 After a year of intense work, Professor Knut Lind will give a presentation together with a panel analyzing the findings. Professor Lind has since 2006 been the Professor of Innovation Economics at the Technical University of Berlin. His academic role is the coordinator of the business unit for regulation and innovation at Fraunhofer ISI. It sure will be a challenge to present and discuss the findings as the report is extensive. But if somebody can do it, it's Knut. So Knut, the floor is yours. Yeah, thank you, Astor. I'm quite excited to share with you the results of the study. And just to be a little bit, yeah, and welcome to almost 300 attendees. Just, I remember that I was, I think it was around 26, 2006, attending the presentation of the study results by Richard Gosh under a team kind of put together by Merritt. It was in a small room at the European Commission's kind of premises. And now we are here 50 years later with kind an update and maybe also some new avenues regarding open source software and open source hardware. I have not much time, 20 minutes to talk about the economic impact and the impact beyond open source software and hardware collected by a team by the colleagues of Open Forum Europe. And then Mirko Bimmer and Andrew Katz, you will be here later. But I'd like to thank especially Stephen Page and Paula for their great work. And after my talk, Sachi Kupmutur will then present you only a few policy recommendations. Overall, we, I think, collected more than 30 that we will kind of highlighting the most relevant recommendations, which also Commissioner Petron kind of asked us to deliver. And the plan was really to present the results here at this 5th of February, already last, last February. But there we didn't know what kind of would happen in 2020. Therefore, it was even, or it's even more great achievement to have now this opportunity to send these results going through the whole COVID crisis and challenges. And before I'm going to start, I'd like to acknowledge also the great support by Frank Nagler from the Harvard Business School. I will mention him later because he was also very helpful during the last year. Also, the different and many experts and their different support by the OFE experts group. The interviewees, we talked to the respondents to the stakeholder survey, but also last and I think more important, most important, Augusteas and Luis from Hitchick Connect, who are kind of responsible for kind of accompanying us through this study. And they gave us these 5 tasks. It means first, and this is kind of the focus of my brief talk about the economic impact of open source software and also hardware. And then the colleagues from OFE, they did some policy analysis of policies in the EU in different member states, but also at the commission level and worldwide. We do not have time to present this work, but this more or less implicitly goes into the policy recommendation. And then we have tasks for the case study analysis here in the panel, Mirko and Andrew will talk about and all this then went into the division of policy recommendations. We kind of translated that a little bit into a different methodological approach. That means we really looked at the literature, which has been kind of collected or augmented in the last 20 years. We looked at what data is available. And then this is the basis both for the impact assessment, but also for drafting the questionnaire for the stakeholder survey, because there are different other surveys running and the Linux Foundation already mentioned, they had a big survey also last year. Then we have these case studies where we do not have much time to talk about, but here later, Mirko and Andrew will talk about. And then, as I mentioned, these analysis of policy initiatives and all this went into a kind of a comprehensive analysis and a large set of recommendations. What's the overall approach we choose? This is kind of a two-sided approach. We looked first at the cost, what do companies and countries invest in the development of open source software? It means here we focus on software and not on hardware, because this is a kind of a case-based approach we have to. And we do that on country and also company level looking at the most active companies. And also, we had some information from this stakeholder service and other service plastic case studies. And then we compare that also with the benefits. We do that on the one hand, at the macro level with the macro economy growth model and the analysis of the contributions of open source software to the GDP and EU. And we also do that on the company level. Here we derive all the results from the stakeholder survey, but other other surveys like here in Germany, the Bitcoin kind of started the open source monitor also last year with the representative survey of companies. And we kind of cross validate these different approaches in order then to come up with the figures which are at least kind of validated from different perspectives in order to be kind of really a serious. The data sources here regarding open source software, it's a GitHub, it's also used by Frank Nagel and others in different studies, because here we have millions of users, billions of comets, links to organizations and country codes, which makes this country and EU a kind of based study possible. Then we combine that with data from the OECD. They always start patent offices because they also responsible for trademarks, crunch based and the company data and various other data sources. Looking at the developments in the last 10 years, it's a continuous kind of growth of comets to GitHub. And here's Belgium, Germany and the UK, but those of all from France are quite active. These are the comets, but maybe here are the contributors where we see a little stagnation after 2017, 2018. It's stable. Overall, here we have more than 30 million comets and 250,000 contributors. I will come back to these figures later. This cost-based impact lesson is more or less, I know, a baseline approach to really kind of start with what are the efforts, both on the country level here in the EU, that means the member states, but also then we sampled the around 2,000 most active companies and organizations which are located with headquarters in the EU and looked at their efforts. And these are kind of lower bound assessments, because as I already mentioned, we cannot kind of attribute every contributor and every commit to kind of an EU member states or the EU. We are missing probably 50% of that. And the basic approach or assumption beyond this approach, this goes back also to work by North House, he's a Nobel Prize winner, about the assessment to value public goods and also other intentional steps where you look at the cost side and you say, okay, these investments are at least kind of a minimum benefit you can expect. And that's the baseline approach we took. And what it found overall, we have around 3 million employees in the computer programming sector in the EU. And in our analysis, we found 260,000 contributors to GitHub, which are kind of located to the EU. That means this might be more, and this are slightly less than 10% of these people employed in the computer programming sector. However, it's clear that also other sectors contribute to open source, but nevertheless, this is the most important sector. If you look at the cost in order to hire or pay these people, this then amounts in 2018 to 14 billion. On the other hand, we also looked at the comets and use the kind of also well established model to calculate the so-called full-time equivalents needed to produce these comets. And here we come up to 16,000 full-time equivalents, which in order to pay them, we need more or less more than 1 billion euro in the EU in 2018. These are the baseline calculations from the cost perspective on the macro level. Then, as I said, we identified the most active companies which had a headquarter in the EU, and they are responsible for more than 10% of the contributors, even for one third of all the comets coming from the EU. And they employ more than 1 million employees. And what we see, and that's also a very important kind of finding, which is also becoming relevant for the policy recommendations, is that we see in Europe a very high share of small companies which are really most active in participating and contributing to open source. That means more than 75% of these companies have less than 100 employees. That means we are here in the SME or even in the micro company sector where we find most active companies. And the smaller the companies, the more contributors they are listing and the more comets they provide. That means overall, we see that in the sample of the most active companies between 1100 employees that they invest more than 5% of the full-time equivalents in contributing to open source. And overall, if we put the macro and the company-based figures regarding cost together, we find quite valid and reasonable and kind of sensitive results. That means on the cost level, I think that's a fair picture. Now, at the benefit level, it's a little more challenging. Here we kind of run a growth model and include besides R&D and other kind of indicators for technological progress, also the contributions to open source. And we find that between 2017 and 2018 that the contributions are 0.4% of GDP in the EU. If we then take the total number, then we come up to 36 billion per year. That's the base on the comets. If we take the contributors as a specific kind of subgroup of the labor force, it goes even up to 95 billion per year. It means overall, the EU economy is significantly banded fitting from open source. And in the future, one could say properly that by increasing this activity by 10% per year, additional 100 billion GDP per year can be expected. In order to put this figure a little bit in context with my other history on standardization, we did some studies on the contribution of standardization for the German economy 20 years ago. And we find that the German economy benefits 15 billion per year by the standardization work, which is not the same than open source, but sometimes in some dimensions, some kind of similar mechanism. That means also in this context, these figures are nicely put in context. That means that's the benefit assessment on the macro side. And if we put this together and also taking into account that in 2018, also a significant kind of open source has been used, which has been produced before, also considering additional hardware costs, which the contributors need, we come up with a cost-benefit ratio to one to four. That means one full-time equivalent contributing to open source generates additional GDP of four times this cost. And there are other studies which look at the contribution of ICT hardware and also quite recently about innovation expenditure in general. And they find, especially the last study from the US, they find also a cost-benefit ratio of the investment of one euro for R&D generates four additional euros in GDP. And this as a baseline, as a minimum level. That means also here, we have quite consistent findings. Now, what we also did, and again, thanks for both the contributions to designing this stakeholder work survey, but also to contributing to the response to it. We did that last from September to November. The idea was to gather and fill the views on the impact of open source software, but also here in hardware. That means the previous speakers are not covering the hardware story and also to fill some gaps which are from the literature not covered that the existing data is not really kind of providing. And also the case studies, Mirko Bülmen and Ruketz conducted, didn't fulfill, then we thought we might also then use this stakeholder survey in order to close these gaps. And in order to really create a robust representation of all their opinions and issues at stake, that means also taking all different stakeholders into account. Not only industry, that means companies, but also research organizations, the public sector, NGOs, and even foundations. And this as presented at the very beginning is contributing them to the revision of policy recommendations. Overall, with the help also by the colleagues from the European Commission, several open source organizations, including foundations, we got over all 900, more than 900 responses who are at least partly answering the question. That means that the more sensitive issues about kind of profits and turnovers, they hear the responses is a little bit significantly low. Now what are the major findings, which are also from their character a little bit complimentary to these hard cost figures. Why are organizations in general contributing to open source software and hardware, although I have to say the responses from the hardware community were quite limited. Therefore, the findings are, I think, representative for the software sector, but not necessarily for the hardware sector. We come back to the hardware sector later. What are the major incentives? It's about finding technical solutions, but also carrying forward the state of the art of technology that needs contributed to technical progress is very important. And also, and this is also from a macro and political perspective, an important aspect is to avoid the lock in into specific vendors. That's also on the top kind of incentives. On the fourth and fifth position, it's about knowledge seeking and knowledge creation. That means reflecting the principle of open source. Now looking at the benefits, what are the benefits? And here, open source provides open standards and interoperability. And in a connected world, these are especially interoperability, maybe kind of realized by open standards is key and this is becoming even more important. By the way, we did some other studies where we found that meanwhile, patents do not contribute any more to much or to GDP, but but standards are still doing that and having even an increasing relevance. And this is also reflected by these assessment, then the access to source code and again, the independence from proprietary providers of software. We also asked for the cost aspects, because maybe there are some additional cost aspects we we missed in our cost based impact assessment. Overall, the different cost aspects are less relevant. However, the issue of stability and and and areas of accessibility are important. And also, what what's key is the cost for skilled labor to to contribute and use open source. And this is also again coming back to the Bitcoin survey, a very important challenge. And this will be also then later reflected in their policy recommendation, because there is the shortage of skilled labor is is an issue. Now, we also asked them for cost benefit ratio, just to validate what we have found on this more quantitative approach here just to get the gut feeling from the respondents. And overall, we see that the majority of the respondents see at least high benefits and only medium costs related to open source software and hardware. And then we even ask for a specific number. And then here, the people have a kind of the assessment of one to 10, which is which is higher than the percentage before, but this is probably also do some subjectivity bias. That means these are the main results of the of the stakeholder survey. Overall, what we see is Europe is really making heavy investments into open source. Also, the companies who are located with the headquarters in Europe are making really a major, major kind of investments and only kind of taking the labor cost for the full time equivalence is one billion if you take the contributions of 15 million a billion per year in 2018. And this is a little bit different than what we see for the US where here the big tech companies are the major contributors. And we do not see kind of this very high share of small players. Looking at the benefit side, as I said before, based on some macroeconomic calculations, we could see for the future an additional kind of 100 billion euros in GDP per year with an increase or driven by an increase of 10% of more comets or 10% more contributors to open source. And as a third bullet, which I didn't kind of introduce so far, Frank Nagler and colleagues, they did a study on the role of open source for for ICT startups on a global level. And based on their findings, what's possible then to calculate the contributions of open source to startups in the EU and what taking their approach and their figures, what we find here that again a 10% increase in the kind of contribution to open source would create additional 1000 ICT startups per year. And that's that's very important. Because here we also see quite a shortage. I just saw yesterday some figures from Germany in the last 10 years, the kind of startup development really was slightly decreasing and it's not really the recovery. We also see and this is from the case studies and later in the panel maybe Andrew and Mikko can talk about this a little bit more is that the total cost of ownership in the public sector can be reduced regarding software and especially the avoidance of Vandalog N on the micro level but also the contribution of open source to increase or assure digital autonomy is a very important aspect. Overall, the benefits are of open source are related to openness, including the contribution to open standards, independence and also labor cost savings. That's also a very important aspect which drives the benefits of open source but which also is an important driver for companies to get involved. And overall it's not so much about generating additional revenue. That was very short, very condensed and maybe too fast. The summary of the main results from the one part of the study later will be then presented by Sachiko. Thank you Knut and also thank you to everybody contributing in the chat. I hope we have a way to capture all the comments. These are still useful. We are still working on agreeing the final report and so there might be an opportunity to take into account some of these comments. So thank you for adding also an element of liveliness to the event. Now the commissioner asked us just now to focus on what brings value to Europe and he also talked about open source as an idea that has turned into multiple success stories now. And for someone who has believed in and promoted the idea of open for over 10 years, I have to say it's great to see the value that open source contributes to the European economy quantified in this way. So this is really exciting. Now indeed an important task in the study consists of formulating policy recommendations and I feel here the need to make the point that Knut's presentation really shows that there is a significant impact of open source to the GDP of the EU which justifies a scaling up of policy intervention to support open source software and hardware in all sectors of the economy and public administration as well. In our study, the recommendations are conceptually organized around the different functions of innovation systems. They have been discussed with practitioners from the public sector in an online workshop and also discussed with our experts and where necessary have been adopted. Now given the time constraints today Knut had a short time to present the study. I have an even shorter time to give you a glimpse into some of these areas of recommendations. In total in the study they are over 30 of them and we have their strive to make the recommendations specific and actionable and of course they are much more fully elaborated in the final report so I apologize for sort of needing to rush through them. I hope it doesn't seem that they are not well founded because of that. As Astor already mentioned there will be further opportunities this year to discuss in more detail what we present here today. So again I will focus only on the areas highlighted in the presentation. The first one and I want to really emphasize this. We consider that increasing the institutional capacity within the public sector related to open source software especially is a necessary condition to being able to implement all the other recommendations in the report. Today and I think it's important to say the scale of Europe's aggregate institutional capacity related to open source we think is this proportionately smaller than the total value created by open source. And that is to say that also we know the European Commission and others have initiated activities and programs in some of these areas that are that are valuable but we need to scale this up to match the potential that open source has in growing the economy. So and again just highlighting one area where we feel that the European Commission can take action to promote this is through the OSPO so an open source program office. And we have seen this emerging as a fundamental building block and a networking interface strengthening the institutional infrastructure of open source also in the private sector I would say mainly and so the European Commission has already created an OSPO as part of its open source strategy and we believe that the European Commission can play a leading role in also establishing OSPOS in government institutions across Europe. And therefore you know we want to emphasize this this way that the European Commission can play a leadership role by highlighting some points mainly giving the the the European OSPO an external networking component and encouraging the building of 20 or so OSPOS throughout Europe possibly through a pilot funding program and creating a network where these OSPOS can share best practices. And we think that in this way OSPOS can play you know an important role in encouraging that winning open source culture that the commissioner was talking about. Now another important slide and I'm going to rush through them here. We have seen again the what Knuth presented these significant positive externalities that are generated by open source and which is also confirmed in other studies and this recommends this you know it justifies us recommending level of public R&D funding of specific open source software and open source hardware focused research you know for example in Horizon Europe and the the figure I'm showing there is that we can see that if we focus specifically on SMEs we think we think that such funding should focus target mainly SMEs or even micro enterprises and startups because of this this virtuous R&D funding cycle that we see here. So basically if public funding and R&D of SMEs that can contribute to open source software that would you know would support and push the creation of further startups which will then increase again the available source code and can benefit society. Next slide Sivan I'm trying to move forward. Yeah so an important part of you know an important function of an innovation system deals with human capital development and here we see that a lack of skilled labor does prevent companies from using and contributing to open source software in Europe and so an important area to focus on will be just the development of the skills needed to be able to benefit as a whole and we do recommend we have specific recommendations how we can promote coding skills but also at the entrepreneurial level skills to understand how you can build a company and a viable business model using open source so we believe there's a sort of basic skills level that should be should be supported and also sort of change in in culture and and just I guess a sort of further realization of the opportunities that exist working with open source and so next slide I'm going to try to wrap up quickly and so creation of the legitimacy this is in fundamental for the breakthrough of an emerging technological system especially now we're talking about open source hardware which is developing but also for the further development of established technologies like open source software now we think that one opportunity to increase the legitimacy of open source is to further elaborate the role that open source can play in achieving digital autonomy or independence I think the commissioner used the word actually the term technological independence and we also recommend other ways to create legitimacy for example by integrating open source communities more into the European research and policy frameworks here we can maybe learn from from the world of standardization where SEOs are already well integrated into these policy frameworks whereas for open source communities such integration is still at the beginning and we think that this can go beyond research innovation to also integrate open source further into Europe the European Green Deal and European industrial strategy and we might also consider public support of open source foundations that could be raised to a level comparable to the support provided to SEOs okay finally the regulatory environment and again I'm sorry I would like to go into these things in much more detail but one of the looking again at innovation we know that high risk of liability can hamper innovation and we have seen this I think recently as obstacles to use and also to contribute to open source software and particularly open source hardware in the area of medical devices developed to tackle the challenges of COVID-19 and at the same time there's a lot of opportunity in this area so we recommend increasing legal security by clarifying the liability regime especially for individual developers and of course well of course ensuring the safety of users and coming here really we know the commission has has a has a project that has been renewed also looking into improving the security of open source software components that underlie you know the critical infrastructure of Europe and we would recommend scaling up this activity and also in order to fully you know public procurement plays an important role as we know in in in in Europe giving the large size of the public sector and we believe and this is something that we've focused on quite for you know over a decade in in open firm Europe but you know really consider open source in future revisions of the european public procurement directive and to develop guidelines for how to procure open source software final slide we can just say that we think that you know the large economic impact of open source software and potential impact of emerging open source hardware it has been recognized by the european commission but the scale needs to be be increased and and to look for coordination across europe and we think the commission can play an important role there now i hope i managed to wet your appetite a little bit by this glimpse into the policy recommendations of the study and now to discuss this further i am happy to be joined by other members of the research and for a discussion which is moderated by oiffy's very own chairman and founder Graham Taylor it's great to have you uh with us uh today thanks Sachiko um i hope everybody could hear me okay so uh if not then somebody will shout at me i'm sure um but hopefully i'm going to be joining four other people um as well it was sorry yeah four other people as well as Sachiko so let's just see if we've got there we've got Merco great um anyhow while we're getting those come up um just to say very much i'm delighted to be here i think it's a fantastic summit and the studies is is superb as well um it's was what 2006 since the last study uh was run and uh many of you remember Rishabh gosh at that time and of course uh Luke Sutter who's with us today was uh headed up that overall thing for mastery so it's going to have Luke back here he's been at a of our previous summits as well anyhow my job in the next half hour maximum i guess i suspect Astor will try and cut me off a bit shorter than that is to try and delve into some of the detail a little bit more detail um go into some of the the results of the study and try and draw some out some of the more the interesting aspects of the conclusions i think came so let me just introduce those of the two people or the three people that you haven't seen so far uh first of all Andrew Katz Andrew is an open forum academy fellow um he's a a lawyer and head of technology and CEO at the UK law firm of more more cost but Andrew in this study has been focusing very much on the open source hardware aspects of the project but again many of you but most of you will know him with his background in open source Merco Berm is again very well known to everybody um and is now open source ambassador at Daimler against somebody very well known to everybody i think listening in on on the summit today has taken really i think the leading role on some of the open source aspects of the study but as a guest and not part of the study as such i said is Luke Serta Luke is now the honorary professor of international economics at Maastricht as i said uh Luke has been involved in the whole economic uh view of technology for many years he spoken with us before um he was involved in that very first study that Sachiko uh related to um he's got a formidable background i think on economics he was the uh rectum magnifica set Maastricht is still a member of many international organizations um and i think particularly is looking at some of the um economic aspects of technology and innovation and speaking to him the other night very much i think interested in some of the areas of open innovation so for me uh that's a really good place to start and perhaps Luke if you could just just talk a little bit about what you've seen in the changes in the whole view of uh technology of openness and innovation and particularly open sourcing perhaps in those last 15 years um and as i go i've got some other specific questions you know to the other guys on on the panel please feel free to dive in as well so let's try and get a little bit more of a discussion great q and a session but look perhaps you could just kick off with that as a topic and let's take it forward well thanks thanks very much Graham and it's as somebody remarked in the chat the old guard is here and to some extent the proof that there is now a clear history to open source uh and that this is pretty fantastic to see to be surrounded as old guys here by all these young researchers and young participants just on your question i would say that back in the 2005 and 2006 we felt i must say at that time a little bit like david versus goliath and i still remember very much when we did the study on the economic impact of open source software it was a fight we need to to convince public policymakers to convince the european union also and of course we had opposed to us we had there's no doubt about this the goliath was microsoft so to say we focused and i think in that debate we used even the terms of open standards much more than open source to get to to get the argument advanced i would say over the last 15 years the roles have been to some extent that david has become a goliath itself but not in a fight so much but more well as as you all know the the change on the the microsoft side of having once called linux cancer and now satya nadela calling linux or being in love with linux etc and being all in on open source so i think this has been a tremendous change and i think the study and the figures you highlighted or which were emphasized by both knut and sachiko illustrate this enormous growth impact of what has happened in the 15 years so i think the situation is totally different from that perspective and i find it remarkable what has what the study shows in terms of the economic impact of this 100 billion gdp impact which is is really very impressive if you look at the full impact of digital technologies thanks luke you you've talked very much about the economic aspects and that clearly has been the focus as well what about the innovative aspects though the open innovation you know in terms of openness overall and how that fits into that thinking around that which is as much cultural i would suggest as it is technological yeah no i think this is a very good point i think if you look at the debates which as we have had them in europe in the particularly in european commission we've had this debate on open science which was launched by another commissioner the commissioner on on research and innovation the previous one carlos moirdash that has been enlarged from open science to open innovation you see now terry breton commissioner who really called upon the impact of open source on he called it exactly if i heard his words right scrutinizing artificial intelligence developing this kind of this whole idea of technological whatever sovereignty independence you can debate about this but at least to create a spirit of open innovation as it has become also popular in much european commission writings why i think this is is really as an idea as a concept and indeed as a culture is becoming rather crucial is that you could imagine that with the covet 19 impact and the whole medical field just imagine that we would have the open source principles applied in the medical field which i'm sure will happen in post corona time there will be a new discussion about the way the whole medical sector and the different and the development of vaccines or development of other drugs is subject to a system which is completely at the opposite of open source so i i think that the open source community can show his insights in terms of revising the system of proprietary innovations as they exist in in the extreme form of course in the medical field yeah and we've seen a lot of that happening in the perspective of open hardware as well particularly as in the covet perspective so i that that's that that's proved to be very very interesting people are having to learn very quickly about the ways that they can collaborate and also learning about the the friction that exists and obviously you know one thing we need to do is to try to reduce that friction as much as possible now i think this is where open look i think it's harari who mentioned with respect to covet 19 a scientific triumph and a political fiasco yeah and i think the scientific triumph has been based on open science in the sense of the underlying the exchange of data the open access to data etc the political fiasco is in relationship to the today with respect to vaccine access etc and it's all to do with the way in which we don't have the access to the underlying technological knowledge for instance with respect to vaccine development so i think the open source community has really a crucial role to play today in the whole notion of open innovation yeah absolutely and i suppose some of the developments as far as open source program offices are concerned means that they can initially focus on open source the understanding of open source that we have and then gradually use that as a springboard to introduce other opens as well which are relevant to that so open governance open hardware open data open science and so on so if an open source program office for example within an academic context becomes a real a real sort of center of of information and dissemination you know that can be a very powerful thing but something that you know the open source strategy of the european nation you know talks about quite a bit about how the actually the the experience of open source working with open source communities has had this spillover effect for you know that has applied to the way that you know the european commission works together in turn and i think for us i know if you use we've always focused on this with the cultural aspects of open i think that that's really interesting and i think we need more of that it's about you know building on existing knowledge you know standing on the shoulders of giants etc will be better if we don't reinvent the wheel we have you know we lost our leader but i think you know we have to prove now you know that the principles of self you know governing communities you know it works so graham you're back yeah i don't know i suddenly lost all of you so i apologize i don't know where the problem was i want to extend on what sachiko said i think this kind of leads into this question of like now that open source is very successful um what is what's the what are the next steps like is are we done and i think um what luka's just laid out indicates that we're not completely done yet right there a lot there's a lot to be proud of um we are well established and in civil society and enterprise and politics but there are still some problems that i think that remain unsolved um the the covid 19 apps show us um that some aspects of open source like reuse of code work quite well we see austria australia forking from singapore or or belgium german forking from germany but we don't what we don't see here is a lot of collaboration on the actual development and this indicates um i think quite some potential to go from here so we've learned to share what we've not necessarily learned to to work together um in the open source sense for example cross countries um also we see that large companies that technically could be champions for example in europe um struggled the most in adopting open source and the small and medium-sized companies that king just mentioned in the results they they kind of lead the way so there's still a lot to do i think we've come quite far um we can be proud of the results and the growth potential is amazing um but i think there's still a lot of work to do i'm not sure if you've covered anything while i was off but one of the areas i wanted to pick on because going through the results we didn't get a lot of discussion around open source hardware so andrew you know how far do you think open source hardware has come how far clearly has it got to go and do you think what are the lessons you think can be learned from open source software um particularly i'm thinking of some of the community and cultural aspects yeah i mean what's very interesting about open source hardware is that um there is a really a very broad spectrum of what that means so it can it can mean sort of anything from mechanical devices very hard hardware um that you know you need things like um lathes and mills um to create a large factory um right through to things that are much more similar to software so this this would be i mean when people are talking about programming or configuring FPGAs for example using hardware description languages um then they will talk about that being hardware as well so what what we've learned is that um you know there is this vast spectrum from mechanical devices like trucks um in the middle some way you're looking at electronic devices um that's like arduinos for example um and then you're looking for for looking at things like open silica and FPGAs um and the way that uh the all of the characteristics of open source software that we've learned they impinge differently depending on how hard the hardware is so and you can have um a product um like project like myriad rf for example um that consists of FPGAs so there's communities that are developed around the the programming of the hardware description language to configure the FPGAs um then you've got um the the the the firmware and the software around those um and then you've got the actual circuit boards themselves and so they're on a they're on a sort of spectrum of of hardwareness um and the open silicon area i think is the is the most interesting one because that is in many ways it is very very similar um to open source software and the sort of communities that will develop around open silicon they can be very similar to the sort of communities that develop around open source software because a lot of the development methodology is very similar you know you can put your core designs on github for example um you can have a community of of people who are able to make changes to those core designs and they're able and the the cycle that you have of development testing and production is very similar to the cycle that you would have with development testing and production of software but if you're talking about something like a circuit board then that that's that's very different and what what we've what we've seen um is that different sorts of communities will will develop so the ones that develop around software and things like um hdl um programming um they're they're quite similar in that they sort of adopt the opens frequently adopt the open source ideas of release early release release often um whereas uh there's a it's been described as open when ready tends to be more applicable to things that are more at the harder end of the of the hardware at scale so this is something that the open compute project has seen quite a lot for example whether designs are released you know once that they're developed using a fairly fairly traditional um in-house development methodology but they are released um when they're ready and then a community forms around essentially the the completed designs do you see then that we're going to see the same sort of progress as we saw on open source okay open source software always is going to be something uh on a much lower basis um i think the most interesting area is definitely around open silicon and i think that's where there is the uh the the biggest potential um i think there are there are always going to be constraints because physical items are physical and therefore they need to be made of atoms and therefore you need to um look at a whole load of characteristics like you know the the actual physical physical tooling that you need the feedstock the environment you know there are many many more potential constraints on the development cycle in the harder end of hardware um than there are in the in the softer end so i think the uh i think the softer end um has got an enormous amount of potential that's not to say that there isn't potential um in the harder end as well but i think the dynamics are going to be going to be very different um but they you know there are things do not necessarily have to be completely open um in order to obtain all all of the benefits but what we've seen is the more open that things are the more benefits that they obtain and that's something that's possibly easier to attain um at the softer end of the spectrum than it is at the harder end okay no just moving on because i know we've got i've got a hard stop on this i think at 20 past so a couple of the areas that i did want to recover and i particularly wanted to pick up the areas i guess it's two areas of culture and skills and that's something is potentially i think common of course open source hardware and open source software um and i don't know if newton sachiko perhaps want to kick this off is your views on that because on the skills that came out in the project but for people who don't the background of open source software don't really haven't been into it um the cultural aspect is really quite a hard one to understand and i know it's something that is much less tangible to measure for some of the things in the project so i don't know if newt or sachiko want to kick off on that and perhaps any of the others come in as well ladies first okay um then i i i take the opportunity to make maybe a somewhat personal comment on this because i think we we all know that you know to change culture we need to start with the children and um and i'm going to say here that it's not just about focusing on open source it's really fundamental about focusing on you know young people becoming creators uh you know versus consumers and i think a lot will be gained just by um making um you know changing uh early you know even early childhood curricula to to um you know you see uh you know it's not enough um for for europe to bring tablets into the into the into the classroom we need to uh we need to encourage programs where where where children learn how to how to code and i think you know in that in that way a lot will be you know and learn how to tinker with with with um with things as well i really think a lot will be won then uh anyway knut do you want to come in yeah indeed i think education should start uh related to openness in general as as soon as possible and because what what we are going to face is um we have a already a general problem regarding kind of skills and we have some demographic issues especially in europe we have to face and and therefore the the competition for for people and contributing also to open sources is getting is getting harder uh that's that's that's just from from the quantities and and therefore we we have to to increase our uh efforts regarding education on the one hand and and also um i think we should get kind of a global coalition and try to maybe we think that the the discussions or the trends we we saw in the last uh a few years to uh where every country or every block twice to uh kind of yeah maybe close a little bit their their value chains i think here open sources is a way to to really keep these these value chains open to to uh to also to uh to assure independence and and then we kind of we did some work on technological sovereignty and i think open source software but also open source hardware is a very important element in in assuring this technological i'd like to add what is the sorry on on the of education um i think we've had a focus in the past more on on teaching kids well how to use something that exists and basically look at it from the from the surface um look at maybe marketable skills which is necessary of course but not the only thing i think what we require is a shift to learning and teaching how things really work and that requires for the systems that you teach to be introspectable and and that means it's a matter of maybe principle more than cost and um direct benefits of teaching not just about open source but with open source as well uh it basically gives gives the the children the opportunity to dig as deep as they like to learn how programs and computers work okay i'm keen though is there anything specific in the study that you've made as a recommendation particularly looking at the commission that you'd like to see them taking as the next step in this area what i just said is at least stated and one of the recommendations okay look i'm very conscious of the time um i did want to cover one other area if we possibly can and that is look at some of the globalization aspects we talk quite regularly now about digital sovereignty digital autonomy choose your take your choose your language for that but again are there aspects in the study that you think are important for the commission to understand in terms of its and the way that it moves forward in particularly with some of the recommendations so i don't know if Nutt wants to come in here luke you might want to comment at this point as well looking at it overall because you've had a wider aspect as well luke well i i can't i can't say much about the study but i i pick up what i heard from sashiko in particular on the open source program officers i think that's something one could pursue in the way they could throughout the e you could indeed be an element which could help and develop i mean the remains of course that on procurement less progress has been made than than i certainly think we had hoped for back in 2006 and i think this has a lot to do of course with the the lock in at least vandalok in which occurred in many public services over the years i still to come back even on the previous issue about education if you reflect on it i guess differently from our the countries we are in many of the countries have closed schools or we have virtual education it's for me it still seems very strange that we don't have anything on public television for instance where we have according to classes open courses using open source in particular areas why is it that every school has its own online program closed locked in just to its own students why don't we have just mooks as they were developed at levels of different schooling and open to kids from different schools etc so all this is still an area where i'm amazed that so much progress could be made but where the public part of it seems to be tremendously nagging i took just to to continue one one one aspect i think the the big challenge is what what we are going to face and after covid 19 is certainly the climate change and and here we need global solutions and and here open source software but also open source hardware can make really a major major kind of contribution in order to maybe tackle this challenge successfully as a global society okay my conscience has appeared at the bottom of the screen there so thank you all for your contribution it's a great shame i think that we're having a lot longer time to go into some of the details i think the the study is a fantastic opportunity for the open source community and hopefully the open source hardware community to develop and move forward and it's i think great that we see some good progress so thank you all astra back to you perfect thank you graham knut luke satchika mercon andrew and as graham said it is a lot of information to digest not just what's mentioned here today but also just the the study itself is expansive but we at oaf e and this is just a heads up we will host an in-depth event later in the spring to really discuss the findings where you can ask all the questions that you might have this will be around the time when the final version is published