NGI Sargasso open call one beneficiaries received an inspirational talk as part of their 9-month Capacity Building program to discover how Linux Foundation Europe works as a host for transatlantic cooperative community-based projects
The afternoon of the 19th of December 2023 the teams behind APSIDE, D3ICA, DDIP, EBSI-CAN, EvORAN, INTEROP4DID, SBAS and SNDS, NGI Sargasso innovators from our first open call, received a talk from Mirko Boehm, senior director for community development at Linux Foundation Europe, illustrating how they host cooperative projects across the Atlantic.
Why did the Linux Foundation land in Europe?
The Linux Foundations as the globally largest open source collaboration platform established its European chapter in September 2022 with the aim of acting as a catalyst for bringing European open source players closer into a global collaboration hosted at a local level.
Today, 31% of the Linux Foundation members are European, and the foundation is deeply involved in EU legislative initiatives like the Cyber Resilience Act and the Product Liability Directive, to give Europeans open source contributors a stronger voice and position.
“Open source is a positive sum-game that fits into the tech landscape and into how our societies embrace digitization. When we talk about AI, we are talking about how it would impact various parts of our society and the ethical aspects. Open source can be a driver for positive change” – Mirko Boehm.
He spoke about the open source grassroots community, the open source commercial and financial ecosystems and the collective value and social innovation fostered by the academic sector and by public funding programs like NGI Sargasso, key players in developing early stage technologies to a point where they can become mainstream, even in business applications.
“We are essentially a member-driven neutral governance entity, which means that no single company controls the collaboration”, stated Boehm. That’s another reason why the Linux Foundation landed in Europe, allowing their members to participate at a high level in building the open source ecosystem, so small and larger businesses can work together. No membership is required to contribute to Linux Foundation Europe projects.
Open source is widely viewed as a vital part of the future of multiple industry sectors that traditionally don’t think of themselves as primarily software-driven, explained Mirko according to one of their reports. He added that as digitalization spreads to all industry sectors, open source is becoming the default collaboration mechanism.
In short, the role of the Linux Foundation Europe is to enable local collaboration with the European open source community.
Mirko highlighted that open source is not primarily a tool to achieve political goals, it is a tool to work together when you can agree on licensing and open governance of the projects, and that this technology is available to the whole world:
“There is absolutely no restriction on who can use the technology and where and for what purpose. That is the nature of open source” – Mirko Boehm.
How does the Linux Foundation host transatlantic cooperative projects?
When people hear about the Linux Foundation, they usually think of the Linux operating system. It was the starting project, the first of the over 850 they have now.
The Linux Foundation hosts the projects, and not a single company owns their assets. Instead, it’s all community-based, clarified Mirko.
In numbers, the Linux Foundation manages about 1,000 different domains and server names; 700 trademarks; 15,000 different source group repositories, and over 3,000 member companies.
“We basically translate the funding that we get from our member companies into support for the projects, and aim to come out with zero at the end of the year”, said Mirko.
To the question “What do you require if you want to be a project?”, Mirko answered that members need neutrality of the technology, meaning that the assets are handled by the community, setting up an environment where they can trust that transparency is there, and that they, as participants, can join the project. “It’s really up to the community to drive it”, he clarified, and “that’s what we call open governance: it’s a community project and it will remain to be a community project, because projects come to us seeking a neutral home”.
The Linux Foundation doesn’t require projects to be large, instead, they focus on important technology developed in the right way, which for them, means open source. Some projects have funding, but some others don’t.
As usual, the inspirational talk ended up being an interactive online session with vibrant discussions with our innovators.
