 Everyone, welcome to the big impact of open source. You've probably all seen the little small impacts that open source can make. But in this talk, we're gonna talk about some of the things that we never talk about in other talks. Stuff like me and you and nature and gingerbread and other really exciting stuff. So be prepared for some big words. Yeah. So yeah, that's really the big impact of open source. First, let's talk about the most important thing in this talk. After that, you can go out me. Yep. I am Matthias Bort Lesniak. If you still use Twitter, I'm proven pudding there. Yeah. And I'm from outside Oslo in Norway. However, right now I'm based in Hawkes Bay, New Zealand where I'm living with my wife and two kids. So I know everything about life, right? I have been using typo three since 2003. That's a piece of software. I crashed it, went away, tried to write something on my own that didn't work out. So I came back and I've been doing it so well that I'm now in the board of the typo three association. And I'm an open source evangelist at a company called Toujou. So yeah, well, back to the less important stuff. Now, you probably are wondering now by now what typo three is. Yeah, right? Typo three is a PHP based CMS. Never heard about that. It's free and open source. Yup. It's community driven. Totally new to me. It's backed by an association. Heard about that before? And it's got a long history. We're actually 25 years. So we've got a big celebration and we had a big celebration a few months back. So we're very proud of that. But yeah, now you got your most important answers. Now let's head on for the big impact that open source can make in the world. But before we do that, we really have to look at what is open source really? And I mean, yes, you probably know the stuff about you have some code and everyone can see it and use it and change it and those kinds of things. So I expect that you know that. But let's look at the deeper side of what open source actually is. How does an open source project begin? An open source project usually begins with something like that, an itch. Yup. Or if you're allergic, it's not the cat itching, it's you itching. But yeah, someone who wants to do something, you know, it's something that, why isn't there a software for that? Why can't I do that? And then some developer probably goes and writes some code and says, yeah, this is pretty good code. Now I'll show it to the world. Yup, and you put it on GitHub or something and there it is. And if you do that right, it turns out pretty much like the story of the gingerbread boy. Have you heard the story of the gingerbread boy? It's a fairy tale. Hmm? Well, for you who haven't heard about it, it's about a mother and the father or a man and a wife, and they so much want a child. And I don't know why they don't have a child, maybe they don't know how to make it. But anyway, they really, really, really wish for it. And in the end, the wife says, well, I'm going to make a gingerbread boy. Yeah, and she does. She bakes the gingerbread boy, pops it in the oven and waits for the gingerbread boy to be ready cooked. And when she takes him out, he jumps up, he's alive. She's wished hard enough that she's actually got a son, but he's got a will of his own. He runs out of the house and there's a long story about what happens after that. It meets lots of people. Lots of things happen. And that's pretty much what happens to an open source project as well. When it's open source, open sourced, the maker of the software sort of loses control. It's free. It can do what it wants. It meets lots of people along the way. Lots of stuff happens. It has freedom. Freedom is a core thing with open source, but in addition to freedom, there comes responsibility because open source is not about anarchy. Open source is about taking responsibility for something. If everyone took the open source project and made their own version of it, it's a lots of forks. That wouldn't really have made any sense, would it? You wouldn't have benefited from the software if everyone just made their own version. So it actually takes conscious effort to be an active community member in an open source project. And it takes more than one person. Open sourcing a software is not really what makes things happen. It's first when people actually actively participate in the project that you get all of the good effects that we like from open source software. So you also need governance, right? You'd need people to get together, talk together, find out how can we make the best out of what we can and what we want the software to do. But it's also something more actually with open source. Is this your garden? Well, just imagine for a moment that this is your garden, right? You've been redoing your house, you got a lot of rubbish there and you got a teeny-weeny car. It's so small that that would be like 20 trips to the rubbish dump, yeah. But that's what friends are for. You've got a friend with a pickup, huh? How great, right? You call up your friend and says, hi friend, I've got some stuff you can put in your pickup. Let's drive to the dump. What an outing, yeah. And the friend says, yeah, sure, I'll do that. I'll come and I'll help you and maybe we'll have a beer afterwards and yeah, we're friends. Now what do you do when your friend is finished? Are you going to pay your friend a wage? Say that, well, you work four hours for me, here's. Money for your job? Is that usually what you do with your friends when they come to a party? Do you pay them? No, you might pay your friend the cost of driving, the petrol, for example, for covering the costs. That's okay, but you don't usually pay for the friend to be there. That's why you're friends, right? And that's like open source. You might actually pay for downloading open source software, but once you have it, it's all free, just like a friend. And you know what that looks very much like? It looks very much like love, not the kind of sticky love, but the kind of love that is unconditional love. You give something away and by giving something away, you might get something back that is bigger than what you gave away. But you don't do it just to get something back. You do it just for the sake of giving as well because you know that it helps other people. And that love, it takes more than one person and it takes a conscious effort to keep a friendship going. And when it comes to open source, you give open source away, right? And lots of people download it and they live a life of blissful ignorance about all of these kind of things. That can be irritating sometimes to think about, but let me tell you this, it's actually totally okay that people use open source software without knowing these things about open source that you can get back to it and stuff. Because not knowing is not their fault. But it's also a reason why we need to talk more about what open source is really about. Make people understand what's actually expressed when you make open source software. What's possible? If you think about, well, it takes two to tango. It's not just about me, it's about other people as well. This everyone is a desert. This is my analogy of close source proprietary software. It's a monoculture, right? It is an expression of dependence. Imagine that someone here on the other side of that sand dune owns a watering hole. It's really nice. You know that can be a nice relationship to your neighbor. You can go there and get water when you need it. But what if your neighbor puts up a fence? What if you're suddenly limited and your neighbor says that, well, in order to get access to water, you need to pay me money. You need a license to get water from my hole. Well, then it's not so nice anymore, is it? This, on the other hand, is an analogy of open source. It shows diversity. It's freedom, but a special kind of freedom that happens here. Any plant can grow here. Anything can happen. But at the same time, for things really to work out here, you can't have competition. You have to have some kind of collaboration and you have to have an understanding of this is only possible because there is an interdependence. If one plant takes over this, it's a monoculture. And it's a plant desert. It's just a field of one thing. On the one side, it's kind of easy when you just have the watering hole there and you can lean back and you know where the water is. You might have to pay some money, but maybe that's easy for you. On the other side, in order to change something, you have to do it yourself. You have to participate in the community. That's the way to bring change with open source. You have to participate in it. It is fine to lean back. It's fine to say, I don't have time, I'm sick today. That's totally okay, but if you want to make the change, you have to make it. That's similar to this. That's similar to the world. That's similar to how the world works in most cases. You can have things decided for you. That's easy sometimes, just leaning back and not participating. But if you want a change in the world, you actually have to make it. In most countries today, we call that democracy. But there is a thing that democracy only works if you understand that there is this interdependence. If you only vote for what's good for you, there's going to be people who don't have it so good. You have to vote for what's good for as many people as possible, really. You have to understand that interdependence that happens in a community. It really asks something of you as a human being. Open source does the same. But many people don't understand what open source is really about. And you can see that very often in government, for example. Governments often don't think open source even when they use it. And you end up with two classical thoughts that I've seen around in different countries. On the one side, the government should do everything. The government should build its own software. The government should own its own software. Yeah? Or some people come and say, well, you know, the private sector should do everything. The government shouldn't do anything. The private sector should own it. The private sector should do it. The government should just pay money to the private sector. That's one way of looking at it. But if you take it to the extreme, it's really proprietary software that you're building. The government might have some software that they use, but they don't show it to anybody else. Or they might pay the private sector to make software that they pay licenses to use. And they can't look into it themselves. But the way that open source works, it adds in a third element into this. That might be hard for many people to notice. And that third element is what many people call civil society. Do you know the term civil society? Sort of? Well, civil society lives between government and private sector. It's any non-profit, any non-governmental organization, non-profits. Your sports team might be a civil society organization if you really ask the question. It's someone's interest being represented by an organization. It's someone's project being represented. And the interesting thing that happens with civil society, we're gonna look at that. Because somehow it happens that civil society actually won the Nobel Peace Prize last year. Mm, it did. Because it brings about democracy and peaceful coexistence. It brings about people's ability to work on their projects outside of government and outside of their work from a personal involvement. So this is the community part. This is the sand from the desert a bit earlier. Look at that sand. There is nothing that holds that sand together. It's lifeless. It's dead. And just to ask you, what do you people mostly do when a desert is expanding? Well, they might move away, but there's one other thing that they can do. Any idea? Reborn station? Hmm? Reborn station? Exactly, they plant trees. Because what happens when you add life to sand is that the life tends to hold the sand together with its roots. But also with all of the organic matter that is created, it holds water in there. The water doesn't just run through. So life, by being there and collaborating, it actually also holds on to what life needs. So it holds on to water, which is quite a nice thought actually, that by adding the life factor into the sand, you create a place where more life can exist. So this thought of community and collaboration, it holds us together. Now back to the slide that I showed you earlier, about typo three. This might sound similar to something you guys know. I think every point here can also apply to Drupal content. So let's look at typo three and Drupal, because we're quite similar. If you look below the surface, well I've downloaded Drupal 10, the core, the sort of recommended distribution, and typo three version 12, the core, the sort of recommended distribution. And we have different ways of doing things. But I've looked at the composer dependencies. And Drupal 10 has 54 dependencies. Typo three version 12 has 98 dependencies. That's not really important with those numbers. It just shows that we have a different approach to certain things. But the important thing is what I'm gonna show you now. Yup. We have 33 dependencies in common between typo three and Drupal. And I'm sure if you install more modules to Drupal or more extensions to typo three, it might actually crawl upward. And a few versions ago, there was even a little bit of typo three in Drupal. Well it was a security patch for PHP, so I don't think it's used anymore, but it was there. So we are already collaborating. We are already codependent on certain things. But what's funny with the open source community often is also that we haggle a bit or sometimes we look at each other and we say that, well, those guys haven't understood anything or what? Those guys have spaghetti code and what are they thinking when they're doing that? Yeah. And if there's a security problem in one of our CMSs, we go, oh, we didn't have that one. We're better, right? But there is a dark sky looming above all of our open source projects. And it's been looming there for a while. They're proprietary vendors. And you know what? Well, maybe they've actually understood something essential but they're using it in the wrong way. They talk about open source as one. I met a guy a little while ago who said, yeah, sure, I tried open source once. It didn't work for me. Yeah. Mm-hmm. If there's a security issue in type of three, that affects Drupal too because the closed source proprietary vendors are going to say, well, look at open source, look at what happens. They had a security hole. You can look into the code and you can see all of the bad code they have. Of course, what they don't say is that you can't look into their code. You can't see how much money they put into the bling in the front end and how badly they write the code and how little money they put into security. Of course, but it's a way of doing marketing. So we are actually dependent on each other. And therefore, the first choice for a client, should that be Adobe or Drupal? Should it be Site Core or a type of three? No. The first choice should really always be open source. Should be open source, I don't know. There. I thought I was clicking there, sorry. There, it says open source now. Should be open source always. And you know, that is really the most important decision a client can make. Once you have chosen open source, well, we can compete if we want to. But the real thing that comes into play with open source is actually expertise. It's how well an agency can do something, how well the features of a certain piece of software fits with the client. And because it's open source, you're not losing money from choose, an agency doesn't lose money necessarily from making someone choose one or the other. But it's really about trying to make the best decision for the client. And not ending up with a client saying that well, they tried open source and it didn't work. We have to do open source, right? We have to do open source the open source way. Using open source is not always enough. Here's a story about a phone call that we had in the type of three association a number of years ago, like five years ago. Is it 2019? Yeah, no, that's four years ago. We got a phone call from the government of Randa. You get any of those? We got one. They said they had 250 type of three installations that they needed to upgrade. And we went, wow, we didn't even know we had them. But that's how it goes with open source software. But how can we help them? You know, the standard go-to thing for anyone today would sort of be something like this. We would recommend one of our member agencies to go down there and get stuff done, earn money. Well, how should we choose that agency? Should we say, well, that agency is better than that one? Or would that help us? Would that help our project? We actually thought quite a bit about that, how to solve that. Because this is kind of like development aid in one way. I mean, actually now it's called development cooperation where someone goes in and they help a country with developing economy, for example. Well, yeah, that's the way that happens often is that there is a business in one of our rich countries and they go into a poorer country and they establish an office there and they start earning money and they just export the money from the country. They take the money out. And it's often a closed solution, right? When vendor lock-in, so they actually create financial dependence on their software. The nasty thing about that is that, of course it's not open source, but what it really is is that it's both colonialist and it's exploitative. It's not a good way of doing it in an ethical sense. So we chose to use our community instead. And we chose to try to create independent local businesses. We asked our agencies to donate time from their employees and we paid the employees their travel to Rwanda to train people at local agencies so that they could get the expertise they needed to serve their government. This is how it looked and this is how it looks now. We didn't make those websites for Rwanda. Rwanda made those websites for Rwanda. And just to put that into a newspaper headline. I don't know if any newspapers do these long headlines anymore, but to do it a little bit tabloid, we took a democratic and not-for-profit open source project, type of three. And we supported sustainable and independent local business in a country in the global south. Well, that was locally led, main keyword. It was non-exploitative and it was anti-colonial. The real growth factor for a CMS that is open source is community growth. That is the way to work with open source. More people using open source will inherently be better for you because it will help your software. A software that does not have a community but that is still open source is either financed by some company who has some reason that they want to finance it or the project won't exist. It exists because of the community. So I would say that if you rely on community and you don't have community, your project has actually failed. So therefore we have to focus on community first. That is how we build open source and making people understand this community participation part of software that we see in so many other parts of society. And it trains governance, it trains democracy and it builds civil society. And it turns out the values of open source, they are the values of a healthy society. A well-governed, well-run society has a strong community behind it. Today, democracy is not doing so well everywhere. It's under attack. And I think that if you look at any country in this world, there's places where you can say that, well, it could have done better. Well, open source strengthens that civil society that strengthens democracy everywhere. And that's why when you work with an open source project like Drupal in your business, you're not only helping your clients, you're participating in something much, much bigger. And that is the big impact of open source. Thank you. Then the man with the moustache at the back of the room has a question. One of the coolest and weirdest open source ever. Two minute long episodes telling stories like this that are really fresh and different and I really find that Matthias' perspective on this stuff is important and he's thinking bigger than I would like to. So thank you for that and everybody listens to them because they're wild. And second, I'm really proud to say that Matthias works on our team over 10 few partners and didn't work on the store. So... Yeah, so for all of those who didn't hear all of that, Jam said that you should go to opensourceutopia.com and it's great and I forgot to put his company name on my slide, which I'm sorry about. Yes, Schnitzel. I talked with this guy earlier and I gave him a hundred dollars, which is why he's asking that question. Um... Swiss francs. Okay. Well, the thing is that there's a good example out there today where Drupal. It's better than any other example I have from the type of three world. So I keep telling it to people in the type of three world as well. And it's from Australia. You know, Drupal has been big in Australia. It's still pretty big in Australia, but there is a company from another country called something A-Do-B. Yeah. They've been doing some good marketing. They have a lot of marketing dollars and they recently had a project with some DXP features. Well, a long story short, as I understand it, it didn't go very well because it turned out those features weren't working the way that they should according to Australian law and stuff like that. And the Australian government now wants to pay a hundred million Australian dollars a year to A-Do-B for developing these features. Yeah, that's what anyone would do, wouldn't they? Pay a hundred million dollars a year to a country, no, to a company that is in a different country and that will just develop stuff that you will never see the code for, right? Well, just imagine if they paid a hundred million Australian dollars a year to the Australian agencies and got them to develop software and then all of the stuff that they developed, they could also use for other projects and they could earn more money, employ more developers, get more stuff done and be good for Australia. And in addition, they would work with the Drupal Association, which you should become a member of and support the Australian democracy in essence and what government in the world would say no to investing in something that supports their fundamental values? Yeah, and that can happen to open source projects as well. And I think that building an awareness in the open source software world about what open source really means and talking about what democracy and interdependence actually means and the rest of the world as well is an important way to defend against those kind of things happening. And I forgot to say what you said, but it was this thing about the commercial takeover of government, I guess. Yeah, so the question was regarding open core, where you don't open source everything, but you open source some things. And yeah, yeah, that's, yeah. And there, well, how much time do we have? There is a lot to say about that. And I think what's really important is actually that I think a lot of companies don't realize that by open sourcing everything and making everything available, you're also making it possible for everyone to make your services better. And I think it's a misunderstood thing that open source is a product. I think open source is very much connected to a service when it comes to earning money. And that service will always benefit from the community. And the thing you're actually competing on is expertise in the end. Very short. Good. Did you have another question or? Well, talk afterwards, okay, good. No more questions. Oh, there's a question. It's in the middle of happening. So, you know, check in a year's time, but it's, come up here and talk in the microphone because I can't repeat all of that. And I'm sorry, it's a wired microphone. So yeah, I want you to talk into this ice cream cone here. Yeah. Yeah, so we, our open source hosting solution actually hosts GraphCMS. That's the project that you're talking about. It's a Drupal-based distribution and they moved away to Adobe because they said they have better features and then in the end it turned out that they can't use the features like you mentioned. And so there's all these discussions. The problem is though, it's really like, Drupal doesn't have a marketing department. Like that's the thing. So even though we have this case now, there's still this move or this possible because Adobe can invite all these politicians and can invite all these people to this events and can like do all these things. And of course, there is like laws around this but it's just, it's very hard if the people that sit in the decision chair don't understand Drupal or don't understand open source as you're saying because it doesn't actually matter if you talk about to a type of three or not. It's very hard to get them to understand this. Now, on the level on Australia, like there are a lot of people there that understand the good of open source. Actually some tenders or RFPs, they include if you find a similar product that is open source, you have to use the open source one. So that's great. But somebody has to add this into the RFPs and if it's not there, like this is very hard. I mean, I'm like, we're still struggling. Even though this is a great case with Adobe, they're still pushing very, very, very, very hard. And I don't know how to solve it unless to talk to these people trying to explain them open source and stuff like that. But it's just much, much, much harder to explain the open source way than Adobe showing flashy things that look great. Like you're trying to explain somebody why they should not use the cool things with an argument of that, that's very hard. So thank you. And the man with the mustache again? Are you gonna talk a lot, champ? Because then you have to talk in the microphone. Thank you. So I know a bunch of the people involved and the scandalous problem in Australia is that they have an incredible Drupal distribution. 133 government departments are running their sites so that they have an internal service model. They've done everything very well over the years. They get the further development done by local companies, keep the money in the local economy, exactly the sort of thing that we evangelize about, those of us who do that. And yet an Adobe salesperson got the right meeting with the right person and the Australian government committed several hundreds of millions of their dollars to a DXP project without writing a tender. There was no public process, which is probably illegal. And it gets better because the people who are asking for this government, this MyGov portal, there is no legal basis for keeping or processing personal data in Australia that supports this functionality. Therefore the government is spending the money on functionality that is illegal for them to use. So it's completely wasted. Yes, it is funny, right? So Matias and I talk a lot. We both took notes for this talk and wrote two different talks about it and mine is much less. Yours is so much more beautiful than mine. His is very idealistic. Mine is very angry. And the good thing is that they do look like they're going to go down a better route with this. But we as open, so I did a bunch of buffs at other communities and other events and other technologies talking about this stuff to prepare this. And we don't have a common big brand together and we don't have a marketing department but Apple does and Adobe does and IBM does and all these people do. And we have to find a coalition or a big concept or something to go up against those things. I say we and I say we have to but it would help us in this case. The government department that runs GOVCMS in Australia is utterly thrilled with and committed to Drupal and they're incredibly good open source citizens and they've given unbelievable amounts of code and value back to all of us. They have no communication budget at all. They've had a hiring freeze for the last decade and yet they've expanded system that the entire federal government in Canberra uses. Before GOVCMS there were 324 different CMSs in Canberra alone. The government and the national and state capital. Now there's Drupal, right? And three other state governments use it. It's been incredible for the country and they still can't stop Adobe coming in so that's the big thinking point. Another question, yes? Yes, these are kind of problems the kind of things you're looking for a solution for by having a marketing department for Drupal? So Dries was talking about a marketing department in the Dries note. Yes, this is one of the things that needs to happen I think in the Drupal world in type of three we already have a marketing team but let's take a step back and I've already been talking with a few people in the open source CMS associations and stuff about this and why don't we team up? Because this isn't actually about talking about Drupal or type of three or Jumla or WordPress this is about talking up open source and making sure that we make sure that the choice is always open source over proprietary software. We can never win against close source proprietary systems with millions and millions of marketing cash that talk about the features that you could have in the future. You know, we need to do this together so something like the open source CMS alliance you know, it would be very nice to have. You first I think? Yeah, we're always switching because it's like you're saying is it's something flashing the reason why we're in Drupal and I was like we couldn't build hero images with any other software so lack of understanding I think knowledge or organization at least prosper in Drupal is the way we're saying it. So spreading the knowledge about what open source is really about is very important. I mentioned values here, I think values is actually a much better selling point for open source than features in very many cases because I mean, especially governments are sort of supposed to make value-based decisions in many cases, but they don't. And education is extremely important. We've seen that in the EU, in Europe now recently as well about security that there's a suggestion that every developer is responsible for the security of their software which sort of makes some really strange cases for open source like you know, you build a software, somebody else changes it and makes a security hole is that your responsibility? What if you die and someone inherits your, well your wife inherits, you know, my wife inherits Michael, you know, people don't understand open source very often and that's why they might use open source but they don't understand the real values. Yeah, so we need, exactly. Yeah, so we need to fight for the possibility. So yeah, just to repeat for the microphone, it's important that we fight for the possibility to choose open source. And you mentioned the open web manifesto. There's a lot of things out there and reasons why type of three hasn't signed it. It's not out of, well, any bad will. But yeah, and it's more the question of time to process it. But yeah, you know, we actually, I think we need to think community all in our communities. Jam, something like that. Yeah, so that's a huge, I mean, it's the strongest part of the economy in Europe so that's really great for open source. And it took a closed source competitor away. The type of three communities doing really impressive international outreach, including creating a kind of good digital government actionable manifesto, right? What's that thing that? Yeah, so what, for the microphone again, type of three is really popular in Germany and the German federal government has chosen type of three as their go-to platform recently. And then we have been doing a lot of work internationally. Well, both in Randa, I'm going to pop on Ugini next week. And we have created a four pillar plan that anyone can use for setting up locally led non-exploitative anti-colonial projects in the global south. But actually you can actually do it in any country because it applies anywhere. And if anyone's interested, it's in our report which I have a few copies of here. Yeah, so, yeah. And you can't read it, but if you go to type of three.com slash Randa dash report, you can also download it. But yeah, if you have any special interests in it, I'll maybe keep a couple and then someone can come and choose here if you want to read more. And on the second to last page is the reusable four pillar model for doing these kind of projects. But that's a talk in itself.