know, a mutation.
And so, you know, open treatment is under the Lenox Foundation, open single nucleotide
polymorphism, I'm not really a biologist or doctor, but you see the power of bringing
together data from all over the world to make something out of, you know, where there's
no really commercial drive, there's no drive for innovation.
And so, all of this to say that I find open source itself to be the positive sum game
for which whether you are a corporate, whether you are a government, whether you are an individual,
we can find ways to engage these people and I know that, you know, there's a lot of polarization
today and I hope, you know, nowadays whether it is, again, individual versus big tech,
whether it's Europe versus the US or versus China, but I do think without being naive
that open source actually can be a way for everyone to collaborate and deliver not just
technology innovation but social value.
So, I want to, before we go into sort of what are the challenges, I think it's important
to talk and sort of understand how some of the most successful projects, at least in
my experience, came about.
I mean, I'm sure you're all pretty familiar with a guy called Linus Torbal, so I'm not
going to go into Linux as a pretty obvious example of a project that was individually
started or individually led at the beginning, but more recently, again, more in the world
of finance, one example that has been pretty interesting to me of a project that started,
you know, by an individual out of really coding, maybe not so in the garage, but, you know,
during the pandemic in lockdown, it's a software called OpenBB, it used to be called gain stunk
terminal.
If you're familiar with, you know, the gain stunk frenzy two years ago, where, you know,
the community started betting against Wall Street and, you know, created a pretty interesting,
you know, basically growth of a stock that really didn't gain stunk, didn't really have
a lot more value, but it was an example of someone that, you know, of a movement that
was really trying to democratize access to, you know, a very elitist and very wealthy,
you know, part of the industry.
And so one guy overnight built sort of a replacement Bloomberg terminal.
For those of you who are not familiar with Bloomberg terminal is what, you know, people
use in Wall Street is a very closed, very heavily proprietary terminal, you know, literally
a thing, a box, that are used by traders to research and trade.
And so someone went out there and built an actual terminal.
Turns out that not only when you pair open source with a cause, you really get a potential
amazing exponential growth, but of course timing has to be right.
This was done when at the very moment that, you know, the whole world of retail investors
was betting against Wall Street.
And of course it's not just about the code.
It was lucky, DDA, which happened to be a friend of, was able to, you know, put it on
Acre News, it went viral on Acre News, went number one, and so it was off the razors.
It started getting contributions, it's now gotten funding, and it rebranded from, again,
gain stunk terminal to OpenBB.
So there's a lot of power when you are able to pair open source with an actual social
cause or, you know, an individual cause.
Now we're very familiar, I think, with corporate led open source projects.
We're getting more and more common.
There are two, you know, examples here.
As I said, I never really grew up with the American dream, but it has to be said that
some contributions from big tech like Kubernetes or PyTorch have certainly created opportunities
out there.
And of course this is not because of charity.
Let's be clear, while us coming from the open source community have an aspect of conscience,
you know, these large corporations largely do open source because they see a potential
down the line, whether it is commoditizing a competitor, if you've never seen the Kubernetes
documentary, they actually have a documentary, I wish one day I'll be so cool that I have
a documentary about my project, but, you know, Google said it out loud, incrementalism
step by step wasn't going to get them to catch up with Amazon on the cloud front.
And so they open source Kubernetes and, you know, we now have about 21 trillion investment
globally about one trillion in Europe.
And Kubernetes is one of the most sought after skills out there.
And again, this doesn't mean that the motives originally were about the spirit of open source,
but certainly it has created opportunity.
Same for PyTorch, you know, some of the main advancements out there, oh, we can talk about
TensorFlow, but really AI has certainly benefited from the open sourcing and more recently the
introduction of open governance around some of these projects.
But of course, as I said, open governance, you must play by the rules.
And I know that we all have, you know, slightly different ideas what the rules should be, but
certainly a good starting point is to use an OSI approved license.
And ideally, you know, be in any foundation where you can bring all the different parties
together and be a neutral environment.
And then, you know, we have plenty of examples of non-profits led open source, whether it
is projects from the Linux Foundation or more from, you know, a 501c3 type charity like,
for example, Mojaloop, that works around financial inclusion.
We have seen, especially in the last few years, how open source not always super successfully,
because, for example, I left public health, was created, you know, in response to the
COVID-19 pandemic to have, you know, open source COVID tracking apps, and, you know,
it's been used in some governments, but as a U.S. president, I still have my paper-vaccine
card, like when I was in the 80s.
So it hasn't really been sort of as ubiquitous as we wanted to be, but certainly the attempt
was correct, was the idea that we are all in a major global crisis, and open source can
help.
I think a great example is OpenSSF, you know, actually, while I tend to forget that OpenSSF
was created two months before Log4Shell, not after, although the Linux Foundation was pretty
well positioned to help and corral a response, at least from the U.S. government.
We had several meetings at the White House, acting really as a sort of convening power,
also for the large technology companies, and I hope, you know, we can work together on
a global standard here, because, you know, we're all at risk based on open source sustainability,
really.
And then finally, as I said, known profit, when you, you know, talk about financial inclusion
or other causes, you can attract also, you know, private funding, charity funding.
And Mojalope is largely funded also by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
And so, what is preventing us to make an even bigger impact?
I think there's a few reasons.
One I just hinted to, it's open source sustainability.
I mean, most of you have probably seen that comic about, you know, about how often, and
in some cases, how little we know about how the modern infrastructure sometimes is relying
on, again, the amazing work of some random guy in the brackets as that, but, you know,
I know many of you can relate to sometimes how, you know, unthankful the internet can
be, or the technology community can be, when you are doing amazing work in maintain a library
that then turns out, you know, large corporations, governments, and technology companies rely
on every day.
And so, whilst, of course, log for shells, solar winds, and all the, you know, attacks
that we've seen in the last few years have raised the profile and created organizations
like OpenSSF to really start addressing not only security, but sustainability.
This remains a big problem.
Also because of sort of a lack or uneven funding across the world.
As I said, I had the luck quite early in my career to start being paid to do open source,
and it's a beautiful thing.
I never had to really struggle to do what I love so much doing.
And a little caveat here, I don't come from a rich family, but they were able to make
me study, and, you know, I think in Europe is, to an extent, easier to have sort of those
basic rights, but I never, never forget that it's a privilege to be able to work in open
source.
You know, I used to start, you know, growing up, I used to say, look, if I, I wouldn't
be here if I hadn't started contributing to open source when, you know, when I was with
that picture with long hair, but it's because I had time to do it.
There are simply people and, you know, large slices of society that, you know, don't have
time or don't have the opportunity to be able to start contributing, because they have to
do three jobs to get to the end of the month.
And so open source sustainability is a major issue, and I think we need to continue addressing
it.
And of course, a little touch on open washing, it is, it is very much still a thing, especially
in much, less mature industries.
It's very easy and very cool to jump on the open bandwagon without truly understanding
or, actually, either maliciously, meaning trying to exploit the marketing value of open
source or inadvertently not understanding that, yeah, you have to contribute back if
you want to, you know, ensure a lively ecosystem.
And if you can do software as a corporate world, you can fund open source.
You can pay your developers to work in the open.
But I do think that the main issue is fragmentation, actually.
This is a report that Linux Foundation Research led together with other foundations like Eclipse,
Live Networking, and, you know, Linux Foundation Europe.
And it's about really trying to understand what are the main challenges that prevent
us from, you know, even further getting together and addressing some of the most pressing issues
out there.
This is one that is near and dear to my heart, especially as we are here in Brussels, and
we recently started the Linux Foundation Europe in the understanding that there are, you know,
there's a lot of potential to, you know, help Europe, European technology, European values,
not in Europe, but really go global through the Linux Foundation platform, that of course
is all over the world.
There's clearly, you know, desire and a set of statements to use open source for advancing
digital sovereignty, creating the digital commons.
But it seems very much to me that it hasn't yet been a sort of true set of actions that
are very concrete in, you know, driving towards that vision.
It's very much promoted in principle, but, you know, sometimes even well-intentioned regulations.
I think if you were here yesterday, there's been a lot of conversations around the Cyber
Resilience Act and, you know, what the potential unintended consequences on open source can
be, and the burden they might create on maintainers and foundations.
While again, in principle, the goal was to, you know, try to address sustainability and
try to address security and put some of the burden in the commercial, on the commercial
companies.
I think it's fairly correct.
And so you always end up with great statements, but not so much of a aligned actions.
And you have to say, Ospo's, you know, the European Commission is an Ospo now, two days
ago the Dutch government announced the creation of an Ospo.
They are sort of really starting to spring out there and I think it's a construct that
is going to help.
But I think, again, for what I've learned from finance, you need a bottoms up and a
top down approach here.
So where do we go from here?
If we want to make an ever bigger impact, actually I'm missing a slide, sorry guys.
I guess I lost it.
I think there is a couple of things that we need to look forward to.
One, understanding that open source is not the battlefield.
We can, you know, compete on the commercial side of the house.
We can compete on, you know, what is truly differentiating, but it's not the open source
community where this battle should happen.
Digital sovereignty doesn't mean building borders around open source.
And indeed that is also what's coming out the fragmentation report.
Transparent open source developments are the best antidote for techno-nationalism.
This is something that, again, despite we know there are tensions all over, open source
should be a bridge.
It shouldn't be another way to divide us.
And there are plenty of areas where we can collaborate, whether it is, you know, open
source infrastructure, whether it is, you know, open source security, whether it is intellectual
property that remains a pretty regional sort of concern, whether it is even broader goals.
And that's where I'm going to go in the next slide.
And I want to say we are asked as foundations to work better together.
There are plenty of educational initiatives out there that we have helped the government.
You know, we have the Tudor Group at the Linux Foundation, but there's the OSPO Plus Plus,
works a lot with the public sector, there's the OSPO Zone and OSPO Alliance from the Eclipse
Foundation.
If there's one objective that I have in my new tenure here in Linux Foundation Europe
is really to bring not only governments, but really start from foundation.
This is something that we are being asked very much loudly by the ecosystem.
And I realize this is in the U.S. up there, but we do have travel funding, but we are
starting to also organize conferences and moments where we're focused on really educating
the government into how they can help.
Not just in words, not just in sort of grants, the stop at research level, but really with
active participation in open source projects.
And as I said, part of the issue here is fragmentation.
I know for a fact, even within the Linux Foundation, we create five or six projects every day,
sorry, every day, every quarter, there are thousands of projects created in GitHub every
month, probably thousands is an underestimation.
And so it behooves us, and that's again what comes out from the fragmentation report, to
really do more to align projects.
And I think I want to applaud, if you guys were here yesterday morning, the Open Source
Initiative announced their partnership with the Digital Public Good Alliance, which is
very much aligned to the UN Sustainable Goals.
And at the Linux Foundation, we're also trying to align our initiatives, our projects.
Again, we have, I don't know what's the current counter project, over a thousand projects
in the Linux Foundation, and I have no idea how many can address, you know, climate, can
address, you know, water crisis, can address energy.
What I know is that Europe has, many of these projects are based in Europe, or as climate
has a large presence in Europe, AgStack for agriculture and AgTech.
And of course, LF Energy.
Those of you who know LF Energy know that the leader recently passed away, Shirley Goodman,
she was a great activist and very much seen Europe as a springboard for global climate
action.
And so you can certainly expect from us a much stronger alignment towards sustainability.
In fact, again, unfortunately, the CFP closes today, so if you're quick, you can probably
still sneak it in, but we are adding another track to our Open Source Summit, which is
sustainability gone.
Again, in the spirit of trying to at least have our house in order, and then hopefully
start collaborating more broadly on the 17 Silver High Value Golds.
And then, you know, I think another way to go beyond standard, beyond sort of this fragmentation
is really, and I'm sure, again, this is not a new comic book, comic strip, I've taken
part in standards, I've taken part in Open Source projects over time, and hopefully I
don't offend anyone here, but I think Open Source is better.
I mean, it's just more apt to incremental progress, and you know, you can always fork
later if you don't agree, but ultimately it allows to build on an existing concrete piece
of code rather than coming up with yet another sort of top-down, you know, 15th standard
whereby 14 do exist.
And I think this is something that also impacts how we collaborate as individuals.
On one hand, look, one of the things that came out of the fragmentation report is, you
know, that fragmentation is a double S word, sure we want consolidation, but on the other
hand, you know, there is value in the distributed mode of Open Source development whereby, you
know, we want to allow multiple options to solve the same problem, and then, you know,
Open Source Darwinism is going to run its course, but I do also think that it beholds
us as developers, I guess, I don't know if I can call myself a developer anymore, to
try harder, to try harder not to reinvent the wheel.
Again, I keep aging myself, but I used to be the Maven guy before going into the foundation
world, and I got so much crap from the ant, guys, like, dude, what are you doing?
This is not, this is not where, you know, it's very polarizing, and I'm like, yeah, sure,
we know it's not perfect, but how about we try to consolidate and improve rather than
creating yet another framework or yet another library?
And again, sometimes there's perfectly valuable reasons to do so.
And so, how do we bring it all together?
This is a very similar slide to the one that we've seen before on finance, and my, the
lesson that I've learned is that it's important to start with why.
And by why, I mean, not only, you know, the conscious aspect of Open Source, but we all,
I think, if we're here, are familiar with, are driven by, but if we want, I think, to
truly make an even bigger impact and a more focused impact on whether it is those major
social goals and sustainability development goals, whether it is, you know, starting to
change an industry, finance, healthcare is one that, of course, is near and dear to my
heart, and due to many reasons, it's still very closed, and, you know, sometimes they
hide behind the regulated nature to sort of enact change, but the reality is that, as
we've seen for banks, this is actually possible, or whether it is to, you know, make the government
understand what they should be practically doing in an open source project to advance
a certain policy to, you know, there's so much, at least in the EU, talk about open
source and how open source can advance, you know, European small and medium businesses
and innovation, and that really does need to be translated into action, and so I think
independent organizations like Foundations, or just the Linux Foundation, any foundation
out there and hopefully better collaborating with each other, here's a way to bring all
these different actors together, still with the principles of open source, but, you know,
I think if we lead with that, we're going to lose some people on the way, we're going
to lose the people that really are there for the money, or for a cause, or, you know, unfortunately
not everyone has this natural driver to collaborate, and so you always need to try and sell it,
you know, it's a dirty word, an example, sell the reasons and the value why people would
want to participate in open source, and to me, yeah, bringing everyone together under
a common governance is really the way forward.
And so, about to wrap, what can we do, can you do, practically to help?
I think from our side, there is much more work in being organized and collaborate and
aligned to common goals on the Foundation's side, but I think if anyone here is from the
public sector, and you are listening online, open source can be the vehicle to drive policy
goals, I mean, there's so much that we can bridge if we start with open governance, and
I think we're not going to be there probably this year or even next year, but I see a moment
in which, like I've seen with banks, we can involve, or why not, the government should
be able to start open source projects that, you know, contextually drive these big policy
goals, whether it is DMA, DSA, the Subresidency Act, the Interoperability Act, there's so
much out there that Europe, in fact, is leading, I mean, I think about GDPR, I live in California,
you know, thanks to GDPR, we have CCPA, which is the most similar sort of data privacy protection,
in another wise, pretty wild landscape, and, you know, at level of consumer protection,
that's really, you know, it's been a standard setting from the EU, and on the other hand,
it makes very complex for companies to implement it, and so open source can really deliver,
as a positive sum game, an easier way to implement for the regulated industries, and a more effective
way for the government to enact those policies, and of course, I will continue reiterating
that digital sovereignty doesn't mean building borders, we don't want to fragment the open
source community, we're going to, as Europeans, not only lose existing technology is out there,
but potentially lose sort of the innovation and the growth potential for the local small
and medium businesses and hopefully growing businesses, I would like to see larger technology
companies in Europe being born out of open source.
For companies, invest in open source talent, again, I have a lot of grievances in the United
States, but they do invest in talent, and that does allow maintainers to work in open
source without having to struggle, and that also has a, as I said before, a diversity
angle here, like there's just folks that cannot, in many parts of the world, don't have the
time to just invest in open source, to just, you know, do it in their own time, and become
an open source leader, I do think that, like we've seen for the examples of Google, I was
actually talking to a company here yesterday, a local company, said we wouldn't even be
in the market if we were not, if it was not for open source, that's what got us on the
global stage, and I think, you know, if anyone here has the decision making power, if you're
trying to sell your CEO into doing open source, lead with why, lead with how they can commoditize
a competitor, they can, you know, become a de facto standard, and then, if you're not
able as a company to contribute time or code, well, contribute money to open source through
a maintainer funding, you know, with Patreon, GitHub sponsors, you know, Foundation as a
mentorship platform, there's so many ways to fund open source, doesn't have to be foundations,
doesn't have to be directly employing someone, and then, last but not least, as an individual,
I think you have an amazing potential to be an activist through technology, and be an
activist, I think some of the most successful activists out there are not just about, you
know, the quality of the code, you gotta market what you're doing, and we're here to help.
I can't promise they will be able to market or promote every single open source project
out there. I've been working on this deck until 3 a.m. yesterday, and got here 10 minutes
late this morning, but we are there to give visibility to a lot of these projects. And
culture remains still a major fragmentation, a fragmentation problem in the industry. I,
the slide that unfortunately I wasn't able to present showed how there's still a lot
of prejudice, and so whether it's national, whether it's racial, whether it's political,
check it out the door, because that's just not gonna, you know, that diverse perspective
make better projects. And then as a guy with a big ego, this is more of a lesson for myself,
put your ego aside. If there is, you know, I know as an engineer at heart, I have very
strong opinions of how code should be written or how, you know, certain libraries should
be done. There's plenty of reasons why you want to start a new framework, but there's
the whole, there's a world of open source out there, and we as foundations can do a
much better job at showing what projects are healthy, what projects are aligned with certain
goals. We have a lot to do there, but if we want to really make that bigger impact, we
will need commitment, so from you guys to sort of put your ego on the side. And with
that, thank you so much. I appreciate you being here so early and coping with me being
a little late. Thank you. I know if there are questions.