Open Source Summit Europe 2024

Open source is not just a tactical choice for consumption made by a developer. Open source should be a key part of your innovation plan and strategy, and product managers and business leaders need to understand it. From managing a key open source dependency to releasing open source for building an ecosystem and standards, to joining an open source foundation as a core part of a business plan, business owners need to know open source. Often, the business side of the house is not involved in open source decisions and don’t see it as business impacting. This session is about how to get the business side of the house involved in opens source. It is understanding the business planning process and how to ensure open source is included in that process. Whether it is ideation for a new product, managing ongoing investments in a product line or in marketing and launches, open source is a key component of business plans. As the head of the OSPO at Amazon, I work to build bridges with the business side of the house and to show them implications to the business of open source decisions we make. They need to be involved, support and invest in how we do open source at a company.

In the world of product management, spread sheets and analysis tools dominate the daily business. However, when it comes to open source, many product managers struggle to quantify its benefits and limit it to risk and compliance handling. This session aims to bridge the gap between the open source community and product managers by exploring how open source can be incorporated into their existing tools and considerations. While traditional tools focus on quantifiable metrics, the non-quantifiable benefits of open source communities, such as technology awareness and company insights, are often overlooked. By integrating open source considerations and measuring points into existing tools and perspectives, including monetary quantifiable numbers, product managers can build a comprehensive business case that captures the value of open source. Attendees of this session will gain insights into the tools and considerations that product managers employ in their journey towards product innovation. By understanding product manager perspectives and needs, the open source community can better collaborate and support the integration of open source into product development processes.

Information about open source project users and usage characteristics can be an invaluable tool for maintainers and project leaders to prioritize support for features and old versions, as well as understand how users engage with their project. However, many open source users see incorporating telemetry into a project as an invasion of privacy. Within the CHAOSS community, we discuss and define metrics to understand and measure project health. Many of these same metrics can be used to infer characteristics about project users as they are part of the extended community. In this talk, we will discuss what we can and can’t learn about our users from existing publicly available metrics while respecting the privacy of our communities.

This session will showcase how open source metrics can be used for monitoring open source projects developed for global health challenges. GitHub and the World Health Organization (WHO) partnered to build a framework for tracking and analyzing the health of open source projects. The WHO, an international public health agency of the United Nations, utilizes and creates open source digital tools to enhance global health efforts for remote care, disease surveillance, epidemiological modeling, health information systems for data collection and analysis, and digital platforms for emergency response. Within these tools, challenges exist in monitoring open source: the lack of a high level view of best practices adopted by various open source projects; linking open source practices to realized impact in the public health; and building interest in open source work and advocating for more open source development within the global health community. This presentation will highlight these challenges, discuss opportunities to tackle them and close with an open dialogue on how open source projects can be measured, and drive collaboration between the OS community and public health practitioners.

What happens when a beloved open-source project used by millions of developers suddenly changes to a non-open source license? In this session learn about what lead to the creation of Valkey, the open-source alternative to the now proprietary Redis project. In this talk, two Valkey maintainers will discuss how Valkey was created and the lessons learned along the way. We'll discuss the concerns that existed in our community before the fork, the challenges we faced during the creation of the new project, and where we want to take Valkey in the future.

When widely adopted open-source projects get relicensed, engineering organizations that rely on that code feel the pain. But when the communities behind these projects create a fork to preserve the availability of an open-source alternative, those engineering teams gain a unique opportunity to step up and help drive the technology forward. In this talk, you’ll learn how developers and engineers can support open-source projects and lead innovation with an enterprise organization, based on experiences from the OpenSearch Project team at Amazon Web Services.

In the last three decades, we’ve seen an evolution of open source starting from the ’90s when foundations and ideas were birthed with the likes of the Free Software Foundation, the Open Source Initiative, and projects that changed the world like the Linux Kernel and the Apache server. From there, open source has gotten into mainstream adoption and advocacy, where we have platforms like GitLab, GitHub, and SourceForge, enabling people to build software projects openly and increasing collaboration among people in tech. Within the last ten years, groundbreaking innovations like the cloud, AI, and big data have become open source by default - this is where we are now. However, the global south is still stuck in the advocacy and adoption phase, with people who haven’t moved beyond their first contribution or are only aware of open source. We need to address this and move the global south to the next phase of open source—ideation, designing, and building. In this talk, we will share what we’ve been doing in Open Source Community Africa for the last 8 years and how we are currently fixing this problem through our latest flagship program, IDB (Ideate, Design, Build).