I'll come back to the funding open source track here.
We are going to listen to another talk, and this time my gift is going to tell us that
to get money for your open source project, it would be awesome if you have paying clients.
I know it's a talk, but I don't want to break any of these things, but yes, so I might
get there.
Can you give me all right?
I'm not sure if you can.
No, we do something, I don't want you to walk, okay, excellent, that sounds a lot better.
So my name is Mike Kifford.
I'm the open source and standards of practice lead at civic actions.
We're an American company, but I'm a Canadian, I'm a based in Ottawa, Canada, and I've
been dealing with procurement, particularly with procurement and government for Lisa Decaid, trying
to look at how different governments go and procure technology.
I'm also a drip-al-core accessibility maintainer and a WC3 embedded experts on a bunch of issues.
So we want to go ahead and look at how we're shifting things from the preassets to actually
building them as living resources, let's say also for open collective, I am a supportive
open collective.
Everyone should be a supportive open collective, there's so many dependable tools out there
that we use, we should be supporting each other and open collective is an amazing way to
do it.
I'm also in a big fan of the Sarmatech Fund and the Sarmatech Agency and the European
Sarmatech Foundation, in fact, I've involved in creating Wikipedia pages for all of them.
So definitely feel like there's amazing stuff that can be done here with that stage.
The scale of the problems, like we do need to follow the money, we should, this should
be a standing-room only event because the money is so important, we need to be thinking
about where do we get the money from, where does it go, how do we support the maintainers,
how do we support the communities that there's a more thriving, more vibrant ecosystem.
Anyways, onto the presentation.
Oops, that didn't work, we're on the side and, hey, so open sources had a charity model in
the past and this is a problem.
We've been relying on, in many cases, donations of time, it's led to burnouts, a lot of
frustration, we've had a lot of underfunded resources, there's a great deal of technical
debt in our communities and I think that the main critique I have is of initiatives like
the Sarmatech Fund and in fact, open collective is that these, these are really useful,
but they don't address the scale of the problem.
And to look, you need to go up and understand the problem, you need to look upstream.
So donations don't scale, we need to be able to think about how to take the problems
we're facing and move them up so that we have a capacity to actually deal with, I mean,
open source is such a huge part of our technical ecosystem and we're often, there's
the dependency cartoon from XKCD that the Sarmatech Fund folks have, like, that is a reality
on so many fronts, it's not just that one peg.
We need infrastructure that's going to be ongoing and is funded by regular investments
over time and we cannot rely on there being, you have one time projects or one time
grants we need to be thinking about open source and these technologies as infrastructure.
So this has also been something that's, that's not new, this is something that was said yesterday
it opened for a Europe was also said at the, the Drupal for Gav conference the day before,
it's been said a bunch of different times but I'm here to just to emphasize that this is
this is a conceptual framing that we need to shift and it's a cultural change in our funders
because that's government, it's big business, it's small business, it's, it's conceptually
we need to move it from your buying a product to how are you buying the infrastructure
that is going to run your digital service. So yeah, we've, we've been looking at this
in terms of, of coffee money in many ways, individual user donations to projects are great.
So often the time in, certainly in the Drupal community, we tend to go off and fund
raise within the community, which is great but we don't do a good enough job, fund rise
like preaching to the choir is useful and that's largely what we're doing here but we need
to turn outside to look at who are the people who are using our services, which is everyone, right?
We need to be able to say how do we get that funding outside of the open source
the converted population into everyone else? How do we move beyond pledges, again the open source
pledges are great? I love that initiative, there's useful to go off and get companies to go
off and to make a commitment to a certain percentage of their profits to go to funding these
projects, that is a great individual initiative but it's not long term and it's something
that can be taken away if there is a shift in the wins and as we've seen in the past year
when one single funder decides to go off and shift their funding from, from supporting a lot
of different projects and being like a lot of the open source projects that we use like signal
or having trouble because one of the funders that they had is no longer there so we need to be
thinking about how we diversify or income and how we try and find ways to support the technology
that we use and yeah the procurement is huge like I will drill in on us a bit but you know
government procurement I mean $15 million contracts that's not unusual for a lot of government
procurement it's not for every government but it's like that's what we do is $15 million
like how much how many government websites run Drupal for instance and as a Drupal core
accessibility maintainer I've watched the contributions that have come into Drupal and even those
so many governments require Drupal for their infrastructure they're not contributing upstream they're
not paying for the organizations to make Drupal accessible even though it's a requirement of the
web accessibility directive or section five or eight or whatever there's very few that are doing
this as an intentional part of their their strategy and yeah we need to move from from from
the idea of buying a buying a product to buy a process and we're trying to go off and and move
so that we we're we're looking strategically at government procurement because it's such an
important part of the strategic process how do we try to make sure that inner or public
procurement that we're we're finding ways to favor open source projects and the we're
favoring contributing back upstream in the process so technically we we you know 97% of the
audited code bases of black it's a black deck it's the OSSRA report 97% of audited
could bases contain open source projects so there are in this one audited set of studies at
the large set of software 3% of software that was audited did not include some level of open
source so in many ways we've won right and and the Drupal sovereign tech folks and now I learned
about this first from them but we've won so but we've won battle but perhaps we're losing the war
because we're not looking at how do we fund this infrastructure how do we try and ensure that it's
part of the culture it's part of the technology because everyone uses open source but it's not
part of how we think and work together collectively as a as a movement as a social movement
strings economic political force we we are that we just haven't organized that way
so and premise because the business incentives are not aligned you know still in terms of
government contracting another contracting often it's the lowest price that wins and lowest price
what gets cut the contributions the quality control like there's so much that is lost if you're
looking at bid the bidding process you're just looking at the lowest bid so how do we ship that so
that that the that the largest buyers in in every economy which is the government is trying to go
often and incentivize open source at every stack because if the federal government goes off and
provides funding for it the the the the municipalities and the states and and provincial
governments also benefit from that as well and they should all be finding ways to contribute to
the tools that they use and collaborate because it helps citizens everywhere to have that approach
so yeah I mean game the southern tech front is amazing they've done amazing work in public city
and and awareness raising and they've raised a lot of money and helped a lot of projects like
Drupal like the Jeff foundation like so many other projects you know but but but it's small
you look at the size of European the the procurement of the European Union and it is
buying digital products and services in the European Union like the government is it's hundreds of
billions dollars a year you know kind of one study it's just hard to get numbers for this but
one study suggested that the gov tech marketing general globally is at least 600 billion a year
it's probably bigger than that and if 97% of that 600 billion value is is leveraging open source
in order to deliver the services that's a lot of money that we should that should be on the table
for us to look at some portion of that and some portion of 600 billion dollars a year is a lot of money
and oops I get that before okay so yeah try to go from put this in terms of minos versus
whales versus pods of whales in terms of the size of the the infrastructure here and
hopefully it's it's the little bubbles I randomly created to make this slide more visually
interesting or not distracting in the presentation so we can make a pivot to making to operational
maintenance how do we make sure that we're that that we're I mean we want to have central funding
but we have to realize that central funding is fragile we need robust strategies we need to have
it built into the infrastructure where we're thinking about this so so yeah we want more grants
we want more sponsorships we want more scholarships absolutely but but this is a tricky political time
so we can't rely on that and if we can build it the the the build stuff into the infrastructure
so that the the change that there's thousands of contracts that all have open source built into
the millions of contracts that have open source built into them then we can we we will be an under a
lot less risk and we will be less exacting like a hands out don't look at hands out
initiative for charity handout we don't want charity handouts we're driving the infrastructure
of the internet and of the digital world that we're trying to build together so we should be acting
that way um so one of the the discussions have had in the past is looking at how how we need to
be able to move from a a capex to opx so essentially how do we transition from a a process where
you're you're you're looking um the on individual projects to to looking at at the lifespan
of the project like if you're looking at bridges like yeah there's an initial cost to install a
bridge but then there's ongoing cost to maintain that bridge and you know governments know how to
deal with infrastructure projects and to pay for infrastructure projects if they're framed that way
if it's allocating the budget there's an anticipation of how to go out and structure and organize that
we can be thinking about how to to in our contracts mandate option contributions
maybe it won't be 20% per year or per contract maybe it will be like what what can we push for
what should we be asking for as the people that are delivering the digital worlds that that's
our our governments and our citizens are are demanding so yeah the open standards and open
source our free open standards prevents lock-in lock-in is a huge cost it's a really useful
important piece of the puzzle open standards it enables reuse and for an auditing as well
I think governance is often overlooked as well the whole process of like how do we make decisions
the dribble communities really quite unusual and that we have multiple different companies and
individuals who are involved in shaping the direction of dribble community we have a model that a lot
of other people are looking at because there's not one company that's involved in creating the
structure of that governance but governance governance takes time and it takes money to organize that
if you have a single company that is making all the decisions like perhaps like whichever
whichever content management system runs the majority of the web for instance whichever one that
might happen to be if a single benevolent dictator for life is is managing that project
bad shit can happen and we need to be investing in supporting those those communities that have
good infrastructure to make sure that if somebody has a midlife crisis that they don't do silly things
because they have the power to do silly things not that that happened because I said nothing
so I did want to also touch on AI because how can you not talk talk but AI
so the I think that that if not open AI unfortunately but if you look at boss AI if you look at
truly open awaits open models if we look at open communities that are driving AI there's a lot of
potential and there's also a lot of challenges especially for maintainers I think that we haven't
thought about like as more and more people get involved in using AI to create changes and modifications
to code bases we're putting additional pressures on maintainers to review those so we need to be
thinking about how do we provide additional supports because there's going to be more AI
shop coming out that needs to be reviewed to see if it's any good if it produces additional
problems and so we need more people looking over the code that is going to be coming in because
it's so much easier to produce code the problem is not producing code these days it's it's
editing it it's it's producing it it's evaluating it to see that it maintains that it has
continuity over life and again we need to be thinking about that a couple examples that the
I think that that if you're if you're acquiring upstream contributions it can be quite useful
you can in your contracts you can require there to be a public repo in day one
you can include license information read me information you can put the service stuff into your
contract you can encourage them to have a contributing dot MD file in there they're open repo to
encourage people to engage contracts can be set up this way not only to encourage companies that
of a history of contributing to open source but also require it as part of the contract
and you can also just you know potentially provide it an escrow so that you're holding back a
certain amount of the contract until all of the work is contributed up is easy to
contribute upstream or is released like there are innovative ways that we can use
contracting vehicles and contracting language to be able to do this so we have you know different
deliverables that we can look at and I do like the the the example I think the French
police force the John Deere have have have had a contracts in the past with a they say
everything it must be 100% standards compliance and at the end of the contract we need to have
complete control over the software to go to do whatever we want and so there's things like that we can
do there's holdbacks to try and make sure that that you know maybe it's one or five percent of the
the repo is held back until things are released or has a continuous integration process as
part of it that that is open we can we can look at defining maintenance as at on an option
years that there's there's a the an SLA to to encourage those upstream contributions I do want to go
from and also touch on like this is a huge change for the procurement industry like procurement agents
have a there's a we're asking a lot for them to think about how their workflow works and how they
think about technology and how they're there's a lot of demands for procurement officers in a very
sensitive they need that we're asking them to to to learn quickly and move to to be able to
adapt to the rate of change that we're that needs to be done in order to do this but we need to train them
civic action services involved in a procurement program providing a procurement program to the
US federal government called die-tap which is an education training program and we've we've updated
most recently last year and we have a procurement guide that we've released of their open source
license and and we want to be able to to show that with the world have people learn from it and
critique it and adapt it to their own countries it is it's all available on GitHub and we can start
to embed you know best practices and share best practices is quickly as possible across boundaries
because there's a lot of work that needs to be happening happening over short period of time
everyone here know this phrase what's the next line are there a lot of please
yeah okay good good just wanted to check so the procurement is often overlooked
it has to be something that we're we're being more intentional about
it is the most powerful powerful lever we have to sustain open source
procurement controls it's like it's where the money where does the money flow in our economies
we can help direct that so it's not going to big American IT companies which affect everyone
including the US government is paying a huge tax to these these big big multinational corporations who are
sucking a great deal of money out of out of the economy
we need to be thinking about recurring revenue recurring contracts predictability
and to to think about the the building up these these open deliverables that that encourage
reuse of technology small policy scales or policy changes can really scale for
first sustainable investments to be do it correctly I wanted to talk a little bit about the
the Netherlands Ministry of Health their their the open source ambition ladder but it really
makes a lot more sense to just bring up the author so if we bring up Maurice Hendrix to go off and
talk a little bit about about the work that he's doing with with encouraging open source in
the Netherlands that would be the easiest way to do this
that's a microphone work yes okay great
I work for a Ministry of Health well for sports I'm the open source expert at the Ministry
and been doing open source procurement for the last few years and not on the 15 million contracts
but 15 million if that's okay for you guys still and what I've seen about around open source
in government is that most procurement experts really love to do open source they would love to
take this into practice but I've also noticed that no one actually understands exactly what
open source is or how we can put it into practice and that's and that's something where we as
also as a community should partner up with with government because from the idealistic side of things
I hear here government say okay but if we procure open source then somebody in Canada
from a group of community can have a say in what a software should do and we lose open scroll
and we all know that that isn't true but it's something that's in the beliefs of people in guide
that don't know open source as we do and it's the same thing that people think okay if we want to
do open source and everything has to be in public from day one as Mike said maybe and people can
participate and we lose all control and that's where I started with the ambition letter
I had these stocks with procurement experts with team leads and I just had a talk okay this
what do we want to do do you want to have these companies partner up and cooperate
I do you just want to have them work on a single roadmap individually do you want to have them
publish from day one work openly fully open source or do you want to have them publish all the
works at the end so and if you have that talk internally then this becomes an ambition letter out
by itself so I said okay at number 10 it's what we all want from the idealistic side that's not always
realistic and on level one it's at least a step having things published at the end of a procurement
is at least much much better than we have now what I did I opened up the idea that just the
talks that I had internally I opened it up put it on the internet and all stay community of experts
can you please help me build this thing into an instrument so Mike is traveling the thing
this is one and the other one this one is also cool but I sorry I'm not
someone's here with most yes oh yeah but it's so I work in hack and D it's it's marked
down and it's also a usual friendly way of again people to participate not having to create an
account and it works well in my get up workflows and this is a call out to you guys as well
I translate everything into English and I really would love to participate with anyone so the idea of
the instrument is that I help people in the Dutch procurement practice to think about what you would do
or the choices you have so like with transparency and as this the right one no are you in your
mouse music click yes yeah so it actually says there so in your descriptive document from a
procurement you can have a talk inside the government or inside your team what do we want with open
source do we want to publish all source code after completion of the tender is that what we want
and then you can use these requirements in your procurement to do so or and for you guys I've made
it into a div kind of a few the sentences change do we want to publish the source code that
fixed intervals or at key moments or at the end do we want to have fully open source development
of the source goes throughout the procurement and these choices have been set out throughout
all the different levels that open source can deliver so that it enables the dog inside of
government inside of these procurement teams okay everyone to apply open source what are the actual
choices we have and how can I cut and paste these lines inside the requirements to companies
the other one same thing I did an open source licenses in that review and I've all kinds of these
instruments so also build fully open source thank you it says what I often see in the Netherlands
is that we are using the ELPL open source license because it's the ELPN union license and if we see
open source as a strategic policy instrument then that's not enough the licenses have value in what
they say but if I ask to developers okay what do licenses actually say not much not much people
have a clue so for example the ELPL is super cool on the software as a service lines so it has
the same software as a service lines as the AGPL has but not being a strong copyleth license
and not having the viral aspects not many people know that and even if you partner up to ELPL with
the GPL then you have the same coverage of size with the GPL I have made a document with a
Patricia Emmanuel the author of the ELPN Commission that explains the most common open source
licenses in a user-friendly way so that even maybe not your mom or grandma knows it but at least
everyone in the audience can understand so they can use open source licenses for the strategic
instruments they are as well this is online fully open source ready to participate in ask questions
and it's it's without everything I do I translated in English I can I can get help not only for
might and actually English translations because I use January to do the English translation for me
but help me with that translated in French translate in Spanish whatever and make this the promises
also of open source collaboration in policy that would show my colleagues that open source
actually works also for them that's it thanks do the people oh sorry a couple more things in
lessons of course we have a couple more quick slides I have a you have a slide just a couple more
I'm not much just just a very very so that one there's a list of handouts that people can
see and you can't click on those links of course but you can get to the slides there if you
scan a QR code and you can also find my contact information up here if you want to reach out to
me there but does anyone have any questions yes so I'm here question for noise oh my oh sorry yes
yes before we go into questions which we have five minutes for questions if you like to stay
seated until we're done because otherwise it becomes too noisy if you really have to leave please use
that door because this one squeaks so thank you very much for your presentation and for your work
I would like to know if you have set up a forum to discuss these procurement things
a forum a discourse or otherwise what organizations do I can to host that forum
otherwise I would do it for you
so are there any forums to discuss this is anyone is anyone aware of places to to take these ideas
and and build on them to make them go further and and I don't really know of any there's
little pieces like there's some places in the dribble community there's individual people but I
don't know of any broader discussion about public procurement oh actually there's a political so I'm
also quite involved in a political and if there's how many guvies are here government employees
okay you're not going to get me to play anymore John as if you are a government employee or
having the government employee apolitical dot gov does sorry apolitical dot co does have an opportunity
for people to go off and discuss discuss play things there for government employees but more
you still have any ideas um the the EU website join up also has a platform so I have the the English
one about license I've posted it's on join up so there's a link and Mike knows my links as well
I should partner up with Mike and he will transfer all the links to you guys just looking at David here's
well and the chaos community also probably there's a chaos slack that that might have a camera
with some procurement section but there could be something that procurement slack but no okay thank you
any I which you please move into the screen so I can see your lovely t-shirt
hey this is I'm not in for matrix so just to jump on the points and the question just now there
is quite a bunch of effort happening in terms of more lobbying angles so if you talk to people
like Apple OSBA all these kind of open source organizations they're talking a lot to directly
to the governments if your project selling to governments like we are then that's also where we
try to push it but the more projects who are in touch with the governments directly are pushing this
idea like mandate the upstream funding in your procurement frameworks is definitely interesting
and yes today there were yeah basically it's getting more and more talked about to European
Commission European Parliament they're sitting on stage saying we need to find ways to force
upon source by procurement and we need to find ways to get the money into the upstream so there is
definitely stuff going on and yeah so also I'm part of the European
Pensorz Academy and we are trying to work on this as well from that angle so happy to help
as an answer yes and we are we partners partner with the Dutch open source business lines a lot
that we we have learned a lot from each site and we will I will be talking that tomorrow in a
better discussion with Apple as well and what I'm trying to bridge here is it's not only
having the the political talks about okay what should we do and then I've been doing procurements
by helping procurements myself and actually hearing what these people have issues with
and trying to deal with that knowledge gap so that that the bridge between strategic policy and
operation gets govers we have time for one more question I heard it Apple and not April and so
like I was like Apple does nothing to open source but it's a strategy good more data point really
you're just to give people a sense of scale the combined total of all silicon valley venture
capital funding combined in 2025 it was 990 billion with the B by comparison US federal government
software purchasing was 103 billion and the EU in 2022 is 170 billion euro in IT there a small
fraction of any that will make a maintainers life happy as they say it really important this is a big
big deal a billion here a billion there so you're something you're sitting on your talking real
money I think I got around 40 million to open source developments by doing the procurement by defaults
open source and the Netherlands