European Linux Open-Sourcing Summit, 2019, Lyon, France, reviewed

Open-Sourcing is going beyond software. That’s the key theme seen at this year’s European Linux Open-Sourcing Summit in Lyon, France.

By Catherine Hallinan, social entrepreneur and project lead of Moyo Nua

Open-Sourcing has recently been involved in projects spanning from energy to clothing to the film industry. Attendees of the Lyon summit gained an insight into how working in a collaborative community, such as Open-Sourcing, can achieve unprecedented projects. The average open source project has 74,403 contributors according to Erica Bereca of Github. Software. It is becoming democratised and decentralized, and increasingly so.

Review of European Linux Open-Sourcing Summit

Recent projects in the Linux Foundation include involvement in the film industry. Companies who previously created their own software can now share it with others. This allows focus on the main objectives of their business such as story-telling rather that low levels of housekeeping such as software development. Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, said this is one of the most exciting projects, claiming it to already be successful, hopefully claiming him a seat at the Oscars.

Open-Sourcing is undoubtedly changing the way software is used, with every project fulfilling a niche where people are coming together to solve problems that affect modern society. When asked what industry open-sourcing could contribute next, Zemlin said “Life sciences, there are opportunities as more pharmaceutical biomedical research is becoming driven by computer technology. There’s an opportunity to share that code to create better drugs or healthcare outcomes”.

An area where Open-Sourcing is going beyond software is through LF Energy, a Linux Foundation’s initiative that uses open source tools and practices to help the energy and electricity generation sector achieve 100% decarbonisation. Executive Director of LF Energy Shuli Goodman examined the stages of the six projects under the project and how each are progressing. LF Energy’s open smart grid platform, originating in the Netherlands, is a complementary SCADA allowing the management of large amounts of data of the organisation of microgrids and using open source has improved productivity.

Goodman called on Ireland to take further action, inviting Eirgrid and the Government of Ireland to collaborate and share ideas on how to efficiency management Irish grids, bringing in Open-Sourcing community to can ensure 100% decarbonisation and efficiency. If this project were to be successful, it could be implemented globally. Goodman acknowledges security as a risk that is [prominent in such a project, however goes in to say that coming together through coding to combat this, and proceeding with the idea is the way forward in the energy sector.

To do this Goodman believes that it is crucial that everyone is involved in the project as she affirms that “Change is going too slow”. LF Energy is in talks with an oil company in Canada (the company has not yet been publicly announced) in how to achieve decarbonisation, Goodman thinks that she doesn’t think leaving them out of this transformation to decarbonisation is an option and open source and LF energy can lead the way in this collaborating

Open source is now essential. It is the basis to modern software making, a huge accomplishment in itself. the fact that the majority of people are utilizing it, makes it easier, more secure, diverse and build on more infrastructure.

Open-Sourcing projects still face a high degree of challenges. Zemlin cites intellectual property and cyber risk as the two main challenges.  He further discussed the need to ensure that there is a new generation of developers learning to create and share ideas and code to expand the Open-Sourcing community further into the next generation. Linux Foundation ensures this. It provides mentorship programs for new developers from diverse backgrounds, providing funding for members of diverse backgrounds to attend such events as the Open-Sourcing Summit.

Throughout the summit, it was evident that the Open-Sourcing community has a unique opportunity to increase the number of people from diverse backgrounds involved in coding open source. As people can work from anywhere in the world, open-sourcing is empowering communities to code for themselves the hope for the Linux Foundation is to continue to expand in the future to reach people of more diverse backgrounds.

Overall the European Linux Open-Sourcing Summit was a showcase of the best and brightest open source projects. It’s sponsors including Intel, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Google, IBM and ST life augmented. Its diversity in speakers allowed a wide range of opinions, workshops and talks to take place from training on unconscious bias to open source projects for cloud automation. A key cornerstone of the event and Open-Sourcing community is that a diverse community provides for a stronger community, something which every member is making a conscious effort to improve.

The European Linux Open-Sourcing summit is coming to the Convention Centre in Dublin next year on the 26th- 28th of October 2020.

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