So, I'm pleased to introduce Gab Colombo from Finos and Linux Foundation Europe, and please
correct me if I'm mispronouncing EGLE, Abel Senot, from Red River West and commit, and so this
is going to be a different format, no slides, just discussion, and they'll be talking about
accelerating the open source flywheel in Europe with private sector and VC funding.
So, without further ado, please take away.
Thank you, Galen, and thanks for being here.
I know we are the last session of the day.
Actually, Williamson Edition has an event starting now.
So, we're going to be super late.
I'm very excited to have Abel Mithir here.
Today, we're going to talk about how busy funding.
You probably are familiar with the United Nations Edition.
We do sustain open source projects, primarily from a membership standpoint, having both individual
and corporate contributing to sustaining open source projects and also through money and upstream contributions.
I'm a very good number.
I lead one of our fundations, the Finos Edition, and with my thick Italian accent, I also lead
Linux Edition Europe, but I am based in California.
In fact, jet lag is.
You guys have been here for a couple of weeks, but it's still tired.
And maybe Abel, you want to introduce yourself?
Yeah, with pleasure.
Yeah, you don't make.
So, Abel, I'm one of the funders on partner of a new VC fund called Comet, which is the first
fund in Europe, focused 100% in investing in commercial open source companies.
We are engineers at Hertz, and we've leveraged that to scale through interesting repository and
analyze them, and then finance people that want to build a commercial company on top of that.
Together with the community of commercial open source funders and operators, the funders
of engineers, funders of companies like SuperBase, Motel, etc.
And our goal is to support these commercial open source funders on one side.
And then from the financial incentives that we get out from that as a VC,
we also give away a part of that to three open source projects that are not meant to
many times.
So our goal is to create a fly with effect whereby financing the best commercial open source project
we can also then help three open source projects sustain and kind of have an impact
try to have a small impact on the open source senior in Europe.
So that's what we do with Comet's bet to talk today.
Is it your first item?
It's my first item.
First item.
Okay.
Did they let you in?
Because, you know, VC is here.
Yeah.
That's a good place to start, because, you know, I come from a, I grew up in Europe in pretty
grassroots open source community.
And, you know, maybe starting from talking about the relationship between open source
and provider is after is maybe a good place to start.
You know, there obviously are, you know, when someone mentions a VC in a free software
or open source room, they're certainly sort of, you know, antennas go up.
But even in the Linux condition, we have seen obviously we sustain the open source projects,
but we've seen this, this fly will accelerating, and of sustainability is quite a bit,
by, you know, not only enterprises contributing back, but also VC funded,
I think, about the cloud native ecosystem and Kubernetes, obviously this large enterprises
using GitHub is also a huge amount of startups that have been created to sort of build products
and ultimately contribute back upstream into the ecosystem.
So, maybe, you know, a good place to start is sort of to think about what are,
maybe talk a little bit about what are the different business models that sustain open source.
So, like, when I go around and sort of explain even to policymakers that basically 80 to 95%
of providers after is based on open source, and it's our goal to actually,
get the necessary feedback.
But maybe from your standpoint, you know, when you tell us a little bit about how,
how do you see from a VC perspective what are the different business models that you see built on open source?
So, historically, it has been mostly about service. So, redat and all the others,
these other companies selling service on top of open source projects,
to kind of help enterprise companies that don't master this product,
that sometimes don't have the brand to hire themselves great engineers,
because when not a lot of great engineers sometimes want to work in, like,
old companies, etc. So, they need to have service and people that knows this software
and that can help them, you know, implement that, and most of the time these big,
you know, service vendor, they contribute back to the project and that helps this project
to be more sustainable and to grow into very, very big projects.
So, that has been kind of historically what kind of happened there.
And now you had, since a few years, new business model that emerged,
and particularly two business model, one is called Open Core,
and the core of the software is completely open source,
and the software that SMBs, developers, individual contributors,
that are really used, ease open source.
But the features that you, that's big enterprise companies,
need to implement it, that really has scale, like, you know,
multi-tenant, SLA, etc., etc.
or sometimes are a bit close source or at least you need to pay for that.
And I think it's a business model that is interesting because in one sense,
all the developers that don't have the money to pay for the product,
have the benefit of getting a product that improves, and that is free,
and that is getting better, and that sometimes is much better than the close source competitors.
But the company and the people building this project,
still managed to build a sustainable business model by, you know,
making the big enterprise pay.
The thing is always, you know, you need to be, you have a product,
and you have a product, and you need to continue sustaining your project,
and your open source projects, that your community will continue contributing,
and it would grow, etc., but on the other side, you need to find a way
to not make it your main competitor for selling to big enterprise.
So that's the challenge, and that's something that a lot of people struggle on,
and some did very, very well, you know, the team at the Databricks built up,
as she spoke, and then built a Databricks on top of that, etc.,
and then you have the hosting business model where you have a lot of people
that want to host the projects themselves, and etc., but sometimes,
people don't want to host themselves, they are database, scale it, etc.,
or when you have, you know, a calendar, a tentative, like CADOTCAL.com,
maybe you don't want to host it yourself, and you just want to play for platform,
and then you have these businesses, like super-base, for example,
my natural post-grace career, etc., who offer these kind of services,
and are able to kind of sustain also their open source business.
So that's the main business model that we look at.
Then it's not a business model, but I will say that some, you see on the other side of the spectrum,
big text, using open source kind of as a weapon, a weapon to commoditize markets,
you know, be able to compete against each other, which sometimes does great thing,
because they offer to the world a lot of great things, and sometimes, you know,
it's a lot, not sure about the motivation behind that.
Well, we'll get there through our talk, and I think, if I can,
you know, we'll do this going to be more of a fire search out, if you guys are okay,
it's going to have actually the fire in there, but it's been advised not to.
Now, I think, on one hand, you know, I started working in open source 20 years ago,
aging myself, and I was working for a commercial open source company,
kind of classic school of fresco, and, you know, they were the own,
they have their own open source, and, you know, they would be the community and the press version,
things really changed when cloud came in, and I've seen sort of this sort of goal,
sort of open source plus SaaS business model, which certainly opened,
kind of a way, I think, an easier way to monetize open source,
but also kind of a clean division between what, you know,
the community can do versus creating sort of additional offerings, you know,
for enterprises, for example, a different sort of delivery model for open source
piece, you're not really selling this software, you're selling a service.
On the other hand, we'll talk about the side effect of cloud on open source,
but I guess maybe my next question would be what, like, what do you think,
you know, obviously when there is a proprietary software, you know,
what's the main difference in terms of besides sort of the funding side of things?
What do you think the benefits are for enterprise to sort of leverage,
you know, obviously from the standpoint that they still have to buy, you know,
they still have to sign somewhere when they buy sort of enterprise software,
but what do they do?
Why do they do it?
Why do they still get an advantage?
I think it's about a few things.
One is about reducing vendor looking.
When I'm talking today to CEOs of big groups,
they are, they want to reduce the number of SaaS platform that they use,
these SaaS platforms sometimes are squeezing them,
putting higher price, closing the data, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And so having a platform like for example, you can use a host adversion of superbase,
but if you want, you can just take the open source, I think it's Apache 2,
and host it yourself, and so if they, at some point,
they want to kind of lock you, or if you have, at some point,
I don't know, tariffs, some software, or stuff like that, you can, you can live.
So that's kind of a freedom and something that allows you also to negotiate and to have more weight.
Then I think it's, for a lot of them, it's having access to being able to self-host,
being able to keep your data for yourself.
That's why that's where the definition becomes a bit complicated,
because it's not most of them are not open source,
but open weight models in AI is interesting for a lot of people,
because they don't want to give away all of the data and to lose control over their business.
That's why.
And then it's about trust and about being able to audit the code and understand what's behind it.
And I would say, last one thing that we find very interesting is that,
in infrastructure, when you are a small company, a small business,
that wants to sell to a big bank or a big energy provider,
you know, an API management solution or a solution that's on which all of their infrastructure will run,
and millions of clients will use that.
And if you are a small company of 10 people,
I'm not sure this big company with millions of clients
would want to buy your product if you're not open source.
Just, even if it's the best product, just because it's too risky for them,
because if you die, if you don't have the money to sustain yourself,
they won't, they don't try infrastructure is done.
And so having the access to the code allows them to kind of have this insurance also.
So it's about sovereignty insurance and safety.
I think people think it's about and used to think and still think,
in a lot of ways, that is about cost.
I think it shouldn't be about cost.
It should be about having more control and having more, yeah.
That's very well said.
I started 15 years ago, sort of in the grassroots open source,
and then, you know, went to a very different world as a,
I joined the Linux Foundation, you're by bringing banks together,
working an open source so you can imagine that, you know,
asking banks is, hey, you should share your code.
This is the Apache way.
This is, you know, the right thing to do
wasn't necessarily what was moving them.
And certainly cost, cost reduction was the first point that they look at.
But obviously, as we know, open source is not free.
It's not free to build.
It's not free to manage.
And I think we should, what I'm seeing, especially as I came back,
really in the last couple of weeks,
I still think that in Europe, many enterprises think about open source as free.
Yeah.
And there's a lot that we need to fix there.
But if anything moving from the vendor lock-in prevention to the digital sovereignty
conversation, since we now, you know, understandably,
that's a lot what we're talking about, but the concept is really the same.
It's like you want to regain control with your an enterprise or a state of your own
technology destiny.
It actually seems that it allows certain allowing me to have conversations that are more
around the strategic goal for these organizations that is not just saving money.
They hated, like, this is a strategic choice to reduce dependency on foreign vendors,
like something that really would create an operational risk to your to your day by day business.
And I think that's the first time that you're seeing like discussion around open source at
board level of very big companies.
And they didn't, like, most of them didn't even know what was open source.
Yeah, a few months or things like that to go.
These story around, like they've all heard of deep seek.
They've all heard of all of these things.
And now they're hearing about what's happening.
And the potential to kind of curse caught the access to US vendors and stuff like that.
And it's becoming a risk and went in, speak of me in risk.
You have the board that involves itself.
And then that can push the things forward.
I'm absolutely, I think we have a honest and opportunity.
If we do this right, not just for commercial open source, but for open sort itself to sort of go to the board room.
And the problem there, maybe I can add one point is,
I was talking with the Sizo of Big Bang that was telling me.
What I like about commercial open source is that I have the advantage of open source and the advantage of SaaS,
which is that if the product breaks with commercial open source,
I have, like, the company that's normally is kind of an insurance that they should fix it.
But if I choose a open source project where don't have a company behind, if it breaks, it's the best of both works.
Yeah, I'm fired.
And I don't want to be fired for a technical choice.
So I prefer sometimes using, you know, this kind of thing where I have the insurance of having people that can be reliant with that.
I think, yeah, I think it's very well said.
And I want to kind of get some practical issues because we've been, you know,
I've been talking a lot to policymakers and enterprises here in Europe on how, you know,
I think we need to move from the conversation of open source is great for digital sovereignty to how.
Yeah.
We actually get there and I think besides raising the profile of open source on the enterprise side as we're doing,
I think it's equally important that we look at the funding side and sort of not talking only about the commission
and government funding of open source.
In other devs we're talking about the sovereign tech fund, sovereign tech agency,
maintain sustaining open source containers.
But that's why I'm very interested on the busy side of things of how we create
an ecosystem of commercial companies here in Europe that can scale and create competition.
But when I actually was at the conference, you guys have organized last summer.
And I was with three European funders all of them moved to the US to get funding.
And a better funding and a better exit.
I have seen things changing in the last year.
I've spoken to more VCs.
So I'm interested to speak to VCs because I want to make,
want to help make commercial open source part of the sort of central investment thesis,
which I gave you guys one good example.
I've seen things changing on the policy side where there's less conversation around regulation,
and more conversation around doing stuff.
Things like, I don't know if you guys have heard about the EU ink proposal,
like creating a single sort of company that can access the 27 states in a more simple way,
because in the US you create a company in Delaware,
you access 350 million consumers here.
You have to have 27 companies, you want access to 27 states.
And that really it's a major friction.
But also things like the scale up Europe fund and trying to push for it to be sort of very focused on open source.
What do you see in the sort of funding landscape in Europe?
Are you seeing the same thing?
I mean, obviously you're doing it, but is this not a lot of competitors right now?
Are your competitors looking at open source in the same way?
What's interesting is that Europe has always been,
has always had this culture of open source,
where in the US the DARPA was building the ancestor of the World War Web,
we built the World War Web in Europe.
Yes, people in Europe.
Same for Linux, et cetera, et cetera.
We have more developers in Europe than in the US.
When you look at the biggest commercial open source in the companies in the world,
more than half of them have been funded by at least one European funder.
It's the only area of the tech industry where the majority of the big companies have been funded by European people.
But the thing is that most of them have been funded in the US because they couldn't find any financing in Europe.
When you look at the number, 80% of the big commercial open source companies in Europe were financed by US funds from the beginning.
When you look at normal software SaaS, it's 27%.
So we can see there is a big gap there.
Because most VCs in Europe are former consultants,
former private equity guys, et cetera, et cetera.
And you don't have a lot of developers from the funders in the VC landscape in Europe.
And that's what we are trying to do with commit.
We are from our operators, developers that are scientists and entrepreneurs.
And our goal is to try to finance these developers that are building very cool companies and try to bring them.
Most of the tools that we have a lot to have to kind of build the company and build the sustainable business that will respect their open source community.
And that will allow them to scale and to create and to have a global impact.
And so today we don't have any fund, we didn't have any fund focused on open source in Europe.
And that's what we are trying to do.
I'm very excited to say how you guys go and I'm happy to help.
I hope being here at Fuzzlem is generating.
Thank you.
You know, quite a lot of interest on that.
We'll have cool interactions in a little bit, but I want to touch on one other topic that is sort of hinted to.
You know, VC is always an interesting word in the open source world.
And particularly in the last year we've seen in the last few years we've seen, you know, several VC backed commercial open source companies changing their license.
And as you say, you know, this is also a sort of, you know,
if I'm thinking elastic I'm thinking among I'm thinking red is I'm thinking, you know, there's a few of them.
And obviously shameless plug, often time the community has exercises, writes it right to fork.
And this project has been forked and recently put in the Linux Foundation.
That's why the foundation exists to make sure that projects open source projects stay open forever.
That's sort of the role of a neutral steward amongst other things.
But, you know, I guess we don't take necessary religious position in any direction, but I'd be curious to see, you know, as a VC.
You know, you mentioned you have to be respectful to the community.
It's interesting to see that you're thinking some of your company funds, you know,
fund that we'll go back to, some of the proceeds we'll go back to you upstream community.
But what's your position on rock pools as a VC should we, should be worried that you're going to get to manage to change license?
I think most VC's just don't understand what's unique about open source.
And I think they don't understand that not only it's immoral to change your license,
because it's a contract, a contract of trust and the most important thing in this world.
And not just, you know, put in the open source world, but they believe it kind of, more broadly, is trust.
Trust with your peers, trust with you.
You know, immoral VC is kind of an oxymoron, isn't it?
Yeah, and it's not just immoral, so there is the moral compass.
And then there is like the financial result, which are, it is proven that each time you change your license for each time,
it may be more than 90% of the time you change your license for a license that is less permissive.
You will lose your community and financially speaking, you will lose money.
So there is no point in doing that.
And it's just for me, people that don't understand the business model, that don't understand the open source world.
And I think, oh, they have just 1% of the client paying.
If I close the license, everybody will be paying and we will be, you know, we will be, you know,
I will be, you know, we will be, you know, we will be, but 100 the revenue, that doesn't work like that.
And from all of these examples, we've seen all of these projects that have been forks.
Yeah, and you lose your trust of your community, you never get that back.
And you, your gross stumble, you lose revenue, et cetera, et cetera, and the end, it's a loose loose loose.
So I think it's has been something that people have experienced because they haven't understood that and
May I hope people will not do the same mistake in the future
Some will do because they won't have like read this
Learn these lessons or just to did the things and I hope like most won't because in the future
We have these examples now that it doesn't work
I must tell I guess so now I think it's a really good point and what I would love to add is that
You know again, we don't take a religious stance on outside here
You know there are commercial reasons why this single vendor open source companies have changed their license and often time
It's pressure from the hyperscalers
Effectively competitive pressure from the hyperscaler
So I sort of understand from a commercial perspective
But you know in my experience even in companies that I work for in the past
It's kind of an art to maintain the balance between community and commercial sort of outcome
I think defining the contract upfront very clearly
Sometimes you don't know the contract
Sometimes you don't know what you're going to do
And in that case we would prefer you begin like you know bit less permissive like HEPL and then you go more permissive
Then the contrary where you're like breaking the trust
So if you don't know maybe you can start like that and then while you kind of know more you
You become more permissive
Yeah, and I think sometimes it's just even
It's not really they don't know that just don't understand there's no one side with soul
I think that some I've seen many examples in with the value line has been drawn in a completely long way
And then after a while the business becomes not sustainable and sort of use that as a
Last resort
The same I'm sort of a particular big fan of these layers I work in a foundation of sort of
Saas models on one side you're building a platform and then the platform will leave you an open government
Setting because you know, it might not always be the solution but it clears it creates a very clear contract between
On one side you have the ecosystem of commercial companies on the other side you have a very clean
Openly govern meritocratic project
So we need to wrap because we have two minutes left
You're here, I'm sure to meet a lot of builders as you build a fund
What's your recommendation for builders in 2026?
Continue building and continue shaping I don't have particular recommendation for builders
But if you're building something cool and want to know more about like how could you potentially make it bigger
Make it a business out of that we there would love to kind of talk to you and just to kind of
Bring our experience of like helping entrepreneurs doing that so don't hesitate to contact us
This website is commit.fund
So yeah, happy to talk it's pretty cool website
Yes, absolutely that's what is there any question
Please
Sub serving question
Sorry
Again share this on
I was interested because you mentioned the question of I mean licensed changes and also contracts
I'm trying to understand that better myself
Do you have any advice
To either projects for considering VC funding or VCs or considering investing into open source about
Like CLAs and whether they should have or not have one
Yeah, I mean to me it was sort of touched on it and you tell me what you think about here
But to me is less so about the
Like the usage of CLAs the choice of a license the whether you use a foundation or not
in my mind is
a function of
If you're trying a function of the business model you're trying to do around the open source project and so in some cases
I mean we've seen say Kubernetes it was born as you were saying as a way to sort of commoditize a certain ecosystem out of enterprise
But he wouldn't have become such a defect to standard if he wasn't in a foundation if he wasn't in a foundation that does not require copyright
Like the linear solution so that effectively the copyright is spread around
That is left in the hands of the communities of no single entity owns it
I've also seen very good examples of single vendor open source projects that
Understood the contract and you know they got away with sort of saying yes, I'm using a CLA you give me the copyright
But you know allow open governance have never broken the contract and I think that's a function of them having picked
Sort of the right model in the right contract for the build business that they wanted to build so that this sort of flywheel was was respected
So I don't I don't think there's one side fits all I guess that's my answer
I think times up, but yeah, I would completely agree with that
I think in the end the more
Permissive you are the more adoption you're going to have
But sometimes the more it will be difficult to monetize it really depend on your on what you're building
Sometimes it will be easy to monetize with this because your project is perfect for that
And on the other side the less you know permissive you are more you put back conditions and strings attached to that
Unless you're going to have adoption so maybe it will also impact a lot of your petition potential revenue
So there is no one side fit all that's why also
We with coming to the goal is to have people that have already done that in all the different spectrum so that they can kind of insert the equation based on your particular
You know
Experience and plot the project
Thank you. Thank you much for being here. I want to thank you all guys for staying
I hope you found it interesting and I got to say I've been so excited to be back in Europe this week because I'm seeing a very different energy
Few world by digital sovereignty
Seriously, there are good vices that really understand open source
So let's scale some of these open source projects in Europe. I think this is a we have a unique opportunity at the moment
So I hope you have a good time for the rest of the first them. Thank you. Thank you