 Welcome everybody to the fourth installment of OVE's Open Source Policy Series. My name is Sivan Petch, I am OVE's Research Director and I have the pleasure to open tonight's event on a topic that the team and I spent a lot of time on over the past 12 months. For those who don't know us, Open from Europe is a Brussels-based think tank working at the intersection of open technologies and public policy. We've organized this event to give you more details about the European Commission study investigating the impact of open source. While the study is not out yet, we can provide new information today and you'll have the chance to ask questions later. I don't think with this audience it's necessary to give a long intro on something that we all know. Open source has become ubiquitous wherever software is a factor. Some estimates go as far as 90% of software having open source components. And with software eating the world, open source isn't far behind. In a moment we'll hear directly from Pierre Chastainet, Head of Unit at the European Commission's Cloud and Software Unit on why they have tended the study. But before that I would like to say that we at Open from Europe are very pleased that together with Fraunhofer ISI we could do this work on understanding the impact of open source software and hardware. We see this study as a milestone of open source research and much needed, being the first comprehensive study in over 15 years. The study assesses the economic dynamics behind open source, its economic impact on the European economy, how open source has impacted important economic sectors, the impact of policy actions around the world, and finally provides policy recommendations. We're thankful for the European Commission to have tended the study and the European Commission is already here, thereby increasing our collective understanding and knowledge on open source. After Pierre Chastainet's keynote in a minute, our collaborator Knut Blint from Fraunhofer ISI and Thierry Berlin will provide you with an overview of the results regarding the economic impact and policy recommendations. Both will then join our panel also featuring Jutta Kord, Head of Director DG2 at the German Federal Ministry of the Interior, Building and Community, and Reagan McDonald, Director of Global Public Policy at Mozilla. This panel will be moderated by our excellent collaborator in the study, Andrew Cutts, a lawyer leading in the area of open source and joint managing partner at Moor Croft's LLP. Just a bit of housekeeping before we get going. We want this policy series to be a space for open exchange and we are very happy to take questions from the audience. If you'd like to ask a question during the panel, please write your question in the chat or use the Ask Questions feature in Crowdcast. Please also take note that this event, like all OF activities, is covered by the OFE Community Participation Guidelines, which you can read on our website. And a reminder, this event is being recorded. So we had Pierre Justinier on for a second now, but he should be coming back, I'm sure, so that he can start his keynote. So we'll just wait for a second until he comes back. There we are. Perfect. Yes, it works. Can you hear me properly? Yes, I think we can. Then I will minimize myself and we're listening to you. Okay, very good. Many thanks. First of all, many thanks to OIFE and for the front of her institute for the work on the study that was commissioned by the European Commission on the economic impact of open source in the European economy. We can see that open source has really gone through a maturity process. Over the past 10 years, it has moved from something that was done in a garage to something that is really into all digital technologies nowadays and that is attracting the attention of large global companies, investors across the globe. So we can see that the market is well aware of the potential and the huge added value that open source can have. So that was the reason we launched this study on the economic impact of open source software and open source hardware in the European economy. I will come back on the hardware aspect in a moment. The study has been identifying already a number of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and challenges of open source in relevant ICT policies in cybersecurity, in artificial intelligence, in digitizing the European industry, but also in sectoral aspect like connected mobility. So the study really looked very broadly both at technologies and sectoral application from this economic point of view. Another of our objectives through this study was to explore the competition angle of open source. We know that open source drives innovation and helps lowering the barriers of entry for new market players by providing a software base on which any startup SME can start developing its innovative ideas. So intuitively open source helps to increase competition and to bring more dynamism into the software market for the benefit of consumer and businesses. But what we wanted to see is try to quantify these benefits. So by removing barriers to use and develop software, open source would ensure a level playing field where the market winner can be those who add value to their product, to their services, to their customers, and not those who lock their customer with proprietary solutions. So as I said, open source we believe lowers barriers for new entrants, reducing the burden to use what has already been developed by other community, but enables them to focus on really the key added value on new innovative features that they can then bring successfully to the market. Let me quickly address the open source hardware dimension, which was also a big novelty in what we wanted to explore with this study. Obviously the level of maturity of open source hardware is pretty far from the one of open source software. Nevertheless, we see that the business ecosystem developing in open source hardware is moving very fast. 3D printing, for instance, is a good example that comes to mind where very quickly a global ecosystem has developed in this area. Open source hardware shares a number of features with open source software. Its modularity, for instance, the capacity to self-assemble different features. And it appears to follow the same development as open source software. So we do expect that the demand for open source hardware is going to grow very rapidly in the coming decade. It could actually constitute a cornerstone of the future internet of things, the future of computing at European and global level. What is the role of the Commission in all this? Well, let me recall that the European Commission is agnostic and must remain technology neutral, so we don't favor any specific technologies. However, our role is to put in place the right framework conditions that will enable to increase European economy growth and innovation potential that will both benefit citizens and European enterprises. So a very relevant outcome of the study conducted by OFE and Fraunhofer is the identification of open source with what economies call the public good. So that's a very different approach to how open source was regarded say a decade ago. Now we can see open source as becoming a common good, a common digital good. This new conception implies positive correlation of open source with public wealth, and that's a reason per se for public administration, notably the Commission, to foster the use of open source. What's more, we're seeing a positive correlation between the increase in contribution to open source and economic growth. So that's one of the key outcome of the econometric work of the study. Qualitatively, it seems pretty logical that more contribution will generate more opportunities, more ideas will generate more startup, more SMEs. What is new now is that we have, through this econometric aspect in the study, the evidence that demonstrate and support those ideas. Let me highlight now the importance of the skills aspect around open source. This is yet another societal dimension which is very important in analyzing the development of digital markets. Software quality and productivity increase are highly impacted by the acceleration of the use of open source software. Enhancing the developer's knowledge on open source libraries, on repositories, on middleware applications developed through open source can be a decisive skill for developers to develop and put on their CV. It's not to be important for all the professionals who want to re-qualify, who want to upskill, and who have been used in the past to use mainly proprietary software to develop new competencies around open source. So we see as building the necessary open source skills in Europe as an imperative for ensuring digital competitiveness of the EU. Let's have a look at open source and the next generation internet. You will understand that open source and next generation internet have quite a common value in common and that's why we are keen to foster an open source under the NGI initiative. Building a European initiative for a human internet that respects the fundamental values of privacy, security, participation, diversity, it's not an easy job but open source is really a very good tool to deploy our common European shared values in the next generation internet. In what Europe wants to project in the internet, including in global discussion. This will notably enable to support European citizens, European enterprises' needs and to address global sustainability challenge. Open source enables anyone to access the source code. That's a key factor to increase trust in software, especially when you start to bring together different software services, assembles them coming from different providers. It can ensure and when security in a more easy manner. Everyone can potentially audit it, even though the most only advanced user will be able to have the knowledge. But open source communities and generally the open source paradigm ensure freedom of contributors and users and therefore match the profound values of openness, inclusiveness, which are essential for the EU. Coming back to the study, we see that this study will help us to drive future European policy in the software area. The study has now quantified and evidenced the positive correlation of open source and economic growth. And it's now necessary for us to develop the adequate policy plan to conceptualize future policies that will enable us to make European national public administration industry the research sector benefit to the maximum possible extent from open source. There are many technological trends that will have a major impact on the development of software and software-based services market in the coming years. The digital transformation of all sectors of the European economy, big data, blockchain, DevOps, cloud and edge technologies, cybersecurity, Internet of Things, these topics all represent very dynamic market segments and key drivers of European innovation. But open source can be a key common denominator across the development of all those technologies. The commission takes very seriously to have a competitive digital ecosystem in Europe. As we see open source as potentially a prime industrial differentiator and the basis of a growing range of innovative products or digitally-enabled products as well as new digital services that can improve Europe's competitiveness. So the commission is very committed to continue developing policies in this area and not only to look at the investment opportunities on how we can support those developments in the future. So with this I'm really looking forward to the other presentation in today's event and looking forward to a fruitful discussion with all of you. Many thanks. Thank you Pierre. It's very interesting and I'm happy that you will join the panel later on too and you already gave a short introduction, a tidbit, a sneak peek on the study and I'm happy that Knut will now also join me in a second. Knut Lind will join us in the second and will provide a full presentation on the economic impact and the policy recommendations who I think will come up just in one second. This is always digital events. In a physical event somebody just walks up the stage but here doesn't quite work like that. I can see he has accepted and is connecting in the system. There we go. He's not coming up right now. I'm just going to click the prompt button. Otherwise we might move things a little bit around but that's just... Thank you Paulo. I think he changed browsers. There we are. Hi Knut. I was blocked. Well, good to see you and now I will go away again and let you speak. You have to allow me. You can hear me? Yeah, we can hear you. Okay, you have a full screen already? No. No, but I think it's fine. Maybe just minimize the other stuff and just go through the presentation. Now you have a full screen? No, we just see the PowerPoint. But I think if you just make the presentation itself a bit bigger, it will be fine. It's okay to see the rest. Steven, do you hear me? Yeah, I think everybody can hear you. Yeah, but if I go to full screen then is that readable like it is? Yeah, I think, yeah, let's just leave it like this. Okay, yeah, first of all, thanks to OFE, Steven and its colleagues for providing another opportunity to talk about this study and also first of all, thanks back to Pierre and his unit that they launched this study and that we have been selected. I think we put a lot of work into it and the study was more or less dominating our life in the last year. During the corona crisis, more or less, we had a real kickoff and then corona made us work remotely, but I think nevertheless it worked out quite well. I'd like to talk a little bit briefly about the core study team. I was coordinating it and kind of the main frame of the impact assessment was definitely developed by myself, but then we had, I do it by alphabetical ordering Mirko Böhm, also a real experienced software developer doing together with Andrew Katz, who is then guiding us through the discussion later, they did the case studies. Paula and Simon did the policy analysis and Sachiko was also involved in drafting the recommendations and my colleague Torben Schubert, he did the econometrics supported by some other people at Farnhofer who put all the data together. The commission asked us to do or to fulfill these five tasks. Main task was task one on the economic impact analysis, especially for open source software, but also hardware. We'll talk about the difference later and then there were two tasks about policy analysis in the EU, but also all over the world and the econometric study has been uncomplimented by the case studies and all these things went into the variation of policy recommendations will be also at the end of my lecture. What did we do? We looked at the literature. There is a tradition of more or less of two decades of literature on open source, mainly software. There's not so much on hardware, almost nothing. Then we checked what data we could use. I will talk about this in a minute because that was also a challenge and this went into the economic impact assessment. On the one hand, we also then designed the stakeholder survey to collect the views of the different stakeholders in the field. Then the case studies also included some success stories, just to complement then the quantitative study and then as Paul and Stephen did the policy initiative analysis and again this went into the recommendation. Regarding the economic impact approach, we did it in a multiple way because there have been studies out on the impact of open source with really large numbers and not really validated approaches and therefore we did some cross validation. First of all, the approach is based on a cost assessment. That means we looked at what did countries but also companies invest in the contribution to open source code development. That's the one part. The other part was how to assess the benefits. Here, this is the more tricky part. On the macro economic level, we applied a growth model which we have applied some years ago, more or less 20 years ago, the first time to assess the economic impact of standards for Germany. I know open source is the same decision, not the same but they are both some kind of for public good and therefore it makes sense. Then we had the stakeholder survey where we asked companies and other organizations about the benefits and this has been complemented by the case studies. That means we had a validation between the different cost assessment approaches on country and company level but also we had a validation of the approaches regarding the benefits and in the last stage we compared the cost and the benefits both on the country and on the company level and came up with some cost-benefit ratios and we also compared them. You see, here we try to be quite serious and also our approach is quite conservative. Maybe the numbers are going to present you a lower level numbers. What are the data sources and I'm now talking mainly about the open source software kind of part which is the major part of the study because here we have, as also Pierre said, 20 years of experience meanwhile whereas the open source hardware sector and activities are still at the very beginning therefore we have not really the data to come up with really sophisticated econometric studies. What we did, we relied on GitHub because this is not the only only repository but the most important one and that was the situation of 2018 32 million users with 1.5 million organization affiliations and country codes that means we could do something on country level and we had also then around 700,000 organizations on GitHub and we then connected that with the traditional economic data taken from the OEU and we also considered patents. We looked at startups taken from Crunchbase, other companies information from MADU, World Bank, Data and Sport. Looking at the development, these are the comments by the EU countries from 2000 to 2018 and you see GitHub was established around 10 years ago and then you have this increase and here with the UK and Germany as the leading country before France on the third base. As you know, GitHub has been taken over by Microsoft in 2018-2019 means the 2018 figures are not affected 2019. You see some stagnation a little bit also here in the next slide where we looked at the contributors. Nevertheless, we just used data provided by the two devs because they downloaded all the information and in 2020 the growth path is back. That means we see still increasing contributions, increasing comets, although the exponential growth is certainly a little bit at the end. This has also to do with maybe some demographic changes, especially in Europe. We see some stagnation of the labor force and therefore this is also means that's the basis for our assessments both on the country and company level. This cost-based impact assessment, the idea was to say okay, we look as I said on the efforts by the member states of the EU and in 2018 the UK was still included. Therefore, this is also including the UK and we also look at the activities of the most active companies which had their headquarters in the EU. The basic assumption is that the organizations or the countries investing in the open source means in the public domain should at least outweigh the cost for these investments. This is really the lower bound to say the benefits should at least reflect the cost invested in contributing to open source. What do we see also as a reference? We have around three million employees in the computer programming sector in the EU in 2018 and what we've also found around 260,000 contributors to GitHub which are located at the EU and that means these are slightly less than 10 percent of the employees in the computer programming sector. If we calculate the personal cost, assuming that these people would kind of work full-time for kind of writing open source code, this would be an investment of 14 billion euros in 2018. On the other hand, we also looked at the commits that means here again we have some other robustness check that means we look both on the number of contributors and the number of commits and here we use the constructive cost model also used by others and they come up with 16,000 full-time equivalents which would be an investment of around 1 billion euros. That means that's in line with these 14 billion because here the assumption is that the people would work full-time on developing open source. That means we have already some indication about the cost from the country perspective. Then what we also did is we looked at the companies most actively and here we got a sample of around 2000 and they are responsible for more than 12 percent of the contributors and one third of the commits and in total they employ more than 1 million employees and this is a figure which we can put in context to a previous study published in 2005, 2006 where the global employment of companies contributed to open source was around 1 million but especially not a new and what we also see is there's a very high share of small and even very small companies. That means 75 percent have less than 100 employees and on the other end what we also see the smaller the companies the more contributors are listed and the more commits they provide means all most 50 percent by companies which have less than 50 employees and especially small companies between 1100 employees invest more than 5 percent of their full-time equivalents to open source. It means overall if we take these figures together with the macro figures this fits together that means we have a valid approach looking at the cost side. Now the benefit side, this is a little tricky exercise and I'm not going into the econometrics but what we found is that the contribution to open source is 0.04. What does it mean? That means especially between 2017 and 2018 and even before we have around 10 percent growth rates in the in the commits and this means that this increasing investment in open source that means in the commits would contribute to 0.4 percent of the GDP in the EU and if we take the numbers this will then that means the total GDP in 2018 in the EU was around 16 000 billion that means the 0.4 percent of 36 billion per year. We also did that with looking at the number of contributors like other employees which is normally used as an input indicator in these growth models and here we come up with a slightly higher elasticity of 0.6 therefore we get to 95 billion per year that means overall we see really significant benefits of the EU economy from the global pool of open source and especially from the pool contributed by the contributors located in the EU or the commits which could be attributed to the EU and as I said before this is a lower level because only less than half of the contributors or commits can be allocated to a specific country. However overall if we kind of think beyond the the COVID-19 crisis and when we are back on the normal growth rate we could expect more than 100 billion euros per year that open source is contributing to the GDP of the EU including the UK. If we exclude the UK it's around two-thirds of this number but as I said in 2018 the UK was still a member of the EU and what we done that we put the cost and the benefits together and we also took into account that the source code developed in 2018 or the impact of source code goes not only back to the code which has been developed 2018 but also in previous years and here we looked on the survival rate of code and assumed okay we take the last five years on the one hand and also we took into account that the software developers do not only spend time they also maybe need hardware and here we put a quite high assumption that means we have some figures about investment in hardware in the IT sector and overall we get to a cost-benefit ratio to 1 to 4 and there have been other studies especially in the US which looked at the contribution of ICT hardware on on TEP or also on innovation expenditure in general and they come up also with a minimum kind of cost-benefit ratio of 1 to 5 which can then go up to 1 to 10. That means we are in the same same range it means the contribution especially to knowledge pool or to innovation in general is creating really significant benefits for the economy at the macro level. At the micro level we had the stakeholder survey a little bit as as an approach to get some information here from the stakeholders and the idea was then also to ask a little bit for the softer factors overall the survey was really broadly distributed also due to the support of the eclipse foundation means we got more than 900 responses at the end we had some tricky questions in it I admit therefore we got around 100 total responses and what were the main findings that means why are people contribute to or companies contribute to open source it's really finding technical solutions or contributing also forward the state of the art of technology also to avoid the render log in and it's also an instrument for knowledge seeking and knowledge creation. The benefits are especially seen in really supporting open standards and interoperability also getting a better access to source code and as already related to the incentives here independence from provider to providers of software. The cost aspects are overall less relevant here sometimes error issues and stability issues are named and another aspect is the cost for skilled labor here or worked has also mentioned by Pierre that here skills is key and we asked them people then also for cost benefit ratios and and overall they come up with the also ratios one to ten as the ratio what was made named most often which is very kind of similar to to the one we came up in the macro study. That means overall we see on the one hand significant investments by the EU countries and the EU located companies into open source with the kind of baseline investment of one billion per year and here we also kind of underestimated that because we did not really have the numbers for the exact wages of developers therefore it could be certainly higher at the benefit side overall the number is that if we increase our contribution to open source it will generate around additional 100 billion euros in the EU per year taking still the UK and another interesting insight and here I'd like to thank also Frank Nagel from Harvard Business School who supported the study team because they did a study on the contribution of open source to startups on a global base and we took their approach and applied it to the EU and what we find is that here we could also expect that the contribution to open source generates around 1000 ICT based startups per year in the EU and that's also a very positive impact. From the case studies which I didn't talk too much about we also learned that the public sector is benefiting from open source in saving of total cost of ownership and again avoiding vendor login and there are further benefits of open source and this is related to openness here standards and independence and maybe also digital sovereignty is an issue but also labor cost savings is a topic and here I also would like to refer to the BITCOM open source monitor which has been launched in 2020 the first edition and they will update that now and I'm curious to see the results and here especially companies that okay we are saving a lot of development cost and labor cost for developers which are a very kind of rare species and therefore this is an important cost saving aspect. Now especially from the case studies and the success cases we devised a SWOT analysis that means we looked at the strengths and weaknesses for the European economy but also on the opportunities and threats and we structured this according to political, pee, economic, social and technological aspects. What are the strengths? It's about the growth potential of the EU single market that means we have a common regulatory framework that's positive. We have really a diverse innovative SME ecosystem there is support for the culture of collaboration in this ecosystem and we have also a growing profile of open technologies across European ICT sector companies. Weakness, there's still some lag in the implementation of open source, there are also some legal issues related to IP and sanitization maybe you can discuss that later. From the economic perspective there are still big players the big tax which are dominating the market and that's tough. From a social perspective there's still maybe limited recognition of the economic world of the open source communities and hopefully the study will change that a little bit and there's also from a technological perspective a gap because we have good technologies but there's a gap to really make them into really successfully, commercially successful products in Europe. For the futures what are the opportunities? From the political perspective we have the EU single market, the Digital Market Act and the Digital Market Act maybe also future frameworks which can help. From an economic perspective we might have the opportunity to promote flagship projects and maybe centers of excellence. We see that already delivered in the hardware sector. Then from the social perspective it's seen that open source is also contributing maybe to the sustainable development goals that means that's an important aspect and from a technological perspective we have the opportunity to use this diversity of the network and the player to come up with technologies which are really addressing customer needs but also maybe sustainability issues. The threat there is still the threat that the good and really attractive startups and SEVs are taken over by the big techs. Also here at Ministry of Barriers in the public sector still might play a role. From the economic perspective the dominance of the US companies is still a big challenge and could be also a threat. From a social perspective also grain drain of talent to US and Asia is an issue because these people follow the funding opportunities which are still limited in the EU. From a technological perspective the cloud might be a threat for the future development of open source but maybe later about that. I have to speed up a little bit. Now policy recommendations. This is the overview of we restructured them and we have kind of three pillars. The first pillar is addressing instruments which help to get to a digitally autonomous public sector. The second one is about open harmony enabling European growth and the third one about digitized internationally competitive industry. It means here in the first three policy domains it's about really building up institutional capacity and here the open source policy offices might be helpful for the public sector within the European Commission. There's an issue but also maybe to build up the European networks of these OSPOs maybe fund the development of new ones and then take these actors and bring them together in an OSPO network and this should help them to establish a European open source culture by these OSPOs. Legislacy is an issue. We still see a problem but here we could address maybe and discuss this also later that digital autonomy and technical sovereignty might be achieved via open source and also open source should be considered as a public infrastructure like other public infrastructure. Strategic and intelligent that means we need more data that means we also had the challenge of getting the right data for our study that means here open source should be integrated in the data collection activities by the European Statistical Office and we have already the open source of sovereignty and this can be expanded by more kind of elements of strategic intelligence that means more information especially maybe also forward-looking information. Now regarding R&D the funding is an issue that means here one should focus on an open source project although being still maybe following the principle of technical neutrality which has been also mentioned by Pierre and then especially SMEs and startups have often problems to enter these programs and here maybe there is the need to really ease the access and maybe construct specific programs for that. Regarding diffusion knowledge creation is good but the economy impact and social impact is only generated if it's diffused and that we also see by the results of our study and one aspect is maybe really making the results including the code open accessible which have been funded by the public sector and also maybe the creation of open source platforms or networks or kind of expanding existing one like the foundations which for example like Eclipse have been moved to the EU to Europe might be another instrument to push this aspect. Entrepreneurship I already mentioned quite often that the micro companies their startups are key and what we see on the other hand we see a little bit of lack of that these startups take off and here maybe we need to provide more education and also maybe try to maybe help them by promoting partnerships maybe with either intermediaries again foundations or maybe even larger companies. Human capital is key we have a lack of skilled labor especially in the IT and in the developer area and this will become even more crucial when the baby boomers start to retire in the next years or have already maybe started to do so and here our higher education institutions have to make a move they have to to address open source much much broader in their curricula in their programs this is not yet the case this is really a problem and maybe also promoting that they offer management skills or potential skills because it's open source success is not only about the quality of the code it's also about having really entrepreneurial and management skills to commercialize this maybe a European certification scheme is an issue because this would help to reduce friction in the labor market and diversity is an issue because the open source developers is a male business and it's even higher than in the proprietary software sector therefore here maybe diversity programs or enhancing programs are needed then it's also about money and there might be different approaches maybe tax incentives could be an issue for contributions to open source we have some funding schemes already in in the EU in Europe and that might be kind of also expanded to open source based startups also especially also not only addressing the starting phase but but especially the growth phase and last point especially SMEs could also be a benefit for maybe pre-commercial or public procurement programs in general which especially support innovative open source solutions and here again Frank Nagle showed that a change in the law in France really made the difference and here maybe we can join them and that means other member states could be the same regulation the regulatory environment is also playing an important role and here maybe Andrew cuts can jump in later on this liability regimes are still a little shaky here that's one aspect the other point is security issues open source is certainly a way to increase the security level of open source but we see also that the investment in in this aspect is quite low as studied by again coordinated by Frank Nagle under the the roof of the Linux Foundation showed with Mirko Mibirm we did already a study in open source standardization to improve the interface we see some significant improvement in the last two years that means some organizations try to to benefit from both sources in order to improve their their specifications as I already mentioned public procurement is a regulatory instrument and we have a public procurement directive but which is referring to standards but not to open source and finally also the IPR regimes that means the European copyright and patent legislation should really consider in in future revisions the aspect of open source which has been not yet the case market creation also in competition platform policies open source should be addressed that's not yet the case although we know that especially the big platform providers rely in their business models and also in their technology and open source contributions and I just read yesterday there was a new study from China and open source and here also the big China Chinese players are really having increased the investment and also global perspective that's an issue and open source could be also explicitly included any SME policies and channel because what we have seen that the SMEs especially micro companies play an important role here to open source hardware very brief there are different aspects which maybe Andrew cuts can then later a little bit kind of elaborate further some some aspects on this and then we had also some domain specific recommendations with the last one also open source can also help to to promote the implementation of the of for example the Green Deal that that's that's that's important potential we have also to to explore it in the in the near future in summary to come to an end here now we see there's a large economic impact and we have seen the studies now also about China some things are going on in US I haven't seen it's not yet the last results that means there's an impact and and there's also a strong will for public policy to to really exploit this public good character of open source and also maybe to incentivize further contributions because we have also the challenge that maybe the contributors are becoming really aware of spacey but overall as you have seen we have 13 different policy areas with the different sub recommendations adding up to more than 30 recommendations we need a very comprehensive coordinated approach and and we have also to set up this institutional capacity in the different various layers that means both at the European Commission layer but also at the member states layer and even at the latest at the regional layer in the public sector to really at the end yeah leverage and exploit the potential of open source in Europe thank you that was it and I stop here thank you crude I think there's a lot to digest now for the audience that wasn't just a few slides I'd like to help you a little bit with digesting all of this we'll start our panel now so that means that our panel of uh well you, Knut Blend, Pierre Chastainé, Yuta Kord and Reagan McDonald are going to join me in a second and Andrew Cutts who is going to moderate the panel I'm sure people will show up there we are Andrew is here that's good no hopefully even yes we can do that's what I like to hear hi Reagan hello nice to see you again and then we're only missing uh Yuta Kord and Pierre Chastainé who I think is still there so let's see if you can jump back in um otherwise I think maybe Andrew while we wait maybe let's already start um since we are since we only have half an hour left yeah okay let's let's let's try to accelerate things a little bit um so Simon thank you very much indeed for that um and Knut um excellent presentation you managed to contains what we up to 435 pages or something at last count so that was a challenge which I think you rose to extremely well and Pierre thank you very much indeed for your keynote and gradually expanding our knowledge of where things are going next so that was that was absolutely superb um I uh this is the first time I've moderated anything so apologies if I'm not getting this this quite right um what I will be doing is asking some initial questions but I'm also very keen to have questions from the audience as well so if you want to pop questions in the chat I will certainly do my best to to ask them it's entirely possible that unfortunately I won't be able to do all of those but I'll certainly answer well I apologize in advance for that so while we're waiting to see whether Yuta can manage to get the technology to work properly let's kick off um and I think I'll probably start by um asking Reagan a question if I may um so obviously Mozilla's regarded as being very much a poster child um of the amongst open source organizations um and I'm I'm always a little concerned that that we have sort of an issue with survivorship bias here when we're talking to organizations that are very successful then we're going to get a particular viewpoint from them so the initial question I was going to ask was um you know is open source software vital to Mozilla's success and I'm assuming that the answer of that is going to be yes so I will move swiftly on to the supplemental question which is what characteristics of open source and I mean by that I mean in the wider sense community development model etc etc do you think um a vital to Mozilla's success thanks Andrew and I'm glad you went straight to the second question because the first question is really easy to answer um and uh thanks for inviting me to this conversation and also congrats on a very comprehensive report it's great to see the correlation between open source and financial well-being and community and all of these great things and I think it's also worth acknowledging that open source has really come a long way um even 10 20 years ago when Firefox for instance first open source code it was actually quite controversial and so you know having gone from that into now something over 90 percent of all enterprises have at least some sort of open source component in their day-to-day operations is just I think really um heartening to to acknowledge and I'm glad to see the European Commission commissioning these studies and I hope they uh take on a lot of these recommendations so maybe um I can uh talk a little bit about well maybe a quick background about Mozilla for those who may not be aware of us and then I can talk actually there was one particular characteristic that I wanted to highlight about the the open source community I think for us reflecting on what's been successful in our view um but you know Mozilla is a mission-driven technology company we're both a non-profit and a technology company we're creators of Firefox the open source browser but also many other sort of Firefox family products like Firefox Focus and Pocket which are used by hundreds of millions of users around the world and we have used a lot of these different open practices as we call them not just open source and this is really I think in terms of success given Mozilla a way to compete asymmetrically with a lot of much larger organizations with a lot more resources and to give you a sense of our scale in 2018 about 14,000 individual and commercial volunteers worked with us to build and to test and to debug and deploy our software making over 52 percent of our contributions community driven so I think that's maybe the one piece that I wanted to to highlight that is mentioned in this report I think that is a really crucial component when thinking about open source and making sure to scale and to upkeep and also maintain the longevity of open source and and that's really community and to think about embracing open source beyond code and to consider it as a strategy and so some of the ways we have done that is to prioritize open call and to think beyond the code so thinking about open practices and how you engage with external communities another thing that we we have done is to try to be very strategic about the kind of code that we build so we think a lot about open by design so thinking about the purpose and the strategy and the value to the broader ecosystem so what is the community contributing to and in our view that has helped maintain that longevity and to keep up with the upkeep of a lot of software and then and the other issue that we've looked at is again looking at communities really expansively so the value of social connections and valuing people's contributions that are both paid and unpaid contributions has just been really valuable so I think that would be I guess one of the secret sauce elements that has maintained Mozilla in our product development over you know over two decades on this so yeah and do you feel that that's translatable to other organizations this is just something that uniquely works within within Mozilla I think this is a hallmark of really successful open source projects so Github also is similar to this and many other open source projects but you'll notice that those that work really well have a strong community have a clear mission and people are sort of understanding that they're contributing to something so I think this actually brings you know what the commission mentioned but Pierre mentioned it in the in his keynote around you know the the public benefit of this and the fact that open source can also help bring European communities together so yeah Brilliant, Pierre can I move on to you next because so given what Reagan just just said about the the importance of community and also a few weeks ago we had the new industrial strategy that was published by the European Commission so how does open source fit in with that? Yes that's a very good question so we as digital is a key enabler of all sectors of the of the European economy and we start seeing every sector undertaking digital transformation as I mentioned earlier we see open source as a bit of something cross-cutting but at the same time on a sectoral basis especially when you need to have like a lot of data sharing or industrial ecosystem working together open source can really be a differentiator in terms of trust among these different competing industrial actors to be able to exchange data have open software that will enable to interface with each other to make the entire industrial ecosystem more efficient so that's one area where we see a great potential for open source in the in the coming decade and that we will try to foster on a sector by sector basis yeah okay so if open source helps to make industry more efficient on a on a an organizational by organization basis then there's also a question about the sort of the interrelationship between organizations in different countries as well and I think that probably then leads us into the question of digital sovereignty and if I may Yutta welcome I'd very much like to to ask you because I know that when Germany took over the presidency of the European Council last year one of the things that was widely talked about was the importance of digital sovereignty and of technological autonomy could you talk about that a little bit please of course thank you and we thought it is important to create the right conditions for Europe to develop and deploy our own key digital capacities including the deployment of secure cloud infrastructure and interoperable services that fully comply with European legal provisions and ethical values and all these aspects addressed by the Berlin Declaration which was officially you said adopted in December of the last year and in the German presidency and there's a signature is therefore agreed among other things to implement common standards a modular architectors and and insutable open source technologies in the development and deployment of cross-border digital solution in the member states and the strengthening of European digital sovereignty plays the key role for German BME and we in the BME promote a trustful and human centered digital transition and the German administration cloud strategy and the center of digital sovereignty are two examples how we already implement the principles of the Berlin Declaration that's a first for the Berlin Declaration thank you absolutely so I mean and I think everyone has mentioned the the sort of human centric nature of open source software development and Knut if I can come to you because one of the things that also comes out in the study is that is the question of community but to what extent do you feel and this is probably a question that I shouldn't ask an economist to what extent do you feel that the impact of collaboration is really the sort of greatest benefit in terms of from pure economic perspective lowering costs when you're developing software developing innovation etc etc or do you believe that there is also a sort of human factor in there as well in the sort of sociological coming together of individuals in developing through open source projects is something that is sort of equally of benefit that maybe maybe can't be quantified economically yeah indeed it's a little challenging question for an economist nevertheless we we didn't address this in in our burger study which is really was focused on on the numbers on really the hard numbers however we also screened the literature and this issue of community building and and these soft impact factors are definitely an important aspect which is at least I think supported by by the assessment of the incentives and and when you're looking at these question on incentives to our stakeholder survey that means here this this incentive to contribute maybe also to to the development of code to to technical progress that that was highly rated and also from from other studies also the the the german bit coms open source monitor shows this this is important and together with mico we did two years ago this study on the comparison between open source and station and and both activities are really on the one hand they are certainly a commercial interest but there is still also this this very intrinsic and yeah interest and there's studies about what motivates researchers and and and it's its reputation on the one hand that's that's also an aspect but still there's this this motive to to to solve puzzles that means also to contribute to the good and maybe also contribute to the society but I'd like to come back to Pierre I just checked the the the update of the industrial strategy and I was very pleased to see that you you decided to to go for the development of a european station station strategy that's one one key element but unfortunately what I miss in this strategy is is the topic of open source this has been not not really addressed at all and that's uh I think that our common uh yeah future future objective we have to push that really further that especially in such strategic documents uh the topic of open source is is really reflected or is at least considered uh in the next editions that's a little bit my my point was there a discussion at all on this topic when when when there was the discussion about the update of the industrial strategy yeah that was definitely part of our input but as you can imagine this is this sort of document or the fruit of many consensus internally in the in the institution as this is a broad industrial strategy so not only looking at the digital transformation aspects so open source was just one out of so many considerations to factor in but this is something that we definitely continue pushing for stay tuned there will be more excellent excellent um but we have um so one question that's come in from the audience so um Stefan Fermigier asks um so the figures that that that you gave um on the impact of open source development very very interesting um but um how do you know um what the causation is so we is that just a correlation or or or do you believe that there's a causation there as well um we we um we did not really just one correlation analysis this is a kind of a long-term panel analysis where we we looked at time series and looked how the the input into open source had an influence on on the the the change in in the output I mean in in GDP uh I have to I have to admit um there are normally it would be better to control than for some external shock to really exclude completely the the the so-called endogeneity problem that means uh which which way is the causation going that means maybe you can also argue if the GDP goes up then there's maybe more resources uh which can go into into into open source however um Frank Nagel did some um studies where he looked for example in France uh at the with the shock of the change of the public procurement law where he then really had this external kind of shock which you use then in order to control for this uh causality problem in in order to show how the causality works that it works really from open source to the for example more higher number of startups more people working in IT uh also uh then at the end also contributing to to economic growth and and therefore we we can rely on on on on this specific work and also his uh work on on the startup or the the influence of open source and startup because here you could also argue if you have more startups then they contribute more to open source and you have a reverse called causality but here could apply some sophisticated instruments to control for that and therefore um the the the causality is clear and we we use a 20 years time panel and and not just a pure correlation analysis yeah okay okay and there's some interesting um discussion going on in the chat as well about the extent to which various characteristics are not necessarily able to be captured in in terms of um any form of economic analysis and I think you know we would all all agree with that um so um you know I'd like now um like to ask Reagan if I may because I read the um the Mozilla manifesto and the 10 principles um a while ago which is very interesting um and um you know it and it it talks a lot about community benefit it talks about um empowerment of individuals human beings um and a lot of stuff that um you know I think I think everyone would think is fundamentally important but it's very interesting in there it also talks about the the necessity of creating um uh commercial activity within the world of the internet and open source how vital that is and how you need to strike a balance between commercial activity um and individuals rights freedom freedoms dignities um and all of that um so uh could you expand on that a little bit please um I think that I it's an interesting principle that that you picked out and and it's one that we go back to a lot um with especially with regards actually to open source software when we're building products and it's something we sometimes have to remind people uh like journalists or even you know policymakers that Mozilla is very focused what we're you know a not-for-profit caring we care a lot about the individual empowering people and you know as a browser we consider that the the user agents so we really want to empower people and protect them um to you know be empowered to have their own uh online experience but we also want to acknowledge that this striking this balance between public and private um is really important and there's a lot of value in having uh you know striking that right balance so um you know whether it's open source uh products or if it's you know advertising online uh there's all sorts of different um uh sort of the the right balance where you can have uh you can pursue you know uh you could have a business I guess like Mozilla which is which is technically you know a business but also not driven only by profit so I guess I don't know if that really answers your question but I think um it's a really important uh principle for us to always keep in mind that you need both sort of public and private investment and this has been when the the web has been the best at its best when these two mix um and when one doesn't overpower the other yeah yeah so I mean I think um it makes sense to think of the different domains um actually keeping each other honest to a degree so part of the open source dynamic being that um you know if an organization running um a project may be dominating that project but if they become evil then everyone has the the right to fork the project um and that's a sort of dynamic that means that it's less likely that the sponsoring organization is going to do that in the first place um but it also means that there is there is ultimately um a safety net there as well um yes and and I think I think building in the open with open practices and using open source software mitigates against the evil issue because you don't have to just trust you can verify and anyone can verify and and I think that's one of the the the greatest values uh you know around trust uh for open source is that it is collaborative and you can look under the hood and see what's going on and you know not only contribute to it but also um see what's going on under there and I think that uh in terms of the the you know evilness uh is often not being able to understand what's what's going on and what's happening and so uh open source technology and approaches really sort of mitigate against that risk and again I think help achieve that sort of balance of making profit but not being evil so here's here's here's a following on from that here's a question and I'm I'm going to throw open to to the whole panel really um which is does the increase in prevalence of cloud technology and the fact that it is easier to hide that open source and the development that's going on behind the cloud and it becomes therefore more difficult um to to to access the source code and exercise the rights that you would have um under an open source license or free software license um has has that disrupted the dynamic at all is that something we need to be aware of I'll get started if if nobody picks it up yes please so yeah in Europe we definitely the the benefit I'll take up on a particular stack but uh open stack has really demonstrated in Europe its capacity to boost uh uh the delivery of european grown cloud-based services because it has literally reduced the cost of licensing to zero for those companies to operate a cloud stack and really focus on the on the infrastructure and this has really uh a lot quite a number of factors to survive to remain actually very competitive and compete with uh the large global hyperscalers and currently this creates a very successful growing european ecosystem now let me take this one step further and say that this is this has actually created the baseline to create a multi-cloud environment for europe because as you have all these actors that are more or less using the same stack or slightly different flavors of the of the same stack it enables to have easier interconnection of those different players and actually create a european federation of cloud service providers so we are really convinced that this this will foster uh competition while making sure that there is interconnection of different competing services across the the EU and let the user choose depending on their needs depending on where they decide to open a sales branch or whatever business you need in this or that european country and get local availability via these providers so this is clearly very important for um the digital sovereignty digital autonomy so yuta if i can can ask you on that topic um what do you say to people who say that developing digital autonomy is really just another word for saying that the european union is becoming protectionist and it just wants to close down the the influence of the the large mainly u.s corporations uh no i think it's not um uh our point but uh because we in the german government have to um strengthen um um our um our digital sovereignty and we see that the solution is to make it by um by open source um software and so we are in at this point at um um in the european is um sundered we want to make a proof of concept and we want to um let me uh show um it's uh yuta i think we've we've lost you unfortunately we have some some technological problems um i'm afraid so hopefully we will get to um yuta back again um in a moment you were there for a moment and then you went again no okay sorry this is this is the modern world unfortunately um hopefully we'll be able to get you back um um back soon um so if i can um sort of move to um pierre now um i mean what what do you think um the the sort of the the broadest policy recommendations as far as um open source should look um could you could you talk about that briefly yes i'll i'll be brief on on this because that's really part actually of the uh what we need to finalize with the with the study to look a bit deeper at the policy recommendation and actually uh done on our own what we're going to do with it um maybe that was the subject of of earlier um uh discussion uh under the umbrella of oefi but judges to ally the fact that the commission is working the talk for the european institutions themselves so um the commission is promoting the use of open source within the institution as part of the digital public sector modernization of the european institution we adopted a dedicated strategy for for this purpose um so now uh well the berlin declaration was a was a first step to engage with the member state to actually uh share uh these sort of best practices uh on uh digital transformation of the of the public sector including through the use of of open source um we we have uh to see how we bring this uh further now uh so we have identified well quantified the the benefits uh that's really key outcome of the of the study we have done very solid evidence collection uh now we need to uh to do the internal policy conceptualization to see how we can bring this further right right um so one of the this sort of recommendations that got some of the most um interest in the chat was um expanding um the um already very good work that the european union has done in terms of open source program offices um so the idea of expanding that program um this is really a question that i threw out to the whole panel that do we do do we see that as being something that is limited to um open source software or do we see that expanding to open hardware open data and potentially other forms of openness as well so can you i don't know if um you want to respond to that one yeah i think i think what we see is is here and there that that ospos are now installed at different levels and i think that's that's the first step but but i think we have still to go uh some some way to to get really this this roll out this this principle and if we have then this kind of institutional change or or build up this institutional capacity um then um then one might go one one step further and in areas uh which which you have mentioned but but i think uh we are not yet there that we could say okay we have already the institutional capacity at the different layers of the public sector which is needed to exploit uh the potential we have identified i think this is still some some way to go and and this is uh not a short term a quick win yeah that means you have to establish the people and the people have to probably uh they have to fight uh it means even if if they are there they have to convince then all the surrounding uh kind of employees in in their in their public institutions that that open source could really help to change the game and and therefore uh first we have to have them make best at all layers in in in a very broad coverage and and we have that then it needs some time until they then are convincing uh maybe the whole public sector but then maybe also develop some community of practice or or some expertise this has to grow and and and as i said it's it's really key to have the right people and and uh they have the skills they understand the communities or maybe um even um they have links to the communities maybe maybe they already bring in some networks uh from from maybe previous backgrounds uh and and and i know network building takes time and you need a long-term strategy that means uh this is this is key uh before we think about the next step you you you already raised i i think we are not yet there yeah so do we think that um one of the characteristics of having a network of ospos is that it essentially is leading by example in going to make organizations um public sector organizations foundations companies um easier for them to establish um similar bodies internally within their own management structures yeah kind of i don't know if you wanted to to respond to that okay brilliant right fantastic i think unfortunately we seem to have lost yuto which is um is is is very unfortunate um and um we are um sort of reaching the the end of um of our allotted time as well so um i would very much like to uh thank the panel members um for their excellent responses and fascinating discussion i'm going to go around and um ask one final question for each of them see if we have time to do that yes i'm sorry i i went in a bit early there no no no problem at all no problem at all um so um if anyone would have got any closing remarks that they would like to make based on the discussion that we've had so far so um if i could start with reagan please i guess in terms of closing i would i would highlight what i said in the opening which relates to this discussion about the strategy uh and in the ideal world um any kind of strategy that is intending to bring you know to scale open source and to keep it you know to keep these projects going uh and to really increase the adoption is really important to think about um a comprehensive strategy and not just the code itself but to really consider open practices and what does that actually mean working in the open thinking about you know having a clear we you know we have the manifesto but you could have you know different sort of principles to help guide that ecosystem engaging community finding ways to to get um you know contributors and document all of their work so there's a lot of peripheral um work i think that is often overlooked and in any strategy in the commission is really considering how to do this i think considering those elements um and what has been mentioned as well around the ai positioning and all of those things would be really really beneficial to help um really i think ramp up the the uptake of open source in in europe excellent thank you can it um final thoughts from you yeah indeed uh what what i'd like to see is is really that that that open source is really embedded in in different uh strategies uh at the european level at the national level at maybe also at the regional uh again you mentioned ai but if i look at the the recently published papers by the commission on ai uh open source again uh is is either not mentioned at all yeah or or really to a very limited degree i mean it's not really exploiting the potential which is there also to to make the difference and push push ai towards uh an ai we we also want yeah that means uh open transparent and also uh for the people and maybe also for for getting the the sustainable development goal switched excellent thank you pier any closing remarks okay many thanks uh yeah indeed i think on the on the public administration side we're very much on track so um at european level but also uh we see increasingly member state taking this up as part of their um digital public sector modernization strategy um uh well we we focus on the on the uh industrial strategy but what you have to realize is that europe is injecting at the moment huge amount of money at national level through the resilience and recovery uh facility and that's something we actually scrutinize whenever member state are putting forward project proposal for digitization of the of the public sector so we're quite attentive on the on the sort of solution that they that they want to deploy looking if they can indeed reuse or use open source solution in that in that respect and just a remark on the on the private side because it's not only it should not only be led from the from the public side and you know it takes a few large companies to to show the example and create momentum you know a couple visible cio's saying we're moving our entire entire enterprise to open source solution that makes a huge difference so we we also need to work on on this side there can be courageous cio's innovative companies that can actually make the switch or make switch that they have made already just more visible which is also part of the of the equation so we're very much looking forward using the the recommendation of the of the study many thanks to Fraunhofer and OFE for doing this work for for us and looking forward pursuing the the engagement with the with the community many thanks yeah thank you Pierre so unfortunately i think that yuta has still dropped out so i would like to take oh yuta are you there no it's not i'm sorry i'm not yuta right so okay so thank you once more to the panelists really appreciate your sort of insight and input to that that was very very interesting much appreciated Sivan thank you over to you yeah thank you also from from our side from the east side of everybody participating and especially of course speaking so to Pierre Regan Knud and Yuta who probably can't hear us now and last but not least Andrew you i think we're really so happy to finally start sharing more and more from the study and that will continue at some point i'm sure we'll also talk about the policy analysis which i'm personally very excited about and yeah also to say that i think from the from the discussion i think everybody i'm sure took away a lot from that the the criticalness i guess of open source when it comes to digitization open source as more than just code many other aspects and we'll get more opportunities to speak last thing to say is that we'll have more events of the policy series that will announce very shortly with very exciting topic so stay tuned and have a nice evening bye bye thank you bye thank you