Thank you and I have to click the mic because I am Italian and so I need to move my hand
to speak. Do you hear me? It's okay. Okay. So this is just for the mic.
So hello, I am pleasure to be here and today I am discussing a very broad and
challenging topic. I am talking about power, democracy, innovation and at the end of the day,
our future. But stay tuned up to the end of the presentation because I want to share with you a
couple of practical and effective proposal to solve maybe a little bit of these issues. I am
going to say from Pam Paloni for first apologize for my bed English. I am the vice president of
Rio's Italian network of open source companies and we are part of a pair. So I want to thank
you Sebastian for his great job. So let me talk about a very big issue, big picture in the last
year, just 10 to 15 years. We have witnessed the exponential growth of the power in the end of
very, very few companies and especially tech companies. Today, the magnificance magnificance
7, I don't know exactly what it means, magnificance, but there are the tech giants and
as you can see in this chart, they represent over 30% just a few months ago, this report.
Maybe in the last day a little less, but it's a huge amount of ever. The 30% of the market
capitalization of the standard inputs, 500. So in other words, seven companies are
more than the third of the other 500 companies combined. It's not just impressive for me, it's
alarming. And well, in the last year is increasing the gap from the tech companies to the other
companies. So the tech companies are becoming more and more powerful and they control not just a
huge amount of money, but they control our data, the communication platform. So for me, the
the issue is increasing, you know. Others say it's not just a problem related to the economy
because data communication and even political decisions are influenced a lot, influenced by
very few companies. And those companies are often actively resisting to our regulation to the
regulation in general, but especially the European regulations. And they clear
want to say outside the democratic control. And they are using a well-known excuse. We cannot
slow down innovation. This is a real excuse. And well, we can discuss about if it's a real
innovation because for many of their products for me, it's like weapons of mass destruction
instead of a real innovation, but however, this is the argument they are arguments.
So for me, but not just for me, it's a direct threat to our democratic systems. I need a
water, but do we have some water? Just a minute. Sorry. So the power concentrated in a few
times is dangerous. And just two days ago, Christina Kaffara, during the open source
policy summit, says something very clear. We are as European citizens, we are a colony
of United States. And for me, she is right, but the truth for me is even worse, because we
are a colony, but we are happy to be one colony at the end, because we are not, okay, thank you.
We do not resist and we even convince ourselves that that model is the one to follow. And
well, even draggy seems to say something like that, because he says in his report,
less regulation in Europe and we need to bet on a few champions, few big companies, that's
exactly what they are doing in the US. Regarding the regulation to be fair, he is right
saying that not just less regulation, but we need less fragmentation and better regulation.
So not less, but better regulation. And so today, which is system that is leading us towards
dangerous parts where we are ignoring ethics, privacy and, recently, event diversity. So, is there a solution?
I think so, not a global solution, of course, not something we can solve all the problem
with, but something can help us to understand how to do that. Because I'd like to think about
some open source, not just from a technical perspective, because open source already one from a
technical perspective and even from the, let me say business strategies, you know, but it's
not enough. And we can use the example of open source that it works to think about a different
model, a different way to, to let our lives, you know. So open source showed that innovation
does not have to be monopolized and that the power can be shared between all of us. We already
know that collaborative development and collective intelligence can lead us to a better
way, at least this is my opinion. And yeah, we are at the crossroads of the history or one,
another one of the history. And we need a cultural movement, a cultural shift where we stop
following that model, stop admiring that people and start a different way to do things. The different way
we already know here. And I'm asking you to think outside our technical bubble, because we experienced
the benefit of open source together, but we are quite few. We are not enough to change effectively
the history, let me say. So we need to involve different people despite their technical background.
And I'd like to share the open ideas, even in arts, business, education and in every
sectors. Who remember the name of this painting in English freedom, some quite familiar for us,
so some call to action. Last year I attended this event at the United States and has been very,
very impressive to me because we were close to the security room at the United Station.
Together with people coming from all over the world, from South America, Asia, Africa. And I ask you to join the upcoming event this year,
because has been announced at a bigger event. So last year was two days. Maybe this year would be an entire week. The open source, the United Nation week.
Deeper on the proposal and the suggestion, so I started from a very high level topics down to some concrete actions.
I'm talking about something concrete, for example, to add an additional exclusion for copyright limitation,
for those using that information to train artificial intelligence system really is open source under the OSI definition.
We already have a couple of exemptions, the Article 3 and 4 of the DSM directive exempt for scientific topics, for scientific activities and genetic activities, the copyright for data training and data mining.
But that likes to see an additional exemption for open source AI model. So we can even enforce the definition of open source AI definition by OSI.
The last proposal, since in two hours, I'll give another talk in a devroom about venture capital investment in open source. It's a very challenging topic.
For example, I'd like to see tax reduction for those investing in open source again.
It's a strict way of open source, not open-forcing, and we need to do a lot on this topic, but I'd like to see at least the Europe tax reduction for start-ups releasing open source software and backed by venture capital as well.
So I think I'm on time. If you have questions, I don't know how many minutes we have, and here we have my contacts.
Thank you very much.
All right, there's a question in front here. Please speak up.
Thank you very much.
I don't understand why you mentioned the picture called freedom. I'm not to use something.
Because I cannot change the name of the painting, but I'm joking. You're right, and usually I display my presentation that I want to use open source and freedom and free software in a free way.
Because I don't know the differences, but because in the past we have seen a lot of discussion and we have lost a lot of power and resources discussing between each other against these differences.
We need to take care about these differences, but at the end of the day the rest of the world doesn't care that all doesn't care at all these topics.
So you are right, but I want to be extremely practical.