Master of Ceremony: Emiel Brok

Timo Väliharju, President APELL and COSS
Ronny Lam, President DOSBA and APELL Treasurer

Laurent Rojey, Director DC-EDIC

The intervention will present the Digital Commons EDIC as a new European instrument to help digital commons move from isolated projects to shared, sustainable infrastructure. It will focus on how public authorities, open-source communities and professional ecosystem actors can work together to strengthen Europe’s digital capacity.

Æva Black, Founder, Null Point Studio
Jean-Luc Dorel, Future Internet Unit, European Commission DG CONNECT
Laurent Rojey, Director DC-EDIC

Moderator: Sebastian Raible

Astor Nummelin Carlberg, Director of Open Source Sovereignty, SUSE

Open source's political moment has arrived – but so has the opposition. The cloud and AI lobbies are the best-funded in Brussels, and open source advocacy can no longer rely on the goodwill and informal coalitions of a few years ago. This talk looks at what a professional, organised political response for open source actually requires: building durable coalitions, engaging early and substantively in the legislative process, and translating shared principles into concrete legal text. Drawing on recent experience with the Cyber Resilience Act and the EU Tech Sovereignty Package, it offers a practical view of what it takes for open source to compete on equal footing in EU policymaking.

Gina Plat, Program Manager OSPO BZK

With digital sovereignty being more important than ever, open source ambitions are taking flight within the public sector. Yet, governments often still struggle with implementing open source practices, and not every open source project goes from pilot to production. Besides that, there is also the question of how to best engage with open source communities, in such a way that government actually strengthens the ecosystem it often relies upon. In this talk, Gina will highlight examples of Dutch digitally sovereign government projects, and opportunities and challenges to open source ambitions in the public sector.

David Walter, Vice President, Open Source Program Office, ownCloud - a Kiteworks company

Three million. That's how many open source contributors Europe has, according to the European Commission's own Open Source Strategy. €260 billion. That's how much Europe spends every year buying digital technologies from third countries.
This keynote asks the one question that number makes unavoidable: why?
Not a talent gap. Not a regulatory gap. Possibly an enforcement and penalty gap. A stewardship gap, for certain. There are enough large companies which could afford an OSPO. Only a few of them run an OSPO. Only a few employ the maintainers of the projects their products are built on. Only a few fund the upstream software they ship proprietary layers on top of.
Meanwhile, the community itself is fragmenting, over and over and over again. Copyleft licences deployed as commercial moats (with a bridge where nobody enforces them). AI contributions blocked while the world accelerates. Open standards replaced by proprietary protocols. And forks that split communities rather than strengthen them, announced in the language of freedom, executed in the logic of market capture. Calls for sovereignty and freedom are sometimes just covers for anti-something sentiment.
David Walter argues that Europe's sovereignty gap is not only a policy problem waiting for Brussels to solve. It is partly an enforcement problem. But more urgently, it is a corporate behaviour problem that every company can address on Monday morning. Run an OSPO. Support the projects you depend on. Employ a maintainer. Comply with open standards instead of copying proprietary dependencies or building your own. And before you fork something, ask honestly whether it serves the greater good, community, the balance sheet, or the ego.
The EC's Cloud Sovereignty Framework defines eight objectives. Open source is a credible answer to most of them. But only if the companies that profit from it act like stewards rather than tenants. Drawing on Kiteworks's OSPO launch in May 2026, including its governance charter, DCO-based contribution model, this talk offers a concrete model of what responsible open source stewardship looks like in practice. Not as a blueprint to copy, but as evidence that the gap is closable. An OSS project out of maintenance is a security liability, not an expression of sovereignty.

Jutta Horstmann, Co-CEO of the Heinlein Group

In many aspects, the Commission’s OS Strategy is an Open Source advocate’s wet dream. It finally recognizes our work of the past decades as the fundament for a sovereign Europe, and Open Source as a major strategic lever to achieve digital sovereignty.
Still, both CADA and the OS strategy leave a lot to be desired.
So there is a lot to do for the Open Source ecosystem in the next months, while the Package makes its way through the European institutions. We need to up our game massively when it comes to lobbyism. We need to move from amateur league to major league.
But it’s not only about lobbyism.
With the Tech Package, the European Commission is asking for the solutions required to break away from dependencies on authoritarian countries.
Now we have to live up to the promise of Open Source. But let’s get this straight: Most of our solutions are not mature. And besides the lack of maturity, our offerings lack key parts required to build a sovereign stack, namely powerful AI models, and mobile operating systems.
Taking all of this into account, my second plea is to start mapping out concretely what needs to be done from our side to become able to deliver.
No single company can manage this on their own. We need to talk about consortia, mergers, interoperability and a joint action plan.
Funding lobbyists means that we have 11 players on the lawn, not only one.
Being able to deliver means we have a ball that actually flies – and scores.

Nick Veenhof, Director, DevRel Engineering and DevRel Programs, GitLab

AI is rewriting the contribution funnel. Tasks that once gated newcomers are now assisted by agents, and the bottleneck shifts from writing code to reviewing it. I'll share what GitLab learned running an AI Hackathon at scale, what AI-assisted contribution does to junior developers and underrepresented contributors, and where the human still has to stay in the loop. Honest signal, not a sales pitch.