OW2con'24 Program

Event opening

After two years of leading a global, multi-stakeholder conversation to co-design the Open Source AI Definition, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) is getting close to the finish line. Stefano Maffulli, OSI's executive director, will explain how the co-design process works, reveal the content of the latest draft of the Definition and highlight the next steps.

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From its historical dedication to education and women's rights, Tunisia has laid the groundwork for a thriving inclusion in various technological fields especially for women. We will showcase key figures and approach to gender inclusivity, our journey and contributions related to technology and specifically the open-source field and discuss the opportunities and challenges, we face in nurturing Tunisia's Open-Source landscape.

Join us in exploring the groundbreaking success story of open-source 5G technologies that has transformed the landscape of telecom technologies. This talk will delve into the wider paradigm shift brought about by open-source initiatives such as Free5GC, OpenAirInterface, Open5GS and PacketRusher, which have shattered the barriers of proprietary systems (or have they?). Discover how open-source is making telecom accessible to a broader audience, breaking down the complexities of traditional telecom, and fostering interoperability in a once-closed ecosystem. Explore the future of telecom, where innovation thrives in the hands of a collaborative, open community.

The smart device revolution has given rise to amazing products and services. It has birthed unprecedented connectivity, powered the rise of social platforms, generated new industries and empowered people. Looking forward, we see a significant shift towards open web technologies and open mobile technologies. A shift that will liberate developers from siloed models, encourage interoperability and champion fair competition.

Huawei invites you to step outside Droid’s house, go past the walled orchard and discover the free world. Let us show you a new landscape with Oniro and OpenHarmony, a future-proof open source operating system collaboration for a multitude of devices

The Oniro Project is a collaborative effort between the Eclipse Foundation and the OpenAtom Foundation, forging the world's first cross-regional open-source operating system project. Built on the robust foundation of OpenHarmony, Oniro leverages the strengths of both organizations:

• Eclipse Foundation's Open Source Governance: Oniro benefits from the Eclipse Foundation's proven experience in managing open-source projects, ensuring transparency and fostering a thriving developer community.
• OpenAtom's Technical Foundation and Developer Base: Oniro builds upon OpenHarmony's strong technical core and taps into its vast developer ecosystem.

This unique partnership empowers Oniro to create a future-proof operating system with a rich graphical user interface (UI) for mobile and IoT device. In this session, we'll delve into the various components and layers that make up Oniro.

The goal of the FusionIAM Community is to put together open source software used to build a global IAM (Identity and Access Management) solution.

Most of the time all the softwares present in the FusionIAM community are well know separately but never in the context of a global IAM solution. FusionIAM project will provide an easy way to deploy and configure the whole stack:

• LDAP directory
• Management interface
• White pages
• Web Services
• Authentication portal
• Access control
• Synchronization connectors

FusionIAM provides containers for an smooth deployment, either on a virtual machine or on a kubernetes server.

As more and more software companies decide to abandon open source licenses to adopt source-available or non-compete licenses, it is time to take a step back.

In this talk, we will look critically at those recent developments, replace them in historical context, explain the origin and value of the permissionless innovation that we currently all enjoy, and reassert the value of software developed in an open collaboration.

Forty-four years ago, Richard Stallman gave birth to the Free Software movement. Personal interest, an intellectual view about the pragmatism of software openness, and a deep-set belief about the morality of software as a commons, ran head-first into the growing shift towards closed and protected software. Clever use of copyright law to enshrine software freedoms kick-started a revolution. Yet despite the rise of the more business-friendly Open Source Software movement, many for-profit companies still view liberated software as an anti-capitalist endeavour. It's a common question: "How can something given away for free, even possibly used and exploited by competitors, make any financial sense for a business?" This talk will explore the notion of value and why, when and how freed software makes good business sense.

Worldwide, we spend over 1 trillion dollars per year for the loaded cost of software developers.

If every company spent just 0.1% of that amount to fund open source maintainers, we’d unlock a billion dollars per year to fund the maintenance of open source.

That would pay the full time salaries for thousands of maintainers, their managers, security training, etc.

That seems fairly cheap for software that accounts for 70% to 97% of our software stack depending on how you count. And just imagine the positive impact it would have on the security of our software supply chain!

We’re way overdue making a clear distinction between open source developers and open source maintainers and professionalizing the latter.

In this talk, we’ll look at the current solutions to support open source software maintenance and their limits, the negative impact of feature-driven open source sponsoring, successful example of professionalizing maintenance in an adjacent field (Open Web Docs), what this could concretely look like for open source, and the benefits it would have for the community, the contributors, the users, and the end-users.

This presentation will focused on the return of experience of 3 organizations of TOSIT association :

MAIF : 1. Funding of individual developers and 2. Creation in open rather inner source (mélusine, shapash...)

SNCF : 1. Creation of PostgreSQL.fr interentreprises 2. Major investment in TOSIT 3. Co-creation of open rail Foundation

ORANGE : Establishment of a network of 15 partners based on recurring annual budgets such as maintenance to sustain support for Orange and in turn, for the open source ecosystem.

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A free, trustworthy, inclusive and respectful internet is one of the main visions of the founders of the internet, users and the authorities (e.g. https://www.ngi.eu/about/). Research estimates that approximately 96% of all software nowadays is open source or has open source at its root. Initiated as a response to proprietary code, open source is usually defined as source code made available to the general public for modification and redistribution, where human programmers build upon the work of others, adapting excerpts of the code, often in a collaborative process. As a decentralized software development model, with its main principle peer production, open source grew out of the F(L)OSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) movement, where free refers to ‘freedom’ and not price, with source code openly shared without restrictions. However, there are also those who promote F(L)OSS and state that open source is the resulting business model built upon it. Yet why is it necessary to understand what open source is, its histories and how public funding promotes sustainability?

The evolving genre of FOSS/open source has been offered as a solution to the problems of (corporate) proprietary code; simultaneously it opens the door to software developers worldwide, who build new infrastructures and technical solutions based on shared resources and open code. The EU’s NGI (Next Generation Internet) funds diverse projects from a range of developers: SMEs, entrepreneurs, academics and activists––one of them is NGI Search. The vision of the NGI Search project is to ‘change the way we use and experience search & discover data and resources in general on the internet and on the web’, with the condition that all code from deliverables must be made open source. (https://www.ngisearch.eu/) Ethnographic interviews/surveys will be conducted with some of the developers to comprehend the ethics and values of the forms FOSS is taking within their awarded search projects and the sustainability of open source development through various lenses (financial, ideological, mental health, community, etc). This research delves into the ethics implicit in FOSS and open source business models, thereby contributing a theoretical framework/data visualisation mapping of humanising open source software and sustainability development.

Free software is increasingly financed by large organizations, which tend to steer projects towards their own specific needs. I will explain why this is not desirable for anyone and I will give feedback on the way I try to ensure the projects I participate to continue to remain attractive and useful for everyone.

The virtuous sides of the Open Source model are well known; at the same time, and without necessarily a causal link, many companies are migrating to SaaS-type models.

In this session, we’ll explore both subjects and see that a causal link does exist, but also that this relationship between Open Source and SaaS is actually more complex than at first sight, since it forms a virtuous circle that, in retrospect, looks like a no-brainer! Are Open Source and SaaS, two very strong trends in our industry, the perfect couple?

The OW2 best project awards recognize and reward "best of breed" projects and successful implementations of OW2 technologies.

On February 7th, France and Germany announced that they were collaborating on a sovereign digital suite based on open-source and interoperable solutions, aiming to create a coherent and comprehensive range of digital tools for public agents, including an instant messaging service based on Matrix.

In France, this effort is lead by DINUM. We will present this new approach and how we intend to take part in open source communities to help finance, maintain and support the development of open source solutions used by public agents.

Today, Open Source alternatives are missing when it comes to the search of complete suites integrating the most common use-cases of collaboration: email, chat, document & knowledge management, issue tracking, user management. IT departments looking for such suites are forced to turn towards proprietary solutions such as Microsoft 365 or Google Workplace.

However, alternatives are in the building. Among them, openDesk, an initiative lead by the German Ministry of Interior, stands out.

This project aims at building a complete Open Source alternative to Microsoft 365, where the software, the integrations, and the infrastructure required for project are to be released under Open Source licences. At the core of this project are several European Open Source software vendors, including Univention (user management), Open-Xchange (email), Nextcloud (file management), Nordeck / Jitsi (video conferencing), Element (chat), Collabora (document editing), OpenProject (project management) and XWiki (knowledge management). Operations on the project are also coordinated by Dataport, a service provider for the German administration.

This presentation will focus on describing the project, its governance, and describe how its different actors organize in order to foster integrations within Open Source products, and thus create a usable platform on top of them.

Join us for an exciting update from the world of Collabora Online (COOL). Let us show you how users and integrators benefit from using a security focused, truly open-source, online office suite. In this session we’ll show you why File Sync & Share and LMS provisions are integrating Collabora Online into their products. Hear about the work we’ve done over the past year to improve integration APIs, and make COOL an even better experience for its users. See what makes Collabora Online so feature rich and powerful. For administrators seeking cutting-edge solutions, we have interesting new Kubernetes deployment options that are easy to install and automatically-scale. From seamless deployment and integration of external tools, to easy font management APIs and tooling to enhance compatibility across platforms – COOL makes your job a breeze. But that's not all! We have infused the underlying LibreOffice technology with a host of essential features for users, building on our foundation of strong interoperability and collaborative editing. Hear about the latest features including usability, accessibility and interoperability improvements, as well as how we have improved performance across the board. Learn how Collabora Online brings scalable, secure, on-premise document editing to everyone – allowing integrators to provide extra functionality to their offering, and users to stay in control of their data.

In the last year we saw the rise of AI systems like ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, Dall-E and others. Large Language Models like GPT are enabling a lot of new innovative features and products which will revolutionise the world. But this large autoregressive language models come with a lot of challenges that can have negative effects on the Open Source and Open Tech community. For example it’s unclear if in the future everyone will have access to the same ML models and training data. Can students, startups and open source people build innovative new products using AI in the same way the open source communities build Open Code and Open Tech. How can we make sure that the AI system are not discriminating underrepresented minorities? What is the energy consumption and CO2 emissions of this new big AI systems? This talk will discuss the current challenges around AI. In the second half it covers the new innovative local and open source AI features that the Nextcloud community is building. At the end the talk looks into the new Ethical AI framework and what it means for existing SaaS AI solutions and the open source local alternatives. It  also covers the ongoing discussion to define an Open Source AI definition in the OSI community.

For the past 50 years, the computing industry has been following Moore's law, so we end up sending to trash millions of well-working computers every year. We can do better. In fact, now that climate change and biodiversity collapse are here and getting worse, we urgently need to do better. I have a plan. The good news is that Moore's law is slowing down. If we start optimizing the software stack we have, we'll realize we're sitting on a huge pile of unused ressources. This will enable us to keep innovating without having to build new IT equipment, which is the biggest environmental issue with IT. In short, we'll run tomorrow's services on yesterday's computers? We have to, we can't wait any longer.

At the FOSDEM '24 event, OpenLLM France evolved into OpenLLM Europe, embracing the goal of fostering an open collaborative space to develop partnerships among national initiatives aimed at creating open-source, sovereign, and efficient Large Language Models (LLMs) in the respective languages of each country.

OpenLLM Europe now boasts over 450 active members, receiving significant backing from the academic research community (22% of our members) and nearly 40% of our members are either users or companies specializing in AI.

Following the publication of CLAIRE in October 2023, our new model LUCIE has entered the pre-training phase. With 7B parameters, our primary objective is to address the underrepresentation of the French language in LLMs generally.

We have also incorporated other European languages, including German, Spanish, and likely Italian soon, alongside developing code to enhance the model's reasoning capabilities.

LUCIE is slated for 200,000 hours of pre-training on approximately 96 GPUs within the Jean ZAY machine, a sovereign supercomputer provided by our partner GENCI.

By June, LUCIE will be made available, having undergone transparent and independent evaluation by research teams from CNRS and INRIA.

This presentation will offer an update on the training progress, fine-tuning efforts, and the adoption of the LUCIE model.

Therefore, today in Europe, we have all the capabilities and, I believe with OpenLLM Europe, have generated the momentum, to build a real Open Source and sovereign European LLMs that meet our regulations.

The AI Act, which is the new European AI Regulation set to be adopted in April 2024, establishes a comprehensive legal framework for regulating the commercialization of AI systems. Its rules relate in particular to the transparency of the AI systems, and their strength depends in particular on how an AI system is developed. That’s specifically where Open-Source becomes key in AI development ! By fostering collaboration, transparency, and community-driven innovation, Open-Source enables the responsible and ethical advancement of AI technologies.

This regulation, through its cardinal principle of transparency leads to the creation of an exception to its application for AI system distributed under an Open-Source licence. In this respect, by recalling the conditions under which the Open-Source qualification will be retained, the AI Act specifies the criteria(s) under which it will not apply to AI system distributed under an Open-Source licence.

The purpose of this presentation is to understand the conditions for benefiting from an exemption from the application of the AI regulation for AI tools using Open Source. In this way, we will analyze the definition of Open Source adopted by the AI Act, a definition which emphasises the need for transparency through the desire to encourage developers to create models to accelerate the sharing of information throughout the lifecycle of an AI. This will make it possible to address the specific cases in which AI distributed under an open-source licence is exempt from the application of the regulation, and the direct consequences of this.

Local-first community created a fresh new architecture for our world dominated by cloud. In this talk, Andrey, will advocate for local-first architecture, delve into its unique futures, and provide real-world production experience.

This talk is helpful for every engineer because it contains multiple steps to improve privacy. From simple first steps without rewriting the app to profound revisions utilizing local-first architecture- there’s something for everyone.

A significant source of stress for maintainers and contributors to open source projects is mismatched expectations around credit and feedback for contributions. Sometimes a person makes a contribution representing months of work, only to have a maintainer lightly rewrite it and take sole credit. Other times a maintainer is overwhelmed by work, has no time to review unsolicited contributions, and is accused of plagiarizing work they never saw. And sometimes people game the system by sending large numbers of low quality, computer-generated, or plagiarized contributions to artificially inflate their apparent qualifications.

This talk describes one way to reduce this source of stress: a written contributions policy laying out what contributions are welcome, how they will be handled, and how the credit will be distributed. We will present a draft contributions policy written by members of the RIPE Open Source Working Group which can be adapted and reused by open source projects.

Real-time group communications involve many building blocks to bring functionalities like calls, chats or video conferencing. In an open world, relying on a single actor to supply all the technology required for such services to be live is not recommended. Video conferencing servers are key components that need to be integrated in full-scale digital workplaces. Functions such as conference scheduling or participant management need to be tightly  linked with calendars or address books. The Linphone’s team has developed an open source video conferencing server that can be controlled following RFC6503, an open standard designed “to create, manipulate, and delete conference objects”. Therefore, there is no need for proprietary code to integrate conferencing management into a wider system. As an illustration of the matter XCON CCMP intends to solve, this talk begins with an introduction to existing conferencing servers (Jitsi, Zoom, Teams, etc.) and their specific controlling APIs. Next, a quick introduction to this protocol. Then, we present an implementation made by the Linphone team in the Flexisip SIP conferencing server and how to control it from a third-party component.  Finally, we conclude this talk by emphasis how open standards improve the resilience of complex solutions based on heterogeneous building blocks.

At first glance, it may seem obvious to associate Open Source and Open Science, whose synergies seem natural. Open Science is the unhindered dissemination of research publications and data. Open Source can be seen here as one of the branches of Open Science in the same way as Open Access or Open Research Data. Open Source, which defends the freedom of access to and modification of software, therefore appears to be a perfectly complementary approach, both in terms of providing the tools and platforms for Open Science and in terms of the transparency and openness of results to the community. There are many remarkable examples of this with initiatives such as GitHub and, historically, Mozilla Science Lab. But a more nuanced view, informed by the experience of these projects, particularly in business and public/private relations, shows us that there are obstacles. Cultural differences, intellectual property issues (with a wide variety of licences) and the challenges of funding and commercialising projects all come to the fore. The need for companies to achieve a return on their investment can lead to constraints on intellectual property - or even patentability - that conflict with Open Science. Similarly, laboratories are increasingly seeking to add value to their work and collaborations in order to consolidate their budgets, which are not always sufficient. These constraints can call into question the Open Source nature of tools and results. So we see that challenges remain, including in the management of open data and compliance with publication standards. Overcoming these cultural, legal or financial obstacles in Open Science projects requires a good understanding of the issues at stake for all the partners and the adjustments that need to be made. But this is the only way to build sustainable opportunities and real leadership for the Open Source and Open Science ecosystem in research. By way of illustration, OpenStudio will be focusing in particular on the field of AI and its European challenges, drawing in particular on the experience of the Atlas of Productive Synergies, LongRun and Mellia, research and scientific cooperation projects (four CIFRE theses are currently in progress as part of public/private collaborations).

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