So good morning everybody, welcome to the open source in the European Legislative Landscape
Devereux.
I have a confession to make which is that we applied for this devereux two days before
the end of the closing deadline and we have made it up as we went along after unexpectedly
being awarded a devereux.
So the whole day is very organic but it has a very important purpose.
We've discovered that the European Union has noticed that devices contain software and
that the software needs regulating.
And they have started doing an amazingly effective job at writing software into regulation.
So one of the people we have with us today, Benjamin Bergel, wherever Benjamin is, he's
presumably, I know he's here but he's hiding.
He was involved in writing the NIST 2 directive and then he went on to write the CRA and he
is surprisingly expert if you have a low opinion of EU policy officers or unsurprisingly expert
if you know that they're all generally brilliant people.
However we discovered that the EU's model of what open source is is that it is low quality
components full of defects that are created by hobbyists in their basements.
And the regulations rather reflected that.
And so we found over the last year it was very valuable to engage with the regulators.
Today what we want to do is not talk about the technical details of any regulations but
rather gather the feedback of the open source community so that we can document the reflections
and outlooks of the community for the benefit of the commission as they go forward in regulating
within their digital agenda.
So we've arranged for there to be four workshops today.
The first workshop that is starting in six minutes is a workshop on the consequences of
the Cyber Resilience Act and the Product Liability Directive.
Then the second workshop which starts at 11.15 is going to look at how we engage with policy
makers as a FOS community.
The third workshop which is at 1.20 is going to look at how we can assist in getting more
free and open source software in use by public administrations.
And the fourth workshop is going to look at how the free and open source community can
come alongside the task force that is implementing the DMA and the DSA and promote interoperability
given that the best path to interoperability is not standards but rather the implementation
of standards in shared open source packages.
So that's our agenda for today.
We have some ground rules that you'll see again during the day.
First of all we encourage you if you are like me and you talk a lot to maybe talk less
and to encourage and leave space for other people to express their opinions.
We encourage you to always be holding the microphone when you speak in a session where
notes are being taken and that is all of them because today we have four rapporteurs
free to the workshops.
The rapporteurs will be listening to what's said, noting down the substance and writing
a written report for us to send to the commission after the workshop.
When you do start speaking please make sure every time you start speaking you indicate
who you are and if you have an affiliation what your affiliation is.
Please note that this is a very complex topic and we know that it's a very complex topic
so please be open to new ideas.
When we run into an intractable problem let's note it and move on to something we can fix
rather than obsess about the obstacle.
And finally there's two ways of looking at this.
Please observe the FOSDEM code of conduct or if you prefer let's have fun and make
new friends.