Tag Archives: fosdem

General

Digital Sovereignty Runs on Open Source

The tagline for Open Forum Europe’s (OFE) EU Open Source Policy Summit on January 30th in Brussels was “Digital Sovereignty Runs on Open Source,” which is in sharp contrast to last year’s tagline, “What can open source do for Europe?” At the 2025 summit, the conversations were about convincing those working in the public sector that open source was a good idea. Given the changes in the political landscape over the past year, many of those public sector folks seem to have shifted toward talking about what it will take to use open source as a key component in the EU’s digital sovereignty strategy. While we still have a lot of work to do, it feels like the conversations are moving in the right direction from why to use open source to how open source can increase digital sovereignty.

In my post last week about Funding Open Source Sustainability at CHAOSScon and FOSDEM, I talked about how open source sustainability was top of mind for me during these events considering the increase in maintainer burnout due to a lack of resources for open source projects. What struck me about the OFE event was how many people were talking about how we need to provide more resources for open source projects if the EU wants to rely on them to facilitate digital sovereignty.

In Dirk Schrödter’s keynote, he talked about how the EU doesn’t want to be locked into big US tech firms that deliver technology as black box, proprietary solutions. He mentioned that open source provides shared knowledge and skill development that leads to open innovation and lower barriers to entry, which is a key to economic prosperity. Dirk went on to say that sustaining open source software requires shifting spending to prioritize open source solutions, and public money should be spent on open source solutions. These ideas were common threads throughout the day that came up again and again in other panels and talks.

Here are a few other key points summarized from throughout the day:

  • I heard several people say that we should “never waste a good crisis,” and the current political landscape is an opportunity to re-evaluate how the EU uses technology, but speeches aren’t enough. Many public procurement policies make it difficult to use open source, and that needs to change. Procurement policies need to focus on open source to facilitate standardization and interoperability.
  • Digital sovereignty is about choice and the need to be able to switch between solutions to avoid lock in and create a transparent ecosystem to build solutions on top of open source. The EU should define concrete steps to replace proprietary solutions and transition to open source and use this as a window of opportunity to leverage what already exists, rather than reinventing. 
  • Open source is worldwide, so there is a need to fund the maintainers and people who are contributing the code wherever they are located. Open source has always been global and there is a hope that we can continue to collaborate together, rather than being isolationist. 
  • We need to all work together to strengthen and scale open source to improve sustainability, but financing and sustainability is a big challenge, and it requires investing in open source maintenance. Maintenance keeps innovation alive; it’s like plumbing, roadworks, and other infrastructure that needs to be steadily supported over time. There isn’t enough money in public budgets to make a big enough difference, so there is also a need for industry support. 
  • There is a need for action now beyond the people attending the summit. The message of using open source to facilitate digital sovereignty needs to go well beyond the tech crowd to local officials across the EU public sector.
  • OSPOs can help put digital sovereignty and open source in context and facilitate collaboration and discussions between internal stakeholders, but also between industry and the public sector. OSPOs can help organizations take a more strategic approach by contributing to and funding open source, encouraging employees to take on leadership / maintainer positions, and increasing advocacy for open source solutions.
  • There were also two announcements at the summit. First, the Open Knowledge Foundation, Open Source Initiative, and OpenForum Europe came together to launch Open Technology Research to create a sustainable global platform for research, knowledge exchange, and policy engagement around open technologies. Second, the UN published the report from the 2025 UN Open Source Week and announced that the 2026 UN Open Source Week will be held in New York from June 22 – 26.

As someone who has been working in open source for a very long time, I’ll admit to being a bit bored at last year’s event with so many discussions about why we should use open source, since I’ve been having those discussions for 25+ years. This is why I was so pleasantly surprised to see how far the conversations have evolved in just one year. The shift toward talking about what needs to happen to make using and relying on open source in the public sector along with conversations about sustainability felt like progress. There is still a very long way to go. So many open source projects are struggling with finding people, funding, and other resources to sustain themselves over time, so we need to continue to move from conversations to action so that the open source projects we all rely on will continue to thrive as even more people rely on them to facilitate digital sovereignty.

Related Resources:

If you want help with your open source strategy, I’m available for consulting engagements.

Photo from the EU Open Source Policy Summit’s photo gallery.

General

Funding Open Source Sustainability at CHAOSScon and FOSDEM

Open source sustainability impacts all of us, and unfortunately, we know that many open source projects are struggling. Maintainers are experiencing burnout, lack of funding, and a general lack of resources to sustain their projects over the long term. This is something that was top of mind for me while I was in Brussels for CHAOSScon EU, the Open Forum Europe (OFE) Summit, and FOSDEM.

At CHAOSScon, during the opening session, I talked about demonstrating the value of open source efforts with a focus on how to articulate the value within organizations so that the open source work can continue over time (slides), which is one aspect of sustainability that I’ve already talked about here on this blog. 

We also had a fishbowl panel all about funding for open source projects to wrap up the day at CHAOSScon. The funding panel covered a wide variety of topics, so here are just a few topics mentioned by the panelists:

  • Past vulnerabilities can be used to make the case for future funding (e.g., Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund)
  • Money isn’t something that all open source maintainers want to spend time thinking about, and it can be a problem for communities to decide who gets funding?
  • We need more recognition by policy makers about the value of open source and need to revamp procurement to make it easier to use public money to fund open source. 
  • Funders need to understand the impact of their funding, but many corporate FOSS funders programs don’t have a focus on understanding and measuring impact.
  • Funding can be exploited when it’s not well-defined, and this can happen when people who aren’t particularly familiar with open source (e.g., policy, regulators, legal folks) are defining these programs.
  • Open Source Wishlist is an effort that Emma Irwin has been working on to bridge the gap between maintainers, funders, and practitioners.

I also attended several sessions in the FOSDEM Funding Devroom. Luckily, all of the devroom talks are recorded, since I wasn’t available to watch every talk, but I did pick up a few interesting tidbits from the talks that I did attend:

  • When measuring funding impact, quantitative data can help support credibility claims, but you also need qualitative data with narratives that carry meaning. 
  • Human sustainability is harder to measure than infrastructure impact, but maintainer health is a critical blind spot that should also be considered when making funding decisions.
  • Short term deliverables dominate impact measurement while long-term sustainability is undervalued because success often looks like nothing happened. 
  • Funding impact isn’t neutral. Funders’ visions shape everything: what / who gets funded, how impact is measured, and how work is valued. Funding from companies can bias development toward corporate interests. 
  • Funders often use a trust model where they fund people, projects, and organizations they trust, but that’s fragile because it’s personal, and people change roles. This is also hard to scale and creates bottlenecks. 
  • Funders often struggle to provide funding to individuals, since it’s often easier to fund projects or organizations.
  • Funding can be a time consuming and ongoing process for maintainers and projects to continue to find more funding when one wave of funding ends. 
  • It can also be hard for funders to work together to align processes and goals to create joint funding efforts.

Seeing more people talking about funding was great, and I really appreciated the thoughtful approach from several of the speakers about how funding isn’t a panacea. Funding doesn’t solve all of our sustainability issues, but it is one important tool that can help projects improve sustainability. If you are interested in learning more, we have a CHAOSS Funding Impact Measurement Working Group that meets every other Wednesday, and I am also available for consulting on this topic.

Related Resources:

Photo by micheile henderson on Unsplash

community

Open Source Community Metrics and State of the Puppet Community

Many of you probably know that I’ve spent the past week in Belgium for Puppet Camp Ghent and FOSDEM. I’ll be writing a blog post on the Puppet Labs blog later this week to talk about Puppet Camp Ghent, but I wanted to at least get my presentations out here while I finished writing the longer post.

Puppet Camp Ghent was amazing. I saw a few old friends and connected in person with quite a few community members that I had not yet met in person. Overall, I was very happy with the event, and the people at HoGent were great hosts. There were so many amazing presentations, and we’re getting them uploaded to the Puppet Camp page as soon as we get the slides from the speakers. Here is the presentation that I delivered on the State of the Puppet Community.

state-of-puppet-community

I had an amazing time at FOSDEM, too. I helped facilitate the Configuration / Systems Management DevRoom on Saturday along with a DevRoom dinner that evening. I love working in such a collaborative industry. The DevRoom and the dinner were organized collaboratively with our primary competitors, but we all worked together to pull it off in a way that benefited the industry. Aside from the DevRoom, I got to see a lot of old friends and had a great time!

At FOSDEM, I also gave a short version of my Open Source Community Metrics talk. If you are interested in open source metrics, you might rather look at the longer version that I presented at LinuxCon Barcelona in November. I also had a great conversation from Jesus at Bitgeria, and they are doing some awesome stuff with open source community metrics that you should look at if you are interested in metrics.

Next on my agenda are trips to Stockholm, Sweden and Oslo, Norway for two more Puppet Camps in the next two weeks before heading back home to Portland.