Hi, everyone. Welcome to the ultimate session of the day. This session is going to be unique
for several reasons. The first is that the format is different, so we're going to have
two lightning talks. First of all, Max is going to start with a 10 minute lightning talk,
and then to be a 5-ion here, we're going to follow that with a 10 minute lightning talk.
Then we're going to have a 10 minute Q&A. If you think of questions during either or
both of the lightning talks, please write them down and share them during the Q&A. Without further
do, I'll pass over to Max.
Yeah, just a soundtrack. Okay, sounds good. Yeah, my name is Max. I'm a CEO and co-founder of Open Energy
Transition. My background is that I did a peach-teen energy system planning, and you
like research. The research world, Open Source is the standard already. Everybody uses that.
But yeah, when I looked just in the industry, on the industry side, Open Source was not
a standard at all. In the energy planning world, so I'm like, I had the choice basically
to either create something or be unemployed, because I wanted really Open Source, an Open
Source job. Now, he still don't work on the code anymore. Like, I just bring funding,
somehow in this space. Yeah, like I just tell you a little bit from our experiences on
how we grew within two and a half years to now 50 people. We're helping, like the philanthropic
world to better understand by free and open source of this really important. And we have
never rising like 10 to 100s of million, actually, funding going into Open Source through
our activities, and not just for our company, but for the whole ecosystem. And yeah,
now I'm really happy to talk a little bit about some thoughts that I drafted two weeks
ago about this topic. Okay, grid planning. Like, if you don't know it yet, it's actually
grid planning, like we do that to figure out what's the optimal grid investments, which
we should do, or how should we operate our grid infrastructure or energy system. It's
actually a 1 billion per year software industry behind that. At the moment, you're like,
mostly proprietary, but yeah, there's already, like I was just estimating the first number.
It's growing. Like, we're getting there. And yeah, like the big, large effect is really
with the software, we actually decide, you know, like thousands of billion investments
a year into real hardware infrastructure. And so on. So it's really important to actually
improve our planning tools to have maybe some impacts, like savings on the 1000,000 billion
factor. And yeah, like we hope we're like with Open Source software, we can be actually much better
more innovative and collaborative to actually have impact on the 1000s billions here.
Yeah. Like, I just, like, status quo is also actually quite interesting. Like, most things
are proprietary, as I mentioned, but there's also the new digital, so a Renete angle,
getting more and more important. We don't want to depend on, let's say, Russian software
to operate our grip, which, that's currently not the case. But partially, we depend on,
like, American-owned solutions. And here, I think, the dependency on such a software angles is
a little bit shaky since the recent months or years at least. Yeah, and digital sovereignty
really helps to be independent on the open source of its useful, but in the energy planning sector,
but it can make sure, like, a still room to improve and work on it. And we really need to make
it mainstream to get adoption on another level. Both on actually the demand side, so we need
more users, but we also need more supply companies, like service companies, helping you to
adopt this of helping understanding what it is and so on. And yeah, for that, we need some kind of
revolution or evolution within the first sector for energy or grid planning. Here, you see a graph
talking about adoption on the Y-axis and on the X-axis, and you're like, the different type of users.
I would say currently we have this red dots here, and where we have mostly early adopters
working with us and others in the ecosystem to use fast software in action. Some examples,
like, we personally work with the European energy regulator, with various grid operators across
Europe and in other parts of the world. And then also many industry users are also
depending on free and open source software, but we are not yet mainstream. We have a couple of
magnitude, more potential users out there, and this is where we need to get. And one theory is,
okay, once we have this large dependency on fast software, then we can also have this large money
to finance developers to make things self-sufficient, like the Linux space.
Good, so as I mentioned, we need money in general, money to fund people mostly, and here the
funding source, I split it a little bit here, we have generally industry funding,
it comes to adoption often, we have public funding and philanthropic support, and then also the
research adoption and funding that comes from there. So the question is, okay, how can we get
more private in public in philanthropic funding to catalyze this revolution? That's the question that
we are really passing all the time. Like that's an answer that we try to figure out every day,
and like I hope to get some inspiration on what are our thoughts and thoughts about that, and maybe
you have to also have some ideas on how we can improve that. So point one is that from our experience,
I think it was really important to spot the opportunity and know how to get first of adopted,
spotting the opportunity, we like I said, okay, there was already a proprietary, like proprietary
surface owning our old school grid planning industry, and people paying shit ton of money for that.
So me like ding ding ding, like it's a big opportunity to get frost in there. And yeah, but beyond that,
beyond that, me like more, let's say money friendly aspects that frost can provide there, actually
lot of other things that benefit the industry, like accessibility, the collaboration nature that
is much easier with free and open source of and then also the innovation aspect. And like with
the changing energy infrastructure, we really need much more and faster innovation. So that was important
to realize, and then yeah, how can we get frost more adopted? What we currently facing is
like industry, which doesn't like surface so much, and like they're generally very risk hours,
which is good, you're like we need electricity 24-7 all the time, so of course there are
risk hours, but most of those grid planners they never heard of open source of like some of them,
like we enter rooms and they they don't know what's first of them, though they are paying
like a billion for proprietary software. So just testing the market awareness and creating
increasing confidence and so on, it's very, very important for our old school industry,
and yeah, like the last points, a little bit unclear, but like we also need to focus on growing
the frost ecosystems, so I'm not talking about a single project that we need to blow up with money,
but we need really to fund the ecosystem race awareness around the ecosystem, and there's
a few initiatives that really help here. What also, like what we realized is that there's a lot
of noise within the funding world, and noise, like we have a lot of projects, there's so many
open source projects around, but we need to actually figure out where should we prioritize,
and what's key to measure ecosystem growth, high impact users, and benchmark the technical
capability. This is what we did just recently with a benchmark platform that we developed,
where we compared 200 different open source grid planning tools, and that really helped us
to prioritize how should we invest in this ecosystem. And last but not least,
yeah, almost okay, I have another slide after this. We need to actually work really, really hard
on the success signals, and that also means you're training competitors, helping adoption for
high impacts cases, like we need more earlier adopters, and until of the problem, and yeah,
if you have any ideas around that, please reach out, and I'm done. Thank you.
So, do you hear me? Perfect. When we continue with Patu, Fabian and myself, to bias,
we are from SAP and want to share a bit about the perspective from how can open source funding
work for an established software company, what are some of the challenges, and maybe inspire
as well, other companies to do something similar. So, just to set the stage, who is SAP?
It's probably some of you have heard about us. It's one of the largest provider of enterprise software,
one of the largest software companies in Europe, and already 50 years old, and with quite a bunch
of developers, so we have around 40,000 developers worldwide, and also a lot of different solutions
and products we commercially sell. And what's in common for a lot of these solutions is where
use a lot of different open source components, under the hood, be it for development, be it for
actually running these, be it for infrastructure management. And these things are quite important,
and also very relevant for us, where these are well maintained and in a great state.
But, how do you can, how can you engage as a software company with open source projects?
Probably quite obvious, the easiest way is, hey, you provide development contributions,
you have development, developers which can provide them. And one thing we heard in earlier talks,
as well, is open source projects are quite diverse, they are either driven from individual developers
in their spare time or just a society project, they are well established projects and foundations,
they are open source projects driven by commercial entities, and all of these have slightly different
governance structures, slightly different engagement models. And development contributions are working
quite seamless for all of these, so that's nice. But when we look at how can we financially
support this project, it gets a bit more tricky. For foundation projects, for example,
memberships is a common way to engage with them, you can become a member of the Linux foundation
or of a Clips Foundation, and with your membership fees as well as support will work of the foundation.
For company projects, a very common approach we have seen is that they offer either support or
some even like special enterprise additions of their source project, and they have a nice legal
department and purchasing department with whom you can interact and to contracts and then do stuff.
The big question we had is that this cover, some of our other use cases and are also quite
established already, but last year, or to be precise, even before that, but last year we started
to focus on what about the last category. Independent projects which are quite small,
there may be one developer or two developers are doing that in their spare time. We can help them
or we can engage with development contributions and that's nice, but sometimes what really helps
our project is that we just say, hey, maintainer, you're doing a great job and we appreciate
your expert knowledge and it's probably not worth that we scale up somebody internally to get the
same level, but it's rather easier to say, we give you some money to keep on doing what you are doing
best. But the big question was when internally, hey, how can we, as a company, give money to such
independent, maintainers and projects? And that's when what we sought out to try to figure out.
How do you give money to individuals as a company? And that sounds rather easy, but it actually
starts or starts getting quite complicated because a normal scenario would be, okay, we have a
contracting department and say, hey, here's our standard supplier contract, it's just a couple
hundred pages, give it to your legal department, they can review it and then be done it, that
that probably doesn't work for a single in the past, maintainer. So what we ended up doing is we
found an intermediary, we looked both at GitHub sponsors as a platform or open collective,
which can handle all various legal annoyances for the projects itself, but as well for us
to ensure that we have a single counterparty in that sense. We ended up using GitHub sponsors,
because the advantage is that GitHub sponsors can as well root money to open collectives. So you
kind of get both, but only have one platform and it's another thing we then just had to ensure
is that, hey, we don't give money to people who are employed by SAP because Kitking,
but of is just having a small pilot project with like one or two projects where we could
experience the whole process and get started. But now we have a process on how we can give money
to maintainers and projects, but how do we actually select projects and maintainers and for that,
I'm handing over to Fabian. Yeah, so we noticed two main challenges in this regard.
First of all, there are thousands of possible open source components that SAP uses on
in their products and which of those products or projects do we want to give our money to.
And the other challenge is in the future you might have different funding goals to the funding
goals you have at the moment. For one funding round, we might prioritize improving our supply
chain security while on the next funding round, you may just have the goal of giving back
to the open source of their community and that results in completely different lists of perfect
fitting open source projects for this funding round. So what we ended up doing is we chose
an approach that based on two different methods. First of all, an internal voting, but the idea
was that developers at SAP can nominate project to get funding and as long as another team says,
okay, we use this product as well and we find it good as well. They get entered into this internal
voting where every developer SAP has who has verified open source contribution to any project
outside of SAP can cast the vote and say, okay, hey, this product is really cool. I support that
you give money to it. And our expectation was that this would have a high probability of identifying
crucial projects to some products and also identifying projects that are really well known and
yeah maybe passion projects of some people. So what came out of this is for example, Nick
so as is one of the projects that we are funding with this and yeah it's very well known and so
that this fits our idea. But this advantage is maybe you're probably if you're going to
do a voting which is based on my majority, you're going to get very well known projects or not
the less known project that only one or two teams use but it's very important to them. So
but we kind of found an exception to this rule because mold was also submitted by the person
in the front row here. It's a lot less known project than I would say than Nick so as is yeah.
But the second approach we chose was more we wanted to give every project a chance and we
wanted to do this data driven way where we can see actually the why this would be a good
candidate for open source funding. So the way we chose this is the energy is here that we don't
necessarily have an inherent bias towards the well known project for example one of the project
that got funding because of this is Seabrock Crossing which is a barcode processing library
which is used in surprisingly many products for SAP and is probably something that nobody would
have submitted as a funding candidate but yeah it's really nice that these projects also
get a chance and it really is not a perfect science there's some menu filtering that's needed so
you have to check the same things as you do have to check when the funding you have to check
there's no SAP employees somewhere in there and there's no all things that to be as mentioned earlier
yeah just the metrics are based on our internal usage the project activity
security score we used to open SSF security score card and I also tried to add the truck
ambassador to see how many on how many maintainers project might depend on yeah so this is
it from all the presentation I hope you have a few questions for Q and A now yeah
Q and A now
for the first the first pitch regarding the energy data okay so you mentioned the
comparison between proper the software and software you know and free software for market
communication and I guess right all the framework but what I miss was the value proposition so
what what is the value of you know if you go to a company you bring that message what what is the
killer argument that you will use why free software is better than the properties of the right so in
as light you had innovation no the time of value and of course it's faster we know that
and of course I can add the cost because obviously that's free and the other is productivity
but have you identified or are you willing to identify now imagine you are in front of a big you
know a big guy of a one of the big energy companies that you want to convince him or have to go
for a free software so which argument will you use you know compared to companies who have spent
billions in standardized with a particular you know especially so complex energy market as past
through the last ten years of standardizations and both on the messages as well as the framework
okay so the question was what other arguments besides costs and fast innovation are there okay
yeah I mean there's like you don't depend on a single vendor like yes actually we're like
great planning like I'm not sure if you know that but like 70% of the market is owned by one company
and like they got reasonably bought by a private equity firm and you know like if you know
how private equity works like pump and dump kind of schemas are there sometimes so and then we
had business behaviors happening we're like hey I'm sorry like you depend on the software now
it took you want to use to integrate it unfortunately I have to cancel your contract like I'm
the vendor unfortunately I have to cancel your contract but you're lucky I can sell it for you
for twice the price and that kind of behavior we like like we see them sometimes happening
because it's heavily like you're really bound to one software vendor and and people don't
like this kind of business practices that we see here and there so the independence freedom
to work with whoever is one important argument customization and I can customize for my needs as I
want very important and yeah often it's also the collaboration aspect key like if we work
with the European energy regulator they develop a solution with us but now suddenly all
the member states they don't have to reinvent the wheel like they can just take this stuff adjusted
a little bit for their own needs and and supply the European regulator with the right information
so this kind of more like smoother collaboration is also one of the key arguments
maybe I miss something but and I can whoever you talk with me like the stories a little bit
different for sure thank you also another question for Max you mentioned something about
providing training including two competitors when you're dealing with large enterprises and
proprietary software transitioning staff who are used to working with that to something new
that's part of what you provide as a service I guess question mark and second part is
if they have issues afterwards I they start running this and then something goes breaks in the
middle of the night do they call you and that's part of what they pay for yeah I mean we're like
like the service companies right and like you can make service contracts to make sure that you
offer 24-7 support which is needed in their cases and what I mean with training the
competitors is that we need more people that are able to provide 24-7 support and being capable
to develop on top and they're like we don't want to own this one single open source ecosystem
but understood that part of that transition are you helping them move like when you kind of
data that they have in the legacy system over yeah the contribution that's always needed
I mean like transitioning like you did they are really locked in a heavy way sometimes to
single software options here we can work a little bit on interoperability and they need a
service and support to actually transition as well and yeah as I mentioned we shouldn't be the
only company doing that like we're catalyzing that now we hope that a lot of other vendors are
coming in and supporting here but you like you don't as a vendor you don't enter a support market
if there's no real market there it needs to be big enough to be interesting for a lot of people
and that's what we catalyzing like we starting this kind of revolutionary moment
Hi question for SAP I'm building an open source task management product management tool
and let's pretend that you want to have that what would I need to offer you in terms of
supporting contract legal stuff I don't know so that you would buy it like
from what you explained earlier I got that you mostly fund like libraries and it's mostly
like spray and spray and most and more smaller things that don't have like a product that you can
take to procurement and just buy it yeah so what we the our funding focused on are
exactly be small components libraries which don't have a product because if you have a product
and a company will nice or a nice spring from an enterprise perspective is that we actually
have somebody from whom we can procure that to contract with and do these things with so that's
feasible for let's say something where you have something like a hashikop word or a kathana
or something like that who have a product and and sails department but if you have just a component
which you maintain in your spare time like every couple days you probably don't want the
hassle of like scaling that up but we really want to say hey cool stuff and really really like that
and yeah so that's a bit special case if you want to scale it you probably need to have like
a sales department and the contracting stuff yeah thanks
and I think time is up or do we have for one more question one more okay hi I was wondering
uh or I have two questions but I'll ask the first one um who and how did you convince I guess
SAP to give money and maybe it's something we can do at our respective employers yeah so I mean
the intrinsic motivation was there from the beginning and most people are we can follow the
understanding hey this is infrastructure we are using and we probably have to pay something for that
the question is how much uh and somebody needs to provide the budget for that we were quite lucky
to get it kickstarted that we found somebody with an budget and we said well this sounds cool
try that out we hear you have some budget and that's also what I can recommend what was
really helpful don't aim for like 50 or 100 projects from the get go but target like one, two,
three and then it's as well and let's say it's manageable amount where you potentially get an
easier buy in that somebody says well this is worth trying out and it doesn't worth out it's not
the bankrupt at land of the day and yeah okay do I have time for a little more no I don't think so
so thank you for my free and enjoy the best of the show