When I arrived at this year’s Open Source Summit Europe in Vienna and the keynotes started, I was initially feeling completely out of place. I usually attend pure engineering events but the summit is much more focused on the work of the Linux Foundation and its subgroups which deal with governance and policy topics but also the integration of the commercial sector. I knew that the foundation did a lot but I hadn’t realized just how broad its spectrum has become! It was great to see these parts of the community!
Of all the talks I could attend, I especially enjoyed those given by non-commercial or government organizations showing how Open Source has become a critical component in their thinking. Perhaps my highlight was therefore the keynote by Omar Mohsine, the Open Source Coordinator for the United Nations, who presented how the UN were working on rolling out the OSS mindset across the whole organization. I just love the idea of handing out specific topics like licensing to specific sub-organizations to own that topic across the org.
Another talk with UN connections but also the EU was about collaborations around creating standards for wallets and the Open Wallet Foundation to work on issues like compatibility et al. on a more global level between government and non-government organizations as well as the commercial sector. Wallets and decentralized identity were huge topics in Vienna.
The other large focus area was about supply-chain security and SBOM in particular. It felt like every second talk mentioned SPDX thanks to the various legal requirements that are currently being rolled out all over the world. For instance, there was a talk about how SPDX is used (and adapted) by Toshiba et al. on the Japanese market to solve problems around supply-chain contracts.
As I wrote above, I didn’t really know what to expect when I arrived but came out with lots of things I should look into and just inspired! Three days full of talks at the main event and then another half day for a mini conference about continuous delivery absolutely worked! And yes, I will probably give OpenSearch and Valkey a try 😂 The venue also did its part: I’ve never been in the Austria Center before and now know it is a great place for large conferences with lots of large and small session rooms, great catering. If only we could have had a Chaos Computer Congress there 😅
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