 Hi, this is Hoseb Nipartia, and we are here at Open Source Summit in Vancouver. Today, we have with us once again, Gabriele Colabro, you wear many hats. The two hats that we are going to talk about today is Executive Director of Finos and also General Manager of LF Europe. First of all, Gabriele, it's once again great to have you on the show. Thank you so much for having me here. It's always a pleasure. Yeah, let's talk about Finos. We are really touched upon that when we are in Dublin. But give us some update on the project foundation. This year, of course, is a pretty complicated year for financial services. We've all heard the news. But it's interesting to note that the project is going as fast as it's ever grown. We've had the fastest growth in the last year in terms of contributors and, of course, members. And even further is accelerating. This year, the first quarter, we had about 20% contributor growth quarter over quarter. So it's been pretty substantial, I think, recognition of the fact that Open Source is counter cyclical when the economic climate complex, when organizations are pushed to be more efficient and more innovative, actually Open Source, even in a conservative industry like financial services, is definitely seen as a way to accelerate those. And so I'm really pleased to see the growth in contributors, growth in membership. This week, we have announced fidelity investments joining Finos as a member. We are effectively seeing, in terms of our membership, in a way, our members following the value chain. We start from investment banks. We are now moving into asset managers like Fidelity. We're seeing card processors. We have seen Discover this week at this event having a big present. They became a Finos member already in the year. So I am very pleased to see the growth that, again, such a conservative industry like financial services is seeing in Open Source. You veered a couple of hats. But let's just keep at the Finos head. What is your presence here at the Open Source Summit? So we actually had many members representing us. I was the only representative of Finos here this week. But we have, again, seen our members taking the lead from us and spreading the word. Finos has been mentioned in multiple presentations. We have a lot of... In the last two weeks, we actually ran two hackathons, which is a pretty new thing for banks to get in the same room together, developing. In fact, last week in New York, we had over 100 people hosted the Bank of Montreal, building real solutions that actually were Open Source in nature. I think that's a big difference. You see a lot of generally hackathons, tax prints in this industry that are not open. And so having the opportunity to start in the Open with the sort of insurance, high longevity, ensuring high longevity to some of these projects is really amazing. And in fact, I got a shout out to Discover as well, who ran a global accessibility hackathon over the last two weeks. We're waiting for the results. It's been amazing. We had over 200 participants. It was co-sponsored by Finos. Again, I think this is a true recognition of how the industry is opening and starting to behave more like tech companies. And of course, little personal note, I have a special needs kit. So accessibility topics when I'm able to really sort of bring together my personal and my professional life are definitely very, very close to my heart. If you look at some of this financial industry, I talked to Discover also some of these organizations are very early. They are going through their own digital transformation. Yes. And there is so much code to be written that sometimes that transformation becomes a deterrent because the code has to be written. So can you also talk about, you know, that what role can open source play there? Because this code is not where they're competing. They're competing on services. Absolutely. So talk about, you know, what value open source can bring to these organizations where they should leverage this code for a lot of commodity software and then they can continue to compete in the market when it comes to bring actual value. Absolutely. I think you nailed it. And this is actually something that is going to be a really nice segue into the Europe conversation. I am seeing a very strong development in vertical foundations like ours, you know, focused specifically around an industry, around the business problems of a certain industry. And it's always a combination of, on one hand, education. You're right. Some of them are undergoing the digital transformation and within this process, some of them do understand already that open source is a major factor. Some others need education. And in fact, Venus has a major open source readiness program that really helps, you know, the community, the industry at large in financial services, but certainly our members to accelerate sort of this strategic understanding. Of course, to your point, there are, I think, a couple of levels of value that these organizations get from open source. The first one is the one that we are probably all familiar with, you know, the technical benefits of open source. We're talking about cost efficiency. We're talking about faster innovation. We're talking about better interoperability in an industry that is effectively connected by nature, meaning you have to transact with your counterparts and potentially collaborate with your competitors to do business in financial services. That's the nature of the financial services industry, which brings me to the second level. We are now seeing more and more of our projects, given our vertical nature, delivering direct value to the business in these organizations. So if you are a bank on the cell side that is trying to interact and transact with the buy side, you know, with asset managers like Fidelity, we have standards like FDC3 on the API side and the common domain model on the data side that really make this interaction very, very seamless. And then number three, to your point, they are starting to learn from a cultural perspective and really C-level perspective that not all they do is differentiating. There is a lot, like we know in tech, probably 70-80% of their stack, that is really about common problems that we could and should all collaborate on in the open. Let me give you an example. One of our three strategic initiatives is called Open Rectec. It's about open source regulatory technology. If you think about what open source is about, to your point, is work on things that are non-competitive, work on things for which there are common requirements for all the parties, and work on things that ideally, you know, you get a mutualization of the costs by collaborating on. And compliance and regulation really hits these three points. And so you're absolutely right. There has been sort of an up-leveling of open source in these organizations from just being a sort of a mere way of collaborating on code to truly becoming a strategic pillar of the digital transformation. When we look at the financial industry, it also is like very good at following tenders. A lot of, of course, there's compliance too, but we look at things like shift code. So this industry also understands the importance of such a thing. And this is what open source does. A lot of industries, open source has kind of created standards that in every way it is falling without going to an ISO body. Absolutely. I think you nailed it here, Spopnik, because the reality is this is an industry that, as we said before, has to collaborate by nature. And so standards like, it's very familiar with standards like FIX, like SWIFT. The very fabric of this industry works based on common standards, let alone how you report back to regulators that gives my major benefit to regulators to be able to represent securities and financial instruments in the same format. In fact, again, one of our major project is called the Common Domain Model. And it was contributed by three industry associations, ISDA, ICMA, and ISLA, which were effectively trade bodies, trade organizations building standards for the industry. And they've now realized that open source can accelerate the adoption of that standard. I work both in standard bodies and in open source organizations. And really, you get the best of both worlds when you pair an established open standard with open source implementations, bindings, things that you can actually put in the hands of a developer in a super frictionless way. Because otherwise, the alternative is you either have to implement the standard yourself, and who knows if you do it right, or whether you are 95% compliant, which effectively means you're not compliant. Or you have to rely on a vendor to build that standard for you. And again, we all remember the browser wars and how it happened. You had to have Chrome and Firefox coming to the field to actually move past that sort of browser world world and drastically improve the user experience and just the standardization of the web. So, you absolutely are right. I think open source brings collaboration and financial services to a whole new level. You bear so many different heads. Now, I want to talk about LFU, we sat down I think two weeks ago at CubeCon and we got an update. But talk a bit about, because I think there's something that you gave me a glimpse of that in the pipeline. So, how many of those things have been the fruition this time? Yes, I mean, we move fast. And as you can see from my face, I'm pretty tired. But we've had some exciting updates in the last couple of weeks. Well, first of all, we announced our Linus Foundation advisory board. Linus Foundation Europe advisory board last week. I'm really excited to have over 20 leaders from European organizations, both technology companies like SAP or Dynatrace or all the way to big industrial companies like Orange or Bosch or Thales. We have really great representation of actually over 10 countries in Europe. That's also something that I'm pretty excited about, to really have a diverse representation of the different needs of Europe. You know, in the end, differently the U.S., we're talking about 27 member states just in the EU. And if you add to that, UK, Switzerland, the rest of Europe, we're talking about potentially quite different priorities. So having an advisory board really will help grounding the focus and the priorities of LF Europe. The second thing that I'm very excited about is our work on the UN Sustainable Goals. You can see my nice pin here. This morning, I talked about it during my keynote. Following the announcement from Hilary Carter, our head of research yesterday, we have launched an initiative to really align the Linux Foundation projects to the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals. I think this is important not only as an individual because I'd like to see progress made. And I think open source has a unique capability of solving very complex global problems, but also because these are problems that are global in nature. And so really speaks volumes to the role of the Linux Foundation and why we created the Linux Foundation in Europe. Our tagline is collaborate locally, innovate globally. So the idea of launching Linux Foundation in Europe was really to be able to start projects in Europe. And Europe cares a lot about social and collective societal improvements through open source. But of course, then not creating silos, not creating a fragmentation, but really focus on higher order problems. And I think I'm really pleased to see in this, I think it's going to be a message that resonates a lot with Europe. What we can solve through open source of these very large problems like climate, water, poverty. I'm really excited to see the focus on our mission and impact from Linux Foundation and Linux Foundation Europe. You talked about already, but sometime when we talk to folks, it can go beyond that also. Like I was talking to Hillary this morning as well, and it could be about the sustainability of this planet, but also sustainability of open source projects also because gone are the times where people used to work in their free time. Yes. At the same time, financial also matter, diversity inclusion also matter because of the community. So if I ask you when you look at this sustainability goals, because once again, there are 17, but from your perspective, what are the goals that you for LF Europe, that you say, hey, these are the immediate priorities that we should look at. Sustainability of the open source community is a major conversation in and of its own. And I think you're absolutely right. It is definitely a high priority for Linux Foundation Europe and maybe we get to talk about the CRA, the Cyber Resilience Act and some of the inadvertent effects that despite being well-intentioned, it might create an already strained open source community. But when I look at the portfolio of the Linux Foundation and I think about some of the key projects that we have that are Europe strong, let's say, and aligned with sustainable goals, what comes to mind is certainly LF energy. It is already very active, very well structured in Europe, RTE, Leander. So some of the major providers of energy from Europe are in there and they're making fantastic progress towards energy efficiency. I think OS climate, open source climate is another very SDG-aligned project that it is global in nature. It is not just a Linux Foundation Europe project, but it has a very strong reputation from Europe, the climate. So of course, a global problem, but there is a major focus in Europe, especially Northern Europe, I would argue, to really be aggressive about the issue. And I think a third one that I don't think gets talked enough about is Agstak. It's our agriculture Agtech, if you want, open source effort. This is an area that not only in Europe, but if you think also about India and you think about the broader issue, not only has a potential to massively improve the conditions, the working conditions of many people in the world, but actually does very closely connect to climate. We all know that the carbon credit system is certainly a great attempt, but it's quite easy to game in the sense that there are no standards, there's very little traceability. And so Agstak actually does provide and is starting to providing a lot of tools to really ground some of those measurements in the ground, sorry for the play and word here. And so I'm really excited to see later in the year at our open source summit in Europe in Bilbao, as well as our first Linux Foundation Europe membership summit, we'll have some of these projects very much featured because not only they deliver to individuals, not only I think there are plenty of corporates that are looking to invest in these areas, but it's very much aligned also with the new goal and potentially public sector funding and grants that are coming down that could really help accelerate the speed of some of these projects. Since you briefly touched on CRR Cyber Resiliency Act, I do want to talk a bit about because last time also we touched briefly about that, but this is becoming a very hot topic. So I do want to highlight to our audience also what is the challenge and problem there and what role can LFU role play there? Absolutely. So well thanks for the question. So the Cyber Resilience Act in short for those who don't know it is a regulation that is making its way through the legislative process in the EU. It is meant and it has a very noble intent to bolster cybersecurity in Europe. We all know what happened last year with Log4Shell. We have seen the response both from the White House with the cybersecurity strategy and now Europe is following suit by really trying to regulate to enforce security on software and of course open source software. Now whilst open source is a major pillar of the vision of Europe and the EU for a next generation internet for a human center internet, on the other hand unfortunately the law as is drafted right now it risks to impose pretty strong liability burdens on individual maintainers, on foundations, on the very fabric of open source meaning repositories, code repositories and binaries repositories. So all the intermediaries that actually offer services for free to the open source community think about GitHub, think about Maven Central and so we are indeed concerned that the law as drafted could really mean you know in the worst case scenario really backfire towards the EU meaning they're really investing in open source. They see open source as a major pillar again in the worst case scenario open source should the developer decide to keep things private because of liability and the risk in Europe should you know a foundation and I'm not talking particularly about the Linux foundation but even the smaller foundations out there or even projects that are just in GitHub that are not under a foundation should they have been required will be required to have a pretty onerous and frankly currently not very specified set of requirements around security and so we are working very very hard with the other nonprofit foundations in Europe, individual contributors and directly with you know the European Parliament, European Commission to really try to educate them on what are the potentials should the law go into effect as is and you know we are seeing honestly some progress in the last few weeks but as you know it's a very convoluted legislative process and we are not lobbying organizations there's no you know one interlocutor that they can talk to and so we are all really trying to work better together with the European Commission we're very very you know open to to provide real life models of what this could mean because ultimately both as a professional I care about the impact this could have to open source but as an Italian citizen I'm equally worried as to what can that mean for European technology if all of a sudden this might mean that Europe gets isolated from the you know global open source innovation so yeah lots to lots to keep us busy in the next couple of months yeah really once again thank you so much for sitting down with me and give us an update on you know of course you know LF Europe and you know once again you know there are so many things on your plate but I would love to chat with you again soon to get updates on all this you're working on but I really really really appreciate your time really thank you thank you so much for now