A Recap of the HiPEAC Open Source Consultation Day
by Gaël Blondelle, Philippe Krief, and Diana Kupfer
On September 24, the HiPEAC European project brought together around 20 researchers, industry leaders, and policymakers for a focused consultation on the evolving role of open source software (OSS). This event, organised by HiPEAC steering committee members Philippe Krief and Gaël Blondelle (Eclipse Foundation), aimed to explore Open Source’s potential in addressing key European challenges such as digital sovereignty, the global skill shortage, Artificial Intelligence, new regulations, and the impact of growing geopolitical tensions. Attendees heard from experts in each of these fields, with presentations followed by open discussions, setting the stage for collaborative innovation in the open source ecosystem.
In their opening remarks, Gaël Blondelle and Koen De Bosschere (University of Gent) already introduced a topic that would become a recurrent theme throughout the day: EU competitiveness. Drawing on former ECB chief Mario Draghi’s recently published report “The future of European competitiveness”, De Bosschere drew the conclusion that the EU is lagging behind China and the United States in all predominantly digital areas such as Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, Cloud and Edge Computing, and Cybersecurity, while being ahead of its competitors in less digitally driven technologies such as wind energy, hydrogen, and green transportation. He also pointed out that, according to the Draghi report, the EU is producing a relatively low number of “unicorn” startups, i.e. startups with a valuation exceeding USD 1 billion. More precisely, only 8% of unicorns originate in Europe, compared to 66% in the US and 26% in China.
Could open source be an answer to these challenges, despite being mentioned only once in the Draghi report? Like the other participants in this consultation meeting, De Bosschere believes in the great transformative potential of open source technologies. However, he argued that “why and how open source can help is up to us,” rather than EU policymakers alone.
Top-down Policies and Bottom-up Collaboration
Whether European competitiveness begins with appropriate laws or the quality of the technology itself seems to be a chicken-and-egg question. It was also raised by Ewann Gavard (Gaia-X) in his talk: Without government policies, how can entry barriers that distort fair competition – especially vendor lock-ins – be avoided, ensuring, in turn, that technologies relying exclusively on open standards and open collaboration, such as Gaia-X, are adopted more widely than proprietary software from hyperscalers?
On the other hand, Marco Roodzant (Empero) and Aad Nales (Almende) advocated for more collective leadership, more permissive IP, and a stronger pioneering spirit in the open source space: Roodzant deplored that the entrepreneurial view on open source, often found in businesses in the United States, is not as common in Europe: “We need more risk taking”, he argued.
Nales stated: “If you don’t set the standard, you are following [others],”, identifying open collaboration as key to becoming more competitive against large players in the market: “To set a standard, you need to work together in the open”
In his talk, “Open Source and the Emerging Fourth Sector,” Simon Phipps (Open Source Initiative) observed that policymakers often overlook the expertise and collective knowledge of the open source community, as well as the competitive advantage of OSS. Likewise, emerging Fourth Sector “creator-consumers” such as “self-funded innovators”, SMEs building OS platforms etc. tend to be underrepresented in policy and decision making. All of this underscores the need for increased interaction and regular exchange between businesses, open source proponents, and European governments officials.
Openness and AI
In the realm of AI, open source technologies are already challenging proprietary solutions, as Manuel Betin (OECD) pointed out in his talk. “Competition in AI is fierce – and to a large extent thanks to OSS,” he said, adding that because of its indirect value, there are currently no metrics to measure the true value of OSS. In his research work, the economist investigates the economic impact of OSS models on AI. He concluded that AI models claiming to be open source while being in fact open weights, such as Llama, Mistral, and Gemma, have created a new market segment of smaller, cost-effective “good enough” models, enabling smaller Cloud players to enter the market.
Simon Phipps updated the group about the process led by the Open Source Initiative to create a proper definition of “open source AI”. OSI has run a co-design process for the last 18 months that is coming to a conclusion. It resulted in the current 0.0.9 version of the Open Source AI Definition, and the accompanying FAQ. He highlighted how difficult it is to define open source AI, and especially how challenging it is to approach the subject of training data, given that, for example, definitions of the term 'Public Domain' vary across countries.
Open Hardware
Extending the open source ethos to hardware platforms might also serve as a catalyst for European innovation, competitiveness, and digital sovereignty, as shown by Stefan Wallentowitz (University of Applied Science, Munich) and Flo Wohlrab (OpenHW Group) in their talks. Despite various challenges – i.e. the open hardware community being significantly smaller than the OSS community, investment in making chips being high and a strong dependency on third party licences – European companies can leverage RISC-V based open platforms to build their own innovative solutions. Thanks to their status as open source, “there are no forced restrictions and innovation can happen,” said Flo Wohlrab.
Quo Vadis, Open Source in the EU?
As global conflicts are proliferating and quite a few national economies are faltering, it is indeed crucial to explore how the open source community can become more resilient in order to safeguard existing investments and enhance European competitiveness in the long term. The Software Heritage, a non-profit organisation archiving all publicly available source code, has embarked on the mission of preserving software and software-related knowledge to reduce its fragility, as Roberto Di Cosmo (Software Heritage) demonstrated in his talk. While Di Cosmo is convinced that OSS can help address the skill shortage in businesses as well as academia, its availability should never be taken for granted.
In a similar vein, Astor Nummelin Carlberg (OpenForum Europe) stated that while OSS might turn out to be a “vehicle for technical self-sufficiency” in times of instability and conflict (and this might be the reason for governments’ increasing interest in open source as a political and economic asset), OSS communities also need to be ready for potential political challenges. For example, OSS communities have become so accustomed to the benefits of global collaboration that they rarely consider the potential impact of re-emerging geographical and digital boundaries. “Software is naturally international,” as Roberto Di Cosmo fittingly paraphrased this mindset in his talk.
Thus, now more than ever, a joint strategic approach to OSS is needed in the EU. And more than ever, open source thought leaders are obligated to demonstrate the true value of open source – whether through traditional metrics or other means. Nummelin Carlberg pointed out that while China has included open source as a strategic component for governments and industry in its Five-Year Plan (published in March 2021) and the US industry has always considered OSS an economic asset, there is, as of yet, no evident strategic comprehensive approach to OSS for the EU.
Much like its geographical location, the European OSS community must find its best position somewhere between the US and China in terms of business-friendliness versus government leadership, and bottom-up versus top-down governance. Through discussions and consultations such as the one summarised in this blog post, the community is clearly making the first strides towards a better, open source-driven future.
