The day before the biggest developers meeting in Europe, Open Forum Europe organises a pre-FOSDEM event.
The event gave an overview of how open source is being positioned in Europe. Welcoming remakrs from Pearse O’Donohue from DG CNECT gave a lot of an overview of policy. The new commission has two central priorities, the green new deal and the digital transformation, open source sotware and hardware overlap into both of these priorities and should be supported. He invited partners to the Next Generation Internet . The NGI initiative respects the values of privacy, participation and human diversity.
Other presentation went on evaluating the growth of open-source In absolute numbers and as a market share. How Open source UK is developing a free and open source platform for health services.
Some interesting points from the various research presentations on open source. What was clear to one researcher was that open source is a very good way of developing skills and collaboration. In terms of training and education there is a lot that can be gained from participants in open source projects.
Interesting elements of discussion came up with regards to transparency legislation on open source had an overwhelming consensus from participants when it came to safety legislation. Panel speakers mentioned recently how there should have been more transparency and openness in the aerospace and automotive sector. With one noting, while he is not a fan of copyleft, but when it comes to automotive and aerospace safety it is a necessity. This necessity will get more interesting when AI gets in the mix. Currently the premise of safety regulation in automotive and aerospace is that code is deterministic, when errors in safety happen you can determine how it happens by tracing the code.