 I'm actually MCing and keynoteing and we're going to talk about all the amazing announcements and news in the open source community in Europe from the Linux Foundation Europe standpoint and more globally across the open source world in the Linux Foundation. Hi, this is your host Appli Bharti and we are here at open source summit in Bilbois. And today we have with us once again, Gabriele Colombro, GM of Linux Foundation Europe and executive director of Finos. Gabriele, it's good to have you back on the show and actually you are the one who's opening my whole interview sessions here at the event. We met a few months ago at the open source summit in Vancouver and there is so much to talk about especially that you are MCing this event, you delivered a keynote and a lot of announcements there but before we go there just tell me how has been the event so far, what kind of audience, what kind of turnout. Let's just talk about the event. Well, first of all thanks for having me here Swapnail. It's always a great pleasure. Well, I feel at home here. I actually, I'm Italian but I've studied in Spain, I speak Spanish and it's you know Bilbois is such a beautiful city. The event is looking great, the venue is fantastic. I think we had a great turnout, the keynote this year. I've been MCing for the first time as you know I run Linux Foundation Europe now so I was really pleased with sort of the energy. I mean we're just at the beginning but I see folks being very engaged. It's a momentous time in open source and I think the crowd is very diverse, you know corporate contributors, individual contributors, public sector, I think they get that this is a super interesting time in open source. Now, when we look at TechConf as in a general open source summit before that it was LinuxCon, you folks play a very big role in this space and I do like to repeat that message because the fact is Linux Foundation, you folks paved path for a lot of corporate players, companies to not only start embracing open source but also get involved with it. So talk a bit about corporate presence, companies presence or just give us kind of some takeaways, highlight of your keynote this morning. I think you make a very important point and this was actually one of the themes in the keynote. I tried to really tee up the common traits and the themes that we're going to develop over the next three days. Linux Foundation does you know bring together all the different constituents and historically as you say the open governance model that the Linux Foundation provides is really about creating a level playing field for individuals and corporate contributors. I would add with my Linux Foundation Europe hat on that we are seeing a new frontier here where the public sector is starting to also get engaged more effectively in open source and in fact you know this is one of the themes that have started developing today during my opening keynote we've identified five main themes that we're going to touch on throughout the conference through the announcements that we're going to make and that really are very topical you know across the Linux Foundation but particularly in Europe I think and the first two we really started today. The first one is the critical role of open source in vertical industries as you know I also run Phinos so I might be a little biased here but I have seen how open source is now pervasive in you know finance through Phinos in telco through LF networking. We actually announced today Project Silver which is another European based LF Europe centric cloud telco project across the large operators and mobile operators in Europe so definitely vertical industry is continues to be I think an important area of development open source is not just about technology it's truly about delivering business values as industries undergo the digital transformation so I think this is the sort of one of the key themes I developed today and then the second one is we touched on it the growth of public sector engagement in open source the creation of venues for the government to be effectively influencing and participating open source projects you know the open wallet foundation it's one of our LF Europe projects has a government advisory council has recently announced Microsoft and Google as members so that really is the epitome of this idea of bringing together the public sector technology companies industry companies across the same project in open source and then there's a couple more teams that we're going to develop in the next few days through our announcements and our keynotes you know you would not be surprised to hear that one of them is open source and AI and I'm not going to spoil it just yet but clearly we've seen in 2023 the year of AI we've seen how open source has accelerated the democratization and innovation of AI through the you know llama a large language model sort of being the first milestone in this area and so we're going to have some exciting announcements throughout the week here and then finally the other two teams are open source and sustainability it's something that is really critical you know not just open source sustainability but the impact that open source can make on sustainability and issues like climate change social inclusion and then last but not least kind of going back to your initial point the importance of open governance as an additional layer on top of of course open source and using licenses that are you know allow the value exchange that we're so used to in the open source community kind of going back to the theme of open governance and the importance of it I think you know one of the major news earlier this year was you know Hashikarp changing their license for Terraform on some parts of Terraform to the business source license which is effectively not an open source license and so probably most folks in the community are familiar with the fact that a fork a hard fork has been launched formally known as OpenTF with the manifesto they came out and we're very excited to announce this week that uh uh now called OpenTFU will become a Linux foundation project tofu is of course a very malleable food and the idea is really that this new framework will be supportive and adaptable to all needs in terms of you know infrastructure provisioning uh and you know before I close I want to be clear this is not a religious thing I think each corporate like Hashikarp has fully their prerogative of you know changing the license of a project that they own the full copyright for but from the consumer standpoint from the standpoint of a individual or a company or an enterprise that is investing or creating a dependency on an open source project it's truly important to be able to say hey I have an alternative I have optionality I know that the project that is openly governed will not change the license and sort of change my risk profile effectively and so I think this goes back to what we were talking before about you know the importance of layering open governance on top of open source and that's of course you know sort of our bread and butter you mentioned AI and as you know genitive AI AI is a hot topic these days and I feel that this is a place where a Linux foundation can play a very big role there are a lot of AI related projects which has the word open in it but they are not truly open source so talk about what is Linux foundation doing what are what are you folks doing in this space you're absolutely right and we're very excited uh on Thursday oh sorry I restart um yeah we're you're absolutely right snapnail uh open source and AI uh you know has been a hot topic this year I mean AI itself as of late 2022 of course we're we're I would say leaving the AI summer as opposed to the AI winter over the last couple of decades um but you know earlier in the year most people probably have seen the leaked paper from google called we have no moat that really truly talked about how open source large language models uh are accelerating faster than anyone would have had predicted and that really you know the paper really said neither google nor open AI have a moat versus open source AI innovation and so uh you know if you pair that with the need for open governance around some of these large language models and the idea that you know it's important that such a powerful technology be democratized um we are super excited uh to announce uh that uh we're starting a new initiative under the LFAI and data foundation called generative AI comments uh we are going to host uh um you know we're going to provide a way to have large language models in uh an openly governed uh fashion and we're also announcing our first large language model uh contributed to the linux foundation under the gen AI comments under the auspices of LFAI and data so very exciting developments I think for the open source community and for the AI community now let's talk about Linux foundation Europe it was announced almost a year ago in in Dublin let's talk about some updates on the foundation let's talk about either new members new projects just give us a date what's going on with the with the foundation actually yesterday we hosted our first linux foundation member summit in europe uh it was uh I think a smashing success uh we had uh you know it it seems a lifetime ago but it was just a year ago that we announced a linux foundation Europe and since then we have now reached almost 150 members uh who clearly have validated the need for a regional entity that can act as a gateway uh towards the broader linux foundation uh you know open collaboration platform and federation um we uh showcase the four projects that we launched in the last year the open wallet foundation project silva who we just announced today became a funded project so but some of the largest uh telco operators in europe and then we have rise the risk five software ecosystem uh you know companion to our risk five international uh uh organization but building you know the software part of it the sort of software companion to the uh specification work that happens in risk five and then last but no least is announcement from a couple of weeks ago uh the servo project uh was moved to linux foundation europe uh servo is a uh rust based uh web engine uh so think about you know alternative to blink or webkit truly that uh platform layer that enables you know web rendering but based in rust so you know with all the good things that come with the sort of memory safety and and sort of security features of that language uh there's actually a pretty big project 20 000 starts on github so we're very excited about that uh and of course last but no least this is going to be something that we really unpop our messaging this week uh is uh you know the cyber resilience act i honestly when we launched linux foundation europe a year ago i didn't realize how much of uh our effort was going to be focused on educating the public sector on uh you know the impacts of uh uh the cyber resilience act and other uh legislation that is coming down on the open source community and so today we have launched our fix the cra campaign we're asking for our community to uh help us and and be vocal to help adjust you know the aspects of the cyber resilience act that truly risk to undermine open source in europe as we know it and i want to be clear the cra has very worthy goals about bolstering cyber security but the way it's drafted it truly risks to append the value exchange of open source in the way we've all have been used to you know appreciate and and we'll benefit from gabrielle thank you so much for sitting down with me and talk about the foundation give us an update especially the whole involvement with the public sector of course genetic AI so thanks for all those updates and i would love to chat with you again soon thank you thank you swapnell it's always a pleasure to talk to you