I'm not a lawyer, I'm not your lawyer, I'm definitely not my lawyer, I'm no one's lawyer,
and I'm not certified as a lawyer in any jurisdiction, including America, which is where
I'm originally from.
Why do I mention America because all of open-source law is now predicated upon the American
legal system?
This is kind of confusing and it's kind of weird, but it's because America has been a global
superpower for a long time, and as you all know, it's increasingly less of a superpower
and more of a superpower, like what's going on.
So what I was curious about is what's going to happen with that?
So I currently live in New Zealand, where, yeah, it's really nice, fellow Shannon, where
I joined the Wikimedia group, and it turns out that every single discussion about what
you can upload to Wikimedia in New Zealand is what happens on their American law for this
asset, which doesn't make any sense, because A, it's across an entire ocean, but B, New
Zealand shouldn't be worrying about American law, but they do because Wikimedia is based
in America, and also American law just has a really long arm, you can think of it like
Sauron, just reaching way beyond the border of Mordor.
This is increasingly less of a thing that we need to worry about in a post-American world.
The majority of the legal and interesting policies that we can talk about is really about
the CRA, and about the EU, which makes sense, we're in Brussels.
But I guarantee you, if there was an open-source conference in China, there would be more
about Chinese law, unless about American law than it used to be.
And so my question is, what's going to happen there?
I can't ask anyone here about that.
I can't ask Karen, because Karen is an American lawyer.
I can't ask Richard, because Richard is an American lawyer, and maybe they're lawyers
in other places, but they may not be lawyers in New Zealand.
And I just don't know what this means for the OSI, because the OSI is also a 501c3 in the
US.
And so what happens there?
And if you look at the open-source principles, which they use, on their website, some
of them are really interesting.
For instance, you can't discriminate against anyone using your license.
Your license can't be discriminatory.
But if your license is in English, it's discriminatory against someone in another jurisdiction.
It's not discriminatory if you're entirely based upon American law.
What happens if it's in Ghana?
What happens if it's in another language?
Well, they speak English in Ghana, but I don't know.
Let me just say, I'm not a lawyer, I'm not even smart.
Well, I'm really wondering if my passport is less valuable than it used to be.
And if I can get sued in a different jurisdiction or something, like, what's going to happen
there?
That's really not cogent, but it is for 30.
I think I'm just going to actually stop.
I have notes, oh yeah, the other question.
So when I looked up the open-source principles on the open-source.org website for the OSI,
there's also the open-source AI definition, which was pushed through really, really quickly
by the OSI.
And it was pushed through with the approval of things like Facebook, because they want
to make sure that open-source applies to AI's.
That's also less important than it used to be.
And the OSI is compromised for that reason alone, as well as being an American site.
So when you combine those two things together, it just makes me feel really do me and gloomy.
And so I would be interested in talking to anyone here about that.
This is a lightning talk.
It's not a complete product, and at this point I will stop.
Thank you.
I wish I could respond, but that is not on the agenda.
The next part, we'll go with Jen.
Let me see.
Here we go.
Well, I wanted to follow Richard for a number of reasons, but he posed this question of, what
does it mean if so many different projects, foundations, et cetera, are based in different
national jurisdictions?
And at the same time, we have increased regulation with extraterritoral effects.
And it is a question that I have been looking into, and at the end of my PhD, which focuses
on global governance of open-source software at the University of Cambridge.
When I wrap up this year, I might not have the perfect answers, but I hopefully will have
a answer to this conundrum.
So if you think that I've noticed over the past couple of years of doing this research
and before that, I worked for a decade in practice as an international lawyer, so I looked
at things like global governance of the regimes around climate change or oceans or internet
governance.
And there are all these formalized regimes for governing those comments, but there hasn't
really been that discussion around open-source.
And until now, we haven't really had the political circumstances of pressure to have those
discussions partly because it was freely available, it was open, and there were less restrictions
that were potentially being imposed and more of a cooperative global environment.
However, the reality, as Mark Carney, so eloquently said at Davos, is that we are no longer
living in that world.
We are also watching witnessing a particular geopolitical moment as states talk about digital
sovereignty and how they can leverage the power and potential of open-source to get ahead
and through Jewish dependencies on foreign tech.
So open-source is, in many ways, having a key moment, and that's tying into some very
helpful discussions with states wanting to invest and support in open-source as well.
And I was one of the co-authors of the proposal for a European sovereign tech fund within
this context.
However, as states look also to invest and support open-source, they may also be looking
to regulate and engage in other ways that could potentially further fragmentation.
So another cool part of my research is how can we bring relevance stakeholders together
and have discussions about regulatory cohesion and having a simplified cohesive framework
across borders that supports and facilitates open-source as a digital commons rather than
having that fragmentation.
And with that, I'm very happy to leave things there.
But if you would like to talk to me further, I'm always welcome conversations, suggestions,
people that I should be speaking to and things that I should be reading.
Thank you.
I think at this rate, we may have some time at the end for some rebuttals, which I think
there may already be of interest in doing.
So we'll see how that goes.
Whoops.
So who's next?
Thank you.
All right.
So hello.
My name is Niles Hucos.
So before Christmas, I started looking into digital wallets and in or way, they have
this Sandbox.
It's a program you can apply and join to develop various services or even wallets, technology,
digital wallet technology.
So I said to them, hey guys, I don't want to buy an accrate wallet for iOS or Android.
I'm thinking about creating a wholly different mobile phone, something small, it would
be totally different.
And this was this started, sparked a very interesting process of me talking to this
governmental body because they were like, first resort or first reply was, that's kind
of cool, but it's too bad we couldn't make it this time and so on.
And then I, since I'm in the past life, I was a consultant.
I wrote this wrongly word a letter saying, if you are going to decline me, then you
will have to thoroughly explain why and with pointing to your project mandate and pointing
to the digital market sector where by end explain why you are prohibiting an alternative
platform besides iOS or Android, which this could theoretically be.
And then sometime past and then they wrote me an email saying, maybe we can have a meeting.
And then so that meeting is next Friday.
And I think they are still very on the back first, they don't really know what to do with
something that is not iOS or Android.
I know that they had, like Job offers out requesting people who are experts in Android
or iOS and suddenly there's something else that is not Android or iOS, but we have already
hired people for Android and iOS, what about these other things.
So this is going to be interesting.
So yeah, and I was, that's, so I'm trying to hold the digital market act as a tool and
use it right now, but I don't know how well it will be.
And there's another aspect to this that's also, I wanted to ask that it's released to banking
apps, which is in Norway and in Scandinavia, there's an app called Bank either.
And it's very monopolistic and you use it not only to access your bank, but also to do
all sorts of governmental services and so on.
And it's extremely, prohibitive, it hinders a lot of different platforms because if you
create a fully de-gugled Android operating system, then the users of those systems, they
will not be able to download Bankida at all.
And also, if I would create something small that could readily be worked as a bankida,
then why should this proprietary service owned by a lot of banks even care about me at
all?
So then I wish some of them were here because then I would ask if the bankida company is
actually being a true gatekeeper and should be have all these obligations that we put
on Apple and Google and so on.
So yeah, lots of thoughts.
If this interests you or you've been working a bit with this, come talk to me.
Thank you.
Hi there everybody.
What's good for us them?
So first things first, thank you to the organizers here in the legal and policy devroom.
This is my favorite devroom, I'm completely horribly biased, but I love this place, really
appreciate you all, round of applause for the organizers and volunteers.
My name is Remi De Causemaker.
I am not here officially affiliated with anyone.
I'm here as a private citizen of the global free and open source offer community.
During my day job, you can look up what I do.
I'm not even going to mention it today.
The thing I want to share with you all here in the policy devroom is that there have been
some changes across the way in the place that I come from, but one of them is this thing
called the Share IT Act, it's the source code, harmonization, and reuse of information
technology act.
It is a new piece of legislation that was passed at the end of 2024.
And it says that any custom developed source code that's produced under a contract, whether
it's by feds or by contractors as part of their official duties, and the components
of it such as the architecture and the metadata, it has to be one owned by the agency, two stored
in no less than one public or private repository, three, it has to be accessible under
certain procedures, and contracts need to secure government-wide reuse sharing use and
modification rights for it.
And on top of that, there are four very specific exemptions for it, national security,
national intelligence, public, or sorry, personally identifiable and personal health information,
and the last one is escaping me because I'm standing on a stage looking at the bright
lights right now, but there are four reasons if you're exempt against FOIA.
So back in the day, in 2016, there was a memo called M1621, which was the federal source
code policy it was passed, and it said that, hey, this is an executive order that says
that everybody should default to open.
In fact, there was a pilot in it that said that 20 percent of all source code developed
by federal agencies needs to be published under open licenses.
That had a sunset provision that lapsed here recently, but some of the best bits and
pieces of that executive order were codified in the share IT Act, and it passed.
So there are laws on the books right now that say that source code that is custom developed
needs to be public unless it falls under one of those exemptions, and we can take
that same metadata model, the code.json, metadata file, and extend it to include these new
requirements.
It is very exciting, there are a lot of people doing interesting work in this space.
Take shout out to the software heritage project, the UNESCO project that's categorizing
all of Earth's software.
They use code meta as they are standard.
There's public code.jamel, which I have heard about in this dev room in the past, and the
code.json federal standard borrows from and extends in some cases pieces of those international
standards and brings them together.
So if you're a nerd for metadata and inventories of software, and I know there are government
hospitals that we're here speaking today, I'm a big nerd about this stuff, I would love
to talk about it more as well.
The United Nations Open Source Week is coming up this summer, there's a lot of talk around
this type of stuff.
I think there's a lot of overlap between the conversations that are happening here and the
conversations that happen there.
So I would encourage anybody who's interested in that to check that out and to look up
the Share IT Act, and if you're interested in inventories of open source code that can create
a grand unified directory of all free and open source software on planet Earth that's paid
for by public money.
So we can have public code.
I'd love to talk more with you about that.
And thank you, Legal Dev, Foss, down.
All right, we have one more, you're up.
Hi, I'm getting by, saying sorry, I wanted to be very short, but I'm afraid I might not
be.
So my name is Girard Olishboa, and if the name is not the giveaway, I'm from Portugal.
I'm here because it was just announced the continuity of what was known as NGI-0, and that
means that the money will continue to be bought into open source projects and helping communities
and development.
But at the same time, there's a special fund for marketing, and I want to create a sort
of a network of community managers, local community managers, all around Europe, that
reach out to their communities, and bring them to know the funds, help them apply to the
funds, and somewhat manage the community into forums where they can try to find other partners
doing similar code, so that we don't have to projects doing the same thing in different
code.
And why is this project important?
And my call is for local community managers, or wannabes, please contact me, or the NGI,
or anyone in your open source communities.
Why is this important?
Because we need to create a new generation of community leaders.
They are extremely important.
They are the ones that will keep the fire running, and managing a community, not letting
it die out, is one of the most important things that we have been forgetting.
The open source awards, yes today, yes today?
Well, the day before, well, they chose Greg Hartman, which I think I had heard of him,
but he's the one doing the thankless job of keeping the kernel community alive and in order.
And that's what we need to do in every part of Europe and the rest of the world.
And these people, not only need to exist, need to be refreshed, but they also have to be paid.
And that's what I'm trying to create this project for, so that we have something that also pays
a little bit of the work they are doing, so they are not doing thanklessly and with their time and destroying their health and family and friends and so on.
And with this, I want to finish with something, because managing people is important because,
and I'll repeat this several times with all people I am connecting here, technology is people.
There is no technology without people.
I never you see politicians and I've spoken with my government several times and it's always infrastructure that a lot of other people that other people and say,
no, you have to put people on top, it doesn't matter if the health services puts well infrastructure and new equipment on top and then people on top.
It's people on top, it's always people on top, what's important, what's important in open sources, people open sources, people.
Code is people, they are a reflection of the mind, it's a fraction of intellect and knowledge and so that's why we need community leaders,
that's why we need people that are talking with people and bring more people in.
And on the last note, I had the pleasure of collaborating with a small group that made the latest version of the contributor covenant,
look that so it's a blueprint template, something that you can hold on to manage your community.
If you have already a code of conduct, maybe you can look at it and see there's something we couldn't prove that you couldn't prove.
If you have nothing you can look at and use something, but it's a tool, again, to help people, help people, helping open source and at the end helping the world.
Thank you.
Thanks everybody, we have four of our minutes left.
You were to add it, right, you just want to, well, I'd like to give two minutes to anybody who wants to rebut any of the things that were said.
I knew someone wanted to, you have to come up quick.
Did you want to answer one of the ones that was already, we only have three minutes, so you want to rebut.
You want to rebut something.
There's a camera, there it is.
So, hello, I'm Simon Fipps.
I'm on the staff at the open source initiative.
I am not very excited about the open source AI definition, so it's surprising that I have to say something about it here.
But in the first talk, there were two things that were untrue said.
One of them was that Meta supported the open source AI definition.
It did not matter hate so I say, because we denounce Larmor as a fake open-washed VM.
Secondly, it implied that we are a rigidly American organization.
We are not.
We have three European staff, two Americans and one Brazilian on our stuff.
And I have incorporated a subsidiary in Europe.
I say Europe, stitching or foundation, so that all of our work in the European Parliament, which is the majority of what we do.
We don't even have an AI program at the moment, is conducted as a European activity.
I think Richard missed the real core of, I think Richard missed the real core of the problem.
Which is that we were able to be so successful over licensing because of the burn convention, so that it's the same law everywhere.
And we do not have the same advantage with all the other things we're trying to do.
There we go.
All right, one minute.
Thank you, I'm Jerome.
We are all committed to support open source, so we have an important homework to do now.
Today, because the European Commission has opened a call for evidence and they are waiting for feedback about the European Open Digital ecosystem strategy.
I decided to focus my answer, but we are free to answer whatever you want.
About the first and tight sales of proprietary operating system on PCs is the only example of fourth and tight sales in Europe.
You can buy a car without an insurance policy, but you can't buy a PC without paying the Microsoft tax.
That's just crazy and against any European law protecting consumers.
It's the second point that I answered.
It's the European Patent Office Mark Pack ties.
They grant thousands of software patents, calling them software, innovation implemented by software.
Because in the European Convention on Patents, software must be protected by copyright and not patent.
So, if you want this clear code with the direct link to the form to answer the commissions on the table over there.
And I think that it's ten second well used to support open source.
Thanks very much everybody. Let's give a round of applause to all of our speakers.
How wonderful, super fun use of this time and we learned a lot, so that was pretty great.
Thank you very much.