 It's a pleasure to be here specifically with, particularly with the panel that we have amassed some of the leading thinkers in legal, legal evolutions of open source over the last 30 plus years. This is no longer a baby. This is a mature movement and it's one that I'm proud to be part of. And we won't spend a lot of time introducing the panelists. You should know who they are by being able to look in the program. What I wanted to do is briefly introduce the topic. What we wanted to do is go back to be able to go forward to make sure that we're all on the same page. This is a highly volatile and evolutionary community where new people are joining all the time and we want to make sure they were all on the same page. Those of us who are in government, those of us who are actually in the private sector, should all have a common cognitive ground on where open source is and where it's going. And what we wanted to do is start by kind of looking fundamentally to inform the perspective, remind some, reacquaint some of the audience with certain fundamental truths related to open source. Open source is a wholly unique and invaluable modality. I've always focused on this. It's the way we create value in the new economy that's so important. And open source provides this ability through collaborative technology development for one plus one plus one, not equal three, but equal six or 10 or 20, when we bring smart people together from all around the world to be able to solve problems in software. The concept of universal reciprocity, which is near and dear to my heart because it's something that's embedded and empowers the open invention network community, which I manage. Universal reciprocity is a widely accepted pro-competitive approach to pattern risk mitigation that fosters a permissionless and frictionless ecosystem and encourages active adoption of new technology. It is, in fact, a fundamental linchpin of open collaboration that has embodied the OIN license and the IP policies of various open source projects. And very importantly, it's a concept that has been validated as pro-competitive by competition authorities here in Europe, specifically in Germany as well, and Japan and China and the U.S., dating back to the 2011 CPTN transaction, where each of these countries and regions, regulatory authorities, looked at the OIN license carefully. Open source is underpinned by a mature licensing regime and legal foundation that embraces diversity and inclusivity through highly innovative global open source projects. There are unequivocal regional, national, global economic benefits of open source that have been chronicled by Mirko and others who have analyzed this issue for a number of years. Open source is pro-competitive and accommodative of standards development adoption. Coexistence of open and proprietary has led the most sophisticated among us to participate in what I call a form of practice duality, where both concepts are accepted and embraced. Internalizing the duality of open and proprietary has been embraced by literally thousands of companies who have become OIN open invention network licensees, and in so doing have embraced universal reciprocity. Many of these companies are among the largest patent holders in the world, and some such as AT&T, IBM, Sony, Phillips, and Technicolor have historically been and remain the most active global patent monetizers. Long-held myths around patents equating to innovation for companies and nations is the product of fundamentally flawed thinking. As is evidenced by IBM's recent announcement that it will no longer seek numerical patent leadership and will instead use a combination of open source and proprietary technology approaches to practice meaningful innovation that translates ideas to shareholder value. It is not a coincidence that IBM came to this realization after acquiring Red Hat, the most successful open source company in history. Serious economic analysis is now shining a light on the true nature of innovation and how the modality of collaborative development that underlines open source is a foundational element fueling economic growth in an increasingly software centric world. And finally, 30 plus years into its history as an innovation platform, open source has and continues to change their way we create value in the new economy. With that, I would like to turn it over to Karen to talk about where we've come from and provide some foundational elements around how the open source community has evolved to the point it's at now. Talk about this, and realize that we could tell the story of open source from many different perspectives and they would all be interesting and rich. I mean we could talk about it from the developer perspective and the developers are among the most valuable human beings on the planet because we have very few people that understand the way the systems work on that we're all dependent upon and open source is one way to make the best use of those very rare and valuable resources. So we could talk about why developers are very supportive of open source. We could talk about many other aspects. We could go back to Richard Stallman's original approach, but I want to talk specifically about why corporations actually do this and what is important about that because it's both the individual developers and the corporate resources that have made this the truly incredible transformation that we've seen. People, I still have people, you know, when they get assigned to open source in a corporation and they don't know anything about it, they think they've been sent to the charity arm, you know, that well nobody really makes any money on that. We still hear that. Let me tell you the corporations get involved in open source not out of any sort of altruistic idea that they should be doing something better for the planet, although I wish that was a driver. They do it because it is absolutely essential to them in building the infrastructure that is necessary for every industry on earth. We talk about software, but this is true in every industry. The roads and the bridges and the infrastructure that is necessary for all of the companies to perform and to compete and to develop are some things that should not and cannot be built alone and more importantly they cannot be maintained alone. So it's this sense of vulnerability and dependency that brings them together in a platform that enables them to collaborate and to build these things together. But the magic that we learned from the developers who were the first to the table with these concepts could be killed because if we don't understand why and how corporations come together, we can change the underpinnings in ways that prevent them from collaborating in the ways that they want and need to. And we've already heard today a number of times the word trust and we've also heard the word permissionless and we've also talked about speed. These three elements are absolutely essential to the success of open source projects. When the projects come from independent corporate efforts and into a community, the reason they're doing that is because they want to engage a broader community, a wide base of participation, and they want to do it quickly. Deciding that you're going to do it to build something that might be relevant or interesting five years from now or when we've all negotiated the agreements or when we've all negotiated this is not interesting, compelling, or useful. But being able to use an open source license that everybody has seen and understood and used before and that doesn't have anything sneaking around in the corners or edges that might be advantageous to one party and not to the other, the value of that license as the basis for that development of infrastructure cannot be overstated. And that trust, that permissionless trust, that global permissionless trust that is established, that we're all in this together on the same terms without the delay of having to negotiate that and knowing that no one is sitting on the sidelines waiting to benefit in a way that is more or different, that is absolutely essential to these infrastructure projects. And we may have thought that they were edge a few years ago and that will anybody really do this? I know I heard that all the time, nobody really makes any money for that stuff. That we're so far beyond that when we look at the number of projects, the size of the projects, the number of participants, the amount of funding that goes into this, we now know that this is the way to build the infrastructure of the future. But permissionless, trusted environments are absolutely essential not just to individuals but to the companies that come together to build these platforms. Thanks very much, Karen. What I wanted to do now is the only economist on the panel, Mirko, because he's at so many legal events, I forget that and because of his ability to understand the legal issues so well, I forget that his fundamental background is in economics, but he's done a series of pieces and studies over the years and we wanted him to talk about the economics of open source and how benefits are accruing and have accrued over the last 30 plus years. Thank you. So first I was very pleased to see the results of the recent study that OFE and Andrew and me have worked on on Hans Holtz' slides. I wanted to highlight that we very carefully calculated the impact of open source on the European economy as a lower bound. So it's at least that, it is probably more. In terms of the economic foundations of open source, I think there are a couple of aspects to highlight. One, it is an alternative way to develop technical innovations to the established ways like patenting that we've heard before, which means it offers a choice to participants to pick the model that they see fits their needs best and we've seen that collaboration is a model that many prefer and therefore I think the predominant way of collaboration in the software industry today is via open source. So it's a choice, it's a voluntary decision by all the participants and as such it represents the most established way of innovating in the tech sector, the software tech sector. That illustrates and underlines the point that Keith made that we cannot simply assess innovation anymore by counting the number of patents. It is really an important point that we had to have to unfortunately repeat feels to me like every year more than once, but as you said there are a couple of publications now that illustrate this topic and others in a lot of detail on open source and standardization on the economic impact and only recently an open access textbook on open source law and practice where for example we've delved into a lot of detail on why the question how do I make money with open source is really the one question to ask. Open source provides benefits way beyond simply making money it provides benefits like cost savings across large industry verticals which in the bottom line of a company have exactly the same effect they'll need to have earnings you can also save costs to improve your profitability. The reduction of redundant effort of parallel development similar to in a classic literature the patent race where you have multiple entities trying to invent the same thing in the first pass to go post wins and everybody else is in the dust that is a cost of the old way of innovating that we get rid of with open source. So it's quite clear that if you basically draw an equation of what are the benefits and the cost that you have from collaborating open source that the overall benefit is positive both at the micro economic level and also at the micro economic level. With this I think it's clear that open source is a pro competitive force. This combination of voluntary participation and the open licensing of results basically eliminates the opportunity of an individual player to unduly influence others and invites everybody with very low barriers of entry to participate. The cost to participate the initial barrier is very low and we see this in for example the higher engagement of small medium sized companies in the open source space and this is related to Astros point earlier that European companies are mostly challengers and there are many small and medium sized innovative companies that are challenging the incumbents and open source enables them to do so. Another aspect this maturity at this point I think it was mentioned a couple of times we're not talking about something new we're talking about three decades by now we're talking about the predominant model of the software industry to innovate and we have policymakers and others in the room today which I kind of also highlights that but it also means that we need to iterate another point reiterate another point and that is open source is a term of art it is a well understood model there is a global governance system in place that that's isn't protected and anybody who tries to redefine what open source means or questions the basic tenets like the freedoms embodied in open source licenses to me probably is opening a can of worms that should remain closed so thank you I think that's the initial overview. Thanks very much Mirko and now I'd like to have Andrew talk about standards and open source. Yeah thanks very much Keith I think the theme that both Karen and Mirko have relied upon really has been more about reduction of friction than anything else the success of open source and the innovation that is derived from open source has been very much about the reduction of friction and Karen said the word permissionless quite a lot and the creation of a permissionless environment has allowed for example we were going to have a quotation up here it's not there from Sir Tim Berners-Lee and he talks about you know I think we can all agree that the World Wide Web is possibly the most economically impactful embodiment of innovation in human history many people would agree with us a statement and he says this was only possible because of the permissionless environment in which he was operating he didn't have to get the permission of DARPA to use the internet he didn't have to get the permission of Vint Cerf for example so to build on top of the World Wide Web has also been a highly permissionless environment and by permissionless we are not talking about an absence of patents we're not talking about an absence of intellectual property rights and I think Karen was talking earlier about some of the preconceptions that people have about the open source and the free software movement and yes there are parts of that where you know people are obviously re-evaluating the impact of intellectual property rights at the whole time but we live in an environment where they do exist so the permissionless in this context really means that anyone who wants to participate does not have to as Karen said enter into negotiations with another party in order to do that they need to be able to go ahead and do what they really want to do which is to innovate and there have been a number of other areas of friction so for example the ability to cooperate with one another has been improved dramatically by the fact that people can use platforms based on Git like GitHub and Gitlamp for example so that's one particular example the availability of free and open source software tools so that the development process that has reduced friction as well so all of these potential barriers to entry are being steadily eroded and that is a huge boost to innovation but in order for innovation to thrive there needs to be interoperability between all the various components and this has been a core of European Union policy for a very long time I mean if we talk about the current 2020 to 2023 open source strategy then the European Union says that interoperability of the utmost important to the Commission and to member states and the key to interoperability is to have open standards so the standards in all levels that are available it's a vital importance that and again it's reduction of friction again because if you want to take a particular couple of particular components you want to combine them or you want to be able to improve that particular component it's always going to be significantly easier to do that if you are developing to a particular standard and there's a number of different mechanisms in which way standards can come about sometimes they arise de factoes simply because the development processes led to those those standards emerging and then they can follow through various standards processes with the standard setting organizations such as ISO, ITU, IC etc then you have organizations like W3C and they have different approaches towards intellectual property again and this brings us back to this idea of a permissionless environment in which it's possible to implement these standards without having to obtain specific permission from people through a negotiated license and this is one of the areas that I'm working on in research at the moment is to research how it's easier for companies to operate in these areas because I think in some areas standards are lagging behind other areas of open source in that it's not always permissionless and that there are frequently issues for example with the ISO standard patent policy which means that although people who hold patents are able to declare those patents and indeed they can declare that they're available on a royalty free basis there is still a phase which is unnecessary in my view which occasionally requires negotiation with those organizations but from a positive perspective it's undoubtedly the case there's a number of very impressive initiatives happening at the moment in the world of open source open sources taking into its own sphere mechanisms for increasing the speed and the effectiveness with which standardization can happen and the rapidity with which the open chain standard for example managed to reach ISO standardization at the end of 2021 is a very impressive example of that so you know final note I think it's positive the way that standardization is going but we do have a little bit of a way to go at the moment thanks very much appreciate it and now we've given Karlo the the difficult task of reflecting on 30 years of history the key points and observations that he's had with the incredible diversity of client base that he served thank you thank you actually I was planning on touching upon a few things we have spoken about large companies more companies but the community at large is made by much more than this we have individuals never always remember that linux was initiated by a person linux torwald so the w3c sorry the world web was initiated by a person team bernsley and first off the foundation was funded by Richard stormen so we have also grassroots movements that are functional to producing and to controlling to helping the the working of open source and I have happened to be a council to the free south of foundation europe and now I'm serving in the board of the open source initiative osi is the one task it is to one mission I would say to to foster open source and we also have a a list of approved licenses these licenses by and large operate under copyright but licenses are not open source and I want to touch upon another point that was already made but it's important open source and licenses are a means to an end an end it to an is to ensure that everybody is able to use study modify and distribute software in a permissionless way and by permissionless I mean under any possible rise that that are controlled by anybody because this is a game of equals there mustn't be anyone who is more equal than others and you cannot just give freedom with one hand and take it away with another hand and actually I'm saying that because there is a lot of open washing going around of people taking is saying this is open source because this is some copyright permission this is not enough because that's not a game of equals and this is travesty of open source it's very important and of course we can have different opinions as to whether patents belong in open source I have strong views but this is the game we are playing and the game is that there are patent companies holding and organizations holding a lot of patents and we need to make sure that this is not gained against the equality of open source so we whatever our opinion is we welcome very much that large companies and institutions put those patents at the service of open source and they do pledges do covenants to to to permit that people are operating in a safe harbor where nobody is exploiting of course these requires three things and one of has already been said that this this is permanent there is no carpet pulling that you have a liberty and then all the sudden the floor is vanishing from your from your feet that requires that patents as long as the system stays this way the patents are are not waived but preserve their right to be enforced because if they are licensed they are given away under certain conditions this condition must work for everybody and this brings to the final point reciprocity without reciprocity you have a safe harbor when somebody has the right to fire against the enemy so when the United Nations establishes a ceasefire zone they send in the the blue helmets I happen to be one of them and they control that nobody fires at the enemy because otherwise it will be at its length again so reciprocity means that these the the patents are used in to preserve the permissionless environment as this is a very important short of any other policy action a final remark open source is complex is counterintuitive we have been preaching in the desert for 30 years saying that it is also a viable business system recently we have been proven to be to be right but it's an alignment of stars which is very unique and it's very easily disrupted and we have already seen areas where open source struggles because of the surrounding environment and I can quote at least two one is in Europe the radio-defined software it's been heavily impacted by unwise decisions by policymakers and the other is the elephant in the room is the audio video codex which is a heavily patented and until recently a open source couldn't be here so please when we flag if there is an issue if you're a legislator if you are a a policymaker please give us the benefit of doubt that we might be right thank you very much fellow I'd like to extend on this idea of reciprocity a little bit because I believe that this misunderstood to a large extent and in the discussions about open source we often hear that there are certain licenses that require responsibility from the users of the software and therefore we see some sort of reciprocity in in the in the ecosystem I think this is really looking at the the idea from exactly the wrong perspective the the idea of reciprocity in open source is the modeling of collaboration as a social exchange and the reason why it was so natural for the people who wrote the original copy of licenses to put reciprocity into them is that they assume that to be in place anyway and the case in point for that is that if you look at pretty much all recent major industry collaborations that are really at a large scale they're all very much using permissive licensing schemes however you see a very strong sense of reciprocity there so you do not have a legal requirement to act this way you have a community norm in the in the group that participates that reciprocity is the foundation of our work there is an economic foundation an economic theory that explains this but I think in the context of open source it is really important to understand that this permissionless environment we talked about depends on all actors understanding the governance norms in the space that they're operating in and adjusted them and it is also known that a single actor that doesn't play by the rules causes oversized damage because they're changing how others are willing to collaborate they're poisoning you well and I think when we are talking about policymaking in open source it is important that these basic tenets are understood so that we can reinforce and encourage the intended way of collaboration and ideally put fences around that and protect it it's a very successful model it has a very positive impact on on our liberties and on the economy so it's worth protecting and we need to do it the right way so thanks for that Karen did you have a I'm just nodding and verbal nodding and verbal nodding and the other thing that you said that I thought was so important was looking at this from the perspective of small and medium-sized businesses that the platforms that are created the infrastructure that's built is a great benefit to them and and the larger companies certainly benefit from it they come together and build that infrastructure but in my experience the real boon has been to these small companies that can enter a space with security can can operate with and get investment based on a set of norms and and thrive and that's been a wonderful thing to see just going back to this concept of permissionless so when Mirko was talking another thing occurred to me and we often overlook the the sociological that drives the dynamics behind the economics of open source and I think something that's been extremely important and was referred to earlier as well is with the development that for example of ospos throughout Europe this provides examples for any organization that wants to embark on open source development and that's whether the commercial organization where they're they're in the public sector whether in the academia or whatever it grants a form of permission because you are no longer regarded as being doing something unusual and that's not the norm if the government is doing it if it's supporting it if it seemed to be working effectively then it's much easier for you as an individual in one of these organizations to say we should open source this because it's not the weird thing to do it's the thing that works and it's the thing that has been seen to work and I've been involved there are there are really two ways of incurring open source development there's the top down approach which in some ways ospos have bodied themselves they say this is how we're going to do it but there's a bottom up approach as well which is just empowering individuals to be able to say this is the way we want to do things because it works and it might it might not work and that's fine frequently very frequently it does so I think the very existence of you know these excellent initiatives from the European Union the idea of encouraging the development of ospos throughout the member states is a very positive one from that perspective as well I have very little to add which of the rest of the panel I might remind that and this is also my personal experience as a lawyer and also in addition to be to being a an activist an open source and free software innovation happens everywhere so you don't you cannot limit your views to a big research center or a big company innovation can come from small medium enterprises very innovative I have a number of very interesting projects run in in in many different ways academia is also important of course there are research centers in academia that are very important and and doing it in the in an open source fashion is a big equalizer everybody is a free ticket to enter of course you have to play you have to contribute significantly otherwise in an open source you're easily spot as a is a somebody who is just dragging their feet and and just exploiting others but this is one of the beauty of my experience I've been not as as much as the others in the room but I've been in this business for a quarter of a century now and I've seen it happening over and over and I've seen small companies adding to a very large project and and taking over control of certain technology and be very helpful this is thanks to the equality that the open source and the social and legal system together creates in this environment thanks very much I'd like to thank the panel for for their ideas their thoughts their the history that that's created the perspectives that you you've listened to today I've had the good fortune of being around for the past 15 years and it's a really I'm proud to be part of this community open source is a gift and I think we all have to recognize my final comment that that as as the caretakers of this gift whether we're part of government whether we're part of industry whether we're the the the legal guardians the economic analysts we're all part of something that's so much bigger than us we need to recognize what we're part of and treat it with the respect and the dignity that it deserves if we want it to flourish and be able to support us going into the future as an incredibly powerful source of innovation the likes of which we've never seen thank you