Thank you very much. So we spent the last 15 months thinking about all the problems that
could be solved, caused by a piece of e-legislation. At the same time we were trying to think in
a positive sense, what could we do to get something positive? How could we have something
useful? And so one idea that I started thinking about was an EU FAS Act. However, after discussing
this with a few people I agreed this is not the time for a EU FAS Act. It's not certain
that it would get done correctly. So I just added a little bit of punctuation there to
get myself out of that one. So the idea is when we saw the CRA and we saw that it was
a very long document with a single paragraph about free and open source software, we started
thinking about is this the right way to do legislation. Free and open source software
has been getting bigger and bigger over the past few years. And so I looked for a few studies
and one study found that 76% of code bases are free software. And this could be biased
in favour of free software because how do they get access to these code bases? But the same
report also said 96% of the code bases contain free software. So you could imply from this
that also some of the code bases that were not available would also contain free software.
So another way of counting it was by NISA which is partly funded by the European Commission
so there's some legitimacy there. And the average IT application is 70% open source
components and this number it may be higher today because that was a 2019 number and it
also concluded that this was already a doubling since 2014. So the actual number for 2023,
2024 could already be a lot higher than that. So what we're trying to think about is in
future if legislation was to be written is there a way we can ensure that the drafting
matches the reality which today is that free and open source software should be the assumption.
We should have texts that regulate software with us in mind and there should be a little
paragraph at the top if you happen to decide that you absolutely must keep your source
code secret then you have separate obligations but the default should be free and open source
software. So the CRA was a lot of work. We heard from the Commission on Thursday that
they put out a call for input and they got over 100 responses and only two of them mentioned
free and open source software. So Openform Europe was one of the people who responded.
I scanned the response, I couldn't find the other one if anyone knows who it was interested.
But the thing is the response to the input we gave was on a fairly generic proposal,
you know, we're going to do something in this domain and we gave a generic response of well,
be careful. And so this is all we can do if we don't have the specifics of what is actually
going to be regulated. Now, possibly due to the input we gave or due to other people's input,
there was this one paragraph in the CRA and it was very useful. It gave us a starting point to
have conversations. This one paragraph later got turned into pages and pages of text to improve
the situation. But it was interesting that the CRA got written and then after the drafting of
the CRA during 15 months of negotiations and meetings, the actual provisions that will
affect free software got written. So what we were thinking of is what would be the principles
which we would like to see in the way legislation is written in the European Union. And so one is
that we would like the topic to be discussed at an earlier stage in detail and so preferably with
all the people in this room, preferably in the most public way possible. But there are also
internal bodies in the European Commission. The European Commission has an open source
program office in ASPO and maybe, I don't want to hand them too much work, but maybe they could
be consulted either to comment on the content or to be asked who should we be talking to. They
currently have two staff, maybe that could be more. The question then is also raised of when
we want to consult, when we want to talk about how will this impact us, who do we phone? And it's
true, there is not a single industry association and it's not even an industry. So it is a difficult
thing. However, we also have to try. And so first off, European Commission coming to FASTEM last
year this year, it's a fantastic step and it's a fantastic way for them to get a feeling for who is
actually behind all this software. But we are made up of small entities and they need funding if
they're going to participate in any of all these meetings and all these procedures. And this already
complicates the way we work together. At the same time, there are instruments in the European
institutions that could be used. So there are high level expert groups for certain ICT and
standardization topics and there are multi-stakeholder platforms and maybe there could be one for
free and open source software. The second thing is that things should be clarified earlier. And so
at the moment, the text of the CRA is complete. However, we're now going into two and a half,
maybe three and a half years of negotiating 44 different standards with standard organizations
where we're not well represented. It could be useful to have certain assurances that we will be
taken into account and they're taking into account this category of software, which is the majority,
should be a basic principle. And so this could go into the general text of legislation and then
specifically on standards rather than a definition of open standards in the EU legal system, which
says that if the standard is developed in an open process, it's an open standard, which leads to
standards which we may not have access to. We don't know if we will have access to these standards
that we can't implement in free and open source software. And so this idea of open standards
freely implementable standards needs to be thought of in terms of patents, in terms of
technologies, in terms of compatibility with our development and our business procedures.
So with these, we hope that we would at the least, well, we hope that we will get access to all
these standards and we hope that we will be able to use them. These things can be clarified in
regulation 125 is up for review and maybe this is somewhere we can put these suggestions in.
So in summary, what I wanted to say is that what we're hoping will happen is that the European
institutions will discuss early and clarify early and that would help us out a lot. But from our
side, we also have to figure out what exactly we're asking them to do. And when we're talking to
specific people, we have to make sure that we're asking those people to do something that is within
their power. And so from our side, there's also if we want to get to the stage where we could trust
the EU institutions to write an EU FAS Act, we also have to improve the way we interact and make
sure that we're asking for the right things and giving them the right input. With that, when I'm
chairing meetings, I'm quite strict with timekeeping and I like to eat my own dog food, so I'm going
to cut myself off and thank you all very much.