Brussels - Feb, 2023
During the month of February, I had the privilege of attending CHAOSSCon and FOSDEM: two prominent events in the tech community. As someone who has participated in FOSDEM before, I was thrilled to finally have the opportunity to attend in-person after two years of virtual events. The event was buzzing with activities, thought-provoking talks, engaging discussions, and the chance to network with remarkable individuals. This year's in-person event felt more dynamic than ever. Additionally, I had the chance to participate in several notable community meetups and dinners, including the FLOSS Foundations Dinner, Fedora Project community Dinner, and SustainOSS Meetup.
Further in the blog, I discuss specifics of the main events on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
CHAOSScon
CHAOSScon Europe provides a venue for discussing open source project health, CHAOSS updates, use cases and hands-on workshops for developers, community managers, project managers and anyone interested in measuring open source health. The conference stems from the Linux Foundation project CHAOSS (Community Health Analytics in Open Source Software).
The event kicked off with an expert panel titled "How to Use Metrics in Your Context," featuring Ildikó Váncsa, Sean Goggins, and Dawn Foster. The discussion focused on using metrics with context, and the key takeaway was that using metrics requires careful interpretation based on your specific projects and needs, regardless of the context where you work.
After the panel discussion, participants got into groups of three to discuss the challenges they face when gathering open source metrics and the areas that the CHAOSS project should focus more on. My group including Kristi Progri, Dr. Dawn Foster, and I. We had very insightful discussions, and the ideas revolved around better onboarding for metrics, metrics on value generated for investors to analyze open source investments, and soft metrics like DEI, governance, and sustainability.
We had a workshop in the second half of the day when we got our hands dirty with Augur, Aspen, and 8knot: Tools built to make metrics analysis and visualization easier. Some of these I would be trying within Innovation fund to increase our metrics visibility.
FOSDEM
FOSDEM is a free event for software developers to meet, share ideas and collaborate. Every year, thousands of developers of free and open source software from all over the world gather at the 2-day event in Brussels.
Day 1
I arrived at ULB campus at 8:45 AM to assist with setting up the Fedora booth, where I had planned to spend a couple of hours discussing the Project strategies, mentorship and DEI efforts. However, upon arriving, I found that there were many other enthusiastic community members present, which allowed me to also explore other projects in the building and discover new advancements in the Operating System field. After a couple of hours of meet-and-greet, I proceeded to attend some of the talks I wished to catch in person. Here are a few highlighted talks from my first day.
Fuzzy Law-gic: FOSS & the Unauthorized Practice of Law, by Sarajane Whitfield This talk, even though from the US perspective, covered great grounds on some of the legal precedent around Unauthorized Practice of Law (UPL) enforcement related to software, and explored how current and future UPL enforcement may align or conflict with FOSS principles. The speaker did a great job explaining different scenarios with real life case studies/court cases on how they have been handled in the past.
Is “European open source” a thing?: Debating the role of open source in building Europe’s digital sovereignty, by Gaël Blondelle and Alberto P. Martí This was an open debate with the audience to analyze the opportunities for open source when it comes to contributing to building Europe’s technological sovereignty, but also the challenges that this new policy landscape poses for the open source ecosystem in Europe (and beyond).
Learning From the Big Failures To Improve FOSS Advocacy and Adoption: How Are Big Companies Benefiting So Much from FOSS, and Individuals So Little?, Bradley M. Kuhn This talk dug into strategic mistakes in approach to new technologies that often led to large areas of software endeavor to remain proprietary. While for-profit companies have been rewarded with great efficiency benefits and other perks from their adoption of FOSS, rarely do these benefits trickle down to consumers and end-users in their daily computing lives. Bradley's talk discussed the wins, losses and challenges that FOSS advocacy has faced in the last thirty years and explored how failures to foresee both web application deployment and the advent of advertising-based app-oriented software deployment led to serious strategic errors in advocacy and focus of attention. The main theme was "power imbalance"
- Commercial and non-commercial activity ostensibly on "equal footing"
- Commercial resources always exceed the non-commercial
- even today, copyleft alone remains insufficient to equalize hobbyist with commercial actors.
This talk was packed with eye-openers and, like many others, I would be re-watching this talk and forming my takeaways as I go.
- The Professional's Guide To Haphazardly Picking Licenses For Standards & Specifications: Practical tips for the reckless licensor, Nathan Willis This talk discussed the challenges of finding an optimal license for a free and open-source specification project, using a case study of an OpenType font shaping specification as an example. The speaker explored how specifications straddle the space between software and documentation, and how striking a balance between permissiveness and fragmentation poses additional challenges for FOSS specifications. The talk also examined the lack of well written resources on specification licenses, compare licenses used by other standards-publishers, and discussed how specification licenses differ from other non-software licenses.
While FOSDEM always has overwhelming enthusiasts crowd, projects and talks, a few remained on top of my list. I got to meet some amazing people from these projects (LibreOffice, NextCloud, Open Source Initiative, Free Foundation Software, Europe, Linux Foundation etc.) and we had long conversations around state of their projects, future, challenges and also, a few of them, potentially nominating themselves to be a DPG (or possibility of joining hands at DPGA.)
Day 2
On the second day of FOSDEM, I had a lighter schedule. I began by giving an opening talk at the Public Code and Digital Public Goods devroom, where Elena Findley-de Regt (Communications Coordinator, Foundation for Public Code) and I provided an introduction for the upcoming presentations.
I also presented a talk titled "The “Full-Stack DPGs”: Build open, build early, build right," along with Justin W Flory (Fedora Community Architect, Red Hat). Our objective was to initiate a discussion about the significance of allocating funding and talent to community work when investing in DPGs.
After concluding my participation in the Public Code and Digital Public Goods devroom, I went to the Distributions devroom where I assisted in facilitating several talks.
Amidst these events, I had the pleasure of meeting several outstanding individuals who expressed interest in helping Innovation Fund and our portfolio companies, including Documentwrite, Godot Engine, Public Code Foundation, among others. Those 3 days were a resounding success! Looking ahead, my desire for next year and future Open Source conferences is to see more participation from my Innovation Fund colleagues. The true essence of Open Source lies in the collective efforts of a diverse and passionate community working collaboratively to develop, enhance, and share solutions and knowledge for the greater good. My initial experience attending such an event some time ago was transformative, and I am confident that others would share a similar sentiment.