 Good afternoon everyone. My name is Hilary Carter. I'm VP of Research at the Linux Foundation. Thank you very much for joining us at Research Insights Revealed, our session to dig into the findings of the Europe 2022 Spotlight Report. I am joined by a distinguished panel of Colin Eberhardt who is from ScottLogix, CEO who with his team led the authorship and qualitative research into some analytics specific to the report. Sachiko Mudo, Chairman of Open Forum Europe who with her colleague Aster Neumlund Karlberg who was originally supposed to join us today, participated as Survey Distribution Partner and Advisor really on the project from the very beginning and supported this effort. And of course LF Europe's new GM Gabriele Colombro who is the original gangster for this project. He is the inspiration for the report. He said we must conduct a research study in order for LF Europe to be successful. So with Gab's inspiration I really had no choice but to do this. Anyway I'm so pleased that we did so I will kick off our discussion by briefly introducing the methodology behind the research and then I'll invite Colin up to discuss the findings. Sachiko to discuss research that they've done at Open Forum Europe and its significance to the European open source ecosystem and then Gab will come up to describe and solicit input from you on how we can leverage this insight to influence programming and create a flourishing or not create sustain a flourishing open source ecosystem. So the methodology as for those of you who are part of the keynote we launched a survey at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon in Valencia, Spain in May. Our survey was distributed by 15 partner organizations many of them from the academic community. Colin's organization Scott Logic at Tech Consultancy based in the UK incubators and and other entities we had a terrific distribution a lot of support for this effort and through their partnership we were able to reach a tremendous cross-section across the European continent really try our very best to get a robust diverse survey sample. It's not always that easy and so we're very grateful anytime we have a community who gets behind a research project and helps in this effort and so again I want to thank everybody who participated in the survey. We also had a great response of survey takers. So among our academic partners code not commotion but leading technical universities and developer community partners included Code Motion at Technology University at Eindhoven at TU Berlin and the To Do Groups Europe chapter. Our screening criteria was you couldn't be a bot. You had to have you had to not be screened out of the bot questions. It is hard yeah you had to pick the correct one of you know maybe five or six responses. We caught a lot of bounces consequently. You had to be a resident of Europe at least part-time employed because the questions were related to organizational consumption and contribution policies and practices for the most part and you we also filtered out those responses who were not sure when it came to their employer's approach to open source. In terms of survey sample we had 1050 survey starts 750 completed the consumption questions at 670 respondents completed the survey from beginning to end. So we had enough of a sample size that we could do some interesting analytics particular to industry or country and so on. And also sorry 16 interviews with subject matter experts across the continent. We're really grateful anytime individuals are willing to not only participate in an interview but to do so on the record. So that was how we approached the survey and the report empirical research process and I would like to invite Colin Eberhardt up to go through the key findings. Thanks for that Hilary. Okay so I've got the challenge of condensing a 40 page report with 30 diagrams into a 10 minute slot so you know hold on to your seats this is going to be fast. Now as you can imagine I'm only going to be able to give you a little bit of a taster of the contents of the report. I'm basically going to pull on a single thread that weaves its way through the narrative so that's just one thread there are a number of stories that emerge throughout the report. I'm going to talk a little bit about consumption a little bit about contribution so again I'm assuming you're familiar with these terms but sometimes they require explaining so consumption using open source contribution giving back or creating your own open source project then we're going to take a bit of a step back and look at a view across Europe across just one of these dimensions. Another area we're going to focus on a little bit is open source leadership I know that's important to a great many people and then finally I'll share the most sort of compelling conclusions of the report. So let's start with consumption and as I mentioned this is just one of the survey questions and one of the views so what you see on this slide is we asked a question about the consumption policy of the individual's employer and on the left hand side here you can see the five different response options the response option at the top is the most permissive they're actively encouraged to consume open source the next is they are wow this screen is tiny so I'm going to have to guess the next is that they are permitted to consume open source under some limiting conditions next no clear policy and then finally down to I don't know not sure so it's effectively a sliding scale of how permissive it is we were fortunate as Hilary mentioned that we had a sizable number of survey respondents which allowed us to segment the data in various different interesting ways so here we're segmenting by the size of the organization that they are employed at with the smallest the micro businesses on the left hand side and the largest typically multinational corporations on the right hand side and the pattern you can see is is quite apparent within the smallest of organizations 80 percent of individuals said that they're actively encouraged to consume open source and as the size of their organization increases that percentage decreases interestingly for the most part that data almost flows into the next level down whereby consumption is permitted under limiting limited conditions or limiting conditions this is as you'd expect any large organization will probably have legal compliance concerns and so on which will result in those limitations what I also find quite interesting here is is the third bar down the no clear policy where we find policy lacking is not at the two extremes the micro the very large enterprises it's the SMEs and the the sort of mid-sized businesses where 20 percent and 18 percent respectively say there is no clear policy so this is to me is a clear signal that medium-sized businesses need to work on policy clarity in in open source consumption if we look at the other side of the coin contribution again we asked a very similar question we asked about the the employers policy relating to open source consumption so contribution here what we can see on the vertical axis as is a very similar sort of sliding scale from being openly encouraged to the far end where it's not permitted or don't know not sure this time we're segmenting by industry sector and I probably don't have to point it out the the trend almost jumps off the page what you're finding is information technology professional technical services telecommunication contribution is openly encouraged in a number of these organizations with other sectors public sector education and the one that I can't read oh finance naughty finance I work in finance tut tut those are the ones where contributions not encouraged and I think anyone who's worked in those sectors knows that that is the case interestingly that all pushes into no clear policy in these organizations whether people feel that they would like to contribute or not they simply don't know whether they are able to it really shows a sort of lack of maturity in policy in these in these sectors as a whole then if we take a bit of a step back again we we were able to look at industry sector organization size and country so here we can see a combination of a few different survey questions what we're doing is one of the questions we asked is how in how important how significant is open source to your sector and as you can imagine a great many of the respondents said yes it's important to my sector then we're looking at how permissive their consumption policy is and contribution policy and finally we're looking at how this how this is across various different countries within Europe and you can see for example Spain is a bit of an outlier here one of the things I find actually quite interesting is the Netherlands they've got quite permissive consumption policies but when it comes to contribution there's a significant drop there and again one of the things that jumps off the page to me here is the downward slope everyone says it's valuable a smaller number say consumption's encouraged in an ever an ever smaller number say contribution is encouraged the the throughout a number of our our survey questions this imbalance between consumption and contribution was quite apparent we can see 43 percent report a lack of contribution policy compared with 20 percent reporting a lack of clear consumption policy and again lack of clarity is something that really frustrates me because that's something that's potentially quite easy to address so finally I'm going to talk a little bit about open source leadership and and it's quite relevant to this event I know one of the parallel tracks here is Ospo con and again this screen is far too small for me to read it so one of the fantastic quotes I had from Alois is a central role is the of the Ospo is to relate the value to the business as a whole not just in the way the CTO can understand it's it's it's about conveying the the value of open source to a non-technical audience because as you saw in the previous slide many of these sectors but a significant number of their their employees wouldn't consider themselves to be technical and they all need to understand the value of open source so that's a very important role of of an Ospo one of the things that we were quite clear about in our in our survey though was we didn't just want to single out organizations with an Ospo we also wanted to acknowledge that in some organizations they have clear and visible leadership which to my mind provides a similar kind of guidance that an Ospo would this is something that you may see present in perhaps smaller organizations or organizations that are evolving towards having an Ospo so let's have a look at what leadership does to some of the data so here if we look at which one's this I'm going to have to look over there because this screen's tiny which one was this was this contribution or consumption ah consumption okay so what we've got now is we are splitting the responses around consumption policy based on whether they have an Ospo or clear and visible leader or whether they don't and again I probably don't need to point it out when there is an Ospo or a clear leader consumption is much more encouraged than when it is absent and also the one that bugs me time and time again a lack of policy as you can see those with an Ospo or leadership the number of people that reported a lack of clear policy is much smaller than when it is absent so to me this is a clear indicator that leadership is a must whether it's an Ospo or not leadership has a significant impact on the employee experience and the employees are the ones that are going to consume and contribute at the end of the day another one I'm going to lean over here okay this is about their ah the value the perceived value derived from open source so we we we ask them it do you see the the perceived value of open source increasing or decreasing for your organization as you can imagine across the board most people were quite optimistic and said yes the value is increasing however in the presence of an Ospo or clear visible leader the value increase was much greater than when it was absent 64 percent said it increased versus 39 percent in organizations that lack that leadership again another fantastic result demonstrating the need for leadership so finally if we move on to the conclusions as I said I've just pulled on a single sort of strand throughout the throughout the report so the first thing that I want to highlight is some of the things that we need to take home and and act upon ourselves is firstly we definitely need to address the imbalance between consumption and contribution contribution and I personally think the way to do this is through policy clarity we need to address those areas especially in telecommunications especially in public sector and finance where a significant number of the respondents said I I don't know the policy is not clear I just don't know what it is I mean I'm hoping that those businesses understand the value of consuming and contributing if all they need to do is improve their policy they can get a really big win here the next one is I think the obvious thing the obvious route to creating clarity is through leadership and I don't need to bang the drum on that one any further the results speak for themselves there are some other conclusions and all I'm going to do is say you're going to have to read the report to find out why and encourage public sector investment in open source in almost every question that we asked public sector was an outlier and I don't mean an outlier in a good way I mean an outlier in a oh that's not so good and one of the things that's quite apparent within within Europe is there are a number of countries where open source is mandated within public sector organizations and unfortunately our result our survey findings indicate that there's there's a lack of policy there's a lack of contribution there's some consumption but basically policy is is not resulting in a significant sort of impact to my mind so I think the public sector as a whole really needs to sort out it open source and finally I think the final point is almost about the goal that we should be seeking to achieve we should be embracing open source as a mechanism for a political collaboration and shared value creation this is why it's a open source Europe report and open source is a fantastic platform for achieving that goal download the report there we go oh sorry I thought I thought we were so convincing that have downloaded it already cool thank you very much I'll pass on take questions afterwards so I'll now ask Sachiko Muto of open form Europe to say a few words thank you thank you Hilary and I did read the report by the way I don't think that you read our report and I'm saying that because you know your report was very very a very nice read our report was I think 400 plus pages and so I just have to yeah okay so I can move on everybody has yeah okay um yeah so as Hilary also mentioned I'm actually stepping in from my colleague uh Aston and Linkarlberg who couldn't be here um but that's fine because I also lived through uh you know this this report uh for for about a year years time and so um I think I should give a little bit of context to uh this report because it's quite different from from how your report came about I think with um this report was actually put out to competitive tender by the European Commission um and so we together with Fraunhofer um oh I should have introduced us but I'm just going to jump to the report um so it was put out to tender by the commission and Fraunhofer and OFE together responded to this call for tender and so we have delivered this this report for the commission um and so it's published by the commission but it's authored by us and um you can also download the report um but indeed like this is a 400 page plus report and that's also because we did not necessarily have control over the the uh you know what went into the report it is quite a a sort of um a strict specification that comes from from uh from the commission itself I think that's important to understand because it came from from DG Connect and they wanted to understand the value of uh of open source uh the economic uh value to of open source to to European economy um and so um it's pretty clear from the start now I'm sharing a little bit of background information that they wanted a reason to to go in and you know maybe formulate policies around open source whatever but they needed to have the justification for that so it's really important for them that we come to a number and we did come to numbers and I hesitate to put up this next slide because indeed uh the other partner in the project um uh was um led by uh an economics professor actually a professor of econometrics and so it's his model that I'm presenting and I do not have a PhD in econometrics but what the commission wanted was a defend you know a figure that could be defended and so what I'm presenting here is actually a quite impressive number uh estimating um sort of the annual contribution of open source to the European economy and it's a modest number um I don't want to go into sort of the details of how that you know you can read the annex um that I think adds a hundred pages to to our study but I think suffices to say that the the the European Commission was happy to have this and that then this um having this foundation would then lead them to sort of look into what sorts of policies could could could uh could further enable the European economy to to sort of capitalize on on on the benefits that open source provides so um I uh and you know you see a figure of sort of for the year 2017 2018 they estimate this number to be 63 billion euros or something like that and the interesting thing that the model also allows for is that further investment uh you know would would you know would bring additional um additional value um and you know we also had a sort of a qualitative part of our our our study uh also a survey but also a number of in-depth interviews as well um we were also required to come up with a number of policy recommendations and it's interesting because for me I see your presentation and I'm actually more interested in in discussing that because the what was achieved with this was to say yes it's important for European policymakers to care about open source and to you know and to promote and encourage uh European businesses and and public sector organizations to further invest in open source now in order to understand how we actually formulate good policies we do need the sort of survey you know the sort of um reports that that you have um that you have come you know presented today so I'm I'm really interested in taking that next step now uh understanding what are some of the blockers what are some of the opportunities and um but the interesting thing is that we came to a very similar conclusion actually which was um because this our study even though it was um uh sort of initiated by the European Commission the did not have an exclusive um focus on the public sector actually they wanted to understand the you know how it affected you know European businesses SMEs etc but you know our recommendation was also that the public sector needed to invest more um into uh under further understanding uh open source and we made a parallel with sort of um with standardization uh in Europe which actually has if you look at the European Commission has several units in the commission with people working on standardization policy etc and so basically making the point that if you want to understand and benefit from something you have to um build the sort of institutional um capacity and so you know auspice were mentioned and um this is obviously something that's happening also in the public sector and I think it's one of the recommendations that we made as well this importance of leadership and having clear policies in order to benefit from open source and to formulate good policies around it and policies now uh you know when you talk about from a sort of politics point of view it's not just sort of internal policies it's also external policies and so that's basically um I just wanted to thank you for the opportunity to talk about our report for us it was really about sort of setting the stage for more in-depth research which you know I'm happy to see that you're you're initiating yeah okay okay thank you Sachiko so much Gab please over to you good man thank you thank you so much and thanks for the opportunity so I actually am really curious to see what you guys the panelists as well and the audience of course think about the next slides because um I think um when we were reviewing the report with with Hilary I you know I kind of got a copy of the report and I was like you know why don't we change this why don't we change that and Hilary said hey how about we keep sort of separate the research part from you can write your you know forward and your you know inspirational whatever Italian blah blah blah but we'll keep the research research um and so what you see here is my interpretation of the research which I'm actually curious to you know for you guys to challenge because you've you know mine has been a I'm not going to say a scheme read but it's been only a couple of days processing this so feel free to you know jump at me I mean not physically but um so this is like the you had skipped uh calling but I decided to borrow it just to sort of start setting the stages one of the other sort of takeaways I'm gonna start with a key a couple key takeaways from my side and then how we start applying those takeaways as Hilary said one of the reasons for this research was um you know as we launch LF Europe I have the actually of being able to do it on a data-driven basis which is something that I was never able to never been able to do before so um it was interesting to me to see how as Colleen hinted to you know the value of open source is widely recognized not just in the public sector clearly the public sector has sort of shown sort of the most value amongst the respondents but you know even industries like you know finance which we're familiar with still well over 50 percent which is definitely you know encouraging but certainly it talks to the sort of general understanding of the potential of open source towards innovation um that's one of the takeaways then I've taken some of the takeaways that were shared this morning during the the keynote and of course I love that if you read the report uh you'll know more um but about a couple of couple of results that I try to sort of put together into some something actionable um as we said in the previous slides open sources is widely recognized as sort of across industries across countries yes as Colleen pointed out there is a sort of difference in sort of how the different countries when we sort of break it down to country but you know they were all you know even Italy it's actually you know well over 60 60 70 percent and so um despite some variants generally even across countries and regions sorry industries and countries um I didn't see a major difference there um what what struck me that we actually didn't discuss today is that some of the results suggest that the primary reason why especially the public sector looks at uh um open source um you know it all starts with sort of cost cutting unsurprisingly and and and sort of vendor locking prevention was um a major um result especially comparatively to other regions or other studies that we've done for example um you know in other areas innovation was was uh top of mind or or you know it was interesting how vendor lock-in was very prevalent in Europe and I'm you know I'm not surprised given sort of the broader landscape uh sort of of conversations around cloud providers and and sort of uh you know digital sovereignty so it seemed to sort of show that preventing vendor lock-in you know open source is one of the main goals of brand vendor lock-in um another area that I think sort of puts together two results from the from the report um you know clearly most of the respondents saw the power of open source to sort of survive political seasons if that makes sense I mean particularly in the US we're very much on the on a four-year schedule for whatever happens uh and has to happen uh um and and folks really saw uh at least that's my interpretation interested from from Colin and Hillary clearly spend more time on that um that certainly they see the value and they would recommend more investment in in uh open source from the public sector to really foster a vision that is very ambitious you know the one of the digital comments on the other hand what it seemed to me is that transparency was the first and foremost reason why the government thinks it needs to do sort of open source and don't get me wrong transparency is absolutely a a a a key tenet of open source and it's something that the government and regulators should strive for but it seemed to me that uh it's not the whole story meaning we have seen over and over again putting together collaborations like using the convening power of the government to bring together all the different constituents to actually then use open source to solve you know let's not call it a business problem in this case but a social issue or a policy issue and so clearly transparency it's great we all should be happy about that and then the public sector sort of diving deep into that but I think they're not really at least from my interpretation the results they're not really taking major advantage of the full power of open source some of the collaborations that we've seen globally under under the linux foundation under other foundations and then the third one yes this is one of the key results and it talks about the the sort of the delta between the consumption and the contribution policies and that's where maybe I have a slightly different experience with the concept of ospos for me ospos kind of gets me to the next one historically I've interacted with ospos more on the how meaning on the procedural side how do you do open source on the policy side how do you engage how do you contribute how do you consume maybe again this is more from the finance world where it all starts with compliance it all starts with legal and just recently they're starting to understand the strategic value of open source especially sort of an outward facing open source initiatives and so again in the assumption that the ospo as I see it it's more about the how I do think for my experience in finance that it starts actually with the why so we go back to sort of strategic leadership in my mind it all starts from getting the leadership to understand why they would want to do open source and that will make you know rolling out proper policies sort of much easier again we try to do that with banks from the other side it's been pretty complex to just do open source for open source sake in some of these organizations and so yes my sort of operational hypothesis that we need to do more education on sort of the full value of open source beyond sort of code collaboration on government bringing together some of this collaboration of being part of it and on the role of foundations not just the linux foundation in sort of bringing all the different constituents together again it'd be my personal bias but I do think there is a much you know if you compare Europe to other regions there's sort of less tech prevalence of sort of big tech versus strong vertical industries and as you've seen pretty much all the industries are over 50% in sort of understanding their value of open source before I cross reference that with sort of the contribution to the european GDP meaning what are the most important industries in Europe it seems to me that this is you know together we're working with the public sector sort of a second major area for us to sort of develop in Europe and again it's no surprise that foundations like LF energy was climate phenos are pretty strong in Europe and then last but not least I think it has come up we didn't touch much about the romantic nature of open source that I sort of hinted to this morning but it did you know I think we all know as Europeans but it was important for me to have a validation from a data driven perspective that there is a different view from individuals whether you are a contributor whether you are an end user whether you are just a citizen we want to make sure that whatever comes out both the participation is a level playing field and whatever comes out delivers value not just you know to corporations or governments but really to the ultimately individuals I mean we're doing on time okay so you've seen this slide this morning I'm just gonna skip on it I hope I was just quoting an article from a couple of months ago and that's really something that I hope back to that idea of marrying the three different aspects of the romantic nature the commercial nature and the sort of social value and I'm going back to that we think foundations can actually play an important role in bringing those three values together it was interesting to me to see this article was that two months ago where you know in order to actually implement the sort of vision of the digital comments there had been some you know conversations around actually sort of launching a foundation you know of course it would be very supportive very happy to help but you know hopefully sort of we can see the need and the demand converge with you know hopefully what we can support with through Linux Foundation Europe and then one final maybe not necessarily related to the survey operational hypothesis a lot of people ask me whether I'm gonna move back to Europe in the last day or so and you know sure that's the goal but just well this was I think you shared Hillary a month ago this article actually the EU just opened a an office in San Francisco so I feel like I got something more to do there first before actually moving to Europe but I do think again this goes kind of more broadly into the type of things that we hope to be able to bridge you know with this current administration the US certainly the relationships have improved in terms of sort of transatlantic collaboration you know clearly there's a lot of animosity between Europe, Big Tech, West Coast but the fact that EU is you know trying to sort of to be there either to you know keep an eye on or to to sort of build bridges I think it's it's a good sign and we sort of want to support that and I see five minutes so no no Brexit jokes I've been advised to stay away from Brexit jokes as much as Colin you you know how much I love Brexit jokes you know that I've been very I've been probably advised to stay away from Brexit jokes also because again I left Europe not I left you it's the whole Europe we we still love you we still love you Colin that's that's the thing and so these are just a couple of questions I know we only have five minutes so I actually I added the second question that you probably didn't know Hilary how you did it good great sorry I didn't have a lot of time for Google Docs comments this morning but we don't have to answer these questions right now we're actually gonna spend some time to understand especially the second one you know what areas of collaboration should we prioritize it's it's a pretty loaded question and ones that I don't know that we're gonna respond now but I just wanted I don't know if you had the different format for ending this conversation but I'd love to hear from you whether you have any thoughts on this question so the survey results on the interpretation again this has been really the last few days please so a few years back there was the digital copyright act that was in legislation being put through the EU and there was an enemy a German MEP who was saying that can you hear me is that better yeah so there was a German MEP who was saying there's a lot of things a lot of problematic things with this um uh uploading code to github could be affected by this and so on so I had a chat with my local MEP and said uh this is problematic for these these reasons and he said okay we're gonna box that off you know that'll be okay but looking at the legislation it struck me that with with with all of the tech expertise I have I did not have the time or the interest to get my head into the code that is you know legislation so it strikes me that if somebody is into that they wouldn't have the time to understand our stuff so how do they come to understand our stuff given that they have enough to be getting on with understanding their own stuff manage to get this carve out uh yes sorry um so indeed I mean that came in as a as the result of a last-minute fight you know so it was definitely not part of the original legislation and not part of there you know it was not you know in the mind of the the drafters of the legislation and so you know together with fsfee and others we we did this sort of campaign to save co-chair campaign um and basically managed to get this carve out which basically just says this should not apply to you know uh always not meant to apply to uh you know co yes exactly but I don't think that the the legislation the text actually shows an understanding of of of you know of this type of platform it's just that they we had convinced enough legislators uh legislators that you know open source uh contributors you know contributed value and that they should not be in scope um and so you know so it is was an example of you know uh a little bit of the reactive um lobbying let's say and hopefully we can be more proactive you know with with with lf europe and some of the research that we are we're seeing here today somebody said one minute yeah I was just going to point out a lack of understanding is is is at the root of quite a lot of the challenges that as you probably know gab gab heads up finno so I predominantly work in financial services and a lot of the challenges we face which are not not legislative but uh within or with an organization's legal and compliance get in the way of contribution for fear of leaking ip that to my mind shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to commit a fix to a bug on on github so yeah the root there is a lack of understanding we actually are out of time um I I will have to wrap this conversation with very many thanks to all of you for joining and invite you all to please get in touch with us to discuss the research europe at linuxfoundation.org uh can reach out to gab even better linuxfoundation.eu um uh or reach out to me and we'll be glad to carry on this conversation thank you