Okay, everyone, thank you for making it at 9 a.m. as you can hear my voice is already a bit
going away because of all the exciting days that we have at Falsdem and around. I am
Paoloxagosevska and I am with the Linux Foundation Europe. Yeah, like this. Okay, I will
start again then and I see some late commerce again appreciated for you coming here at 9 a.m.
I'm Paoloxagosevska and I am with the Linux Foundation Europe. I've been working on open
source and policy for the past seven years and I have to say that I'm very excited about the
point that we achieved. So far and I think it's a lot because of the people in this room
and the thousands of people at Falsdem. But yeah, let's start with the short introductions
from the speakers. I will allow you to talk about yourself a little bit and what are we doing
here? Vitorio. Thanks for the light. Hi, I'm Vitorio Bertola. I'm the head of policy for
open exchange which is a German open source software company. We make the Avko to make
power DNS and we are one of the companies involved in the digital solar DF thoughts about
the German in France providing the web mail platform. Good morning everyone and voices are going.
Clearly, I am Gabriela Gullumbro. I work for the Linux Foundation, the two things that the
Linux Foundation, one lead Linux Foundation Europe and the two I manage a foundation called
Finance that brings banks to collaborate on open search. Hello everyone. Thank you for joining
at this very special 9AM Sondesla. My name is Tierra's and general manager for the
open infrastructure foundation which is the home for the open stack project and also the
vice chair at the open source initiative. So talking about digital solar IT sounds like a
nice topic. Should we speak like this? Okay and let us know if you don't hear us because
that's important that you hear us that's where we are here. A little short intro because
as I work on policy for us it's very normal to talk about digital sovereignty and then talk
about open source and you know six years ago seven years ago when I worked on this topic
in policy in Brussels with politicians and I said that I focus on open source policy faces
were very surprised, all the eyebrows were raised. It's not the case anymore and it's often
because of the narrative of digital sovereignty. It's a lot of because of the geopolitical
tensions. It's because Europe has realized that the dependency runs quite deep but I would
like to ask my speakers because you know we say that Europe has to gain more independence when
it comes to its technological stack. Many are trying to define it. I honestly don't want to focus
on trying to define what digital sovereignty means. I don't find it to practical and to help
for but what I would like to ask is what is the most omitted when we talk about digital sovereignty
in the context of open tech because us we believe that open source is good. Policy makers don't
necessarily. They see it as oh why should Europe open source its achievements, its technological
progress if this is up for grabs from other countries. Should we start with dealing?
Yeah. So I think what's missing from the discussion when people talk about digital sovereignty
sometimes it doesn't get very practical or very defined and I feel like if we can narrow down
on what is the actual goal in the end it's like there's clearly something we needed yesterday
which is more control over the data and the compute that's happening within Europe. We want
our lowest to apply to it. We wanted to be protected by private circles from the EU. That's
something we needed yesterday. Today we need also to make sure that our infrastructure for critical
workload can't be turned off the next day. So that's the day one resilience and more and more
people realize that they need also to have continuity. They to be able to invest in technologies
that are going to be available to them tomorrow. Not just because it tells which might be turned
but more like the investment they are making into those technologies need to survive any type
of geopolitical or corporate event. We've seen with VMware changing that pricing that sometimes
is not a great thing to bet on a proprietary stack. And I think open source and more specifically
open source that openly governed protect you against those three
important scenarios. The one that we should have worked on for a very long time. The one that we
need to protect ourselves against today and the one that we need for for a long term investment in
those technologies. I'm going to project first time that as an Italian detailed
made that I don't speak loud enough. So can I? Yeah. So I want to piggyback on what to
reset and to be fair I've seen this changing even this week with respect to the previous
conversations that I've had over the last few years. But to me is that the
oftentimes open source and providers after I've referred as a complete dualism
false dichotomy. Keep trying. And seriously, but especially when it comes to this sort of
openly governed ecosystems, we've seen in Linux and Kubernetes and several examples that we
have in the Linux Foundation, it's a sort of combination of keeping the governance and sort of
creating a sort of a basic system of open source technology that can be harmonized together.
But there is a whole commercial side of things. And so most of this open source is brought to market
by a product and services vendors. And so there are conversations around funding,
commercialization around industry contributing back. There's a lot of sustainability
questions here. I've used for the last ten years to work with banks and I know it's possible,
even they're not like immediately thinking about open source from a good for the world standpoint.
So I think I was excited this week even throughout the whole open source week to see
more conversations around funding, more conversation around actually how we
sustain the ecosystem. And the fact that it's not just a black or white open source versus
provider. Thank you. So what I think is most missing from the discussion on European digital
sovereignty is the economic aspect. So we talk a lot about transparency, security,
being dependent on being subject to which is by the Americans, this kind of the. And this is
all true. But we also have to understand that this vital matter of survival for the European
economy. We have an European inton sector. It's small. It's small maybe because we are not
great entrepreneurs. I don't know, but I think it's small mostly because we have been convinced
that the Europeans are not good, that making good everyday online services and products and
software stuff. So we have to buy American because it's better. And this is false. I mean,
there's a lot of very good products in Europe that don't get bought because we have been
convinced that we have to buy the others because the others are better. And this is vital for
our economies. Because this means that every year there are billions of euros,
both public money and private money that fly away from our economies and go to places
every mostly into the Silicon Valley, but a lot of the world. And create jobs there, create
wealth, actually create a lot of power in the hands of very few people there. And we,
we are on money are actually promoting this and creating this very dependence. And what we need
to do is to change this flow of money, make it sure most of it stays in Europe with European
companies also with non-European companies, but stays in Europe, creates jobs in Europe,
taxation in Europe, and they have a news in Europe. And this will really change our destiny.
Thank you. I feel like all of you are touching upon quite similar points that I want to pick up on.
So, Tiri, you were talking about the dependency that comes from because, okay,
there are all these ideas of software made in Europe. I don't know if you have seen a label like this
from our open source perspective, it doesn't seem like a great idea because it's
recreating yet another dependency. And then Vitoria talked about very good products in Europe
that are not being scaled up and that are not given the chance to actually penetrate the market.
What do you think we should do to change that? Because the other ideas to have software made in
Europe, how do we make open source software to be at the heart of this?
So, you're right that the biggest mistake we could make is to not leverage what's already there
and make sure that it is consummable by the European businesses and the public sector and
everyone, whatever their approach to software is. And I think that what's missing right now,
at least in my field, a lot of people want to deploy new infrastructure on our local infrastructure,
that means a lot of interest for the projects that we host. But at the same time, the ecosystem
of companies, the local ecosystem does not necessarily provide the services or the products that
those industry need. And the early adopters, the people that can run their own infrastructure
like technical code and deploy it, they're going to use our software already. But the next group
is all of those companies that have, don't want to be in the business of providing infrastructure,
they need partners, they need the ecosystem of companies. And it exists in the US, it exists
in China, in Asia, in general. It doesn't exist that much in the EU. And oftentimes,
the contracts are won by US-based consulting companies, not local. So, we need to foster
a healthy ecosystem of supply of services around those technologies, I think.
Riffy now from the same concept. I mean, I do think that there are a lot of European
small and medium enterprises that build on open source. I started my career long ago,
I'm not going to age myself, but in an open source consulting company, it's sort of the late
2010s. But I do think what's missing is scale. One thing that I mentioned is sort of funding,
but if I can share an experience from what we've seen again in some of the ecosystems in the Linux
Foundation, there's a little bit of consolidation needed here in my mind for achieving sort of the
scale for which these companies can then serve some of the large enterprises that we have in Europe.
The kind of actually compete at scale. And when I think consolidation, I mean,
not necessarily just from a, you know, merger and acquisition or sort of commercial standpoint,
I'll give an example. In the Linux Foundation, you know, we started to say the cloud native computing
Foundation was based around Kubernetes. And obviously that started with Google, open source
ing it for commercial reasons, effectively. But then Kubernetes became sort of a magnetic asset
that started attracting other projects into this openly governed ecosystem that, you know,
almost like organically created connection. So there was a level of technical integration
completely in the open that allowed for, you know, this harmonization, this technical
consolidation, which ultimately means that the companies that then build on it, say commercial
open source companies, can focus sort of push the innovation top of the stack, allows you to focus on
actually delivering sort of the last mile to your customers, to scale sort of on the
services support and UX, which is sort of these things that we say, open source people can do that.
Well, it's because we spend too much time from the lower layers. And so I think a degree of
technical harmonization between this, this small and medium projects and open source
companies in Europe could be useful to help then scale how we service the large industries that are in
Europe. Yes. Well, I agree that we have, I mean, the proprietary European industry is already coming
up with, I mean, they say, no, we have proprietary European software made in Europe because we control
everything, every single line is written in Europe, so that's the Europeans. So we do have urgently
to agree on the response. So what do we buy a European open source offer from digital sovereignty?
And in our case, even if our software is made in Europe, it's not every light of code is made in Europe,
and it's fine like this. So there's no need to look at where the code is coming from.
I think that if we look at the objectives of both of sovereignty and the economic objectives,
the point is who is being paid to put together the products, to maintain it, to have the
know-how and support and to sell it in the end. So the point is that the vendors have to be
European or at least in Europe and that the wealth the demand of generators to be in terms of
European jobs and taxation and so on. And I think if we go by that definition, then a lot of
two problems disappear because nobody wants to, you know, start checking the nationality of
authors of contributors on GitHub, that would be crazy, it would break open source. On the other
hand, we also cannot just say well, open source is global, so it's fine if we get a
European money. We continue giving, I mean rather than giving money to American private,
the proprietary software companies, we give it to American open source companies. This is also,
yeah, it will not fly with politicians. So we have to find an answer that guarantees that
in the end the wealth stays here without breaking the open source development model, but I think
it's entirely doable. I feel like a lot of what you're talking about is pointing us to the topic
of fragmentation, fragmentation of, you know, you have a company in one European country,
then it's not necessarily that straightforward to the business in another European country.
We talk about fragmentation about many initiatives that are trying to solve the problem of digital
sovereignty. I would like to start with these barriers to doing business, and I think here
it's Victoria, that, you know, from the, like, more SME perspective, I'm curious about it.
Also, if you have questions to each other, I invite you to ask questions to each other.
No, well, first of all, the European companies have all the problems of any European
companies, so in economic terms, a European is not too friendly to business, you say.
And indeed, there's a problem of capital, you know, actually available to venture capital in
Europe is 120 of the United States. So there's still some fundamental economic things we have to
work upon. But I mean, for the rest, I mean, on the other hand, I'm wearing, when people say,
you know, Europe needs to be there on Google. There's this myth that again, we are inferior to
the Americans because the Americans could be Google, and we don't have any very big. This is false,
because we are fundamentally different. We still are an archipelago of countries, cultures, languages,
and whatever. And so we try to build a single digital market, but we do need to have companies
everywhere and to adapt to each and every culture, sub-culture in Europe. And open sources perfect for
this, because it gives you, like, open interfaces, open protocols, and you can cooperate horizontally,
you can find a partner in Lithuania, or in Portugal, or any part of the European Union.
And work together. So this is the kind of cooperation we have to do. And I think,
open source fits that well. So we have to stress it also with public politicians.
I think it absolutely right. I'll try to find something where we can have a little bit of spice,
a little bit of conflict, but you're absolutely right. And to be fair, when I mean scaling,
I don't think we should go to the hyperscaler level. I, you know, there are some fundamental
I would say challenges right now in technology are required. That level of scale, you know,
we're talking AI, we're talking cloud, but, you know, I will go play don't get rotten tomatoes,
but I do live in California. And there are absolutely problems with the hyperscaler approach.
I feel less and less comfortable being there and being part of that ethos. Let's say,
you know, do you know evil? Yeah. I mean, questionable. So, but what kind of kind of tying,
I think we touched on funding. We touched on, I think, one area that to your point of making it easier
to do business. Again, I'm hearing more recently, things like Ewing, it was part of the
one of the policy priorities in the last few weeks from from multistarom and the lion,
funding. But I go back to that also harmonization of the ecosystem is that, you know,
open source, we can build together, we can integrate. To me, the de facto standard digestion,
you know, there's been a lot of, you know, historically Europe, you know, has strong, you know,
European standard bodies. There's a lot of standard digestion, so sometimes innovation is measures
in terms of standards and, and, or more recently, regulation, you know, that's his regulation
to harmonize the ecosystem top down. And, you know, I think the narrative has changed, you know,
regulation is out. Well, we'll see. But I do think that more organic, de facto standard digestion,
that open source, when we actually work together, you know, if we have a thousand different
separate projects in GitHub, it's going to be hard. But I think, again, going back to creating sort
of a pivot, kind of a large technology that we can all use to build and integrate against,
that and in my experience to move faster than, you know, just regulation and standard digestion.
And so I hope we'll look at, you know, whether it's a U-DLE stack or however you want to call it,
something that can really create this, then it was facilitated that the ecosystem of this
companies that would scale on it. I want to quickly go back on to the topic of fragmentation,
because more wearing my open source initiative had, it feels like there's some difficult conversations
ahead around having less projects, because it's what made the success of open sources of
those easy experimentations. Everyone can build their own code, they can fork and existing code
and drive it into a different direction that really let a lot of innovation happen. At the same
time, we're facing right now a problem of sustainability and the ecosystem, how do we get all of
those JavaScript libraries that just do shift left? They have like 20, they're all maintained by
one person, maybe just having one or two maintained by two people would be, would be actually more
sustainable. So there's, it's not a natural conversation for the open source developers. And so
I feel like we want to escape some discussion around concentration of effort to have less projects
to maintain this project to sustain and also having this opportunity to create those platforms
where more, more effort can be, can be called as, but also much just about a branding perspective.
We have plenty of solutions to do things that are provided by US providers right now in Europe,
but they don't reach the level, the critical mass of visibility or the critical mass of branding
that will make them natural choices for companies. Like people continue to use doodle for planning
their meetings, we have from a date, we have other things that have never completely reached
the level of visibility and I think it's part of it is unfortunately due to the diversity of the
offering. And so we have hard discussions ahead around maybe we need less projects, maybe we need
to concentrate on the same projects, maybe we need to build up some of those to a level of visibility
we will let them be the natural choice for at least the European based companies.
Thank you, that's indeed not an easy discussion and I do feel like some of the funding initiatives
are going to have an impact on it, such as the European sovereign tech fund, I assume most people
in the room have heard about this proposal. If you haven't take a look, it's a project that
proposes for the EU to put substantial funding for core foundational open source projects.
It's based on the German sovereign tech fund and in my opinion it seems like probably
you know just if it does happen, if we do have the USTF it's going to point to quite some of those
projects that should become the larger ones and you know kind of through natural competition
and sustainability, please. Just I don't want to be in there shoes because it's going to be
everyone is going to ask for funding for their project and at some point they will have to pick,
they will have to choose and it's going to be super hard but it's necessary.
And Victoria, let's make sure that this is actually an active fund, that does decisions and
decides to invest in stuff that is actually necessary, rather than a passive fund, like most of
the European funding is like you, they wait there and someone comes with the paperwork and if the
paperwork is fine, yes you get the money and five years later you have a proof of concept,
then it dies, nothing ever. I mean how many internet good internet products are widely used
in the products came out of European search projects? I think zero and we spent like 30 billion
50 billion over time. And just to be purposeful, honestly I see the USTF more as a
maintenance fund that's necessarily an innovation engine, I mean obviously we need to make sure that
the building blocks especially those smaller libraries sort of the maintainer in Nebraska type
things are supported and I think the public sector should own that, like the own roads,
railways, even from a defense standpoint and cybersecurity standpoint, the impact I think would be
outsized with respect to many other sort of defense investments that we do, but I don't see that
as the necessarily sort of innovation engine, that's let's make sure that the basics are covered
then we have sustainability for the for the core projects that in the end the larger open source
and companies build on, but yeah I don't see that sort of the innovation side of things.
I think there's another thing we have to explain governments also thinking about what
you were saying about the multiplication of projects, that we have to tell governments how to
be good in the 90s and see the sense of this ecosystem, because some of the governments have
sort of understood that they're working with projects, they've found in the projects, some
other governments have just downloaded the entire core base, forked it and made their own version,
they put their national flag, I mean talking about the French of course, so and basically
they fucked the projects and started really developing them on their own, which is not very
constructive, so I think we have to explain also to the governments how to be part of this.
I would like to go a bit more towards policy, because you know there are all of those initiatives
now and I feel like even you're guessing that yeah you see a fork is very needed but it
just is like foundational layer, this is very different thinking than we had a couple years ago.
I haven't really met many polysomakers who were thinking that oh you SDF is such a bad idea
we should absolutely not do it. I haven't really encountered that, so we have gone a long,
long way, but if we look a bit more future looking in terms of policy what do you think should
be done that we achieve some kind of digital sovereignty in the next 10, 15 years? What is like
the most important part of the policy process that we should focus on?
I'll take the easy answer, because policy is not necessarily my strongest suit,
public procurement obviously, that's one of the levers that the
policy makers have at the very least the government and the public sector should
buy digital sovereignty solutions and that's obvious to me that the very easy lever
but we need to find other level endeavors is good. There is also the question of
forcing organizations, private organizations to care about sovereignty,
you know, like not just the next month quarterly results but also maybe building up the
subordinate independence or the resilience of the European ecosystems against
geopolitical changes against the corporate decisions that's not going to come
naturally, unfortunately to those companies so there need to be some
amounts of policy to force them to take into account that dimension otherwise will always be
renewable. I want to build on that and I would say I would love to see a
mature and sort of harmonized definition of what, how do you understanding and therefore
reflection of that understanding of how actually the ecosystem works across
different pieces of policy and that might be, you know, obviously there is this open
consultation that closes in a couple of days on the open source ecosystem, they've received over
a thousand responses, send them more, they're definitely are listening, but I think
sort of embodying a lot of the concepts that we discussed, you know, it's based on the global
common sense, it's not just, you know, proprietary versus open source but there is an ecosystem
where you just said, like I think I'm Indian from Matrix, a couple of days ago, the policy
is something really interesting, like if you're in the procurement directive, if you're procuring,
it's a public sector, you're procuring from an open source company, you can define what
the definition of commercial open source company, but you should make sure that in that relationship
you are mandating some degree of upstreaming, like it's not just your taking of inserting your
selling it, okay, so you're better than everyone, are you actually contributing back upstream,
not just the fixes, like the CRA, already sort of mandates, but also, you know, innovation,
just going back to your idea of the take a project for a skin and it and then it's for,
sort of like going back to sort of fostering the consolidation of the ecosystem and
commercial sort of the private sector contributing actively to the sustainability of it.
Yeah, in the end I agree, of course, the number one thing, especially in the shelter is changing
public procurement, that's where we can get the money that really changes the market and it will give
also private capital, that isn't to invest because there's a market and so there will be investments
in making products better and companies will grow and maybe integrate. So if we give that for granted,
I think that the next thing in the longer term is a change of mindset, I mean, as Europeans,
I mean, even in the private companies, so start thinking at the consequences of what you buy,
there's so much unaware, I mean, lack of awareness of the use of the technology and
company, you know, AI came out and companies started to give all their most secret emails into,
I mean, they put them into charge of it because, I mean, I know someone at a very high level,
in a very high famous, a very big car company, a car group in it and they still use Google for their email,
I said, but they aren't too afraid, the Google is might just check what your plans are and maybe
come out and out on a bus car as they wanted to. So there's really a lack of this and the other thing is
also enabling the young people. So we are not a continent for young people, we need to liberate the
gross. If you go to Asia, it's full of young people that start doing stuff, I go around here,
not just China, Southeast Asia, India, we have to, I mean, unleash the power of our young people
that are very little of it. Thank you, we have to unleash the power, we have one minute left for the
panel, do we have any questions in the room? I have one question about the European Southern
Tech Fund. I understand that Microsoft GitHub, they want to have also industry funding into the
European Southern Tech Fund. I think that will be the end of the project. The Germans do not have
any funding from commercial offerings or commercial companies and it will end just like Guy Aix,
like a dead thing. So are you able, are will you stop lobbying for industry input or will you just let
you die? Is there a particular person that you would like to ask that or anyone?
I guess I wasn't necessarily aware that they were pushing for the Southern, I think I think keeping
the streamline separate is a good idea. I think having the Southern Tech Fund being a complete
public, a complete public initiative makes sense, but I do think that industry is contributing
back to open source in other ways, whether it is code or funding, you know, in a rendition of banks
to good think for the ecosystem. So thank you, we have to finish. Thank you.