 I would like to invite on stage a keynote speaker from the Eclipse Foundation, its executive director, Mike Milinkovich, please, Mike. Greetings, everybody. Yeah, so, greetings from the coal face of open source communities. We have had lots of conversations so far about policy, about government, government relations, the interaction between industry, open source communities, and government. I'm coming here to speak to you today from the strict point of view of what's it like to actually run an open source foundation and help and support communities. And so, for those who don't know me, my name is Mike Milinkovich, and for the past 20 years, I've been the executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. We've been active in Europe since our inception, and we, a couple of years ago, moved our legal domicile to here in Brussels and we are now the largest open source foundation headquartered in Europe. Some of our members include European industry champions, I think companies like Airbus, Ericsson, Mercedes, also a good collection of successful start-ups such as Obeio, and also quite a few public institutions like the European Space Agency, ENRIA, CEA list, and others. So we have a, and roughly two-thirds of our membership and two-thirds of our projects are based here in Europe. But we are a global organization and a global institution as well, and so we are very much firm believers that open source is a global phenomenon, but we moved to Europe because we believe that Europe needs a home and a champion for open source. I want to start off by thanking the Open Forum Europe for having us all here today, and congratulations on your 10th Policy Summit. That's quite an accomplishment and something you should be very proud of. Personal thanks go out to Curian for all the work that was done on the CRA file this past year. And I want to thank Astor for many things, but among them hiring Curian, empowering Curian, and getting out of Curian's way. That was well done. But I also, for those that have done, read any of the things that I've published or any of the things that we've talked about with regards to the Cyber Resilience Act, know that it really truly and honestly was scary at the beginning. It was truly frightening. I don't want to sugarcoat that. Despite the fact that we shared the goals of the legislation, like who can be against the idea of improving the security and well-being of our citizens in any country around the world. But it's important to do these kinds of regulations in ways that don't throw the baby out with the bathwater or kill the goose that is laying in the golden egg. I think the first version of the CRA could have seriously harmed both the open source community, but even more tragically, actually would have harmed Europe's economy and society. And so I really want to also thank the co-legislators for listening. I think we learned all together so much over this past year. And I think we in the open source community can be very proud of the contributions that we made, like when I started off 2023, doing public policy was not on my list of things to do at all. And we had no public policy people at the Eclipse Foundation. Things have really changed and changed dramatically. And I think for the better. Because I think part of the reason why we got into the CRA situation is simply the fact that we in the open source community, to be honest, to be blunt, have done a really pretty lousy job of explaining what we do and how we do it. And I think we really as a whole community and an ecosystem have to up our game to make sure that policy makers understand who we are, what we do, and how we do it. Now the CRA ended up, I think it's imperfect, like all things that are made by humans. It is imperfect. But I think there is something that's workable there. And I'm actually very excited about the possibilities of helping improve security across the software industry for our consumers and our citizens. And having open source be part of the solution for that. And I really want to underline one thing, that the Eclipse Foundation as Europe's largest open source foundation is absolutely committed to working towards the successful implementation of the CRA. Over the past year, we've actually upped our game at the Eclipse Foundation. We hired, we now have like five people working on security within the Eclipse Foundation. And we are absolutely committed to figuring out ways to solve the problems the CRA is addressing while still being true to ourselves as an open source foundation and community. Now it's one of the things that's particularly interesting about the CRA is it's the first piece of legislation around the world that recognizes open source foundations and other entities as a new form of economic actor, the famous open source software steward. And which is going to get as yet undefined, but promisingly a light touch and tailor made regulatory regime. Of course, the proof will be in the pudding, but especially on the light touch side, but tailor made sounds promising. So we are definitely willing to roll up our sleeves and engage in helping build a regulatory framework that is going to work for Europe, its citizens, but also for the global open source community. But what is an open source foundation? What is it that we do? And how do we justify our existence in the world as part of society? And I really break down what open source foundations do into three things. The first thing is we protect user freedoms. Let's not forget that open source always starts from a position of how do we give the users the maximum freedom to use, study, modify and distribute the software that we build. And now why do foundations help protect user freedoms? Well, amongst other things, an open source foundation ain't ever going to change the license to a commercial one. So that's just not in our DNA. I can do a whole talk on this, but trademarks are probably one of the least understood aspects of control points in open source ecosystems, and the fact that trademarks, the names of the projects and the technologies that they produce, are owned by non-profit stewards is a huge empowerment for the user freedoms that are related to open source projects. So one, protect user freedoms. Two, we protect and empower developers and their communities. And one of the things I haven't really heard too much today about is developers. And developers, developers, developers. But the simple fact of the matter is open source doesn't fall from the sky. It is built by people, and we saw earlier, 5% of the developer community is building 96% of the value. Well, if you track down one of those 5%, they're probably on stress leave. It is, we have been demanding so much of the developer community, it's really important to think about how can we also protect them and empower them. And that's one of the very important roles of open source foundations. When I said the Eclipse Foundation is absolutely committed to the successful implementation of the CRA, what I mean by that is we are absolutely committed to figuring out, and this is going to be a really hard problem, figuring out how to do that in a way that doesn't drive a bulldozer over our developer community. And trust me, that is a really, really hard problem. And we are going to need support and resources in order to be able to do that. You just can't ask volunteers, even if they're working at a day job, you can't ask volunteers to move beyond what they can do. You have to give them support, you have to protect them, you have to empower them. And then the third role of an open source foundation, and this is actually one that we probably talk about the most in some ways, and to a certain degree almost too much, because the first two are very powerful, is we are also here to enable collaboration. And that's Arno in the previous panel talked about the importance of open governance. And that's really what foundations do beyond open source licenses. We provide a platform for open governance that enables collaboration to help produce the software that is running the world. And open governance is an art, it is not a science. And that is something that organizations like the Eclipse Foundation and solely recognize folks out there like from Apache and Mozilla and places like that. Open governance is an art, and there are certain organizations that have been doing this for a long time and deserve respect for what they do and how they do it. And I really think that enabling collaboration is one of the things, you know, I'm up here just before the competitive panel, competitiveness panel, and I really want to touch a little bit about on how collaboration is important for European competitiveness. Because if we're a Europe's largest open source foundation, what are we doing, how are we using these three principles to actually help further competitiveness in Europe? And so there's four things that I think that we are doing and are going to be doing even more of at the Eclipse Foundation over the next couple of years. One is this thing called software-defined vehicle. If you've never heard of it, what it really is is we're teaching elephants to dance. And what I mean by that is imagine you get engineers from Bosch, Mercedes, Conti, ZF, Volkswagen into a room together and actually let them learn how to collaborate and build software together. And it's a real, it's a social experiment as much as anything else, but we are actually teaching some of the oldest, most conservative companies in Europe how to do open source of the right way. And one of the reasons why they're doing it at Eclipse as opposed to other places is because they studied and learned and appreciate our open governance model. We actually have processes at the Eclipse Foundation. It turns out that if you're coming from automotive, processes are a good thing. Who knew? Some, you know, because you have to balance it, you can't go overboard, but the fact that we actually have processes and written rules on all kinds of stuff is considered an advantage in that context. Second, we're focusing on helping further the goals of digital sovereignty, but we're doing digital sovereignty in ways that are different from almost anybody else who's going to stand up and talk about doing digital sovereignty because we're actually focused on implementing code. So it's not about standards, it's not about policies, it's not about business associations, it's about actually building the fundamental protocols and technologies that are needed to implement things like data spaces and digital twins and asset administration shells, all of the things that you actually need to do digital sovereignty rather than talk about digital sovereignty. So that's the second thing that we're really focused on. The third is digital transformation. You know, when I talked earlier about software-defined vehicle, yes, we're working with some of these large organizations and we're focusing them on open source, but really what we're doing is we're helping them change their culture. And digital transformation is all about changing culture and changing the perspective of your organization from we are a automaker, chemical company, whatever, to we are a software company and we deliver value to our customers through software. You cannot master software unless and until you've mastered open source and that's what we're doing with these organizations. And the last is, and to repeat what I said earlier, we are here to help implement the Cyber Resilience Act and do it in a way that will not bulldoze our developer community. We're gonna learn a lot together over the next three years, they're gonna go by in the blink of an eye. But we are really up for the challenge and very much excited to be part of the journey. So with that, thank you very much and let's talk about competitiveness.