Okay, so the goal also of this talk is to talk also about the progress and challenges
of alternatives facing the big techs.
So I want to first explain a bit why apps is key, why end user apps is important and
also where are we, what are we doing with these apps, do they exist?
So first who am I?
So I'm Ludwig Dubost, I'm the creator of Xwiki, so I created the Xwiki software, so I don't
know, does anybody who knows Xwiki here, oh cool, that's already, nice, who knows, and
we also created a second software in my company, which is CripPad, who knows CripPad, cool,
and that's pretty nice.
And so we've been doing collaboration software for 20 years now, like 19 years, and we've
been competing with software from the big techs, and it's not an easy thing to do, like
you get lots of challenges there in order to actually build that software and get to
the level that you can compete.
And so I've done this at the same time I created the company, so it was a business goal to
be able to live from building these applications as open source, and we have 50 employees,
we're a remote first company, and we have employees in France and Romania and also now
in Germany, and actually we hire, so if you're interested, come see what we do, and we are
currently having more success, and that's not happening every year to be able to hire,
so if you're interested to see how it works inside the company that has a goal of doing
open source, of building open source applications, not only using them or installing them, but
really creating them, come see what we do.
So as a company, we're also a member of our ecosystem, we're a member of associations
in France, for example the Systematique, OW2, the CNL, it's Conseil Nationale de Logiciels
Libres, we're not a member of OSBA in Germany, but we actually want to be, it's planned,
we're also a member of, yeah, we're also a member of CLIDIA, so APEL is actually a European
entity over CNN and OSBA, we're trying to be active also in order to try to promote
what the type of things that our companies do, and I'm a strong believer that European
companies should work together more than they do together, and I know how difficult it is
because it's super difficult because we're all very focused on what we do every day,
but collaboration is actually super important.
So first, one thing is, in 1995 technology was more like you buy machines, you buy or
you build software, you install that software, and not all activities in our lives were actually
dependent on software in 1995.
It was not as important, but in 28 years, actually a lot of things have changed.
Now your renting cloud servers, you could even run your server just on the cloud without
worrying about buying in a machine, just take the service, but you could also run cloud
servers, you could build and make your own software and run it, but also one thing is
that almost everything, there is no business that's not dependent on software, it's starting
to be really hard to find anything that won't use any software, maybe some independent agriculture
people might not need any software, but even though might still use some of them to be
more efficient in their job, but you have a lot of activities that are highly dependent
on software for every day work, and it can be a major competitive differentiator to
use software in your business.
We also see that there is a business imbalance, actually these are numbers, so I didn't put
the source, I should have, basically the GDP of the tech sector in the U.S. is 10%, and
there is data from Europe, from Europe's websites where you see GDP is 4%, so it's not easy
to know if they're actually exactly talking about the same thing.
The scoping of what is the tech sector is not always easy to match from one country
to another, but we kind of intuitively know that there is much more tech in the U.S.,
and that actually makes a huge difference, and if we look at the problem from the sovereignty
point of view, so what I try to do here is to look at the different levels of what we
use in technology, and what the situation is, and how Europe competes from that point
of view, but there are some differences also in the way it works, so for example, you might
not know how to make a hardware component, like you might not have the people that can
do it, but once you bought it, the hardware component is yours, and that actually is something
that is significantly different from the top, where you might not know how to do the cloud
service, but you also don't own it, you don't have it, you use it, you use it remotely.
Now, it's true, even in hardware, you're seeing evolutions where the world of software,
the way software works, of software works, is starting to happen on the hardware level,
you can turn on a feature in a Tesla remotely, and you can turn it off also remotely, so
we might have situations where we don't own the software that is inside a hardware machine,
so you have a lot of hardware that contains software, even a chip can contain software,
whether or not they can turn off feature remotely from the internet is another story, but software
is something that you can turn on, turn off remotely, and that's something very important.
Now, we're not actually looking that good all over the place, we know in Europe how
to make some semiconductors, for example, RM is a European company, was almost acquired
by NVIDIA, but it didn't happen, but it's a UK company, so we still own a semiconductor
company in Europe.
We have some actors for hardware, but most of it is manufactured in Asia, so that's
something important, and we know that with COVID, when we wanted masks in Europe, we
didn't get them as fast as we wanted, as we needed them, so being able to manufacture
our technology can be important.
So now, cloud services, we do have European actors, but the good thing is that we have
standardized open source tools in cloud services, so Linux, things like that, like Kubernetes,
Docker, these are open source software, we don't always have the competences in Europe,
we are not the ones that build them, most of them, but we do have access to the source,
and we have actors, and it's possible to run VMs all over Europe, that's not a big problem.
Now when you go to pass software, platform as a service, you have a major dominance
from the actors.
In France, there's been a complaint about the fact that the Health Data Hub, which is
a national service doing statistics on health data, was run on Microsoft Cloud, and basically
a lot of people say, what, you're running health data of all the people in France on
an American system, how is that protecting our data, it's not compliant with GDPR, and
basically the answer of the people that had made these decisions said there are not enough
good APIs on the French cloud services to run it on the French cloud service, obviously
everybody said no, there are, you have enough, there is enough to, maybe you're going to
miss a little bit of stuff, maybe it's not going to be convenient for you, but it's possible,
but they basically, the argumentation was that it was not good enough, the ministry
in France basically bashed the French companies for not being good enough, and the answer
of course the ecosystem, what are you waiting for to give money to the French company to
allow them to be good enough, what are you doing instead of putting that type of service
on foreign systems, so the technology is possible to develop it, a lot of it is open source,
but companies like Amazon or Google cloud, Amazon web service, Google cloud or Microsoft
are very ahead in terms of number of services that they have, when I looked as a company
what technologies are available to deploy Xwiki software and Krippat software in an app store
on cloud providers, I mean you have like different technologies on all of them, but they all
have a lot of options for how you would sell your software on their app store, and when
you look at what European companies have, they don't have systems to automatically deploy
applications and sell them and put the price on them and people would start buying them,
so they are really ahead, and when you go to SaaS you have like thousands of services
all around the world, startups, and we do have national actors and a lot of these actors
are not open source, so you have a lot of SaaS services and a lot are not open source
and even the ones provided by Microsoft, Google and Amazon are not open source or they can
be based on open source but they are not themselves open source, that means you cannot decide
to self host them and take control of them, and that's actually something that we'll
see is important, now in the collaboration space when you ask to the big companies what
they need, they don't need one collaboration software, they need a whole stack, it was
interesting in the previous presentation about the co-op, it was about deploying multiple
apps and this is actually, bigger companies want all these software, they need all multiple
software and they need them to work well together, so they need authentication, user management,
they need of course email, chat, video conferencing, file storage, they want to edit documents,
they want collaboration tools and then they even want to build custom apps, so they want
a lot of different software and they want all these to be simple and easy, and when
you start using apps, you become very quickly locked in, even when the app is open source
by the way, when you put your data in a system, the way you put that data in makes you quickly
locked, because it's complicated to get the data out and to adapt the way you work to
other apps, even if the app is standard, in 20 years of Xwiki, I've heard so many people
say that how they use to the fact that the button in Microsoft Office version X something,
it's here on the screen, and you give them another tool where the button is on the right
and they say it's difficult to use, like it's difficult to use because the button is on
the right, no, they don't even know why it's difficult to use but it feels difficult to
use to them, because they're so used to the way they worked before that it's very difficult
to change, and so we have been trying to move people from Office to Wikis, so imagine how
they tell you that it's difficult to use, no, it's not that difficult to use, you need
to adapt your way of working, you need to learn a new tool, it's not that difficult
to use, it's just, it takes time to adapt, you need to try to think how it works and
try to adapt your way of working, so the lock-in is very high, and on SaaS software, the lock-in
is actually immense, like I worked at Netscape in 1995, and we were talking about the lock-in
of Microsoft on software when it was on premise software, and it's like oh Microsoft controls
your software, like you're blocked on their software, but at least the software was in
your company, and you could put firewall around it and potentially no data would go out, here
now it's on the cloud, and so they will tell you it's going to be double the price to upgrade,
but you didn't have to upgrade, you could decide to stay on the older version for a
bit longer, and you didn't have to pay every year, you paid licenses for a long time, now
you're paying every year, and if you don't pay on the first of January for your renewal
or every month, they turn off the software immediately, so you're actually in an immense
lock-in, the lock-in is actually way higher than it was in 1995 when a lot of the industry
was complaining about that lock-in, and the data is controlled by the provider, there's
a huge lack of standards on the structure of the data, so how that data, your basic
formats are standardized, but in collaborative apps, even in wikis, I have to recognize
that the xwiki software formats are not that standardized, we tried at some point to work
with other wiki providers to work on common syntaxes, but never happened, like our syntax
was based on something called wiki creole, which was discussed 15 years ago, but now
everybody is using markdown, so there was something that people said that should be
the standard, like a lot of wiki providers discussed, especially said that's a good
common standard, but it's a completely other one that a lot of people now say, ah, it's
great, but not many people discussed the markdown standard, it was just, ah, people liked it,
and it started to become very liked, so the standards are very difficult to have, even
when they exist, they're not necessarily adopted, and so if they're not adopted, they're not
very useful to move data from one system to another, the complexity of the software makes
it very difficult to switch, and one key aspect of the software industry is the winner takes
it all approach, like this is basically why VCs love the tech industry, they put a lot
of money, they try to win, and they like the fact that when you win, everybody else is
dead, the winner makes 95% of the revenue, all the other people fight for the 5% that's
left, and they love that because that's actually their goal, trying to be the winner, so what's
interesting is that they don't necessarily win that much because they create 10 companies
or 100 companies and only one makes it to the win, to being the winner, and so in the
end they don't win that much money because they drop a lot of money on the way, but this
is their goal basically of what they're trying to do, and one of the problems of the locking
also is unfair business practices, you have a lot of unfair business practices because
the providers are so powerful that it's very tempting to use that power to make more money,
so if you ask a business lead to make 10% more revenue next year, if there is no difficulty
to increase the price because everybody's locked they will just increase the price 10%,
that's much easier than work hard to try to get new customers, and so in order to keep
that approach running, they also try to, another approach is to, okay let's make other people
buy my second software, I have a first software, if I can force the other people, if I can
encourage them to use it, I give for free the second software, then at some point they
become used to it, it's free, and at some point I say now it's not free anymore, Microsoft
Teams is typically that approach, and Slack has actually complained about it, they actually
sued about it because Teams was free, Office 365 is very expensive, they just gave Teams
to everybody that has Office 365, and at some point they say now you have to pay, and all
the others are dead in the meantime, so you have a huge amount of risks, of lack of sovereignty
associated to this, so if you can stop all the software remotely, if we disagree with
the US government, knowing that all these companies are US based, if we disagree with
the US government, they could turn off the software, and even worse than that by the
way, is that they don't even need to turn the software, because they just need to remind
our government that they can turn off the software, and then the other government will
start being, want less to disagree with the American government, because they know it's
possible, or in negotiations it could be vaguely reminded that it's possible, and that's actually
a big problem, and our ministry in France of economy and finance said no political sovereignty
without digital sovereignty, I'm not sure what they actually do to try to avoid that
situation, but they actually acknowledge it that there was a problem, that at some point
you cannot state your political opinions if you're dependent so much on other people
that have a different opinion than you.
And at this point, I'm not sure how many businesses would still function if you shut down their
collaboration tools, or if you shut down Microsoft today, what's the impact?
It's a bit difficult to analyze, but how long would it take for the companies to start being
able to do work again?
And so from my point of view, that makes really collaboration apps very important, because
we don't have the control on these apps, and it's the primary set of tools that people
use, actually I didn't ask that question, in your company, which ones are using Microsoft
or Google?
And so it's the primary tool that people are using, and they get really used to it.
And it's also the primary authentication system that people use.
Most companies will put Azure AD, LDAP, Active Directory, not LDAP, Active Directory, as
well as the authentication system.
And basically, they end up also being almost ready to deploy servers.
So when you have Azure AD, you have an Azure account, you're one click away from deploying
servers on the Microsoft system.
So people buy Office 365, they tell people, you need to connect Office 365 to Azure AD
to manage your users, and then you're one click away to deploy servers.
And a lot of users like simplicity.
If it's simple to click, they start using the other servers, and they do a lot of work
to make all this work as easy as possible together.
Do they do a good job is another question, but they have the possibility to make it easy.
We might be happy that they're not always very good at it.
And so that gives us some opportunities to provide other solutions.
And so it's the entry point of all software.
And the biggest problem from my point of view has been the bundle issue, is that a lot of
software becomes bundled as a package.
And so when you go to Microsoft's website to buy, you say, I need Office, you will be
proposed the whole Microsoft suite, not only Office 365, and you will have this software
plus this software plus this software.
And you'll see that the difference of pricing is not always very high between the package
rules.
And I'm not even sure it exists, only Office 365, only Office.
You will get for free one thing, even what you don't need.
This was actually the problem of computers bundled with Windows, which were bundled with
Internet Explorer.
I said I worked at Netscape, and I can remember how it killed Netscape's business around the
browser when Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer in Windows.
Who would buy a browser if you have one for free with Windows when you get your computer,
which, and at the time, you were paying Windows?
Well, in the meantime, there's a lot of things that have changed, because now browsers also
got free because you can make money through advertisement.
But that's actually potentially a problem, because you can make money through advertisement,
but we also got tracking, thanks to that.
So we get browsers for free, but we get tracking, and that's also a problem of sovereignty.
So now they bundle even more.
They bundle apps, but they also bundle Office 365 with the cloud, with the pass, with the
yes.
Microsoft has a whole offer, servers, yes, a pass, and apps.
When you go see a client with you, ah, I have a wiki, would you like my wiki?
Well, sorry, I already have it for free in the whole offer.
Like, no, you need, you know, and I even, I think I had a few cases like that, is for
a department that's part of a big company, if they buy another software, they pay for
it.
If they use Microsoft software, the central entity pays for it, and it's divided, and
they pay the same share of it whether they use it or not.
So basically, you come as a provider, and you have a cost, and the Microsoft software
you're competing with has no cost.
It's free.
But it has a cost in reality because everybody then will start, some people will start using
some of the software, and when they renew the license with Microsoft three years later,
Microsoft comes and counts everything that is being used, and they set the new bill.
And so, the company will end up paying it, the fact that they started using that software.
And so, it's very difficult to compete.
And so, everything's, actually, NextCloud has sued on this, I think, antitrust.nextcloud.com,
I think, I have the link a bit later.
And so, because it's a real antitrust issue, in the end, you cannot compete with that type
of situation.
And so, some people say, and especially this is true in France, on our government, they
say, we need to build better software companies.
So, the problem is not the way the competition works, or the way these companies operate
and so on.
That's not the problem.
The problem is we don't have a French one, or we don't have a European one.
And so, say, let's build unicorns and make companies.
But in reality, when you look at unicorns, is that first, well, if they actually get
very big, if they manage to get very big, they will behave exactly the same way.
And it's not going to help the people and the small companies.
It's going to be a bit less a sovereignty issue, because maybe our government will have
a little more control on them.
But it's, we are not going to get our own sovereignty, because we're going to be very
dependent on this big company.
The other problem is that most of these unicorns are made with fun VCs.
Most of them of these VCs are actually not even European, and VCs want to make money,
so they want to sell the company at some point.
And it's much easier to sell it to the ones that have the most money, which are the current
American companies.
So, in the end, there is a very big chance that all these unicorns will either die, because
they don't work well enough, or they're going to be bought by the same companies that are
currently leading the market.
And another thing, yeah, and that's actually, they usually use the American cloud providers
for their services, and so these cloud providers see everything they do.
So when something works well, they can replicate it.
This is actually a complaint against Amazon, even in the US, that small businesses that
sell on Amazon are showing to Amazon everything that works.
And surprisingly, at some point, you get products that pop up made by Amazon instead, and they
take the market.
And so they're supposed to not look at the statistics, but we don't know what really
happens.
And now, how can open source help to solve these type of problems?
So one thing I believe is very important is that if you try to build local companies,
French ones, German ones, UK ones, even though UK is not in Europe anymore, but still in
Europe, physically.
But if you try to build your own local companies, and you all do it at the same time, at some
point, you'll have a problem.
And because suppose one of them buys the other one, you're going to have one very big French
company or one very big German company, and maybe, I don't know, a Swedish one.
And the problem is that this won't be sovereignty for the countries that don't own these companies.
So, you might have a bit of sovereignty in France, but no sovereignty in Poland.
And so if you try then to tell, so let's invest all, let's start using the software from this
European company, like in Poland, they're not very interested to use the software from
a French one, and that doesn't give them that much sovereignty.
So an open source works very differently.
If we invest in open source in France, it can be used in Germany, and it can give sovereignty
to Germany because Germany can control the software.
German companies can build competence on top of that software.
And that's true in Poland, and that's true in Romania, et cetera.
So if we all in different countries co-invest in open source, we can all get more sovereignty
out of it.
And we also can get individual sovereignty out of it because any individual can then
make use of it.
So I'm sure I don't have to convince that much about open source here, but it's important
to remind these arguments which can be useful if you meet people in your own countries.
So also open source is usually a bit more open to standards, and if the provider doesn't
want to adapt this software to standards, then somebody else can do it.
You have this possibility.
So open source will allow to adapt software to standards when providers don't want to
do it because it's not in their economical interest.
It's very hard.
Like if you look at software, you very often have a lot of import tools.
You very rarely have export tools.
But anybody can build the export tools on open source software.
And one aspect that is also interesting is that we can reuse also US open source software.
Like we need, but we need, however, to build local competence.
If we use massively very large US based software, but we're not building local competence on
it, we will risk having a lack of sovereignty.
Because we don't have the people that can take over.
So we can reuse open source software from anywhere in the world, but it's also important
to invest in the competence.
So if we start building massive solutions, and not only competence about how to use them,
but competence how they're built, how they're made inside the software, it's very easy to
use open source.
It's much more difficult to improve an open source software.
Like you need to build competence on the software itself.
So now I want to look a bit at what actually exists.
Because we're looking, and I've been maybe a bit looking pessimistic because it's hard,
it's tough.
But actually, what's interesting is that we have tons of great open source software
in Europe.
And I'm sure I missed a lot, because I spend most of my time on our own software.
And I'm sure I missed a lot, but I mentioned the list of types of software that companies
are looking for for collaboration.
And so for example, in video conferencing, we have software like Jitsi, which has been
created in France.
Actually, core developers are in the US now, but it was created in Strasbourg.
Big Blue Button, Canadian, it's open source, not developed in Europe.
Next Cloud Talk, developed in Europe.
Only Office is developed in Letony, if I'm correct.
There are also issues around Only Office, because it's linked to Russia.
So we also need to have more control on it, on the development of it, collaboration.
On collaboration, Next Cloud, Xwiki, Krippad, project management, projects like Tulip, open
project.
We have a lot of software on authentication, software like Lemoneldap, Univention, on email,
we have Open Exchange, we have Sogo, BlueMind, and on file management, software like Next
Cloud, PDO, Krippad.
And on chat, we have great solutions like Matrix.
So we actually have all the bricks existing.
Now, they're all provided by different companies, different providers, and they do, they're
not as integrated as the other solutions will be.
And another aspect, I'll come back to that, the integration aspect.
Another aspect is that actually building open source business, it works.
Like all these software have core teams, the software I mentioned, they do have core teams.
Most of the companies, most of the software have a core team that is working for at least
one company that has regular revenue out of this software, and they're able to fund the
roadmap and have a regular development on top of this software.
So it's possible, and I can attest to it, with my company, we didn't raise any money,
and for 19 years we've been able to pay the people in the team and grow, and we've even
been able to create a second software out of the work that we were doing on the first
one.
So it's possible to fund the company.
Now, at the beginning it's not easy, like the first years you need to build critical
mass, and sometimes you have an issue of competition, so you're not necessarily finding enough
money to build it quickly at the level that it can compete, but it's possible to find
business and it progresses, the better your software is, the more companies are interested
in it, when it's good enough, the companies get interested in it.
So you have moments where companies will just go to the other provider, the winner takes
it all, so you get very little market share, but then at some point they get more interested
and you get more prospects.
So how does open source business work?
You can, clients do buy support, but you need also to have the price right, so if you put
it too expensive then clients might just go away, but if you put the right price you get
clients that buy support.
You also have clients that sponsor development, but you have issues of dumping and bundling
that slows it down, like you cannot sell to everybody because you have competitors and
their software is given for free or cheaper, and Xwiki knows it very well because we've
been competing with Xwiki with conference, anybody has conference, is there a company?
So while you can try to convince your companies to switch to Xwiki, we have importers and
we have, and Atlassian has kept increased the price over the time and they actually,
they changed a lot the strategy, so they had a pretty low price for small businesses and
now they say small businesses you have to go on the cloud.
We stop doing the small price software even though it makes money.
If you look at the finances of Atlassian it does make money, so it's a conscious choice
to make more money.
It's not something that doesn't work, it's something that works, but now that they've
done that we have a lot of calls and we get much more clients, and even though we never
got the money of these clients to build our own software, so we've been able to build
the software with the money of other clients and now we're having more clients coming,
so I think it's a clear proof that the dumping and the bundling approaches are slowing down
open source and there are unfair practices.
There are also some good news, for example European initiatives, NGI, so we at Xwiki
we've been able to benefit from that on CripPad in particular because CripPad doesn't have
that many clients.
It has almost no enterprise clients, it's just starting to have enterprise clients and
it's been mostly funded with research money.
We do have some clients, we have donations and subscriptions on our instance, but it
would not be enough to pay for that software which requires a lot of work.
So NGI is providing funding for companies and that's really a great thing.
They also, the EU started to pay for bug bounties on open source software, we've been able to
benefit from it also and that's been great.
GAIAX is interesting, but there are also issues with it from my point of view, it's
not easy to understand, to see how four small providers like us that are doing apps, how
to work together with the big cloud providers and big companies that are currently running
GAIAX.
We're not seeing also open source being as put in front in the GAIAX project.
So there are initiatives in Europe to help and we've seen that it's becoming more and
more in subject, that's interesting.
In France we have the French government decided to put some funding, so on one side they're
opening the door to American software, they also reacted to the fact that from the GDPR
perspective there is a huge problem with the cloud act, this is the Max-Ramp act and basically
they're recognizing that it's illegal to host data on American companies systems, but it
seems to be illegal but we don't really know if they consider it illegal for everybody,
is it illegal only for the public service, it's illegal for all the companies, it's
unclear but they started to say, okay for example the national education should not
deploy Microsoft software anymore, but on the other side they're proposing that French
companies are going to build clouds to deploy Microsoft and Google software on them and host
it instead of Microsoft and Google and that will be okay.
So they will control the software but they won't, they will control the hosting but they
won't control the software.
On the other side they say okay let's fund a little bit alternative, so they decided
to put 50 million but they didn't put it on open source, we are partners in some of the
projects to try to get funding for Xwiki and Crip Pad and try to build also additional
solutions, so you have a bit of a mixed message, on one side they like open source, on the
other side they don't promote only open source so it's not always clear.
So you have messages, there are better news in Germany where you have specific funding
for open source platforms with the sovereign workplace project, actually at Xwiki we have
had the chance to be called in and that is actually great news for us and you have a
bunch of great open source software that are part of that project, you also have additional
initiatives like the sovereign tech fund and there is a specific entity called the
Centrum for Digital Server Initiate, then this, my German is good, and you have the
open code project, so a bit better news but at the same time it's never completely won,
you have internally governments, some people pro and some people that will continue to
push for it's not so important, let's use American software.
So there are also, so the challenges I've talked about them, the antitrust is clearly
bundling and unfair practices and trying to kill competition with aggressive pricing.
I've seen cloud develop and I mean the typical cloud business model is let's give things
for free and then increase the price, let's get the users when they're in, when I'm sufficiently
known, let's change the price.
You could say open source, that's the same thing, let's make it open source and at some
point let's give it for free and let's change the price or let's stop being open source
so some companies do it.
There is a big difference however is that what you put as open source you can never
take away, so maybe you can change your price, stop do open source and do your own life and
turn your back on the people that helped you because you have a lot of people that helped
you when you do open source, you give them a lot but they also give you a lot, I can
say that I have a lot of people that gave us things, gave us contribution, make the
software known.
The user's crypto platform wouldn't be what it is with all the people making it known
so we have a lot of people helping so you can do that but you can never take away the
code and that's a very, very important difference versus the strategy of the cloud providers
that gives things for free and increase the price later.
This is also why on my side I'm a big proponent of AGPL with no CLA so no retaining the copyright
of everything that people give you because this shows that you will not turn your back
on open source or at least you will have to give back all the code and redo what people
gave you.
For CRIPAD it's AGPL, XWIC is LGPL and we don't want to change it because this is what
we did and we don't want to change that but CRIPAD is AGPL and we have never taken any
CLA on contributions and we believe we cannot go away of what we're doing.
There is another challenge which is open source financing so the initial financing of an open
source project is very difficult, it's something that is tough.
There is one thing that is very important is that a lot of people when they build open
source software and they try to live from it they question the open source business model
is that yeah but somebody is going to steal my software or somebody is going to compete
with me etc etc and you always have difficulties but sometimes it's very important to understand
that the main difficulty is not the business model, the main difficulty is do a good enough
software.
In many cases when you tend to think that you should be selling it instead of giving
it away as open source, well sometimes that's not the problem, the problem is that the software
is not good enough, you need to be better, the competition is too good and you need to
work more on your software.
We had phases where it was a bit difficult at XWIC and what we did we worked on the software
and things improved so you have to look at that.
We also decided at XWIC to do extensions that are open source but paying and so I usually
have a bit of a complexity to explain that, I even had some people that say but so they
asked but can I take it or can I reuse it for free, I said yeah take the source, rebuild
it, remove the license check and you can use it, it's open source so it's not open source
I cannot use it for free, that's not open source, it's about the source, it's not about
whether or not it's easy for you to use it.
So we decided to have some extensions of XWIC which are open source but either you go find
the source and you go and take it and build it yourself and install it yourself or you
use our app store and in one click you can use it, pay for it and buy it and it's been
very useful for us because it allows also to explain to companies that concept, the
fact that the important part is the fact that it's open source, it's not that it's free
and that's what is important in what we do but it allowed to explain that and it helped
actually improve the relationship with some of our clients which tend naturally to say
okay if I don't have to pay, I don't pay, I don't help the project, I don't need to
pay so you have to find that balance also between the commercial offers and the freedom.
Sometimes when you build open source you are too idealistic in a way that okay everything
should be free but the problem is that when everything is free you have a lot of people
that don't understand that they actually should help the project because this project will
not survive without funding, you need money to survive to make the software, it's necessary.
Another aspect is that it's actually very difficult to make partnerships with service
and cloud companies.
Right now Xwiki has not been able to do good partnerships with other service companies
to distribute our software, it's not simple and I'm not really sure how to do partnerships
with cloud companies.
Cloud companies can be very tempted to just reuse all the open source software available
and sell it and not fund in any way the software that are in these offers and we need a model
for that so if we want to separate the work of cloud service and of software we need to
find a model to how to sell open source software when it's sold to companies otherwise the
software will not be able to fund themselves so Matrix for example has made a blog post
about the fact that they have major success in terms of usage and deployments but many
of these deployments are made by other companies that are making money off of it and are not
giving back anything, not even developers to work on the project, neither funding, neither
developers and in the end they had to fire people and so in order to, I mean if you want
to do good software you need great people, you need great developers and so you need
to find a funding model that works.
One aspect for open source company is to work with less cash so I don't believe in VC investment
because I think that doesn't allow to keep the independence of what we build but you
have to work with less cash so even when you're growing it's difficult to hire because you
need a lot of cash to run the company itself like to advance the money and you are taking
risks and it's not a simple problem.
Another problem is integration and fragmentation so clients want things that are integrated
that's actually also one of the reasons you start to see packages that bundle the software
so trying to make them all installable together easily that's actually something that's important
and cloud providers providing multiple software together.
This is very interesting but there is a lot of integration work that is necessary and
sometimes that work is not brought back to the project and we need to make that happen.
There's also a lot of fragmentation in the EU market so you need to go to multiple countries
to sell it takes a lot of time so we need also partnerships between the companies in
the different countries to work together in order to make that work and I'm very happy
to have partnerships with Univention for example because for us it's a major win of
time to go on the German market.
If a company says look at this French company it changes a lot the way the German market
will see a French company and that is going to be true the other way so we need to work
more together so that's a bit the next step I have and so first is we need to believe
in ourselves so we have great offers and the companies that are building software open
source software are able to make it and the difficulties sometimes they have is about competition
is about being considered good enough so that a lot of companies invest in them there is
a huge amount of money sold on collaboration like I think we count billions of euros that
are given to Microsoft and Google and if we sum all the open source companies we are talking
about we are talking about 50, 100 million something like that revenue I don't know exactly
because it's not always easy to get the numbers but we're spending billions on collaboration
software from America to American companies so there is a lot of money it's just we need
to convince the clients that we're good enough as a group not only as individual company
and open source provides good openness and flexibility and that's useful to clients so
there are also good technical arguments for open source when it comes to company we have
had a lot of clients that were very interested in the flexibility of our software but they
also want easy to go solution one provided to buy from and that's a real difficulty
we need to work more on European collaborations I talked about it so at Xwiki this is something
we're trying to do more so the Univention partnership we did last year and we're also
looking at the partnerships with NextCloud with OpenProject where there are multiple
companies in Europe that think the same way they just lack a lot of time to actually make
it happen and so it's going to take time but there are many companies that want to do that
and the sovereign workplace project is really great to create also this integrated offer
bring the providers together now we will need to find ways to do partnerships with cloud
providers I've yet to see how this will happen and we need more open standards that's also
another aspect that's transversal we need more open standards I've also been a believer
that we need an open source marketplace so a way for cloud providers to sell open source
software in one easy way but it's it I thought I hope that GaiaX would be a place for that
I haven't seen that that happening and we the most important thing we need is clients
so any any clients that are brought to the companies that are providing this alternate
platform are helping these companies bring the software a little bit better and it makes
a difference so everything that as individual you can do to tell your your boss employers
and that maybe they should look at what these companies are doing that other companies are
actually deploying the software is is helping so I mean if you can help us do it and make
it known and that's it if there are any questions think there's two minutes left so everybody
fall asleep one hi you mentioned earlier in your talk that the French government deemed
it illegal to host data on American companies because of the US cloud act could you expand
on the cloud act a bit more yeah so the cloud act is the fact that the US government is
able to access data on from American companies and even from American people so first I'm
not a lawyer okay so don't don't take everything I say for granted so it allows to access data
even if that data is in a foreign country so and and they can even I understood from
a paper in Holland by lawyers that they could even ask to an American person secretly to
get give the data that these people can access and and and they cannot refuse basically like
they risk a lot so Microsoft if asked would secretly have to give money that they have
on servers in Ireland and that is and that is not compliant with GDPR that's that's what
the Max Schrempf judgment said so it's been written but then the problem is that they
it needs to be recognized and decisions need to be made to stop doing it and and and it
seems that it takes and and it seems like everybody's waiting for Europe to sign another
agreement to say that it's okay so that you don't have to make the decision to stop hosting
it on American systems please hi thanks for the the presentation so you were saying that
actually like open source collaborative software would help solve the the issue or improve the
digital sovereignty if we suppose that Microsoft tomorrow makes office source code available
on GitHub let's say how that how that change the the actual stage of the digital sovereignty
in the EU well it will change it if people start to to take that software and host it
and verify that it solves the business needs so but yes it would it would improve it for
example Microsoft does not give the source code of office so if you want to do office
editing you have to work with software that has been built by other people not by Microsoft
and Microsoft and Google have better software more compatible with office formats and so
on and so on so it would improve it still would need to be packaged there will still
be a lot of work but it would improve the offers the alternative offers and then companies
but so about the digital sovereignty the thing is if if tomorrow we have a political problem
they can turn off the software so all our companies will have problems the question
is okay do we have alternatives to replace that software at this point they're not necessarily
as good and they are not as good because we're not buying these alternatives so we we cannot
fund them so the distance between the American solutions and the European solution is increasing
instead of being reduced and so it's all about whether or not we would be able to replace
that software if Microsoft made it open source it would be easier to replace to replace their
own services their online services sorry I want a bit follow-up to the first question
basically so US Cloud Act regarding it as far as they recall privacy shield was the first
one that has been taken down by your court and I'm not sure if like US Cloud Act somehow
replaces it or not because no no privacy the cloud is an American law the cloud that makes
it a problem that makes privacy shield illegal basically privacy shield said it's okay to
put data in in in the US and basically the judgment the from Mike shrimps go see his website
to explain he explains the problem much more precisely says that this is not true privacy
shield says it's okay but it's not okay because of the cloud act and the visa visa warrants
the laws in the US that allow access to data even if it's hosted in Europe yeah yeah and
European court accepted that privacy shield is not valid it's not a couple of years I
believe now the European government is right now negotiating the Commission is negotiating
with Biden some new paper that says it would be okay but it's already kind of validated
that this paper is not okay that it wouldn't but there will need to be another judgment
to say that it's not okay so it's a kind of a cat and mouse because some people in Europe
don't want it to be illegal to use American system and Biden doesn't want to change the
cloud act thank you.