Operationalising open source software strategy: challenges and opportunities

This talk presents an overview of open-source initiatives in large-scale tech projects funded by Horizon Europe, focusing on the cloud-edge IoT continuum. The speaker, a researcher from Polytechnic University of Valencia, discusses his involvement in significant projects like IONTE and Eclipse ARES, which aim to unify distributed computing resources. Emphasizing the importance of collaboration between academia and industry, he highlights how open-source solutions foster engagement and innovation in sectors such as automotive and energy. Moreover, he addresses the challenges of trust and visibility in adopting open-source tools at scale, citing various statistics on industry adoption rates. The session also explores the need for structured governance in open-source projects to meet critical system requirements and ensure sustainability.

[music] Thank you very much the mayor. Thank you everybody for introducing me and for having me here. Um I will be representing one of the projects that have been mentioned before and the title of my talk is instrumentalizing open sourcing horizon Europe funded larger scale pilots. Um let me start briefly. I will be I will try to be pretty fast with this but I will explain who

I am and why I'm here and why I think I can have something to say. Um I am a researcher in Poly Techchnic University in Valencia the southeast of Spain which is called Polytechnic University and I have been in this field for quite a few years now. Rol has mentioned before continum which I don't think has been extended but it stands for cloud edge IoT continuum which

means trying this effort to unify together distributed computing resources that are eterogeneous and can could be abstracted as a single one so that to deploy services providing added value in a single abstraction. Um I have been working in that for a few years. Started with a project that was named inote back in the day 2016 where I started to have my first grasp in open source. This

is why I'm mentioning my history because that's today's conference. That's the goal of what I want to say there. We already had some open source result in the way of interoperability framework between the e emerging IoT platforms back then and we also experienced and experimented with this concept of financial support to third parties in cascade fundings in projects which I believe is a key instrument for engaging

open source initiatives andmemes growing this ecosystem. uh back then after that I also participate in several projects that were providing more open source results and open IoT platforms that are available if you want to look them and bringing me closer to one of the key points I want to say today in another one they participated activate which was IoT for health ended in what in a sustainable

action for beyond the project which was an association thanks to the participation as well of industrial partners. Another key point of my talk. Once this was done and the involvement of key industrial partners such as CA or My Spira or other big hospitals across Europe, this was sustained and open source tools are still used in this environment. Later we continued this idea of moving from IoT to

edge and cloud with this project in which we also had cascade funding and we also develop opensource IoT edge tool suite that is available for you if you want later this brought us to one of our main um projects which was a direct response to the first time the continuum concept was brought into the table which was IOS a meta operating system for putting together this IoT

edge and clock elements together out of that in which we scaled a bit in the size of the demonstrations. Please also bear this word in mind and we developed a open-source result for this meta operating system which was named Eclipse areas. This is now an open-source tool hosted by the organizers of this conference Eclipse that was presented um kindly yesterday by my colleague Grapha here in which

I am one of the project leads. So all of this was to basically introduce you how which has been my road map and my path to here that is redunding now in the uptaking of this opensource trajectory into a project that includes higher TRL demonstrators in a higher scale. Therefore, as you see the progression is what we believe open source should redount into actual high demonstration in

industry validated environments and this is one of the keys that I want to say which is how can the real ecosystem embrace opensource cloud edge IoT solutions and my answer is clear by leading with example of large scale industry because u we might ask a question um if I tell you that there is one meta operating system adopted by some companies here maybe present in this conference

it doesn't ring a bell but if or EDF or NL in Italy are adopting a solution then you might be more inclined to at least know about it right so that's one of the main takeaways was a good ledger to you know take and from my experience this is one of the lessons I have learned this can be complemented with some of the most recent state of

status of open source reports issued last year by either open source initiative but also in collaboration with the eclipse foundation and from their side the Linux foundation research as well that says one real truth which is open source it's really embraced and across companies of all sizes these are some numbers thrown here. 96% utilize at least some open-source suite. 68% have increased the usage out of the

last years. But what I would like to bring is that there is no trusted enough structured enough governed enough way of adopting these tools at large scale that can be visible in critical systems. So these numbers for me create a paradox between because usage of open source exists but maybe not at the scale we would like. Why? Maybe because of this setting example and this is if

you may especially true in the cloud edge IoT stack which is highly dominated by you know US tools especially coming from the cloud uh top down direction. Great. Ro mentioned before that aligned with this mindset that open source is being embraced, the commission has invested quite a lot of money. I think he said between 500 million euros in the continuum with a series of projects have been

going on for three four years now. All of them uh largely funded with some open source solutions other not. And also the commission is making additional efforts to grasp how these open digital ecosystems are being really implemented. So basically there's a track record and there are stuff there and this conference or others such as for them are a clear proof that it exists. there's interest but it

may be failing at the trust at visible large deployments because we don't see here really large enterprises right today and yesterday if you want to see that way so in this regard we believe that to comply with the sovereign package and this structure of demonstating large scale we should trust in reuse and federate resource across projects. So basically value for money from the results of previous projects

uh going hand by hand with EU standards. This was mentioned by Antonio before and it's clear that also by Rol if you develop a standard and you have the code that should be together with it. more likely to be embraced by this industrial grid um companies and you see that everything entangles and intertwined together when we come to this place and to my key point of the

presentation piloting in trusted large EU environments great and this is how we come to what I'm representing here which is the IRS you have there some information about the project um we believe that bringing these leaders in their industries together um and creating some visibility of these previous solutions complementing already existing tools such as the interpretable Europe catalog. This should be a solution and a way to

go. So in our project which is represented here by me and and my colleague graph as well and also bluepix and trial we have focused aligned with the spheres aligned with the priorities of the commission in these two main sectors automotive including SDVs EV charging open protocols CCM also energy with flexibility services renewable energy integration home energy management systems trying to clearly beat for open source solutions

here and in a specific area that in my opinion puts both together which is EV charging. You have the energy grid interactions and the mobility constraints together. And getting back to the message of industrial leaders paving the way and setting examples, we have engaged companies such as ETF, the DSO of France, um, Continental, now Almovio, which is the one of the largest tier one suppliers to OEMs

in Europe, Schneider Electric, I think they do not need any kind of introduction, and also CM, CMA, CGM, which is one of the the main European terminal operator maritime terminals. among others. So this is what we have been bidding for bringing together what we believe needs to be the value chain in these solutions cloud providers edge providers IoT providers largely relying on open source you can see

here from academia forming a value chain towards providing services based on these tools coming from previous actions to industrial leaders. So industry leaders pave the way. OCA creates the bridging and the building and innovative SMMES bringing their tools which thanks to attending to conferences like that are aligned with the EU value principles and how we do that in terms well we are 58 partners from 19 countries

three years and a half of duration it's complex. So we try to discover which are these sovereign needs that are more compelling in these two main sectors energy and automotion leading by these leaders of every of the sectors and map the open source tools that we believe are the solutions to those needs. For instance, orchestration of services with this open source solution that is hosted by Eclipse

or distributed data management with sovereignity from EU with another yet another Eclipse project Zeno that we have also in the consortium or through stability and immutability of exchanges such is done with IOTA which comes from a German uh research project as well or um edge to cloud infrastructure provisioning and deployment. Yet another cloud IoT tool useful for these sectors for instance having cloud integration across the mobility

stack that was mentioned before as well by ro with open nebula yet another European opensourcebased product or forflow as well in connecting underlying with IoT providing energy aware operation control and distributed data also from a European project or new that allows as well to deploy on top this set of infrastructure with EUR principles in mind. These are only some examples and this is what we believe should

be done in European project for now to get this work. I want to stop very uh you know stop much here since also I believe I am already past the time just to let you know that we are utilizing this innovative framework for conceptualizing how open source must be instrumentalized in cloud IoT the hourglass that was presented before by our colleagues Antonio and Amir. So there departing

from what the operators and the industrial partners uh describe which they issue we create this ecosystem mapping and based on what is needed we map to specific opensource solutions to cover their needs across the whole stack. I would like to see here that not always everything can be open source at this stage but it's the clear bit and the clear intention of our project to foster and

engage that this will be completely covered uh by the end of the project as well. We use it for mapping not only the results in our large scale pilots led by industrial leaders but also the actual platform that will derive from the project will be open source. So since I am a you know ahead of my time a bit I could just like to let you know

that there is there are ways to engage with what we are doing and the mindset behind this industrial validation with the project. I would like to start saying that we will have a hackathon in Calgary in 30th June and 1st of July uh where we will present some challenges that embrace both copilot uh concerns and also OCI concerns targeting home entity management systems Jakarta related operations coming

directly from recession Etsy open slice which is more tilted to the world of the telco operators and reducing bandwidth in IoT cloud distributed processing using Eclipse Zeno. So you see very well depth deeply based in open source and of course you are all welcome to come bring students bring SMS try to solve these challenge it will be fun and later this year by autumn we are executing

coming back to my trajectory track record from projects one of the main instruments we believe it's good for open source and and engagement which is open calls we are opening a second round of open calls we already executed one that will uh be with a deadline around October 2026 in which we will fund eight projects composed by two consortia giving 200,000 euro each to engage with this

ecosystem. So I I apologize for the the delay in the presentation but well that has been all from my side. A pleasure to be here likely to discuss with with you later. Thanks. >> Thank you Nacho. I think that you will see also now from the presentations that they are not going completely random but there is a sort of the let's say system [laughter] how we develop

from the European Commission uh CI sphere as a sort of coordination between the projects our glass model first pilot now second pilot and then we will continue with the telco cloud edge and then we come to Malika and to Lucan to see also from the open source perspective so I think I hope you see the logic that this is again not not just a random set the

presentation. >> Yes. Yes. From your last team up should be that just go here. >> So, good morning everyone. My name is yours Katikas. I represent UB a Greek theme established in Athens. Um, thanks all the speakers for the previous talks. I think I have a point to make now to complement what you have said already and especially based on natural talk. um I will just show

how I'm coming to the same problem area but from a different angle. So the reason I'm here is because I have deeply committed myself in open source since the beginning of my career uh with several EU projects but also uh open big open communities starting from ONF back in 2014 2015 and now uh engaging more into Europe uh through Etsy. So particularly since 2019 I have been

serving Etsy communities as technical string committee member uh especially in open slice and teraflow sdn in the former community I'm leading and contributing to the hyper orchestrator uh component of open slice while in teraflow sdn I'm deeply into more networking stuff leading p4 activities there in parallel with my open source u activities I have also been coordinating projects and my main moto in these projects is basically

try to make an impact. One of the ways for making impact in my opinion is uh engaging with communities and contributing to open source. Uh I'm proud to say that very recently one of the projects I was coordinating across uh it it was ended uh couple of months ago was awarded by Etsy for its many open source contributions to various groups uh open slice teraflow sdn zsm

and uh what we try to do is basically leverage the outcomes of these projects uh across p2 code and others now into a new project copilot which I'm also leading and I believe we have to pursue the same path. So [snorts] open source for us is key building a platform which scales and is open is and compliant to standards is mandatory for adoption and interoperability. So um

this is the topic of today's talk uh going around copilot. But before I do so I would like to highlight a bit the landscape that we uh witness uh not only in Europe but also worldwide these days. Starting from the bottom part uh the infrastructure layer where we see uh tremendous expansion of compute resources from hyperscalers all the way to the extreme edge. In parallel, IoT devices

grow both in terms of cardinality and also cap capacity and capabilities. So this is really a heterogeneous continuum of resources mixing data, network, compute together. Um on top we see three main classes of let's say broad initiatives uh trying to establish infrastructure management systems. I will focus on open systems now. Uh the first category is compute. Here we see Euro HPC for example trying to establish a

sovereign uh cloud infrastructure for Europe leveraging Etsy CNCF Linux Foundation Europe and other important initiatives. In the area of networking, we see a big synergy of Etsy, 3GPP, GSMA, Linux Foundation and ITF building open source platforms for slicing the networks. Uh these networks are heterogeneous also. We have cellular, we have we have transport core networks and so on and so forth. And in the emerging data ecosystem

now we see roughly two big initiatives. One is obviously Eclipse Foundation hosting us today. uh the other is legacy fireware systems both they're based on standards and they implement open standards and now on top of this heterogeneous spectrum of of open systems obviously there's recent need to federate federate both data and services right so um we have seen also other initiatives like Gaia X uh on the

data space ecosystem uh GSMA open gateway kamara for uh fed federating and exposing network but also u IPA for example in the cloud continuum area um and on top of this uh there's governance so as ros said previously we have euro u and other initiatives which try to bring everything together and try to provide um an end to end continuum uh sovereign interoperable and with open source

being at its core Um, last but not least, security and trust is everywhere. It's a pretty much vertical pillar uh with other important initiatives in Europe. And AI is going both vertically and horizontally trying to absorb data and produce intelligence pretty much everywhere. Right? So, um this is the really the spectrum we are uh up for today. And I'm coming from a world where uh basically uh

we see things from the networking and cloud perspective which is now converging very quickly to what we see as telco edge right. So I will a bit focus on this. Firstly for you to understand that there has been tremendous effort from open source to actually address uh requirements from the telco edge and the work we have been doing in Etsy open slice is going that direction. Uh

I strongly believe that the open slice ecosystem is a telco edge ready platform to be adopted by Europe. Uh this is because uh at its core it leverages a hierarchy of orchestration components uh which are securely interconnected together via open ziti which is a secure integration fabric and it is easily expanding to any kind of telco edge infrastructure by means of the pluggable controllers and especially in

this part of the slide you see a lot of state-of-the-art uh initiatives in Europe where open slice already binds with open standardized interfaces to cover the needs of telco edge. This is an everexpanding set of pluggable controllers. So we actually uh invite people to engage with us to further develop things in this area but also in the core of open slice and of course one of the

upcoming flagship projects Euro3C uh plays a key role here. uh we are there we will try to promote Etsy open slice in Euro3C and hopefully we will get good outcomes out of this project but now comes the problem here right and this is how you will understand that we are coming from that world of telco eds networking and cloud all together al together uh and we are

now facing challenges and needs from some business sectors where data is really important so there has been a gap between telco edge and data spaces. It's already identified and if you see the recent EU call like two weeks ago, there was a call of funding by European Union promoting especially the way that data needs to be handled compliance of data, data as a service, orchestration of data

services and stuff like that. This is really the gap that even EU tries to bridge now. Um and this is one of the reasons copilot was also founded recently. Um we will try to address and converge let's say the telco edge continuum with the data spaces. uh we do so by proposing um an abstract let's say architecture in copilot where we collocate at the ver at the

domain level both domain orchestration components for managing compute and network resources but also data management platforms um this set of domains scales all across Europe in copilot we have pretty much in every European country uh domains in five different business sectors where we have already deployed these kind of solutions. Our ecosystem is hugely based on open slice. So we have the fullblown open slice ecosystem already deployed

with open slice being the domain orchestrator more than 10 instances across Europe already. We have the hyper orchestrator overseeing the whole ecosystem. We have open ziti as a secure integration fabric. uh five different business sectors tie on top of copilot to provide their applications uh and their needs to manage their ecosystems. We expose a business portal where everything is standardized based on TM form APIs. So they

see products in a catalog, they order those products from a marketplace and they see them uh deployed automatically for them across Europe um in an easy manner. So um we are trying to mix here all the open slice ecosystem with GAX compliant data platforms coming from Eclipse and Fireware. Uh we implement standards across different uh parts of the stack like NGSD for interoperability of data down there

but also TM form APIs as I said previously. Um and actually Copilot now is a huge opportunity to um engage further with you and Eclipse Foundation and other communities and this is why we're here. We have an open call uh running already. Uh the the first open call of Copilot. uh it's due in a couple of weeks from now and we are uh welcoming partners who want

to provide solutions on top of copilot across five business sectors to catch up with us integrate with us uh possibly contribute to our uh communities and grow them further. So um that was all from my side. Thank you very much for your attention. Okay, very good. Thanks a lot. Okay, so first of all, I thank you the previous speakers and particularly I would say Nach and Gorgos

because they really uh covered a lot of of the setting that I needed for the cloud agility continuum. I also had a slide about where I'm coming from from an open source point of view. Then I removed it. I will add it back for the for the for the post proceedings. Let's say I've been in open source since 1998 where I did a middleware for multi- aent

systems for telecom Italia then became an LGPL middleware and then got adopted by by the by Telos in in in some systems. I think they they commissioned it in 2020 or something like that. as you know legacy software um and uh in particular we have we have heard from Nacho the very nice let's say path that you can map in this in this ecosystem um collection of

the various projects that were funded in horizon 2020 and then horizon Europe first cloud separate from IoT then oops the edge computing and in the middle you know what actually there is a continuum and so on so you can see Intel IoT you can see Aeros you can see this still now has been renamed P2 code where we are and also tech is and so on. So

so it is clear that there has been a strong research effort and it was recognized that data centers and small devices and everything in between they now become a spectrum for designing distributed systems. So in a certain sense the continuum model of of software today is more similar to the theory of distributed systems where there are nodes connected with links with processes distributed computation and we don't

care too much if it is a small device or or or something else. Then the next step was the recognition that also telecommunications evolved right because due to softization of the telos in 5G right there is a virtual network functions there is more and more um uh interest in being able to define like there is in in the the automotive the software defined vehicle also the software

defined network now became already specified in 5G in their own way and as you probably know in the transition to 6G G now the idea is to do the network virtualization using the same techniques with which you do computing virtualization on standard nodes. So containerization um function as a services all these kind of techniques that came from the uh manage the cloud service infrastructure are now being

applied more and more also in telecommunication. So uh the the vision of telco edge cloud that uh is then taken from the next wave of project one of which is the 03C that has been already mentioned uh came from this paper in 2024 where the commission said okay what do we need to master our needs for digital infrastructure and this covers energy this covers mobility this covers

telecommunications and in general the digital infrastructure so there were three pillars and the pillars that I'm interested in is the First one the so-called 3C network so connected collaborative computing consider that this vision is let's say nominally independent on AI so you have to have this plus AI everywhere this is what happened concurrently with this because this is only in quote the convergence between the crowd continuum

with the telco to become kind of a computing and networking continuum together. So uh from a Horizon Europe point of view as most of you clearly already know uh the the the funding allocation hit the proper telco joint undertaking in the CGSNS. So with the with some uh uh more network ccentric project then there is this big E3C that is the supply side large scale project in

cluster 4 but managed by the unit that is dealing with with the the future network so with the more telecommunication oriented part and then there is also been on the more open source and community support part the followup of the next generation internet program that also became connected to um aspects of web for those here in f words. So this is what happened and uh last year

the the the important let's say the the the larger two projects are this one is what then was won by Euro3C. So this is the network supply side pilot supposed to to demonstrate the feasibility of a European scale converge and federated telco edge cloud infrastructure. In the meantime, there was the other project part of the of the SNSJU that it was also about TCO cloud. It was

more about more let's say specific network aspect of of experimental platform. But what is important for this for this event is that both projects they name the importance of the open source as an enabler uh approach and they they mandate uh attention and integration with with work. So what happened is that now this project has been awarded and they are under gap preparation. The 15th of April

was the D for submission for these other section this other section that includes this data 02 will fund two or three project with a lot of open call. So thanks also to Nacho and Georgio for mentioning the importance also of the open call mechanism for what I will I will explain later and uh and there is also a CSA down there that will have to provide let's

say non-funding services like governance like um security and so on so support in terms of knowledge training and and compliance. So this is the situation what we are talking about here is the Euro3C product. You will notice the contrast in in let's say in beautifification of the slides. This has a reason because the euroy project is under preparation after have been awarded has been announced by the

mobile world congress 2026 and our press release. So from a media impact is up there on the stage already but there is still negotiation on the on the grant agreement and so uh also consider that it has 75 million euro budget and 87 Telefonica that is the coordinator is a even harder time the port Nacho has with with OCI and so you understand that I cannot um

make infographics without having them approved by enough people and so for this point of view I simply forgive me about that I simply copied parts of the declaration of the proposal okay because how we want to represent the interaction with ecosystems and so on is it is under discussion now because the project hasn't started But it always happens for these big projects there is already pretty meeting

discussions and so on. So from a statement point of view the Euro3C wants to realize the first uh pillar of this white paper about the digital infrastructure which is this 3CN connected cooperative computing networks by developing and demonstrated the first large scale pilot of a federated and open and sovereign European infrastructure for telco edge cloud. So from this point of view it is the very uh ambition

that was explained by copilot and by OCI. The difference is that this is supply side so it is concentrated on the service providers and the other point is that it is uh converged. So it's forbidden to understand okay supplies means the tech operators. No it means the tech operators the equipment vendors and also the cloud providers. So the the whole supply side is already an aggregation of

multiple industries. Okay. And this is the people that that are in in the consortium belong to all of these and they are already uh agreed on some aspects which is not just about helping the telco infrastructures to be more smooth with each other in inter horizontal interoperability but it is also to be able to offer better services or competitive services with hyperscalers because you know that in

the pure cloud computing area Europe from a market share point of view uh is mostly dominated by non-European offering right so because of this um it is it is important that um there is a connection with the demand side so this is what Antonio was saying before that then you have to talk with the with the with the potential users with the potential adopters so from an

open source point of view there is a clear open source strategy this was already explained ained in the in the core. So there was a um a clear mandate to apply an open source policy to to to cooperate from this large project to the existing and new opensource developments. The leader is SUSA in this case. So we have an example of an enterprise focused open-source European company.

So this is clearly the the reason why they have been chosen. And there are three aspects if you want where where the a3c has to talk about open source. On one hand there are existing initiatives some of which George already showed like kamara like silva and most importantly from a certain point of view the software development group out output that are all released under open source uh

definition complian licenses mostly apache I think. So there is the commitment not to create open source from scratch but to contribute to these important uh projects. Then there is also to keep uh a relatively permissive license to maximize business adoption. And then even though the the the project explicitly says that we prefer to contribute to existing code bases to to exploit the community that already exist. If

the project will have to develop some advanced components from scratch, then it will also establish version control but more importantly governance guidelines for contribution and public issue tracking. So all them let's say minimum sets of um uh infrastructure that allows an open source project to gather community support and to show transparency beyond the uh the two larger telco projects that I mentioned. Um there is also the

first project that is what the one that won the data 11 last year which is called restak and it has been announced by the commission in Fosdom this year. This is if you want the first one of the open internet stack stream that is kind of the continuation of NGI but while NGI had its uh let's say it's its mission to support and and and um and

fund open source innovator. uh in this case with the open internet stack there is the combination with what R was talking about which means using open source and leveraging open source in a industrial policy aspect. So the scheme of open calls the topics that have been proposed in the in this in this one and the following the following projects are mostly about um connecting with the industries.

In this particular case the first one has to connect with the urine. So this project will fund open call to do or to to develop opensource products components that will have to be useful and kind of coordinated with the telco the telco large project Euro3 there is a CSA where Martell also is that is called include it was the data 09 that has exactly mostly two jobs

one's to connect the large industrial-driven telco project3c with the opensource driven uh rest app but the other plan is to help the Euro3C supply side large pilot to understand the requirements from the demand side. Notice that there is there will be a large scale telco cloud large scale pilot demand side but will only be funded in 2027. So what do we do in the meantime and this

is where the solution is rather obvious because we have two existing and running large scale pilots on the demand side that technically are cloud edge IoT but in practice we have seen especially in this case with copilot are already well connected to uh telco development. So in the in the in the text in in in the plan of Euro3C there is already to um the commitment to

search cooperation with Copilot and and OCI and then of course CI sphere as as a coordinating entity to help get early some demand findings requirements or gaps that can help the supply side people in Euro um improve already the the the architecture and their work. So to wrap up what is clear in this evolution of convergence on one side and an open source evolution on the other

there are a few dualism because on the one hand is open source about industrial development or is it about spontaneous community you know bottomup growth between the telco and the cloud? Europe is strong in the telco within the cloud but they have to work together so they are in this large project. How will the balance of power and the business interest align? That's of course a management

key aspect of the of Euro tracing. The other one is openness and sovereignty, right? Open source is global is open but we want to be careful. We want to have the software bill of materials. We want to know who in could inject some some back door in some library that we depend upon and all this this is another this another aspect. So there are these three at

least these three dilemma and how do we solve them? But then I thought do we really need to solve them? I assume you are familiar with the word solutionism that is not a good thing. So let me close with a mini philosophical point. The temptation we are European we listen to beovven right we we we are still a little bit romantic let's say so we have the

temptation to go dialectic and say these are so these are dualism that we have to overcome to go to the next phase to something beyond. And here I want to there is a nice book technormanticism. Have a look. It was 30 years ago and it it was using philosophy to to anticipate a lot of problems that we have now. It was very interesting. What I want to

say no romanticism please but we should do something more modern which is for example what is uh goes under the name of complexity science which means that you accept that in complex system there are partial contradictions. you accept that it's good to have a plan because the the high continent sets the map, you know, shows commitment. So these top down things are important, but the way we

really act and that's why I was talking about the open course. We don't know who's going to win the little open course. We have the big project, multiple big projects, but we also have the little open course. And we have to balance these two things together without trying to resolve them. They have to live together. And we have to be able to run many things, most of

which will fail. So this if you want is a lesson from the VC right now there is all this aspect of startups e-wing where there is a lot of discussion about of the about the European model. So this is just an invitation of think of our next steps in comp in combining large scale projects and unpredictable community based bottom up open source in a way that is

kind of nurtures both and allows the ecosystem to flourish in a way that we cannot anticipate. That's also important from my point of view. And last point here, you see diversity and openness are essential traits in this kind of ecosystem. And these are two qualities that open source development and culture luckily has. That's also what was said in the one of the keynotes that the community is

more prepared for some challenges because of these traits. Thank you very much. [applause] >> Thank you very much, Jovani. Especially for this, I would say philosophical challenge. But that's interesting because this is not also something that is very often let's say heard we are more like deep dived into technology rather than other societal also important aspects uh where did I put here right >> yes >> that

seems to be >> yes so our host please [laughter] >> okay so if I am your host it's easy to explain why I'm here it's basically hosting everything and I think Rosaria has helped a lot on hosting everything and make it happen. So thank you very much for for joining us and and let's talk about Eclipse SDB as an example of let's say successful example of industrial

driven uh project in in open just to give you some context and everybody has explained themselves their story here. uh before joining Eclipse Foundation in January this year. So I'm rather new here as director of research I've been working five years setting up the open source product office in Index one of the largest retail fashion companies in in the world I think. So it was just a

challenge before that as entrepreneur setting up a company developing open source to measure open source activities and measure the health of open source communities. before that entrepreneur and many other things working for the national government and research center of open source in Spain the Spanish association of enterprises in open source and before that research on e- health and open source and before that setting up a Linux

user group in a studio Spain long time ago so that's a journey to arrive here and talk about a project that I am not managing itself but I have some some ideas of has been successful and actually about the clips DV as as to highlight something that I think is important for the project is an open collaboration platform and for me that's the key point here is

it's not about an opensource project code that you have there and you can play with it it's a functional platform for collaboration that's not only about the code but the people that are collaborating there and for me one of the key points is that you have already more than 50 companies participating in the projects contributing actively to more than 25 different projects to build a platform that

is usable in in cars and probably of course and and to be honest h since we are thinking about this idea okay open source development is our meritocracy how you get some governance on top of that is how these companies very diverse competitors at the end they are collaborating to to build something that okay why they are collaborating and to give you one example when I was

on on index previously we were talking about okay maybe open source is something that you might be working with others and and potential partners, competitors and one of the examples I I gave I remember giving was Eclipse SDV saying okay you see Mercedes BMW are are there and they are collaborating and I remember people inside the company say no that cannot happen I have a Mercedes that

has a BMW but I thought there are competitors there no it's happening and this this is a good example that could happen and and happens because one of the figures that for me highlight the most was to 70 to 80% of the 70 to 80% of the engineering effort was on things that are not differentiating was not something that creates value to differentiate one company to the

other. So why we are spending dam energy on that instead of building something together and this is where when they join to to work on this and to explain this how this has been work why this work usually this use this approach of what I call the path to open source leadership that I think most of us we are in open source we have also walking this

path you start by using open source in a certain point of your life you realize oh there is already an open source thing that I can use I can download I can already use it and usually the first incentive to do that is what we call value capture usually like okay it's free I can download it I can play with it and I can start using it

with low effort uh well this is the as I said the first step into digital autonomy like okay I don't re I don't need anyone to provide that to me it's already there and I can start using it so it's the first step but there is no collaboration it's basically my own self my own need just willing to do that in a certain point you start thinking

okay but I have some knowledge about this thing and maybe I can influence on what's going on there in a certain point if this is strategic for you and you are not alone you are a part of a company or or a consortium or whatever it's like okay but you know I can contribute back this is open there is a mechanism governance that allows me to contribute

back why not contributing because I have a I have identifiable back or have a feature that I would like to to path. Uh uh I will give you some examples of of this path. I remember a decade ago going to one SDB related conference and hearing one big tire on manufacturing say no we are already using an operative system you know but we are using on floppy

disc and is the copy master that we have for all the cars and we don't don't allow anyone to touch that one decade before they are contributing to SDV. Okay, it's a journey about contribution. I remember talking with Samsung long time ago and I was asking why you are doing open source, why you are contributing some drivers on open source and for them was you know most

of the the cars that are being manufactured the the the screen that you are using is using a Samsung screen manufactured by Samsung. If we wait to the screen to be actually in the market to have the drivers needed for that that's a long time. We need to drivers to be on the market when the when the screen arrives the market because the manufacturers that are fac

manufacturing the car they need already that and that's a strategy for them and they were measuring how to influence more on the projects. Okay, that's open participation like okay the door is open let's start participating. So part of that evolution is like but yes our company you know we have more than knowledge we have some tools inside the company some ideas some projects that what we are

developing then on internally I remember doing analysis in some companies like probably 70% of of the internal tooling that they have they have this criticality security analysis okay if it is broken how this impact is is storing private data or something 70% of the tooling of the infrastructure It's like low risk at all. Basically, if it's open, nothing will happen to the company in terms of business.

So why developing that only inside the company? When you realize, okay, I've been contributing to this project. There are many people contributing. If I unable to release something that the community finds that useful, why not doing that? Because at the end is it's my own needs also. It's my own goals. So it's when you realize, okay, let's start releasing open projects. And it's this idea of leadership

and start to just lead our own projects. Okay, lesson learned here. Of course, let's start by code first. But it's not enough. Some companies do something like okay, we have this open source thing. We release it and a certain point, but it's my project, you know, I don't let you touch it at the way you should usually like. And this is already happening. For example, you know,

Android now has decided to do every development under their own walls. Let's say like that you are not allowed to use only the things that they are releasing as open source just twice a year no more than that. So if you are willing to integrate anything with that you need to sign some kind of agreement. Of course Android is Android but you need to sign an agreement

with Google for example. So that's again it's like okay it's open source the license is there good but the governance matters especially if it's something that for your value chain is strategic and I think this is again an example of how Eclipse having this governance model based on okay industrial partners sme individuals can contribute in an open way transparent matters and an example here so that that's

important to to discuss so we were sometimes discussing okay what would be the next Eclipse SDV for for us in ter of Eclipse and what we are doing basically is is to participate in many many open source projects may maybe you know most most of them already I've been working with Joani with Ami with many of you lately even since I joined last January and I I

know last week was crazy right we all agree about that [laughter] so that's grazing we are many things that we are seeing the same kind of infrastructure ideas that are happening already in the STB sector digital infrastruct public digital infrastructure like e-wallets things like that risk five and all the things around open hardware foundation and stuff like that again is a good example of industrial collaboration to

build something beyond that in health and stuff like that and one of the comments when we were preparing this this talk is okay let's talk about not only the good news or the lessonless but what would be the gaps the challenge and the opportunities for each step of this of this journey and of course about using open source. One of the usual gaps or let's say gaps

I see is the knowledge. There are companies they don't even realize how much open source they already using and how important is for them. I remember having jokes when I was joining one of the companies like oh you are the open source guy you are the one that telling me that it's free and then it's costing me millions of dollars. Okay. Well, it's quite different story. Of

course, the challenge of creating trust on the software you are using and then here for example foundation or stewards has an important role because it's not only the code is there. There are service providers like check IP compliance licensing security this kind of stuff that we are to our projects creates some notion of trust. Okay. It's not only going to jitabloud or whatever and getting the the

code and of course this is an opportunity for regulation now that we have CRA. and all these things is an opportunity to highlight how important it is if we are going to the next step. Okay, now I start to contribute. The typical gap is okay, but how communities work? I mean, I am in a high corporation. You know how important we are. We are putting like 1,000

lines of code there and they're going to accept it. Maybe not. Communities behave in a very different way. So, you need to understand them how they they work. So here the challenge is to manage expectation about what's what's what I'm going to get from going there and what's the speed of the community because sometimes is okay I did this for tomorrow they are not accepting my PR

what's happening here and here one of the opportunities again is for pro procurement we are thinking about okay let's go for European thing and for European companies for me it's more about how companies are contributing already to open source projects not just building open source That's using open source are you already contributing and again that's something that could be a certain point can be measured can be

tracked and then you can use that for procurement public and private procurement and of course if we arrive to the point okay I have already released something I want to build something all together the management cost is one of the gaps it's not the same thing for a big corporation for an SME here is again opportunity for public funding research initiative as the ones we are managing

in Eclipse or participating in Eclipse is a good example Okay, at the end we see ESM with with ideas even research centers, academia, we have these nice ideas but we don't have the okay let's use this funding to build something and let's create I don't know maybe in the long term a working group an interest group that all industrial partners join and build something together and for

that I think one of the key points is and the challenge is understanding how important governance it is because again it's not just I have my code on gitlab or in github is how we manage the collaboration of all of us how I am opening others to use my code not only my code our code to build something good for the future. So for me the key

point is how we are all together to do community building and that's one of the key points when you're asking about okay what eclipse usually do and research project and you ask us what you're providing community building because for us is if there is no community I think I think Joani you always mention Antonio this if there is no community maybe there is an issue okay could

the code could be marvelous but if there is no community what who is using it of course maybe you but you want you need others to make it better and that would be it. So we already have um a sort of emerging let's say patterns [laughter] across the presentations uh from the let's say uh move um from the let's say cloud h IoT to telco cloud including

AI how to build open source and communities and now we end up and I'm sorry Lucen that you are at the end I mean someone has to be somehow the thing is that you are also standing between us and the lunch, it doesn't mean you should be quick. So, no pressure. [laughter] Thank you. >> No pressure. Thank you. Um, I hope that you still have some energy

after all these insightful presentations and all the tremendous opportunities that we have around open source. So, I'm Luchian Bala. Uh, I'm with RT. So, RT is a power transmission operator in France. So we maintain, operate, uh, develop the high voltage and extra high voltage power grids. At RT, I'm currently deputy head of R&D and also leading our opensource strategy. Um, actually our opensource journey really started in

2018 when uh, we met with the Lynx Foundation and collaborated to build the links foundation for energy. So maybe I should here be thankful to the Eclipse Foundation to invite me to talk about a non Eclipse project. So that's demonstrate the inclusiveness and openness of the spirit of open source which makes us stronger um and at LF Energy. So I'm currently also chair of the board of

the foundation. Maybe before going to opensource and very briefly I'd like to present our context because it will help you to understand why we decided to shift to open source. Uh I'm just throwing keywords because uh I don't have time to elaborate on that but what you need to understand is that we are all under the pressure of of climate change. We need to decarbonize our society

and economies and achieve energy transition. And of course power grids are enab enabler of this transition. At the same time we have aging infrastructures that are already confronted to the manifestations of the climate change. So they have not been built for tomorrow's climate and more recently in the current years we are also have to cope with geopolitical fragmentation. So in this context what are our key challen

uh challenges and what are also what is a tricky equation that we need to solve and this has four dimensions. First a massive need for grid investment to to connect more renewables to be able to shift some energy usage from fossil fuel to to decarbonized power and to renew it um the operations of the power grids will become more complex. There are many reasons for that. I

will not elaborate. One of these for instance is the fact that renewable generation depends on weather conditions and these are not fully predictable. So it adds uncertainty. And then if we have more usage of power and we are more we have more usage of digital in our societies and economies then uh the reliability of the power supply will become more and more critical. So reliability remains a

high concern and affordability. Of course in this context there is um a common belief uh in in the grid business in the power grid business that uh digital solutions can be a great opportunity. They can bring new solutions new levels to achieve these transformations to be efficient to optimize etc. And this is recognized up to the policy level with the European Commission that has published a digitalization

strategy. Now the point is how do we make sure that we do not stick with just a magic spell and operationalize the the digitalization? How do we make it happen? And that's where we came to the conclusion that we need a profound shift in the way we acquire our software if we want to succeed uh at the pace that is needed. back a little bit. Yeah, here

it here it is. and then this um this led us this convention led us to open source. I think I don't need to explain what open source brings in to this audience. So I will go very fast just to mention that currently our open source strategy is relying on two vehicles. So the LF energy foundation for industrial grade software. What I also forgot to mention in the

introduction is that we are a critical infrastructure. So we're building core business software for critical applications under an open source scheme. We also have another vehicle that is called CIM. uh more focused on on research topics but also they also uh disseminate their results uh with open source licenses. so along the way we actually we started in a a strange manner approaching open source starting from uh

building a foundations and then then learning how to contribute and how to use open source. That's not the the common way but anyway it worked. But along the journey we we progressively learn and clarify our open source strategy. and and this slides summarized somehow where we are now uh as a vision. Uh I will also elaborate more on that during the panel session after our launch. But

basically we realize that the real power uh of open source only materializes if the community grows. And to grow the community what is essential is is to create trust conditions. So trust in the technology. How do we make sure that we build very high quality software for usage in critical applications and trust in the governance? How can we make sure that the collaboration framework is efficient is

open that uh no party can have coercion on the others etc. And that's where we have the conviction that foundations such as LF energy in the energy sector such as Eclipse have a strong role to play. That's what they bring actually. So relying on the foundation framework to create trust. Then we progressively adopted a strategic participation that levers three things. First we directly contribute to some projects.

We even um like initiated and are managing some some projects with our own internal resources. But we also adapt have adapted our procurement rules to be able to tender and buy uh software services geared towards specific opensource initiatives, open source technologies. And this also helps us to attract the ecosystem to work with us to send signals and to enable uh both startups etc and and um even

our traditional vendors to to join us in this initiative and we are also strategic member of the foundation that allows us also to be on the driving seat and and guide the development of the of the ecosystem. And the aim of all this is to make sure that we can create an ecosystem around us that can both have the innovation pace that we need and also ensure

through proximity that we can make sure that our tech the technologies that we are building here and using tomorrow would be resilient that we have control on them enough control that we have some kind of sovereignty if we want to call it like that. maybe um two two quickly to two concrete illustrations. The first one is the project is named CPASS and the vision was that um

inspired by what happened in the telecommunication industry. We wanted to convert the automation that we deploy in the power substation from equipment to uh softwarebased automation. So virtualized automation. Um and when we had that vision, we also wanted to create an interoperable platform that could uh ensure that a multi- vendor approach. So we will launch the CPASS project with a few words on one slide in 2019

and in a few years later we came to a point where we have the first industrial deployments at RTA. Not only we were pleased to see thatmemes like safare Linux join us and they're already having a commercial offerings around the same technologies that is also used not only at RT but national grid in the UK is working with General Electric we are working with Snider Electric etc.

So a complete illustration of the intention to bring to build ecosystems around in innovative solutions. Another interesting uh story is another project. So is power system blocks name possible. It's quite specialized. It's for power system modeling simulations etc. along the the years it has been uh increasingly adopted by our peers European peers in other countries. So it's becoming a strategic asset for the operations of the European

power grids. This is used in control rooms for instance. And we decided due to this importance we decided to shift the hosting from the LFUS legal umbrella to LF Europe legal show more control uh from Europe on the on this assets. So just to conclude um we started it in 2019 we a bilateral collaboration and along the Euros other parties have joined us. So for instance Aliasite

Aliander is a distribution system operator in the Netherlands. Hydro Quebec there are a big utility in in Canada. Um and this is just the beginning actually what we are seeing a growing interest in the grid operators community in in in Europe. Um our next annual summit will be in Berlin uh with the area 50th group hosting it. So Belgian and German grid operators we are expecting 500

people there. Um and this is growing out of necessity because without open source we will never achieve the innovation that we will need tomorrow at the pace that we will need tomorrow. Thank you. So thank you all for the presentations before the lunch. [laughter] So now it's a lunch break and then we continue in the same place with the panel discussion with all of the speakers and

and again uh we will give introduction after the lunch not to keep you here but again I think you can see a sort of the um themes topics questions patterns that come out of the presentations um and we will continue in a panel discussion with this we have some sort of the let's say questions there but I think that some new things also emerged from the presentations

that we can focus on but we will discuss has this after line. So, thank you for your attention for now.