 Hi, this is your host and we are here at Open Source Summit in Vancouver and today we have with us Christophe Plumer, executive vice-president of SovaFail Linux. Christophe, it's great to have you on the show. Thank you. Thank you. I would love to know a bit about the company. Talk a bit about, you know, what do you folks do? SovaFail Linux is a Montreal-based company with an office in France and for almost 25 years we do Open Source software engineering. And so we help our customers, a lot of different kind of organizations to build a very secure and cutting-edge software. How old is the company? The company has almost 25 years and we opened an office in Europe almost 10 years ago and we always have been very much involved in Open Source. It's really part of the DNA. Since the beginning of the company, we decided that if we want to work in Open Source, you need to contribute. So contribution is core of our business and that's why we are a member of the Linux Foundation for years, a member of the LFNNG for a couple of three years now, a member of the Yoctop project, but we contribute to all that project. And we also have our own project called New Jami, which actually just received a social benefit award from the Free Software Foundation in Boston in March at LibraPlanet. What are the Open Source community or what are the projects you folks are involved with? So we are involved in a couple of projects. First of all, the projects that are linked to our core business, like the Yoctop project, and we contribute to a lot of projects linked to the embedded part, like G-Streamer and Video, FFNPEG. We also contribute and have contribution to the Linux kernel and also to some bigger application. And one of it, which is actually one of our major investment, the past years on the business perspective is the CPAS project, which is a project under the behalf of the LFNNG. Talk a bit about your involvement with the LFNNG Foundation. We joined the LFNNG three years ago and actually there was two motivations on that. There was like a natural one and a business one. And the natural reason was all the executives at our felonics were very much concerned about the global change, about sustainability. And it was natural for us to get involved in that community to give our part. And also we see that it's a gap changer for the young developer and young engineer that we recruit to join the company for them, especially the one in Europe, I would say, probably more than in North America. But being able to work in such a project, it's a key decision for them to join us. And the business decision was actually at the ELC, the Linux conference in Lyon in 2019 when we met RT, which is the TSO of France, which is a strategic member of the Linux Foundation Energy. And we began to work with them on some project. And so we decided naturally to join and to contribute because we need to be part of the community to be very part of it. When we look at LFNNG, they are like looking at solving a specific problem. What role do you feel because we are talking about LFNNG, we are talking about carbon footprint. First of all, for your company, how critical or how important is this problem for you folks? And what role do you see LFNNG is playing? I think there are a lot of challenges to meet the goal of energy transition, the carbonization. There are a lot of projects covered by the LFNNG. There are a lot of different actors, utilities, government, vendors, tech company like us. And I think everybody needs to fill the gap and to play their part. And our part is as an open source professional to help the project in their industrialization and to make sure that how a project begin really open source and we'll get improved and we'll get a community and at the end we'll work in the real life. So that's what we do, especially in the CPAS project. Now can we just go a bit deeper into the CPAS path? What is this project all about? This project, first of all, we see that in the substitution automation, we move towards to virtualization. A bit like years ago, Telco has moved to virtualization because of the grid and the flexibility of the grid that we'll need because you will bring wind and solar energy, the grid needs flexibility. So there were these needs and there was a real wheel carried by RT and a need of building a platform, an open source platform, an open source real time platform that will allow virtualization and to run application for control and protection into the substation. So that's the goal of CPAS and I will describe CPAS like a best of grid solution. We do not reinvent the wheel. We took the best tools to build a platform that will allow the virtualization. And when we look at some of this electric project, when you look at some of the players or RT at the end and all the folks, some of these projects were created internally. Though these are not projected for the sake of project, they were actually solving it and then it were released in the communities to be used. So some of these projects are already in production in some cases. Can you talk about some of the use cases of CPAS? CPAS just actually passed the early adoption stage at the LF Energy. So that means that there is some production and it's being used by RT. Actually, I'm in this conference. They made a conference yesterday and they announced that they will be in production with CPAS soon. We know that they are vendor like General Electric, but also others that are testing the platform very deeply. And actually the use case is very simple. And one use case, which not a use case, but an asset of CPAS and a wheel from the utilities like RTE that's thought about the conception of this project was also to have a multi-vendor ecosystem. So really having a reference design platform standard that will allow different vendor to be able to use and to propose their virtual machine or application to the utilities. So it's a way for them also to maybe to change like an old bare metal black box solution to move to a visualization where the end user will be able to run application from different vendors. So this is really a major use case for allowing the flexibility for the end users. What do you see the scope of LF Energy beyond North America, beyond Europe? Because when we look at Asia, India, Africa, you know, energy crisis is everywhere. Everybody has to play a role. Do you see the scope of this foundation beyond Europe and the US as well? Yeah, it needs. Actually, we need it. For sure you need pioneers and pioneers come from Europe on that topics. But then what we see in North America from our Montreal based headquarters, it's moving faster than we expected. For sure it was a sector that is was very slowed, you know, from the utilities, which is usually very regulation, you know, organization, which are in every states and the vendor. But now, as you said, there are new vendors coming on the market. There are new actors. And that means that's what brings LF Energy is a framework of collaboration of all that actors. And I mean, there is no way to go back. And if you need, if you want to innovate in that part, I mean, LF Energy will be a very safe place to, you know, work together for new actors to come. And for this traditional industry to see that they are not alone and other of their brother and sister of kind of company, you know, they are also faced the same challenges. So I think, you know, as we said, we will be stronger together. Right. One more thing is that the whole energy sector, you folks have been around for hundreds of years, you know, it's going through its own digital transformation journey. And the challenge is that they're the first of all so much code to be written, too much refactoring to be done. There are a lot of, you know, players in some of those in they either they don't have incentive, they don't have resources or they so it can play very good role because the solution is already ready made, which has already been deployed in some of the most developed markets. So that can also accelerate and help them. Exactly. And I think it's it's a good place also for tech company that's, you know, develop new business, because there will be a solution. What we see there are utilities or committee that outsource some project, but this project needs people to develop them, people to enter industry of the project, people to offer support. So there is, you know, like an ecosystem around the vendors and the end user of the utilities. So they are a place for for new business. And to be a because at the end what we need its open source project in production that's speed up the decarbonization. Right. This may be off of topic question, but I want to just throw at you and we'll see how it goes. Because when we look at, you know, economical sustainability, we have started talking about cutting on footprint, carbon footprint data centers have to be more efficient, even Linux foundation, they have a lot of projects where you know, this technology uses less energy, this language consumes less compute compute resource, which means you are creating less heat, you're consuming less electrons. So I mean, we are talking at that level. Do you also see it, of course, right now, a left energies focus is very, very specific. But do you feel that it needs to be brought in? Or you say, no, we have to be very, very laser focused on solving these problems. I think there are so many problems to solve that you can be a laser on one. So that's why we need more actors, because, you know, we can do everything we can solve every problem. So that's why we need that the community grow for being able that everybody in their niche sector, you know, bring their, their specification, their specialty to help such a project. So I mean, and you're right, you know, there are so many also side effects. Sometimes, you know, you develop a technology and there are side effects that are unexpected. So we need, we just need some more reform or investments and more people to join. Khrasov, thank you so much for taking time out today to talk about, of course, the company, but also LF energy, your involvement with the CPAP project and the broader vision that we should have. Thanks for all those insights. And I would love to talk to you again soon. Thank you. I thank you very much.