 So hello everyone, welcome to our panel. Today, we're going to be discussing open source as a game changer for sustainable industry transformation in Europe and beyond. Please have a seat. So I'm super excited to host this panel of absolute industry trailblazers across different industries. And they brought open source to their companies and are making a huge difference. So as you know, software development is at the heart of every digital product and digital transformation for a host of different industries. An open collaboration is a kind of shared plumbing that is making a huge impact, key to accelerating digital innovation, operational efficiency, meeting customer demands, but also addressing sustainability, interoperability, economic competitiveness, and also addressing compliance and regulatory needs. And today, we'll hear from industry leaders across finance, energy, automotive, and telco, who really spearheaded these efforts at their companies. So we'll find out what they've been able to achieve and what are still the biggest challenges that need tackling. So with that, I'm going to get everyone to introduce themselves and discuss a little bit about where they are in their journey. And then we'll kick off a discussion. So Lucien, I'm going to start with you. We need to turn on the buttons. Yeah. So good morning. It's a pleasure to be here for the first LF member summit in Europe. So my name is Lucien Balia. I'm deputy head of R&D at RT. So my company RT is a power transmission system operator in France. So we operate, we maintain, and we develop the largest high and extra high power grid in Europe. And our mission also consists in ensuring a balance between power supply and power demand in real time. And why am I here? Why an unusual company in this open source ecosystem is present today? Well, actually, today, RT is confronted to huge transformation challenges that are resulting from the need to decarbonize our economies and society. And on one hand, we need to integrate, to massively integrate renewable generation into the power grid. And on the other end, we need to prepare for a growth of electricity demand in the future as many other industries that are currently fueled by oil and gas are, we need to shift to power, to electricity in the future. So maybe to make a long and very technical story short, we strongly believe that we need innovative software solution to achieve this transformation. And our digitalization roadmap has been inflating in the past years, in the past months and years. And we are facing significant challenges with our digitalization roadmap that is under time pressure, that is under resource pressure, that is under pressure for innovation. So basically, that's where we came to open source, actually. We got really inspired by the telcos industry. And we learned how this industry leveraged the open source model to boost, to accelerate their innovation. And we decided in 2018 to take the plan. So our open source journey started at that time, 2018. So we are quite new in the open source landscape. And we are new, but fortunately we could take some shortcuts. So when I met Shuli Gunman, who was the founder, the inspirator, and the powerhouse of LF Energy back in 2018, she proposed us to create a foundation. And that's quite an unusual approach to open source, because usually companies go to open source progressively. They start consuming, then contributing, then they start creating projects. And eventually, they get a strategic role. And on our side, we just decided to start creating a foundation. And that seems quite naive, in fact. But if I look backwards a few years after that, I can tell you that this was a really successful move. And yeah, you may ask me, how can it be? How can a non-IT company, a newbie in open source be successful with open source? And that's simply because we co-paste what worked with the other foundations. So we just transpose the model. And we are standing on the shoulders of giants, of companies that have more than 20 years experience with open source. And just to finish and illustrate concretely what open source means at ARTI, today we are participating to seven projects under LF Energy umbrella. These are core business projects that are at the heart of our digitalization strategies that are needed for the power grid in the future. And it's not just a tiny thing. Great, we'll pick up on that. Thank you so much. Philippe, Telco was the inspiration. So tell us about your journey. OK, so nice to be here with you. My name is Philippe Ponsorgue. I'm VP Software Engineering at Orange. So basically, Orange, we are a telecom operator. We are thinking, building, deploying, and operating, I would say, network for countries for retail market, but as well, international backbone for B2B purpose. In telco industry, we are currently having a very, very exciting time for, I would say, two reasons. The first one is because our thanks networks is becoming software. And the second one is about desegregation. So heavy black box are becoming layers where we can envisage new way of doing partnership. Something that is extremely important to understand as a vertical industry, I would say that in less than two decades, we move from, I would say, a pure physical world to a virtualized world where we have the network function that are onboarded into virtual machine. And today, we are entering into this cloud-native journey with a cloud-native network function. It's extremely important to understand that in less than basically 20 years, it's a journey where we overcome physical barrier, hardware, virtual machine, containers, where we overcome logical barriers from heavy monoliths to microservices-oriented solution. And perhaps the most important for today, it's about a way to overcome, I would say, the interoperability barriers, moving from a very, very specific monovander's ecosystem to an ecosystem where solution are made, or I would say, product, and at the same time, open-source solution that are bundled all together. So for us at Orange today, I would say that open-source is definitely integrated into our strategy. Because when you are moving to a very, very vertical ecosystem where you have closed-source, preparatory, monovander, and dedicated hardware to a much more horizontal world that is much more de facto open, orchestrated, multi-vanders, it means that you need to totally rethink the way you want to basically interact with your ecosystem and the way you want to serve your customer. For instance, I want to focus on two topics. The first one is what we did at infrastructural level, because you know that all the network functions are running into, I would say, telco-cloud infrastructure. So with other telecom peers, we decided, I would say, more than roughly two years back to work together, thinking about what could be the next generation of telco-cloud infrastructure that could really leverage our network function. And it was basically where the silver project was born. And it had been officially kicked less than one year back at the Linux one summit in Seattle. So yes, Silva today is extremely strategic for range, but as well for other operator peers that are in the project and network function vendors that are here. And it's the perfect way, I would say, to shift from this monovertical ecosystem to a horizontal multi-vander topic. And the second one that I would just want it as well to emphasize is the way we are currently managing the lifecycle deployment of our network function with our own network integration factory that is 100% open source and shifting the way from, I would say, having fully dedicated tools per vendor that lock our team to have dedicated skill center with no mutualization toward a much more holistic way of doing the deployment lifecycle, I would say. And if it's raised a lot of opportunities and challenges for us, it's the same as well for the ecosystem. Because at the end of the day, what we are requesting is to have our network vendor becoming true software vendor and behaving like true software vendor selling software artifact. Great, thank you so much. And Phillip, over to you, Bosch's journey. Should we switch on, at least I was. It's on? Yeah, it doesn't sound like this. I don't hear the echo from you. OK, well, Bosch is mainly maybe known for the automotive, at least that's where I come from. Depending on the country where you go, there's much more of Bosch, so you may have your dishwasher at home or any home appliance. But there are many invisible products also within Bosch. So we have 135 years plus history of building products. And so you don't see everything. We are in building technologies, surveillance cameras, access professional audios, microphones. Bosch holds an own hospital in Stuttgart area. Even they do medical devices, industry, Rex Road. We have branch companies. So basically, it's what they call technique for sleep. We're invented for life, technology for life. And this you can really see. So we try to be diverse. We try to go what people need, meet people demands. And for this, I can mainly speak for the automotive area where I've been in the last 15 years. And this is something where already in 2010, I became aware of usage of open source and products. And as we had more like cloud side also discussion, we built devices. And a long time, it was mainly the device. And software was more one element of the bill of material where it was not a software bomb, it was a hardware bomb. And it was one item set software. And it was just a plain number. And if you look on this bill, it was a high number. And there was a high cost. And you start looking, how do you get these costs down? And you start investing and see there are chances that you don't have to develop everything from scratch on your own. And you start to consume open source. So that's the first thing. But you will always figure out, oh, there's so much more to do because suddenly it never gives you 100% fits. So you go the next stage and start with the first contribution because you just say, OK, I give it back because maintaining the patch locally is heavy. And then you figure out, oh, there's something cool to collaborate with. You may contribute more in a project. Take a maintenance role. We don't have too many maintainers actually in Bosch. But at least some projects are maintained by Bosch engineers as well. And then we even kicked off a lot of projects from the last 10 years, 15 years. And as a preparation for the panel, I also just check what has been there before. And you see that there are traces 2009, 8, 7, 6. So there's always a track where you find open source. And it's not only on the device side. So we get more into the server side. Dealing demands. Our cars get connected. IoT devices. That was a brave idea to basically have every single device connected, which is produced by Bosch in 2000, 30 time frame more or less, and just gives you just a sheer amount of infrastructure demand. So here, we never find a way around open source. We don't want to. And we want to use it more strategically because it can just help us to manage this maintenance part of the commodity. Because if you sell a phone in the past, you sold it. It takes two years. It gets two years updates. And then it's basically out of line. But it's good because you buy a new one. If you think about a car, you have 10, 15 years of lifetime. And just I checked back. There was 2018 car line releases, which still got released on a 2.634 kernel because it's based on hardware, which was originally there in 2010. So you can see that's when it starts operating. And you will see it another 10 years. So basically, we have operation time from 2010, 2000, 30, and beyond, so 20, 25 plus years of devices. And we see this in the various industries of Bosch. Thank you for that intro. And last but not least, Mark, representing financial services. Yeah, morning, everyone. So I'm Mark Lane from Lloyd's Banking Group. I'm the head of the Software Engineering Center of Excellence. So Lloyd's Banking Group have a long history. We go back over 300 years doing financial services for the UK. We've got a big customer base. We've got 26 million customers. And of those, 20 million are now digital customers. 10 years ago, that was 10 million. So we've doubled in the last 10 years. And to give you an idea of the transactions, we have 26,000 logins every second. That's every second. So that's what we've got to deal with. We're a heavily regulated industry in terms of finance. So security is incredibly important to us. I say in terms of digital transformation, we've probably been doing it for quite a long time. If we look at it in the real sense, we could probably go back to 1968 when we put our first computer into the branch network and the first ATMs for our customers in 1972. We started to look at open source in around 2013 because of our concerns around security. It was something we struggled to open up to, I would say. But we certainly went all in in 2013. And we put our first applications into production with open source in 2015. It's been a massive enabler in that time, really, certainly around DevOps and machine learning. There are two areas that without utilizing open source in that rapid progression that we just wouldn't have been able to do. In terms of strategy, we focus around three areas. So we've got growth, focus, and change. So how we grow our business, so that's where we do new things. That could be an acquisition, another organization, or new features, new functions. Change is how we focus on what we do today well and how we can improve that. Then change is that operational side of things. How do we develop talent? How do we do things like that? That's really important to us as well. But we have a North Star where we want technology now to be part of our DNA. And that's our new strategy in terms of our tech strategy. We want to become probably one of the best fintechs in the UK and that's really important to us. So we're certainly changing and we're sort of aligning technology and business together, which is a little bit different to how we used to be. The business used to drive, whereas now we're a partnership and we collaborate. And that's made a real big difference. In terms of, I'd say, focus around open source today, Kubernetes is very important to us. We've got a lot of applications, three and a half thousand applications, which is a lot too many. We're trying to containerize where it's right to do so to improve those things that we're not probably gonna do a lot with. To make them more efficient. Backstage is also another way we're looking at. We want to ensure that developers have, I guess, an area they can go to, to find out where they can access the services that they need to do their job. That's really important to us. And data is really the big thing. The new oil, as people are saying, we need to understand our customers better and be able to use that information to provide better services for our customers. We're very new to LF and also Finos. We joined earlier this year. And that was because we recognized that to get to our North Star, we've got to leverage the capabilities of open source. That's the only way we're gonna do that. It's so important to us. So we joined, we want to be part of the community. And we've already benefited from that. This year we've created an open source program office. And that's not something we'd really thought of without the help of Finos particularly. One of our values as an organization is sustainability. We're really driving that in terms of, how we as an organization and how we finance sort of green organizations. So that's something as well that's very key to us going forward. Awesome. So those are such compelling narratives. I'm already sold, but we want to get a little bit more into the details. So I'd love to hear from you guys. What are the advantages that you've witnessed with open source? And what are the proof points that this is really working in your company? Lucien, I'm gonna kick it back to you. There are many other advantages, but maybe I would like to focus on one specific advantage that is leverage. And by leverage, of course, I mean leverage in sharing efforts with other partners, but that's not the only thing. We also get leverage in terms of competencies and leverage in terms of credibility. And just to concretely illustrate this, a few years ago, we realized that it could be a high potential in having some ITOT convergence in the automation of power grids. And like following the path that Philippe described in the telecoms, virtualizing some automation functions in the power grid. And moving to software-defined automation functions. And at that time, we were confronted to two challenges. First of all, this is a field of competence that the company does not have. And additionally, the vendor ecosystem was not really happy about this move because their business was selling devices. And RT alone was a too small buyer to force the vendor ecosystem into that vision. So then we created the SIPAS project and the LF Energy umbrella with other partners. And what we are seeing today, first of all, Savoie Ferrinux, who is present today, announced this summer that they have developed a commercial offer based on SIPAS. So they are now investing in the project, a leverage in terms of contributions. Secondly, companies such as Savoie Ferrinux bring competencies in some really complex fields such as the real-time Linux kernel and things like that that we don't have at RT. So, a mentality in terms of competencies. And thirdly, progressively, all our vendors turn back to us and decided to work with us to see how their portfolio could evolve to software-defined solutions based on the technologies that we are working on. So we gained huge credibility and impact through this open-source model that we would never have had as an individual company, in fact. Fantastic. That's one illustration. Okay. Philippe? A hundred percent agree with what you say, Lucien. Perhaps I may add one on a specific topic and highlighting what I introduced with the Silver Project is the way basically industry and companies are able to date two partners. Honestly, on the Silver Topic, so it's an industrial-grade cloud-native stack to basically run 5G open-run and as well, Edge Services use case. Five years back, honestly, it would have been certainly something like a joint venture. So when I'm hearing joint venture in my head, there is a little sound saying, legal process, boring, sorry. So basically, today, what's really interesting, we, Silver is on open-source and thanks to the Linux Foundation Europe, we have a true catalyst to support us and to boost into that direction. So yes, definitely my point will be about the way to make industry-all working together operationally and very fast at the speed of the current business. So the speed to market and the impact moving very quickly. Philip, from your perspective? I would take two examples, maybe the one where things, from my perspective, started was that we were always bound to commercial solution, commercial providers and we saw a certain potential vendor login on the one side so that you are bound to one resource. And the other thing is, as we had a high-volume low-cost market, we wanted to see how we can get a benefit paying less royalties per piece. And this opened up an environment with Linux, for example, to just benefit from this a lot and to also learn the openness because before we had problems in looking into systems and in this way, having it open-source, we could dig into something, really go into drivers, modify something, improve the hardness, grade of it and all on our own and by learning a lot of things and this helped us to get it prepared for open-source business so that we know also how to follow all these processes because there is still, even if you are operating in an openness, you need to make sure you comply with license, you need to check that they, even if you have old intellectual property or you need to respect other intellectual property rights, what do you do with it? You're getting much more exposed. So this is the one thing, but you feel that the people really love to collaborate, to have the openness to be in a discussion and this helps us now in the recent time because you mentioned it also, this is software-defined industry coming and we talk a lot about software-defined vehicles and suddenly things get connected. So it's no longer a single supplier who is responsible for the device, for the software stack, up to the application, just get a little modified at an OEM. So we collaborate with different companies and the boundaries are getting much weaker. So we suddenly are interacting with cloud services, we have digital identities in the car, we have a wallet in the car app stores and what I really like, I saw a recent example when you think about an adaptive cruise control, right? Where you typically have an algorithm which is safety, functional safety-related function, you keep it certain distance, but now you could make use of new ways of open technologies and you need to be very careful of course in your design how to do it, but you could respect weather data, street conditions, or you can get the environmental data around, so you may even see, oh, here is, it could be slippery, it could be wet, and by this you adopt your algorithm and you can become a more safe way of using all these technologies and getting the boundaries together. So this is something really... The flexibility of the learning car, right? That you don't know exactly what the needs will be, but open-source software is going to help you prepare for it. And this creates standards, right? So you have standards and a way of exchange and an open way of exchange with others because you have many companies involved rather than single ones. Awesome, thank you so much. Mark? I agree with everything you've said. Again, for us, definitely that speed of pace of change that open-source enables is very important to us, but also cost, it reduces your cost. You can get into some new technology very, very rapidly. I think another aspect of it is also around as an organisation, you start to change how you operate. You know, we're doing more inner-source, we're doing more hacks, we're just working differently. And what that does is generate enjoyment for engineers. You know, we have about 7,500 engineers and they enjoy work more when they can contribute and they can work in a different way. The things they used to, when they come into a large regulated organisation, it's very different for people. It can be quite hard. And now as an organisation we're changing and we're starting to operate in more an open-source way within the organisation. I think that's important as well because it makes happy engineers and that makes better engineers. Yeah, so a real kind of fuel for talent development and innovation as well. Absolutely. Awesome. Okay, so we're gonna move to the harder part which is what have been kind of the challenges that you've encountered and how have you gone about addressing them? So, Philip, we'll start with you. Yeah, so one challenge which we definitely have in automotive is still that it's a very IP-driven business. So there's a lot about things about intellectual property. You do have smaller devices which you develop on your own and to really bring this forward into a collaboration to work and to contribute to something which is a major challenge we still see. Also, doing the first step, right? You're giving something away so you say, I give something here and then a certain fear of who will follow if there's someone who's following and even if my major competitor is sitting in the same environment to me and would be a partner in this project, you still don't know will this person really bring something in? Am I giving away something which creates direct benefit but this is just something where you just see half of the picture because you see that your competitor is sitting there and wants to shape the same thing as you want to achieve and there's a lot of things which is differentiating where you have core knowledge but you have a very solid base and you need to face same demands like a long, we have 20 years of maintenance as I said so we need to challenge this and we cannot handle CVEs or the regulations in connected environments because we have... So essentially you're sharing the burden and investment that you're making? Yes, sharing the burden, this is something which... to go this first step to the major challenge in there and the other thing with the software-defined vehicle we may see a little bit of shift in there because it's no longer the core technology which you try to give away but you see things which you're not experiencing, you're not experiencing so much in automotive with cloud-native technologies, you get new partners in, you see someone coming from different layers and then it suddenly starts to say, oh, I'm talking to someone who is an expert and I can share some of my concerns, my problems and that starts to enable this and attacking this challenge so here really this connectivity with this really radical change also gives the possibility for more collaboration, for more environmental exchange, regulatory exchange and sharing problem spaces. Thanks for sharing, Lucien. Yeah, maybe the major challenge that we faced is the cultural change and the governance change for our software projects. When we had to go open source, we had to adapt our practices, we had to open our governance to make some room in our roadmaps also for third-party contributions, ideas that are coming from other parties and also putting some effort into some, let's say, proper documentation practices, et cetera. And there was the perception that this could geopolitize our company's road map like the projects would be delayed to accommodate third-party needs, which is true indeed in the very short term. I mean, we had to take some time to enable that but after a few years, we realized that these open source practices are beneficial on the midterm even from an internal perspective. So the open source projects that took the right practices, currently they are performing better than the standard projects at RT because they have better documentation because taking into account third-party needs for additional modularity, so that's good for eviolutivity. And also internally, these practices helped collaboration with the internal stakeholders of those projects. So that also, and that's not surprising actually because we are talking about inner source that is just adopting the open source practices to improve the efficiency of internal projects. So that's... Some serious challenges. Serious challenges, but yeah. It turns to be successful. Mark. Security. Yeah, I think we're running out of time but security is a big issue for us. Also, if we introduce a change that impacts some of our applications, when you've got 26 million users, that would have a catastrophic effect on our business. So we have to be incredibly careful what we do. But saying that open source, we're more comfortable with that. We've seen the benefits of being open source and actually being more secure because of the community. So it is a positive as well as in the past, it's been a negative, but we have to be so careful in that space. Great, thanks for raising that. And Philippe? Very quick, perhaps two more on this. Fully agree with the security one. I may add the trust because with our trust it's extremely complex to implement the services. But what's done by the open SSF is honestly extremely interesting with the Salsa, with the signatures, how to manage the provenance, the dependence and so on. So very, very important for us. And perhaps the last one, and it would be perhaps a controversial one, but how to make this ecosystem sustainable from a funding standpoint. Because when you are basically about 90% of your software stack that is based on open source and you don't spend a euro supporting the ecosystem, how it can really work. Okay, great, that's important to raise. I'm going to extend the panel just very quickly because the last topic I want to raise is super important to everyone in the room, which is how have you seen open source also drive sustainability and social impact? And if you could keep your answers really short and crisp, I think that's important. And perhaps we can have deeper conversations over coffee about how you're going about it. But Mark, I'm going to start with you. Sustainability, I think, is important to all of us. We recognize it and it's one of our values, key values for us. And I just see, as a community, it's probably one of the biggest things that we can enable. When we look at some like Kubernetes, we can make it more energy efficient. And the impact that has globally is massive. The small changes can have a huge impact. So that's why I think as an open source, it's got to be one of the leading drivers for sustainability and technology. And accessibility, also you guys are addressing? Definitely. Again, accessibility, with a big customer base, we've got to ensure that everybody can get access to our applications and the services that we provide. So we've got to explore all the possibilities, whether that's virtual reality or augmented reality, everything, and I think open source, again, is a key area where we can sort of drive rapidly into those areas and make changes. Thanks for setting that example. And testing as well, sorry. I always forget to mention testing for the people that are... Yeah, that's the other side. Yeah, very quickly on this one. So, for instance, on the Silver Project, we have a dedicated sustainable working group. And here, the idea is really to basically got the measure because if you don't have the measure, you don't understand where you stand. And of course, TALCO is, I would say, energy-intensive ecosystem and business. So we absolutely need to leverage this. And the idea is to orchestrate the workloads. And you know the famous quote, network with people, network, sorry, follow people. So we need to switch on or switch off appropriately regarding the number of people who are currently on the network connected. So, yeah, sustainability... Well, thank you for making that paramount. That's really important. Phillip? Yeah, I would take it more as a social aspect. So I see that the driver is the cost. I mentioned it several times now. And I see if you always go for the cheapest solution and if you always try to find a way not to pay for something, it can never be sustainable and can never be showing social responsibility because the person behind need to get money back and need to get it financed whatever the person does and you steal from someone if you don't give back anything. So that's my personal view on this. Cool. Lucien, the last word is yours. Well, I think I can be very short because sustainability is at the heart of LF Energy and this is the north star principle of the foundation. And since we will be... I will talk about LF Energy in the next session. Maybe I can develop elaborate on this at that session. Awesome. Thank you so much, guys. An important narrative that you managed to communicate quickly. I think we could have gone on for a lot longer, but we have the coffee break coming up. So I encourage all of you to engage with these guys because they're really at the forefront and doing an amazing job. Round of applause for our panelists. And...