You are now attending a talk title, the geopolitics of code.
Thank you all for being here.
My name is Anil.
I have here.
We'd like to serve with you some thoughts and ideas that we've been discussing for the last few years.
Well, let's go into this.
So first of all, why we are here?
This is kind of the back story.
So Dario is here.
We're supposed to be here.
It's the original author of, oh, oh, this is okay now.
So Dario is the original author of one of the papers that is part of El Cano Royale Institute.
El Cano Royale Institute is a think tank in Spain that is discussing basically about geopolitics.
And this is the first time, at least to the best of my understanding, that this kind of things funded by some ministries and public administrations and big corporations are doing this kind of analysis.
It's particularly in Spain.
And Dario was supposed to be here, but you get me instead, so sorry about that.
Let's go.
Let's move forward.
So after this article happened, we had a meeting.
We had a variety of participants in the meeting at El Cano Royale Institute to discuss about how to secure the digital infrastructure of Europe.
We had some profiles coming from non-profit, from Spain, specifically some guys from cyber security, head of security, some private companies,
public administrations, and people, specifically as well, from different geographical regions, including China, United States and so on.
And they also put diverse people into the table and talk about freedom of silver and the geopolitics implications of that.
Exactly.
And then the day after, we celebrated a conference called Digital Resilience Forum.
Because the day after, right?
Exactly.
29th of October.
You have here in the QR website and the final document in case you want to read this.
And then you can see here some probably maybe faces that you recognize, including United Nations,
Adrian Agro, coming from Soviet-Ethetic Agency from Germany, John Elyse or Amanda Brok from Open UK.
So all of this basically to summarize and the back of story to say, well, definitely we need to discuss more.
We need to do more research.
We need to do more analysis.
And definitely we need to search this with more stakeholders.
And that's why we are here.
That's a main reason of this talk.
And thank you all for coming today in it.
And the idea is basically to engage again in further meetings.
By the way, some concepts that we were discussing that day.
It was part of the meeting as well.
We were discussing topics as global open source versus local open source.
Maybe it's coming again.
We were discussing topics as for instance, or digital colonization.
We were discussing about what digital infrastructure means.
So there are some, let's say, hot topics out there.
And a bit about us.
So I'll start first.
My name is Daniel Lichardo.
I, as well as my PhD advisor at the University of New York.
In the years ago.
Very well.
Yeah, I finished in 2012.
So it's been a while.
And I'm the CEO of the third year, a consultancy company in development analytics and business intelligence
and open source.
And then I'm the chair of the inner source command foundation on part of the board member of
chaos at the stands for community health analytics for open source software.
And I'm as well as one third barona.
I'm working at Rijon Carrucci University in Madrid.
I've been involved in a free and open source software from different roles for many years.
And the world.
Now I want to talk to with Danny about all of his things that basically are our thoughts.
By the way, if you want download their slides, they're on the web page of the talk.
Because you have many links that you can try while we talk or maybe later.
But try to download their slides, please.
Okay.
So things change a lot during the last years.
I remember in 2007, well, 2006, I joined the research group.
You were ahead of the research group, leave yourself.
And then we were part of some research projects.
One specifically was called flowsboard.
The goal of this was about mining 40s, sort of 40s out there about source code that was,
you know, from China, from Argentina, basically from all ecosystems that were out of Europe.
And the USA, because those were the main two contributors.
And that was the result.
We know about the two main contributors.
The rest of the country were producing just a bit.
So they say that like 20 years ago, 300 pieces of work was mainly a European and nothing more can think.
Exactly.
There was very few collaborations from other parts of the world.
And we can see now, this is a October from GitHub.
I probably, you know, you know about this report.
That they estate, well, this is kind of a list of the most important contributors nowadays to,
to the open source ecosystem in general.
But we have India, China, Brazil, and some more countries.
In other words, you can see many new actors.
And many of them are quite important.
We can no longer ignore the rest of the world as a community.
Exactly.
This is another angle.
OSS Compass is an open source community based in China.
They are producing analytics to understand basically the open source ecosystem.
And this is basically their results.
They are aggregating some of them.
We can see European Union, we can see UK.
But again, it's kind of a similar approach.
We have USA in the China, etc.
But in both cases, remember that the European Union and Europe in general is high in these ranks, right?
Exactly.
And this is something from a study commission by the European Commission.
And this is basically about how different the regions in the world countries are dealing with policies related to open source.
Both in the public administration and in the private sector.
Basically, you can see there is a lot of variety.
On the left, we have countries in Europe.
On the right, we have countries in other parts of the world.
And you can see many different levels of advancement,
that say, in this country, but also many differences from country to country.
So that we can say that every country has been a different strategy.
But most of them are doing something with respect to free and open source of work.
The green diveter, the red of the war, basically.
So basically, there is a class in now, right?
Open source is everywhere.
Open source is now fundamental.
And open source is really, really global.
And something important is this force being fundamental, being essential.
We can no longer, as a society, live without force.
It is moving the cloud.
It is moving mobile.
It is moving AI.
It is moving a lot of things.
And that means that the society is realizing how much they depend on free and open source of work.
But we, as if we are an open source of a community,
also have a responsibility that we didn't have like 20 years ago.
Because just a few parts of the society were really using our products.
But now, most of it is using it.
The question now is basically given all the geopolitics.
If this is happening at the wrong timing history.
Now that we are global, we have all of these problems, right?
And why in the wrong timing, then?
So we can see how open source is affected from different perspectives.
So we serve a couple of great presentations about the CRA.
So we have regulations.
We have the chalk point.
For instance, get have a banning some developers from different countries,
or even how, because open source is so basic for the digital infrastructure nowadays,
how this can be used as a weapon.
So we can summarize this as, when we were small, nobody care.
But now that the open source is fundamental,
some people are interested in using open sources again for weapon.
Some people are interested in regulating it.
Some people are interested in all kind of things that could affect
in a wrong way to open source.
Even when open source is the voting is given a lot to the society, right?
So this is one of the cases.
So we are subject to regulations in all the world.
So we are subject for instance to you as regulations.
And probably you know this incident about the same Russian developers,
beat expert from the Linux corner.
Basically being no longer able of the block in there.
There are a lot of details.
I'm not going to enter into them.
But the basic idea is we can, we can be forbidden for working in a certain project,
because of a certain regulations in a certain country.
We have had a talk about CRA.
And CRA again is going to affect us in different ways.
Unfortunately, thanks to the lobbying to the European Commission and to European Union in general,
the CRA is not that bad for open source.
But in the end, what happens is the data infrastructure is being regulated.
That means that if there is free open source of reddit,
that is also being regulated somehow.
And it can be better or worse that it is going to be regulated.
And then this is not the new.
So all people in the room, maybe remember the natives,
when we had these things about cryptography being considered as a weapon.
It basically in some countries like the United States of America,
it was considering the same grail as nuclear bombs, for instance.
And then there were export, export control,
and you couldn't export a strong cryptography to rest of the world.
And that had a lot of impact in the electronic commerce, for instance,
because we could not really have secured a tiny commerce without a strong cryptography.
And in the end, that was solved by a mixture of lobbying and changes in the environmental many other things.
But still, this thing that regulation is affecting flows,
is not something new in the world.
Yeah, then we have some other example.
This is a paper that was a study in the effect of a gift of sanctions
for different countries, like for instance, here on the production of open source.
At the end, what happens is that, well, people were able to work around these with VPNs and everything.
But probably the most relevant discussion here is what is the effect of having most of the activity of open source in the world,
or happening in one platform, second is in private hands,
and then third is in the hands that is under the regulation of different countries.
And remember, since force is essential, and everybody's interested in it,
if we have a single point of failure, let's say, that single point can be used to control what the community can do.
Imagine if a certain company is up for a billion to work in GitHub,
or a certain country is up for a billion to work in GitHub.
That could be done.
And since this incident, the question is not if that can happen,
maybe the question is when that is going to happen.
And basically, the other problem related to this is all those developers and talent is now invisible to basically money.
That could be funding all of this.
And then, of course, we have to accept, you tell us a bacteria that everybody knows,
because it was like in the press some months ago.
And again, the idea here is somebody who was targeting 300% software
because of the huge importance it has.
So the idea is if I can somehow control the software,
a king control a lot of things in the cloud in other places.
So there is a lot of interest in some actors to do that kind of things,
to plant back doors, for instance, in different kinds of software.
But again, this is nothing new.
This already happened more than 20 years ago when somebody tried to plant a back door in the Linux kernel.
So in that case, it was prevented.
Thanks to Gold Review.
But the idea was there.
And all of the attacks of all of the talks are the moments that this was an actor state trying to do that.
As long as more than 20 years ago.
So again, this is nothing new.
The main difference is software free and open software is now so important.
There is a lot of interest in this kind of stuff.
Yep.
And this issues are basically new.
Are not new as you said.
So now open source is again everywhere.
Let us basically remark this fact.
And now because of this open source is becoming a target.
And it's somehow becoming a weapon.
Right.
So, and let's go a bit into the reality of the industry.
So this is an example we were running in Biteria with some data analytics.
But you can see in the table basically is the more you are to the right,
the more risky.
For a certain definition of risky.
Right.
And then we have some in the y-axis.
We have some metrics.
But in short, what we did was to analyze the first level dependencies of Kubernetes.
Those made in goal.
The programming language.
Okay.
So it's around 400 something packages.
But with this cover is that approximately two thirds of them were at risk.
And were at risk because there is no enough talent retention.
There is no an active growth of contributors.
And basically there are just a few people doing most of the work.
So basically it's mainly an all community related.
So there is certain risk of becoming in my team.
Let's put this in in relative numbers.
So the usual s-bomb.
So the real of materials of a big corporation is around 100,000 components.
We are discussing here about 400, but it's 0.4.
Right.
The percent of the total sample of an s-bomb.
And we are discussing about Kubernetes, which is basically massively used here in the room.
So what happened with the rest of the open source space?
So let's talk a bit about the strategy.
This is the situation up to now.
And now different parts of the world doing different things.
So for instance, the USA way.
I'm not saying they have a specific strategy, but they have a specific situation.
They have a lot of big corporations that have an interest in free and open source software.
That are putting a lot of resources in them.
Probably because they realize how important it is for their own strategy.
They have huge foundations.
Usually located there.
Some of them are in Europe.
But the biggest ones are currently located in the United States with funding from those companies.
And they also have, let's say, the control of some basic infrastructure.
But not only.
If you think about services that we use, many of them are located in the United States.
And therefore, they are subject to the United States regulation.
So they have the kind of interest in situation in the world.
So I'm not saying that they are controlling the free and open source software.
But they are controlling a lot of staff in our community.
Then China, it came a bit later to the discussion, right?
But then the way they've been doing things.
Initially, it's about, well, we are playing as a government.
We are directing.
We have policies.
And then this is part, basically, of our national strategy.
So then, of course, given, you know, the truck point having hit sanctions and this could happen again.
What is what we should be doing as a country.
So then, basically, what they are doing is creating their own stacks.
So then, we are discussing about not having hit half, but we have getty.
Maybe it's about not having our own operating systems.
And then we move into open harmony or open uller.
Sorry about the problems with that.
Again, it's not necessarily that everything in curious intended.
But the situation is like that.
So to some extent, they have been their own infrastructure.
And they seem to have a clearer strategy of using force for, let's say, keeping some independence in IT.
And what do they do the European way?
So that's a question that maybe we can discuss later.
But in this context, probably, as Europeans, we don't have a clearer strategy.
Are you sure?
I don't know.
So again, remarking again, the topic.
So, well, forces everywhere is becoming truly global, it's truly essential.
So this is kind of an open call to the community of can we survive as we've been working together during the last 20, 30 years.
And that's an open call to everyone here.
If we are going into a fragmented space, if we are working silo based,
or if there are still a space for collaboration for next steps.
Now, let's talk a little to a editor.
Let's think a bit about an analogy.
The analogy is about paths.
So forget a bit about software.
Let's talk about paths.
Everybody knows them.
Probably we have paths since we are human.
People started working and they basically created the path by working.
Then they started to realize how important it was to use to the next pillars.
And they somehow improved the path so that walking near was easier and better.
With time, they started to construct paths and all kinds of problems arise.
Since path were that important for everybody, some people started to think about them in a different way.
And you have tips.
You have warlords trying to get you a pay for crossing a path and a staff laid out.
There is a lot of coordination, which means less efficiency.
Because if you are devising the path from my bills to the next one,
maybe I miss in the long path for long-term transport.
That's basically the more you scale, the more meta needs you need to recover.
And produce and have him mind and have some strategies in place.
In gaps appear because somebody needs to build the bridge.
But nobody cares who is going to build it.
Who is going to put resources for that and so on.
So at the end, we have some solutions.
Some people organized around that.
So basically at some point paths started to be a common good.
And people realized that.
And then realized they need to put resources on that.
And they realized they need to organize and coordinate with others.
They realized that this was a basic facility for our work.
And it was important for commerce.
It was important for us going to the next country and see what happens there.
So then as we have in the slides, the Roman world already understood this.
Many older civilizations in the past.
Maybe in the future, I'm going to think of this generation of people here in the room.
So alternative.
Let's think about 300% of the same way.
So probably we were, let's say, in a tile free and open social work.
And now we are young or maybe we are adult.
And this became essential for everyone.
And the rules are different.
So.
Yeah, exactly.
And I think probably, I will go to the next slide.
Because I think this is the key one here.
So open source has been basically, we've been working on our site.
We are producing this, we are producing that.
And then it happens at some point.
We've been relevant for the society.
We are bringing innovation.
We are working in a certain way.
We are increasing productivity.
We are bringing knowledge.
We are bringing transparency.
We are bringing new ways of working together and foster collaboration.
And then it's so important nowadays that it's basically a real threat.
We can say to our current societies.
So then society needs to first be aware that this is happening.
So it's basically a common mission here to say to the society.
It's a society explained, educate that this is the process.
But then at the same time in the analogy of the path.
Now this is becoming important.
So we need a society to take care of open source.
So I'm going to put this important within the society to realize this.
We need the society in general to realize that the free and open source community needs resources.
That we need a friend environment.
That we need freedom of innovation and many other things.
Because we want to bring back to the community what we can build.
But for that we need this kind of stuff.
Especially now that we became important.
We can be attacked by many different kinds of factors.
So yeah, who can convey this to the society?
And my guess is this is our mission because that's what we understand.
So if you talk to people in Kenbany, if you talk to policymakers.
If you talk even to social organizations.
In the end it don't really understand how the free and open source of reward works.
We know.
So I think that it's our responsibility, we think.
This is our responsibility to talk about this to them.
And they have a certain responsibility of listening to us.
Because in the end we are building this infrastructure.
And the fact that this is an infrastructure is already there.
The thing is that we need the rest of the society to consider that and to realize that.
And because of that is our let's say our mission to explain to them this importance.
Because otherwise they are not going to understand.
You know that technology is something difficult to explain and difficult to understand to many people.
And this is a specifically difficult because we have a weight combination of technology and social contracts.
And we need to convey all of that to the people making decisions in all the environments within the society.
Just an example here.
So I had the opportunity to attend the open source of Congress hosted by Eccleson Dasion in September.
I'm 2025.
And there was quite an interest in discussion because there was someone coming from the European Commission.
Policy makers and saying hey we we have a problem because you are so.
I don't remember exactly the word that that the person used but fragmented that me used this word.
That it's it's almost impossible for me to learn what are your requirements need.
How to take care of you etc etc.
There was an answer from the community we can say that it's Paul but that's the strength of the community.
This is why we are here. This is why we are so resilient.
And then but those places are super key to happen and have those conversations because that was probably one of the very first times.
I saw in the same place policy makers and open source developers and having a conversation about how can we effectively reengage and have such discussion and move forward.
Again we were working alone now we created some you know legal umbrella to protect ourselves from the issues.
Now companies started consuming open source producing sometimes and then one of our stakeholders is basically policy makers.
So it's all about how to make this possible.
So we are talking about force as a common infrastructures.
We have been talking about what's that.
We have talked about who can convey that to the rest of the of the world.
How can we really think about this switch?
This change to let's consider open source as something in as a common infrastructures.
So first of all we need to change the scale.
The scale is no longer our world is more community the scale is the world.
Everyone interested in joining and that doesn't mean only technical people that means people from other domains.
We need to coordinate not only among us we need to coordinate with all of these older actors and we need to do that worldwide or at least as much worldwide as we can.
And we know how to do it. We've been doing this for years.
So when we were working on this slide we were discussing how to basically try to find the way.
So we brought a lot of problems and discussions but then we wanted to bring like a path to move forward.
And then we see that at least there should happen to think.
There should be a support from those stakeholders but then at the same time we should they suit and interfere in somehow in the process.
And it's important this balance because we now we need to support and we want to support.
But we also don't want all the actors to interfere too much because we now how to do our staff.
We now how to innovate we now in which direction we want to work.
But still we need to do that in coordination with all of us.
So this balance is complicated requires a lot of talking requires a lot of understanding but it's basic for this to work.
So some examples about this.
So how to promote open source for instance.
We have many different actions in different parts of the world doing this from different points of view.
For instance from the point of view of leading public administration,
give preference to bind pre and open source over instead of any other things.
So that has a lot of benefits.
We are not going to deal with that now but there are some parts of the world doing that.
It was then in Spain like 25 years ago with different success.
All another examples.
We need to create a for a for a first friendly ecosystem.
We need to let people in the first communities stay easily let's say.
There is an example from United Nations from the office for digital and emerging technologies.
And they have the call the UN open source principles that have in some organizations that have been basically.
Atopting them and public estate and we are we are following them.
There are more examples like the CRA have we've seen.
We don't have for.
We had a couple of talks about it before this.
And here the basic idea is we need this kind of regulations to not harm free and open source over.
But work with it and recognize how we need certain rules for working and recognize for instance the role of a voluntary developers.
And developers not affiliated with companies but at the same time as we said in the previous talk.
We also need to recognize the specific role of companies that maybe are marketing the product free software developers are developing.
And then the part of remove barriers basically so.
Certification processes that are allowing open source to be part of the journey or at least have an education process to convince basically certification bodies to make this happen and how this should be.
Moving forward to locate them on how.
The community and the different corporations or universities or individuals are reinforcing support engineering,
support security practices and have those in all align with the legislation.
So remember that the idea is not only to help the phenoperson community but also to let the phenoperson community work.
And for that we move in those kind of areas basically means that there is more room for action and you don't need to have the friction of the link with many different staff.
That could be a barrier in the end.
And we also need to fill the gaps and there are many gaps, mainly related to resources.
To basic infrastructure, to funding and to funding specifically of research and development.
So we know how to innovate for instance but usually we need some resources for that.
We need how to collaborate but we need platform for collaborating.
And those platforms and all of that infrastructure as we said is subject to different kinds of attacks.
So we need to have that thing in a way that that we can work in it as we want.
So again it's a combination and effort and coordination of the different basic entities that we can see here.
We've been open source project basically the central piece. Again it's about having this conversation with the government.
It's about having these conversations with foundations.
It's great that we have people from, you know, European Commission and the CRA and all of this around across them because that means that the community has a, you know, we have mature.
We have evolved. We are now part of the society we can say.
So each of the actors in this slide have different skills and different resources.
We need to combine all of them together and for that somebody needs to coordinate them.
And again it's needs to be the first project and the first community because it's the only one that really understand them can understand all the aspects here.
And where we can do that basically anyone.
We've been doing so far to the point is how can we take advantage of open source being part of the community producing having a conversation right.
At the point of view, I will come to this later.
This is not how to make my country better than the other.
This is not how to make my country the place with a free and open source of what the global happens and not the others.
It's the other way around. We can work with anyone.
So the area is let's try to make anyone willing to collaborate, collaborate. That's it.
And why?
So from some point of view one could say, well this is the ideal work.
Sorry the ideal word. But this is too optimistic or this is something that is never going to happen.
So the idea there are practical reasons why this should happen.
And the main practical reason is if we really believe that free and open source is provided benefits,
any region in the world they can do this kind of a staff basically is going to get a lot of advantages of what the others.
But there are some problems to solve.
So we've been discussing over this during this time.
About the three first on the top, but probably you're aware of some of the others.
And that's where this discussion should happen.
So we've been discussing, yeah, lack of investment, fragmentation, weaponization.
And all of that.
Yeah, I'm many more basically.
So at the end what we need is basically more experience, more experiences probably.
So we need people entities to try and fail and win and save these works.
And compare and share and collaborate basically.
And we are seeing already a lot of these experiments in Europe and in any other parts of the world.
We are seeing how public administration, how foundations, how individuals are trying a lot of things like this.
But we still need to learn from that and to disseminate the learnings so that the next one that comes and tries now
is now some of the lessons of the first one that maybe failed.
So the question is going back into Europe as we are Europeans.
Are we ready to let this?
So remember that during this world position it for many reasons.
We have a lot of developers.
We have a lot of expertise.
We are starting to get some expertise in this idea of collaborating with policymakers with companies.
But still is that enough?
And basically collaborate with others.
There are many other actors in the world that could be interested in collaborating.
As we said some of them already have policies related to open source and free software.
Which maybe are aligned with the kind of things that we in Europe would need to collaborate with them or not.
That's a matter of what's going to happen in the next few years.
But remember all of us probably are interested in this to happen.
So in a way that we can collaborate with all the parts of the world that are willing to collaborate.
That doesn't mean Europe needs to lead.
That may mean that Europe is leading with others at the same time.
And we've seen that this is happening across corporations in the open source space.
So why not at the level of states?
Or do we miss the train?
That's the main risk.
So probably we are at one of those points in history.
Whether either we do this kind of stuff or we are going to be left behind by yours.
This is just something quite old.
I was lucky enough to be a part of a working group in the European Commission more than 25 years ago.
This is 1999.
And we wrote this document for the European Commission then.
Many of the things that we are talking today are already in that document.
Of course, things have changed.
Many of the things that are there are no longer valid.
But still, we in Europe have been thinking about this idea of leading open source and all that like 25 years.
So maybe it's time to do it, right?
Yeah.
By the way, 1999, that was my last year at high school.
I was still doing another stuff.
So the question is, not if we can do this because we have the talent we have the resources.
We have the purchase power in Europe and basically everywhere else in the world.
We have the now home.
The question is, first we believe that open source drives innovation.
And we can have better detailed services because of this.
That's the first question.
And that's a question basically as a community.
So it doesn't matter if this is in Europe or not.
Basically it's all around the world.
The second question is, if we think that Europe could be a good home for all of this open source.
Right?
Now we have something which is right now ongoing.
There is an open call for evidence by the European Commission.
On how to build a digital ecosystem with open source.
So everyone is invited to submit their opinions.
And it's not something academic or something to commercial.
Anyone can contribute.
What they are looking for is let's say input for the future policies by the European Commission on this part.
So if you have opinions, you can submit your opinion about that.
By the way, opinions are public.
You can also read the opinions by others.
And again, I would like to stress the point that we all agree probably.
And we say publicly that open source brings innovation.
But the question to all of you in the room is if you really believe this is the case.
I really believe this is the case.
But that's it.
Basically that's how we talk.
Yeah, that's it.
So thank you very much.
Thank you.
Many thanks for the great talk.
I guess there are questions.
Okay, I'll start on the right.
Thank you for this interesting talk on this.
It's a very important topic.
Sorry, thank you for this interesting talk on this very important topic.
In my opinion, I do not believe that Foss can bring us digital sovereignty if Europe allows
large companies to keep exploiting network effects and to keep monopolizing markets
and to keep monopolizing users what can Europe do to counteract this wave of monopolization
in the tech sector?
So, thank you for the question, so one of the, we discussed about this and the framework
that we have in our minds is first this concept about open source being part basically
of this basic yearning of everyone, it's like tweeting in somehow open source as our physical
infrastructure, right?
So this is key, I need to go from A to B to then that's part that's owned by the state, right?
So that's one thing and then specifically in Europe, you may have different opinions or
so in the room, but specifically in Europe, again, there is the European public directive
for procurement that is happening next year, I think so of the expert here, so if there
is someone else here, would be good to know.
So that's a good starting point to have such discussion because it's basically how can we
not force, but basically recommend what are the benefits, basically a open source beyond
purely the economical fact that sometimes is what people are looking for, how can we force
or basically open source to be part of the discussion, to be part of public administration
procurement and then at the same time, play with the standards, solve for implementation
and then at the end interoperability.
So those are the three things, we were discussing as well about social media and we were discussing
about how to make the case here interoperability would be the great thing because you can create
a standard, you can be interoperable in social media and then you have the software, so literally
you can take your information from one, I know, Facebook, whatever and then you can move to Twitter
and then you can move to some European case, having that power as an inducer, I think,
would be a good starting point, but then we need a strong support by the European Commission
or the different countries.
Not exactly the answer you question, but something I think quite related is basically you
have to different strategies to become sovereign in this domain, one is they blow up your own
staff, everything is yours and nobody cares because it's yours to have, nobody can interfere.
But another one is right to work with others who also want to be sovereign from that point of view
and guarantee that the technology is not going to be a way of controlling the other parts because
it's still opening common somehow and basically Europe and I think every region in the world needs
to make a decision here, I want to develop my own staff ignoring the others when I want to
assert my staff with others in a way that the others can algebra away with me and basically
from a point of view, that's the key point when we're talking about the strategy for Europe,
we need to decide about this.
Thank you. Do you really believe that first-while delivering innovation and other benefits
will continue to do it even when is misused because of geopolitical conflicts and other issues?
Sorry, can you show you again?
Yeah, I can explain more.
You example with roads can prove that good roads can play against you in case of war,
Roman Empire confirmed. So, while we want to make and keep force available and grow and evolve
and actually stay alive, should we accept the risk that sooner or later, whatever resources we
invest into force may play against us because it will be used by regions, geopolitics,
other personalities and so on, it's inevitable. So, either we should stop working on force because
it will be weaponized and we cannot accept it or we continue working on force because it's delivering
innovation and other benefits, accepting a risk.
So, someone I'll try to repeat just to be sure that I understood the question, but basically
it's the question related to the balance between having something open source and basically having
this accessible to other third parties that may not be related to European way of looking at things,
we can say. We have a very specific question. We have a very specific definition of open source,
that means that everyone can use and reuse a silver or everything. The only way, as we can see,
the only way I see open source is in this way and the only way I see that this could happen in
Europe basically is about having all these benefits. So, I don't see problems. I mean,
I see problems from the human rights perspective, absolutely yes. I have in access to technology
to dictatorship regimes and everything, that's a problem as well. I mean, that's more
unethical, question than anything else, even though, yeah, I don't have an answer right now,
basically. So, this has been a discussion, you know, in the free and open source community for many
years and my impression is, free silver is defined the way it is for a reason and the reason is,
it's very difficult to find even in this room the same ethics for all of us. There are probably
very clear cases, but in most of the corner cases, we are not going to agree. So, that's why
I'm free silver, we say everyone can use, that's it. And I think that's not the bad thing in
the sense that in the end it's a tool like knife and the knife can be used if a good or for bad.
And of course, that has a lot of implications that we need to care about, but that doesn't mean that
the model doesn't work, that only means that we need to care about those specific things.
And I know this is not exactly an answer to you question, but still. How do you care about those
specific things?
Exactly. By deciding, I'm building, I mean, what I mean as a developer, I'm building a tool,
and maybe somebody is going to use the tool for bad, but that's not my case. So, what I can do
is to try not to make it really easy to use it for bad, but again, bad depends on my definition of bad,
on your definition of bad, and maybe not the same.
Hi, Orelian here. What's your take on foundations and companies that are funding foundations?
For example, last year, the New York Foundation Europe announced the Neon Air Force Foundation,
which was sponsored by a few German companies. Do you think that's a good practice? And what
can go wrong without? What is the good practice again, sorry?
Do you have local European companies funding foundations together with the Linux Foundation?
And is there something that can go wrong with this kind of model of like a breeding
internally in Europe, and funding within Europe? Do you see some threat in that?
So, the question is related to buy only European. Basically, if you may not,
I would say that, I mean, my personal opinion again, it's, I think that's an error,
because if we want to foster that collaboration and make this space, basically, to bring
others, the opportunity I see for Europe, specifically is that if we start designing certain things,
whatever it is, for basically the architecture, the needs to cover, whatever we need in Europe,
then others may come or may not, but I only see benefits in that case. So, the buying only European,
it's, if I say, English, how Turkey does it work, basically, you are isolated and that never works.
So, but I mean, we are in technology and technology evolve, so, whatever we do now, we'll be basically.
So, first of all, I would like to make a difference between the product and the service.
The product may be free and open social work, and maybe you are buying the service
from a certain company in a certain country. So, for the second, I don't really have an opinion
which is relevant right here, but for the first one, I do. I mean, we can use anything that was
developed in the world, and it is nice that everyone can use in any part of the world with a developed,
because it is in my own interest. So, I mean, if we believe we can compete with anyone,
I mean, if Europe has enough, and now let's enough people, and ask skills to compete with anyone,
then we can believe that our main sport is to actually compete with others in terms of
production of software or whatever. Then, what may happen is that for any kind of reasons,
we prefer to use a services in Europe, so that they are subject to our regulations or whatever.
That doesn't mean that for instance, we cannot use, I don't know, Kubernetes,
for just because Kubernetes has been developed by Maria Maria and companies,
because if we will understand and have the knowledge that what we can do is to benefit from that work,
the same way that maybe they can benefit for our work for other reasons. So, I think that to separate
me, Josh. Okay, my question. Now, first, I have a remark that you took about the digital initiative,
European digital initiative, and the survey is only available until this Tuesday,
so if anyone needs to fill in remarks, you will hear me right? Okay, yeah, so I had a remark.
My question was about software, like for an open source software, and it was,
should we accept like any software in any country, by any company, or do we filter by country,
or do we filter maybe by individual or company? Because for example, I don't think many of us
would be ready to run, let's say, I don't know, like pressure on open source software,
just because even if you throw the developer, you cannot be sure that, you know,
you will not be forced to put the back door, for example. So my question was about which country,
do we kind of include in the initiative, and should we restrict it to, like, democratic, at least,
someone democratic countries, or should we just filter out by commitment? I'm not sure if it's
really clear about it. So basically, but going to the proposal that we have, what country is,
is basically any country anywhere in the world, so what's the problem? We are starting the
discussion about ethics, and that's a different.
So remember that the cooperation in the first community is not really between countries,
it's between individuals, individuals happen to live in different countries. So the idea that
I think we serve is that the environment should be good enough so that any individual was from
any country could participate in any open source community, as long as that person
respects the rules of that specific community. Whether we can set up an environment for that or not,
it's a different reason, a different thing. And for that, of course, we did kind of agreements
between governments, for instance, that the agreement is not on terms of, for instance,
what kind of software we're going to develop, the agreements in terms of, let's have common rules
so that any one can collaborate in any community, which is different. And remember that,
up to now, free an open source software is mainly a thing of persons,
companies are putting resources, but in the any dispersions, the in the software, and doing the
thing, right? Should we as open source community, should we as open source community do something
about governments that contract the cheapest offering instead of the offering where
actual contributions back to core happen? So basically, it's about the procurement process in
buying in software. So basically, our position here, or what you say now, but it's what we've been
trying to show is that we need to give, to have a, an issue ecosystem to open source to basically
to evolve and let open source keep working and evolving and collaborating in the same way.
So, make personal answer is yes, ideally, how to do this. It's the only way I've seen so far,
basically, about having a conversation with policy makers and making that possible, and then
ideally, through corporations, then we have the other discussion about the lobbies,
or maybe how to buy only European, that could be part of the messages that we are hearing today.
But the best way I've seen so far, and I think Ecclesoundation, for instance, is doing a great
job in that space is having that conversation with policy makers and letting them understand,
this concept about educating them, helping them understand how we work, to make this possible.
I think that there are a lot of things here. One is removing barriers so that if people want to
purchase an open source software, they can, because in many cases, for instance, public administrations,
in many cases, they are barriers for that. But the second one is try to explain people how
buying open source software solutions is on their own benefit, which is something that probably
we can try to teach people about that, because in fact, it's a matter of, at least, not only
functional capabilities of the software you are using, but on thinking on non-functional things,
like, how can I innovate with this, or how much I'm going to depend on the vendor, basically,
on this. Daniel, Jesus. Thank you. Many, many, thanks. I think we're done. Great talk. Good day.
Please.