 Let's talk later about the open source keywords and it will be moderated by my dear colleague Kieran that was so nicely mentioned by Mike and now I would like to invite the speakers of our next panel that will be moderated by Clara Dillon. I invite you on stage and yeah, a round of applause. In the meantime, I will take a picture. And as everyone's making their way to the stage, I'll invite everyone to come up and take a seat and I'll briefly introduce folks but I'll give everyone a chance to do that themselves. I'm Clara Dillon. I'm the co-founder of Open Ireland Network and delighted to be here today. I am going to be joined by Karen Melchior, who's our MEP representative here, Gael Blondel from the Eclipse Foundation, who many of you know, Peter Ganten who's here from the European Open Source Business Alliance. We have Max Lemke from the who's the head of the unit for the Internet of Things at the DG Connect. And we also have Jean-Philippe Balanca, oh no thank you, that's my French it's so bad. But delighted to have you here Jean-Philippe who's the CEO of Smile International but also a founding member of the European Open Source Consortium. So we're delighted to have everyone here today and as was mentioned by Mike earlier, we're here to talk about the European competitive advantage. And we've heard and we all know here in the room a lot about the advantages that Open Source brings to any ecosystem, any region. But I think what we're here today to talk about in this panel is about that in the context of Europe. So I'd be delighted to hear from you all now about your own perspective around what that means for you. Karen maybe we'll start with you from the political perspective if you'd like to give us your overview. Well I've been in the European Parliament for the last nearly five years now and I've been trying to advocate for Open Source in the Parliament because I really believe that this is part of having a competitive advantage for Europe. Because if you open up the tools that we have to build industries and software then it allows more bright young things and innovators, developers to actually use the skills and the knowledge that already is there and allows people with the right ideas to succeed and not just the people that have the proprietary knowledge. Brilliant thank you. And Gael we heard earlier from Mike but perhaps you can build on that and think about from your perspective what that European opportunity is with Mike. Yeah so what Mike described and I think that's very important it's what we do well and what we want to do even more at the European Foundation is to connect organisations to collaborate in Open Source and I think that by collaborating in Open Source they can build something that is much more powerful and get a competitive advantage and gain new markets. Brilliant thank you Gael. So Peter you're coming out from the commercial perspective and representing many businesses across Europe so can you maybe talk about it from your perspective as to what you see the opportunities for Open Source in Europe? So I think first of all in this era of digitisation software infrastructure plays a similar role than as roads and communication networks have played during industrialisation and governments all over the world realised at one point that there need to be clear rules that everyone every industry, every individual, every government can use this infrastructure at foreseeable prices, at foreseeable conditions and at the same conditions basically for everyone. And this is not the case with most of the software and cloud infrastructure we are using today. So being the first ones realising this and implementing another infrastructure which uses these routes and which is really freely available to everyone at the same route can even be forked and can even be run on your own would be a huge advantage and at the same time we are seeing that governments and also increasingly the private sector not only in Europe but all over the world asks for infrastructures which make this possible. Companies also don't want to be too much to depend on others and states all over the world don't want to be dependent. So if we are the ones who built this at first this is a huge, huge opportunity for the industry in Europe. Thank you Peter. And Max, Mike was talking earlier about the software defined vehicles. I know that's a particular area of interest as well from your perspective so maybe you can have a little chat about how you think about open source in this respect. Yeah I would first like to make a statement that for my point of view open source in innovation is the opportunity for Europe to have their influence in digital innovation as communities who can only face large global players like the hyperscalers or others if they align along common objectives. So that's an important point for me the basis. I'm not an evangelist for open source so for me open source is not the holy grail. Open source is an important means for reaching one of my key objectives and that means competitiveness of European industry in a world with growing geopolitical tensions. So it's a means. In that sense as a research manager with several hundred million of euros investments I promote open source as a basis for collaboration across industry vertically but increasingly also horizontally meaning between competitors who compete on the market but still collaborate and I have a couple of examples on that that's an initiative a large initiative on internet of things cloud edge IOT where we have a lot of research projects here our colleagues from Eclipse are engaged where we use a platform approach based on open source for better exploitation for making sure that their results are not exploited by the big ones but also by themselves and finally we will also get to the software defined vehicle initiative and a 250 million investment in 2324 which I have started and is now shaping we have the money basically there so there we get the automotive actors in Europe work together obviously in a world market and we get them basically to develop common building blocks in a pre-competitive environment on non differentiating elements so means they all need it and they don't make the difference to the customer we get them to collaborate on that in order to face competition in line with competition law and we the building blocks on software and also on hardware open source is the is at the heart because that's the model they will use for their collaboration having said that that's a bit what I'm working on for me it's important that increased use of open source in initiatives it's not an objective as such but a means to get something so thank you thank you and it's wonderful to hear about these growing industry I suppose collaborations I mean from my own personal perspective and there was a comment earlier about us all having to be advocates to help people understand how the open source community works and sometimes there is a perception that open source is in the heart of the tech technology industry and but when you start bringing it out into these other industry scenarios I think that's where it makes it real and helps people understand the broader value and potential and coming to that then John Philippe from your perspective you're part of a consortia that operates in this space can you maybe talk to how you see the opportunity around open source in this way hi one hi everyone I knew you were I'm going to ask the question so I had some preparation there and I thought how to answer this competitiveness advantage in Europe and I thought it was interesting to ask the private sector what they would think about it what are the answers what what what's the perception with the image of open source by private cooperation and they are very good studies that have been made lately one by Nume which is a French syndicate of IT and digital in France and one by Bitcoin in Germany and these shed some light on what's the perception for large private corporations in these two countries at least and the very interesting thing is that adoption of open source is massive massive I mean to the question have you adopted open source standards governance and tools plus 80% or plus 89% depending on the on the country so that's done that's accepted and maybe to elaborate also once you said the question we get from these private corporations is no longer what is open source and is open source the right solution by itself this morning Omar was saying I don't need to convince you because you're all convinced by open source nowadays with large corporations in Europe there's less need to convince on open source as a vision as a statement as a common good there's to convince on what is the level of sovereignty we will bring on the table what is the usage level what is the the product quality and is it sustainable in time this is this is where we are I think okay brilliant thank you Jean Philippe so we've heard a little bit about your each context that you're where you're coming from and your goals around open source or whether it be a way a means by which you reach your goals or not so let's have a little talk about what you think about the main challenges then that are actually you know facing us now today the state of the nation for for Europe for for actors in Europe and how they can best I suppose take the next best steps to get us to these goals and so Karen you were talking about this in the context of the European Parliament and the transparency and the opportunity there can you maybe elaborate on how we can take the next best steps to get to that goal I think we have a couple of pieces of legislation already on the books or nearly getting into the books on both the data rack and also the IDES and the DMA looking for interoperability and creating demands on how businesses actually share knowledge with each other and I think we need to move further along that line but also look at how do for example public administrations use open source technology and digitalization and I was a rapporteur on a report in the jury committee on digitalization and administrative law where we saw that open source would be one of the great advantages for public administrations both at a European level but also at a national level to ensure public trust and also to reduce costs for public administrations and also if we have a development of a code in one member state why should this not be shared in the other member states and that's why we were calling for in the reports to have if you have public money you should have public code so that the code can be shared across the EU so we're not reinventing the wheel 27 times and also looking at how each member state is doing digitalization and also encouraging public private partnerships which I think having open source as a foundation as a model of work in collaboratively is crucial for this and I'm sure everybody that's been sort of talking about Europe and digitalization is really tired of learning about Estonia but we are not all Estonia yet and we need to learn from each other so that we can all become a little bit better thank you and I think you know Max you were talking earlier about the funds available but I'm just going to do a follow-up question Karen if that's okay just in terms of you know how how does that happen then because if we're not Estonia yet and presumably they've they've learned great lessons but and and these policies are coming into play how do we accelerate the actual implementation of those policies within various different regions and considering that across Europe people may be at different stages in their maturity or towards this open source I think we need to integrate it in for example the there's so many abbreviations in Europe the money that was put aside to re-energizing the economy after COVID I think there is a lot of interconnectivity and digitalization investment in that and trying to make open source and sharing and collaborating part of the requirements for getting that money locally and also trying to see if we can encourage member states to act and local governments to learn from each other and collaborate and I think using the criteria for getting the funds is a good way of encouraging this it's always a good way of encouraging action I think but thank you for that and Gael from your perspective what do you think are the major challenges or the things we need to overcome to leverage this opportunity well the the opportunity is really okay you we can build on top of open source and that's that accelerate innovation that's permission less permission less innovation etc so that's that has been mentioned mentioned before and and Jean-Philippe was mentioning that we have massive adoption I think that behind massive adoption is also at some point the time to to contribute in open source because if the more you contribute the more you influence the project and the more you get open source projects that really fit your needs and so in terms of competitive advantage being a user is well you use something that has been designed by others and with their with their own goals in mind so European organizations in my opinion should really move from the moment when they adopted open source for plenty of different reasons to the moment when they they contribute to open source and even they create their own platforms together in open source and at the European level instead of having 27 solutions or even more and if you think about then that step forward moving from consuming open source into contributing I mean what's stopping people like is it is it is it is it a will or is there like a capability blocker what what do you think is there well I think that's a usual learning curve that every organization has to go through the steps of learning how to properly use open source how to properly contribute to open source and then well how to make it this competitive advantage so that's that's more where where every organization is along this learning curve and yeah it takes time and it takes developers also Mike was mentioning that we need to empower developers and well there are a few developers in the room but I think that there are there are also lots of places where we mentioned open source and lots of forums where where open source is seen as a good tactics or a good strategy for for stuff but we we we should keep in mind that open source is ultimately it's about code and documentation and etc and that's stuff that's that's written by developers so that's also how do we empower the developers to do more and do and how do we empower more developers or train more developers to to write code open source code no that's great um though I will add to it because I think that the opportunity is probably even bigger than developers not that we don't need loads of developers we need even more of them um but we probably need more people who are not developers to also understand how to contribute into the open source ecosystem and there's probably an opportunity here in Europe to actually think about that um from a skills building perspective to understand about that broader ecosystem of designers and documentation writers and business folk that actually all can contribute to that ecosystem as well so I think there's a huge opportunity there did you want maybe on that point of on building skills open source is really the best place to learn software because open source projects are sometimes not too big and you really get in touch with the best developers in domain and that's well everybody should contribute to an open source project one way or another well absolutely I mean the that that that power of being able to learn from open source is something I probably didn't appreciate early enough in terms of that advantage that it brings because if you look at how the experts do it and and actually get to potentially even talk to the experts and build relationships with them through open source engagement I mean that there's nothing better than that in terms of skills building in terms of experiential learning so yeah thank you for that Gail and Peter in terms of again then this idea of how businesses can leverage this opportunity even thinking about the public private partnership opportunity perhaps you can explore what what you think the biggest challenges we need to overcome are so first of all I totally agree with everything Gareth said it is really important to engage with these projects we went through this process with the German government by suggesting to them to build an open platform where where administrations on the federal on the state level and from municipalities can engage and cooperate and this is now the last number I've heard it's called open code with DE at the end it's now used by I think more than 800 or 900 projects so it's rapidly evolving and and one of the key things there was that that some kind of legal certainty for for the people from the administrations was needed are they liable if they publish something and all these things have to be made clear and then it started but having said this we we must not forget that it is okay to just drive a car and you don't you don't have to to engineer it always you can just drive it and there are a lot of smaller administrations in the municipalities where we cannot expect them to become engineers all of them maybe one and we are lucky if they do but and what we see and I think this is still a huge challenge we see that large parts of the administration and many many politicians have understood the advantage of digital sovereignty and open source of there but at the same time the money is going in the opposite direction for example in Germany we have still the situation that the the the the German government hospital it's called senders is now funded with around 25 million euros a year or that's what we have what we expect in the budget for this year last year it has have been 50 million so it's just half of it and at the same time we see frame contracts with oracle with microsoft with others in the billions and I think at as and and the important thing is funding research funding development funding cooperation is all good and is all important and I'm totally not against it but as long as the buying power goes in the opposite direction this will not help too much and we need to change this too thank you peter I know you want to come in on this Karen well I think if we're all going to be driving cars and we don't know how to open the hood of the car and understand what actually is working and how to tinker it how to repair it then we're going to be buying cars from somebody who knows how to build them and if every local authority is just going to buy a car and don't aren't able to open the hood and understand how to adapt it to their purposes then you're going to see these big tenders for big IT contracts going to big companies and not European developers and it also is going to stop people from actually developing the talent that we need in Europe if we don't have open source available if we don't have people being able to tinker with with the products that they're using uh with the code then we're not going to have people curious and innovative uh learning about technology and we're going to be like continue to lack the tech talent that the commission is saying that we're lacking thousands of hundreds of thousands can I can I please please one more quick i i'm totally with you there we need that competence but we need also framework new new kinds of framework contracts for which ensure that this there's this competence I just need to understand so the framework contracts that's we need to reform the public procurement at the new level they need to require that it is open in the end that's that that is what needs to change I do not disagree okay excellent well agreeable disagreement or disagreeable agreement whichever we have like have us but oh please do pop in yeah I think it's um it's a the procurement story is a very important one of course and I think there's a lot of effort that I've been put in the EC to put open source as something that is needed and required still there are some additional moves to make it I think that's that's the idea I think that we are at the moment I like to take the comparison of of Airbus to some point that there are a lot of European champions in the in the field of open source right I don't say we need only one conglomerate uh that would be a champion but at one moment we need to join forces on the markets for business corporate companies to provide large projects to be able to attract talents build new talents nurture talents that and serve and serve the ecosystem and how did airbus grow in fact not by subsidies as such that's I know you if you look at the WTO history then yes but by but by orders for also by orders from private corporations just to also add on on peter so I think it's time now to get in to get there so answering the question but answering also the other guys there thank you Jean Philippe um and thank you thank you Karen max um and you were talking earlier about this idea of these kind of potential for private sector collaboration um you know making sure that they can do that in a way that lies to all the regulations and things like that it's such a powerful concept of big corporations collaborating with small corporations collaborating with the public sector collaborating with academia potentially even collaborating with citizens who have a vested interest in or a particular subject matter expertise because we've heard earlier about how individual citizens can have such power when you open things up in an open source way um so can you maybe give us a little bit more around how do we make that happen faster and and accelerate that whole trend yeah maybe I give I give the example of the vehicle of the future initiative that we that we that we are supporting so first maybe to your point I am not building a conglomerate here I'm trying to get the competitors to work together on things that are not differentiating in a pre-competitive setup so not a not not one company not one conglomerate yeah so just to be clear and we I would like to support that with community driven platform building so I don't want vendor lock in or anything but I want a community driven platform where everybody can participate driven by European actors that's my role I work for the European Commission so I cannot say anything else but I would not mind if also others adopt this platform from across the world as long as I hope our companies stay leaders so so when I started this we were we were confronted with challenges in the automotive industry which are still there transformation need for more computing power you can imagine autonomous car doesn't work with the current processors in the car so we have a disruption here we see a shift towards new architectures and on the hardware side we have to reinvent what we do there it comes on the market but maybe not suited directly for the automotive industry maybe not energy efficient enough maybe too expensive and we may have to just customize it we see unsustainable costs by the suppliers in maintaining software I think that's one of the big things they are permanently adapting upgrading customizing and wasting a lot of talents on that the talent cannot go into innovation they go into all these daily daily work that they do and we risk the dependence on non-eu companies be it hardware companies being be it hyperscalers or maybe in somewhere be it be it government driven establishments whatever they are and therefore we see fierce competition in the different regions of the world and a year ago I started to get all these companies around the table and said can we not share more in a legal environment to overcome this fragmentation that everybody does it himself there was investment of nearly a hundred billion euros that they were claiming to put on stv and I basically say you can save a lot I give no number by doing some things together pretty competitively so we started this vehicle of the future initiative and in two strands the stv software defined vehicle that's the software part and on the on working on an automotive hardware platform and we have now the money in a way from the european research and innovation funds primarily the chips joint undertaking we have the money there we have already some started and some are starting this year so we get quite a lot of investment and open source I would say is at the heart software defined vehicle ecosystem the building blocks are developed under open source most of them not all of them probably there will be some on safety critical where they still have to accept that they may be open source that we are not there yet and on the hardware we work on risk five the risk five emerging ecosystem so it's also open source and we got in in in the collaboration and and the that that I've started I got I get every four three four months I get all the OEMs and all the tier ones around my table to discuss with them to see what we can do in common but but always having in mind they are competing on the market and I don't want to change that that's not at all my goal so we collaborate across the sector in pre-competitive setup non-differentiating elements vertically and horizontally I think that's the important point we see some of these projects in member states they're vertical one OEM one or two suppliers but it serves the companies primarily here we build the ecosystem and I think the ecosystem is the approach we follow a code first approach but we also try to take a holistic view so by having all the companies think what we need together and we scale we gain agility agility I think we still have to prove it and we drive standards and reduce our lock-in so in summary I would say we reinforce Europe's leadership and preserve I pick up the word sovereignty with with that we use we better use financial resources of companies and we support the we also support talent building and not wasting talent and the last point we I think we get the OEMs and the suppliers the manufacturers and suppliers to compete more on the innovative features again rather than wasting their time on customization and upgrading and waste their resources well congratulations on that it sounds like a very successful initiative in that area in the automotive automotive area I'm assuming that provides a pattern for how we could do this across various different industries within Europe and are you aware of similar initiatives in different industry verticals in different any any other industry verticals that might be following a similar approach well yes I see that there are a lot of people thinking about that we think ourselves together for example with the energy industry or energy at the confluence of energy and e-mobility where we are still working a lot in silos so we we think in the same direction we also do a lot when we look at our research and innovation initiatives so I could name three of them where we adopt this where we where we adopt this approach before I do that maybe a quite a little bit of warning we see that the research innovation community in industry and research accepts and say yeah we do everything open source they preach that a lot but for some of them it means they dump their code on jit up and do nothing in community building that will not help at all that will not bring us I think you have made similar statements before and that's not enough so we do this on all the work we do in Europe on cloud edge IoT because we face the big hyperscaler so we have to find a way of getting our technologies our knowledge in we do the same for the central piece of software in the cloud infrastructures and also on our future work on the next generation internet where we have a thousand of in the last five years we had a thousand of small companies work work together so there are also open sources the predominant approach so it sounds like loads of opportunity there and gail do you want to come back in on that point I know that's that's a very important point we have been this talking about that with max for for some time already but I mean so it has been some time since european commission said okay you you get research money to do to to develop your innovations and you should publish your innovations in open source or at least a significant part of it in open source to to improve dissemination but I think that and at the foundation we have been participating in research projects for 10 years now and and I think that we we really work hard to helping researchers understand that it they have to go further than just publishing their code like in our in our workshop yesterday somebody said that publishing the code is one percent of it and wow that may be just a bit more than that but beyond publishing the code there is all building the community etc and maybe just so improving the dissemination through open source in and finding a better way to to transform the money the research money in open source platforms is must be must be a priority but one thing that I want to mention about sdv is that so we we have the part of what you describe happens at at the eclipse foundation under the sdv working group and I really much like the code first approach because that's that's something that is new for the automotive industry and what is what is super important is that we reach a critical mass thanks to your your your group and and all of that it's about reaching a critical mass because when you think about it and and the competitive advantage is that an hyperscaler can create a project on their own they have they and and and create and build the community around the around the project I think that the the european industry really need to group to align their goals to to create a big enough project that that gets enough traction so get good at this collaboration stuff is what you're saying yeah okay so so that's a good goal for all of us I think I do want to comment one thing about the about the ask of researchers to start to do more and build community and it's not only I think a skills problem but back to that comment earlier about what do we ask volunteers in the same way I mean it's a big ask to ask a researcher who has never done this before and is busy doing research to actually build community so perhaps it's another opportunity for us to look at different mechanisms by which we can enable that within that community because we can't just lump it in on top of everything else they have to do I guess and but but that's that's just a comment from from how how we can enable this lots lots of challenges that we can all work out together but we're here to do that and I think this is a wonderful start to that conversation so I'm going to ask one final question as we move towards the next break I think and and that is one of my favorite questions if you and we'll do this very short because I know Paola is here here telling us that we will have to wrap up soon but if if you had a magic wand and you could wave it and you could have a wish tomorrow one thing one thing that you could just make happen with a magic wave of a wand what would it be Peter I already said it okay every every every public procurement must require open source software not just if the public is creating software also if they buy off the chef software we must come to that point not I understand that this is not possible tomorrow but if we put out a policy and and say we will we want to be there and let's say five or ten years huge investments in open source will happen from the european economy thank you Peter jump jump leap wave my mind is a consequence of Peter's one somehow we'll have to do these in order you know oh I'd love that we would have um champions in open source for doing large projects in different regions of our wonderful continents that would gather resources from all over the continents to nurture the communities to grow the people grow the talent create jobs in Europe as well uh and uh show some leadership and that was mentioned by Mike as a statement show some leadership as well beyond Europe and that was really interesting sorry it's a long answer but the UN talks in this this morning are very inspiring for us and I think we're trying to do things for good as well even though private companies we have other stakes right but if I have this magic one this is what I would do thank you Jean Philippe Karen well I would like us to start getting european companies to collaborate before their their sort of time of of of grandeur is gone um I mean now we've been talking a lot about the vehicle industry in Europe but I mean in the news they're saying well the german car companies are shutting more and more down and it's other places in the world where the car industry is doing well so I think it's a little bit a talk about how do we save an industry that's going down rather than how do we make sure that we will have the innovative industries in Europe and not being playing catch up because this is all a lot of creating european champions and I mean Boeing and Airbus are the two big airplane companies in the world because the US and the EU decided to pour in money and pour in protectionism over them to protect them and I think this is not really the way to go unless you are France or Germany and have big influence in the european commission if you want to have the small member states innovators all over europe to actually be driving innovation you need a different approach then let's choose our champions and pour money into them we need to have an open source act I would say we need to have a piece of legislation supporting open source development and just as we've had an AI act a dsa and a dma that actually started as one idea and then I think we need to have a vision from the european commission when they start sometime in 2025 after the hungarian presidency of how to encourage open source development and community in europe and mentioning the the work of researchers I mean we are bothering them with so much red tape to get EU funding that they're not actually spending most of their time researching they're spending most of the time trying to get research so that they can keep their temporary job and perhaps get a permanent one in the universities of europe because it's so difficult to get funding thank you Karen thank you I 100% agree with you that you say it's better to address industry and solve the problem before it has become a real problem nevertheless better late than never so because Europe I think cannot afford to lose this industry so at least we are now not throwing money at something which is the past we are trying to throw money at at something that unites them so we are not using the famous geese cannon to keep money to everything but we try to concentrate on if you master the sdv then you master the digital components in the car so if we get you back on that then we may get you back on other things so I would say I agree but nevertheless so on your point one wish please on your point now I think on the industrial side we still have to provide really convincing proof of concept so one of my goals in this initiative is to rather quickly show that we will get the use of secure and stable open source with automotive grade in company specific systems yeah so that they use it and that we can we can say that and because then we then we are successful and that will also help us to get to the ceo's not only in automotive other if we don't convince them we will not get there if we only have the evangelists in the companies we are getting beyond them but that's really what we have started with so I think that's extremely important to get to that that level thank you thank you thank you max kale a very quick wish very short so my wish if I have a magic one is use the open source to align the efforts beyond the member state politics and our cultural differences so that's what that was mentioned this morning by Omar that make open source are common european language and well of course globally after being european language thank you thank you gayle and thank you to all our panelists for this lively discussion I really really appreciate it so thank you all for listening I hope all the wishes come true thank you you