 How's the conference coming along for you good so far? Yeah. All right. Awesome. So I Would like to start with a little story This is about 2016-2017 I ran into an old colleague of mine named Marcus at the office This was at a time when you could actually still run into people at the office because they were actually there Right and not everybody just working from home. So I said hey Marcus. How's it going? What's so what's up? What are you working on and he said? All good and we're working on this translation component in our team And he told me all about what it does and so forth and I said, huh That is very interesting. Have you spoken to Stefan because I think in his team They're also working on something like this translation component of some sorts and he said In fact, yes, I have spoken to him and you know what so we found out if we both Generalize our component a little bit We can just have one component and we can utilize it both and we would save a lot of time and effort And I said that's a great idea and he told me this because at that time I was already one of the people running around in the office and Advocating inner source because we hadn't Implemented any of that at that time yet So so I said, oh awesome. That's great. So how is that working out for you? And he said well So we went to our product owners. He went to his product owner, which is person in one Department of the large corporation Mercedes-Benz and Stefan went to his product owner in another department far over there and They presented their idea and the two partners said, oh, yeah, that that's actually a really good idea And I said, okay good. So how was how was it coming along? I was working out and he said well They actually turned us down. They said no, it's a good idea, but please don't do it Why? Well, you know, they said so we would have to talk to the other team a lot it would be a big communication overhead all the time and Also, we have the budget. We don't really need to save money, right? So Okay, wow, and that's that's not very good Yeah, but so that shows that the mindset at the time just wasn't right there was no inner source mindset yet and Also in all fairness if they had said, yes, let's do it they would have actually had some problems really implementing it because Also our the legal prerequisites weren't there yet, you know, the the inner company contracts wouldn't allow such a thing and Also the technological prerequisites weren't there because everybody would develop software on their platform That they like best and so exchanging code Would have been possible but difficult, right? so What a dismal situation, but let's see I would like to show you how we can turn this into a success story and How this would be hopefully totally different today. All right so Inters we weren't doing inner source at the time We also weren't doing open source and a lot of us were advocating inner source and open source You know, let's do inner source and while we're at it. Let's do open source because we weren't doing open source either At least not in an organized fashion. All right So finally this reached the very top the senior executives and our CIO and he said, you know, okay We have to do inner source and open source. So it was part of our it became part of our it strategy Officially to do inner source and open source All right. So The problems obviously only started then because we didn't really know what we're doing So we got together all the experts from IT legal department and research and development and other people and So at first we found out We don't understand each other right so I'm an IT guy. I assume most of you are as well and You don't speak legalese and the legal people don't speak IT ish So one of the first meetings was was a kind of funny. So the the legal people they you know, we met with them and they said So we understand that you guys want to develop software on Our budget on company budget and then give it away for free Clearly we must have misunderstood because obviously that's not going to happen and that can't you can't be serious and I said You know, actually that's exactly what we want to do Wow, really what okay, and we sat down, you know, and we explained it to them Why and then they understood and and so forth and so we went from there So it was it was actually really productive And and very interesting to try to understand each other So Beginnings are hard, right? But the first thing I'm gonna outline some of the crucial steps that we took to implement an inner and open source strategy and the first one is Create an internal awareness you need to make people understand that this is what you need right and You can you can tell I'm a computer scientist because I start my enumerations with zero right zero Okay So then we had to go we had it's part of the IT strategy do it so the first thing we did is Create an Ospo, we didn't call it Ospo at the time yet. It's the fuss center of competence but essentially It's what an Ospo is today, right? That's what I mentioned we got together with people stakeholders from the various departments and And talked and so in case you don't have an Ospo yet at your organization But you want to convince your bosses here. There's so many arguments. Here's just I found this very I Think this really sums it up quite well Yeah, so whether you know it yet or not open source is very much at the center of your business and the centralized Open source program offers is simply realization of that reality and the best way to yield the most benefits from open source participation There were a couple of talks already this morning about Ospo's and there's a to-do group and you can find a lot of resources there but this is here a quick summary of What are the tasks of an open of an open source office or open source program office? So It was in our case it was part of the IT strategy now do open source But what exactly does that mean? Yeah, you have to be More clear about it and detail it further down what exactly an open source strategy means for the corporation Then define policy and rules Establish processes and maintain them Talk about tools for automation the development deployment then spread the knowledge and Community management Open source publications membership in foundation foundations and external visibility. I will talk about most of these topics In the remainder of the talk. So here's a Typical example of an Ospo and that's our Ospo We have as a okay. We have some organizational staff at the beginning that help us with Organization and then you need governance obviously, right? When when you talk about open source, there's a lot of There are a lot of Licenses involved and you need to pay attention to the licenses and what they say. I think you all know this So governance is very important They shouldn't dominate the Ospo in my opinion and a lot of times in big corporations that can be the case For example, you know the automotive industry is a highly regulated industry And if you violate things then there can be very heavy fines So governance has a very strong say which is fine, but they shouldn't have The dominating part in an Ospo. I think because it is an IT topic after all right so you need people with technical expertise you need IT guys of course and Sometimes overlooked, but very very important community management Yeah What is a successful open source project? That is an open source project that has a lively community right and a lot of people who are interested in a project and then participate and contribute and so forth and such communities don't just Develop out of nothingness and you know a lot of people think hey if I have a good project It will become successful people will automatically know about it right and then I'll have a community Yeah, you're laughing. It's that is obviously not gonna happen. So community management is really important Then we have Foss coordinators in every business stream is how we call it or every business unit We have at least one or maybe a better two FOS coordinators. So this is a typical multiplier role They are the number one go-to point of contact for everybody in the business stream If they have questions about open source or inner source and they align with us So we meet with them regularly give them the news what's going on What are your questions? What are the questions from your department and so forth? Okay? this is simply because We can't handle all the requests by ourselves because it's a big corporation and a lot of people a lot of questions Yeah, so this is a very successful thing and this is a community in itself by the way the FOSS coordinators Because so we when we first, you know started this with the coordinators They would ask us all the questions and now we have it, you know teams on Microsoft teams And now they ask questions and another coordinator a lot of times answers the question Yeah, and so they do this themselves. Also, we don't always have to step in so that's really good. It really helps you All right Second embrace FOSS in our strategy. We said we wanted to embrace FOSS What does that even mean? Okay, so we had to first can think about what exactly is embracing FOSS. So here FOSS obviously very quickly here you use open source software Keep in mind that even a company who doesn't Maybe doesn't use open source software in their own development Maybe they buy third-party software that contain open source Components so that is also use. Okay, so I think these days everybody does this use then Maybe you want to contribute something back to an open source project or maybe you want to Create or publish your own open source projects. Okay, so these are the three stages and embrace FOSS. I think it's kind of obvious means all of this Plus more and I will get to the more Okay, this is the very good start But really embracing has more to it and I'll show you this. Let me just briefly Say something about Usage of open source when I realize I'm at an open source conference. I'm probably you probably have heard this before so here the synopsis open source Security and risk analysis report if you don't know it, I recommend that you take a look because it's quite interesting Dave they looked at 2400 code bases and they found that 97 percent of these code bases contained open source As synopsis, these are the people that that bring you black duck, right? Okay, so maybe This then the code bases are a bit biased as well Possibly but it's still gonna be a lot even if it's less than 97 percent and they found that 78 percent of the code itself Was open source code? All right, so that's huge and they they divided further down into Various sectors of industry and here this is us aerospace aviation auto transportation And logistics and the number here 97 percent is the same But they said here only 60 percent of the only 60 percent of the code was open source They also by the way found that 60 percent of the code had open source vulnerabilities yeah, this is Completely not the scope of this talk, but it's something to keep in mind Something really important. You don't want to ignore this 60 percent vulnerabilities. You all know what this can do, right? okay, so now Use open source is kind of a no-brainer But what about contribute or create or publish? Yeah, create and publish You can say well, you know, we use so much open source software in our development It would be nice if we contributed back something here and then, you know, it's about giving back We're a big corporation. We don't want to be freeloaders only Yeah, okay, so giving back is nice But it's the right thing to do. Yeah, but you know what when the economic times get tough nice things Being nice or especially it's the right thing to do and giving back are the first things that get dropped Okay, so why does it still make sense that even in tough economic times you invest your time to contribute back and along comes here, this guy frank nagle. He's a professor at the harvard business school and he did an extensive study that very well done i think and It he found that companies who contribute back benefit monetarily twice as much as compared to companies who only use open source right They benefit twice as much why Because when you contribute you go through a feedback process, right your code contribution or any contribution is reviewed And then maybe a discussion goes on back and forth And your engineers are going to learn a lot Because they are talking now to the brightest and best developers out there And this is like a continual internal Continuous internal training program for your own engineers And this is also this is not just a one-time effect only that you know occurs at the beginning when you start getting involved in open source This keeps on giving and it just continues All right, so here now this is a really hard reason. This is a really good reason Then you can show to your senior executives. Hey look at this study We benefit so much more if we also contribute back All right Don't drop it in a tough tough economic times All right, so Two years ago We so this guy here behind me. This is jan brecht. He's the cio of mercedes-benz And once a year he gathers all his senior managers in it and you know they Get together for two days and they talk about it strategy and important things and the two years ago We we had a a slot a little workshop slot for fos and So we wanted at the time it was already part of the strategy But there were still quite a few managers out there were like, yeah, you know, okay sounds good But i'm not sure exactly why I should do this and What's the point and so forth? So We did this little video It's a two minutes long. I'm going to show it to you. This is just you know, why should you embrace fos? Okay, here we go So why should you embrace fos in your team? well for one He really likes fos so you can make him happy But that shouldn't be the real reason behind it. Let me give you some pointers Innovation nowadays happens to a large degree in the fos domain Therefore doing fos can speed up our access to innovative technologies to be at the forefront where automotive goes digital Second With fos we are achieving a much higher efficiency in software development It fosters reuse and it's cheaper and easier on your engineer You save yourself time and money and you can go faster and faster And this will give us the freedom to focus even more on our usps Also, it's in your own best interest By being active in fos And not only use it you can steer open source projects in the direction you need them Contributions are the currency of open source It is how you provide influence to the project your business depends on And what's even more our fos endeavors help us to attract new talent. We need software engineers That's a fact and they are attracted to open source like a moth to a flame. Trust me on this Plus Participating in open source is like a continuous internal training program for the engineers that we already have As has been proven in Harvard study Our engineers will learn and get better and better And this isn't a one-time effect only which merely occurs at the beginning the advantages of the learning process will keep going on over and over and over again Well, I can think of at least 10 more good reasons why you should be active in fos Bottom line is for software development fos is like the air you breathe you need it and that's all there's to it So please Open up as much as you can because it makes us all so much better Okay, so Thanks for the smiles That you can you can rely on the fact that the the uh, managers still remember this They don't maybe remember all of the things I said But they remember it as such and then you know, they can go back to wait There was this video with this guy with the endless cup and Yeah, so in case you weren't able to pay attention to everything I said here. These are all the points summarized Yeah, people told me, you know, I like your video, but I had to watch it twice, you know Because I couldn't pay attention the first time to what you were saying Yeah, okay. So here all the benefits in case you need to convince someone so We had fos in our strategy. We convinced the senior managers and but still We felt that something was missing people were not doing it as much yet and Also, there was a bit of uncertainty so engineers would ask so but Can we now can we contribute back to open source? Is it okay? Can we publish our own open source projects? Because a few years before that wasn't the case. We weren't allowed to do that, right? So what we did is we created the Mercedes Benz Fos manifesto So namely a colleague of mine and myself we sat down together and we wrote up these these rules and guidelines To proclaim the importance of free and open source software for a modern tech organization So the Fos manifesto has three parts preamble company principles employee principles And the goal is to facilitate the change The cultural change basically because that's the most difficult part usually, all right So let me show it to you. Oh, yeah, maybe it can serve as an example for other companies I'll get to that. So here's the preamble the preamble is sort of a Solemn note to set the stage and it says here This comes from the Fos center of competence and also the cio So that means, you know, it's actually valid. You can rely on it And our cio he in turn showed you to the board of management of Mercedes Benz and Ola Kelenius at the CEO And they endorsed it as well Which is important, you know, because you can't make claims About how employees can use their working time, which I'll show in a moment Without having c level involvement, right? And also so a lot of managers came to us and said, hey, wait a minute You can't say this. I mean did every manager on every level endorse this And I said, no, but Ola Kelenius our CEO he endorsed it. I think it's valid and they go Okay, so here these are the company principles They Give the expectations of the company for our engineers So Mercedes Benz shall support and encourage the employees to use contribute to and create FOS projects both in open and inner source endeavors I realized that FOS projects and inner source is kind of contradictory But that was the best wording that we found so To in order to not make it too complicated Mercedes Benz shall allow the appropriate time for its employees to participate in FOS activities So can I can I take the time? Can I do it on company time? Yes, of course you can, you know Please do it So it doesn't only allow the engineers to do it. It's actually sends them on the mission to do exactly that Mercedes Benz shall encourage and facilitate learning advancement of its employees through FOS I think that doesn't really need any explanations, you know go to a conference. Maybe Maybe give a talk even And so take the time to to grow and learn with FOS And then promote the visibility in open source Communities for example be become part of foundations. I will get to that in a moment as well Here are the employee principles So an engineer shall look for inner for open and inner source alternatives before writing custom code or using proprietary alternatives So this says FOS first right Before you invest time and money in something else look if there isn't already something out there You shall as an engineer be active in inner source and you shall contribute to open source projects within the scope of the day-to-day work Okay, so here you have it. Please be active in open source And in inner source and then here this number four is sort of a mini code of conduct Remember that how you behave in open source will reflect back on the entire company. So be nice Okay, that's essentially that all right um Where can you find the FOS manifesto it is on our open source landing page Open source mercedes-benz.com and here in the top right corner. There's the manifesto you can read it and The FOS manifesto itself is open source Which means we have put it under the least restrictive license a creative commons zero license There is a it points to a github repository You can take this Maybe as a blueprint for your own FOS manifesto if you think that's something that your company might like You can alter it in any way you like You can add things change things And you don't have to credit us. It's yours to use Okay, and so some companies have already followed suit um A couple of months ago the continental a g not the airline but the you know the automotive company It's one of the biggest automotive companies in At the world they have adopted it um Based on on this here and you just you know change it according to their company And last week zeemans announced publicly they have published the zeemans FOS manifesto So that is really cool. Hopefully maybe more companies will take it over I have heard rumors of a few more and so i'm Curious to see I so the point here is I hope that this can really help advance FOS In the industrial world in big companies or small companies, right? Okay Train your employees now once you have all these FOS processes in place You need to tell your employees about them. And so we have created a few trainings um I realize there are a lot of trainings for example of the linux foundation that are quite useful But here these trainings they're Uh with mercedes-benz specifics, you know in in Terms of rules and guidelines and legal and compliance to company company rules Okay, so we have the awareness training. That's very basic. It just says what is FOS and why? Everybody in it has to take this and every engineer In it who does software development has to do the use training Tells you about, you know, license compliance and what to take Into consideration and so forth and then when you contribute to other projects Here are some additional rules and what is community management and so forth So that's here and then create if you publish your own And lastly we have a training about inner source On top of that we have a FOS wiki which Isn't an actual wiki in the sense that anybody can change Every sentence because some of these have legal um Reference references and importance. So but it's like our number one go-to source for all things related to open source yeah so Foundations and sponsorships. So we are members Of a few foundations. For example, we're strategic members of the eclipse foundation And we have recently joined the software defined vehicle working group within the eclipse foundation also strategic members And this is a great example of how open source how big corporations can benefit from collaboration with other industry uh companies In open source So this is there's folks wagon is there and microsoft and uh and bosh and Lots of others. I think we're now I'm not sure if we're the hundred members yet Sorry, I don't want to say anything wrong, but it's gay. It's taking up a big momentum big speed And you know imagine we can't talk to folks wagon about everything But we can talk to them in open source about everything related to open source Yeah, and so this is we want to develop things together That you know say stuff that everybody needs and that is doesn't have a competitive advantage And so develop together in open source Right, and so there are a lot of not just automotive companies by the way I mentioned microsoft and there's a lot of others Okay, so this is a really great example how foske can can and will benefit big companies like that as well Compete where necessary or where appropriate and work together where you can right without violating anything antitrust related because open source public knowledge Very good. We're also members of the linux foundation. We're members of the cloud native computing foundation And I think this are these foundations. They're doing great work in open source We have also here's another thing where we try to give back and that is uh sponsoring. So we financially sponsor Uh projects through github sponsors So that means we if you go to our if you go to github.com slash Mercedes Benz you can see something like this Mercedes Benz is sponsored 34 I think right now currently the number is a little bit lower because some sponsorships have expired We're right now in the process of of doing the next round of sponsoring So if you check back in a few weeks, it should have a significantly larger number Okay So sponsoring open source it is about appreciation and giving back but It's also You know, it helps to ensure that the projects that we like We rely on that they will still be around tomorrow. So it is in your own best interest to do this right So I think it's actually a great thing We get phenomenal feedback from the community and it's it's not even just the money You know, most people are happy when you give them free money, but it's also the appreciation So we get feedback like hey, wow, I am overwhelmed by I didn't even know Mercedes Benz is using my project And now you're you're doing this and you're giving me money and thanks so much Um, it gives me the kick to continue working on this open source project. Thank you for the recognition And one one person said hey We wanted to sponsor them and they didn't have a sponsors profile set up yet And so we said hey if you set up a sponsors profile on github, we can sponsor you And then like a couple months later said hey, thanks we For the money, but also like 10 other companies are sponsoring us now. So kind of worked out for them Let's see how this is working. You know, um, I think if more and more companies do this Then it can really help to make open source more sustainable. We all know the story is about You know overworked maintainers that do this as a site project for free And and and that's not right. That's not sustainable, right? And so if more and more companies do this and everybody contributes a little bit then I think that can help a lot and we can change we can change the open source world. I'm serious All right Let me see how we're doing time wise We have until 15 Five minutes. Okay. Good. Um I have a couple more slides will take me two minutes to finish up But let me take questions. Maybe uh now if you have any questions Okay, and then I'll just finish up very quickly. Yes Oh, sorry Thanks for sponsoring the feebs certification for open SSL 3.0 Yeah, there's a lot of people who are going to benefit from that work. Okay. Thank you Thanks. Here's the question over from an organizational standpoint How connected is your OSPO to some of the functional groups like procurement and HR and security and so on? Uh, so we are Talking to each one of these that you mentioned for various reasons. So HR and okay We're talking to each of these departments, but the collaboration is not yet where we want it to be So for example, HR one of the reasons why we do open source is you know, it attracts talent Because you know a software engineer is not going to work at a company where they can't do open source. Yeah, so Ideally Maybe we would have a boost down there Uh, we are recruiting, you know, so I can refer you to them. So that's not there yet We did have that at kube condo but so We we we do talk to HR then comms department of course Uh procurement as well because when we do sponsorings, you know, that goes through procurement Yeah, uh, so we talk to all of them and it's It's Getting better and better. Yeah At first, of course, it was a bit difficult because there was the understanding of open source wasn't there yet But it's now that is completely there Yeah Okay Hi, you talk about compete where possible and collaborate where possible Do you guys have sort of centralized decision about what is your competitive advantage versus what you can collaborate on or is that on a per manager? They decide sort of what's sort of strategy. Do you have to manage that? Yeah, okay So as far as I know, um There are certain things where it's clear that this is you know competitive For example autonomous driving, you know, we're not going to share our algorithms On open source for autonomous driving. Yeah, and the others like for example What's part of the software defined vehicle working group? We this is discussed on a case-to-case basis You know, so here this is commodity. Everybody uses it. It's no secret. So, you know Yeah, so it's some things are clear some things are not clear and then have to be discussed Also, when you publish something as open source Somebody has to you know for at least for i'm better more A principle to is this something that we want to give away or not? right, okay And I should mention that my example from the two product owners at the beginning This wouldn't happen anymore today. Today. They would say That's a great idea. We can make a cool inner-source project out of it. You know, we have the prerequisites technical legal and the mindset is there so Almost forgot. This is the success story. Okay, and now time-wise I think You can obviously find me right after in the hallway as well or tomorrow even Ending up with here have fun. I think this is a really important component. So We had a little FOS conference at Mercedes-Benz and afterwards we took the people to the Mercedes-Benz arena in Stuttgart Where our headquarters is, you know, and just gave them a tour. That was nice Here, this is us at kubecon three weeks ago kubecon in amsterdam and we were awarded the End user award from the cloud native computing foundation. That was really cool. So we celebrated that. Yeah That's that's me right there Here we did a little video with github that you will be able to see in a few weeks With involving robots. That was that was good fun and this here So during pandemic This is at the fos backstage conference That took place only online. I think this was 2020 Or 2021 and by the time I had gotten sick of watching online talks all the time, right? And so I think okay, I mean I have to do something So people will watch my talk. So I dressed up as a pirate and I gave a pirate talk With all the props, you know, I had a bottle of rum and some gold and things like that And I think it's still the most watched talk from that conference here So that was a lot of fun, you know, I didn't ask my comms department Like I mean I gave them the slides, but I didn't tell them I was going to dress up as a pirate Maybe I shouldn't say that now here in my own video. No, but so it was so much fun. Seriously All right, so that's it. Um, oh one thing I should mention. We're hiring in case you are interested, right? So here is a QR code and here's Mercedes Benz tech innovation. That's uh, Where that's my home base a hundred percent IT subsidiary of Mercedes Benz We're hiring where the IT techie guys and the mother company Mercedes Benz AG of course is hiring as well All right, so if you're interested here go to these websites and Then thank you and May there always be wind in your sails. Thanks very much