Miscellaneous

European digital sovereignty and open source

How Europe is regulating big tech and what's in it for FLOSS
M.misc
Vittorio Bertola
<p>The European Union is working with great energy on new rules for digital markets, targetting first of all the big global Internet platforms. Building on the global impact of the GDPR, efforts like the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act, the AI Regulation, the Data Governance Act and the GAIA-X initiative attempt to restrain the superpowers of the big American and Chinese companies and promote rights and opportunities for Europeans, restoring the EU's ability to control its own slice of the Internet and reducing the dependency on foreign products and services. Open source is one of the strategic tools for this objective, and open source projects and companies could be benefited by these changes. Watch the talk to learn what is happening!</p>
The talk will start by recollecting how we started up with an open, interoperable Internet that allowed everyone to cooperate and deploy new content and services, and ended up with a concentration of money and power of unseen scale in the history of mankind. Technical and market developments are centralizing the Internet more and more into the hands of a few companies, very concentrated in terms of geography, jurisdiction, ownership and views of the world. We will discuss how the EU plans to counter these trends, what the various regulations and projects are, and how they would work. We will then focus on how open source in Europe could be impacted by the new rules. Some of the provisions are particularly in line with an open, distributed Internet architecture, mandating the adoption of open standards and interoperability and preventing dominant players from advantaging their own applications and services over independent ones. Social media, instant messaging and mobile apps are three sectors that could be particularly affected. In the end, the talk aims to create awareness in the European open source community around the changing regulatory scenario, so that we are ready for it.

Additional information

Type maintrack

More sessions

2/5/22
Miscellaneous
Peter Zaitsev
M.misc
<p>It has been an exciting year in the open-source database industry, with more choice, more cloud, and key changes in the industry. We will dive into the key developments over 2021, including the most important open-source database software releases in general, the significance of cloud-native solutions in a multi-vendor multi-cloud world, the new criticality of security challenges, and the evolution of the open-source software industry.</p>
2/5/22
Miscellaneous
Thibault Koechlin
M.misc
<p>The <a href="https://github.com/crowdsecurity/crowdsec/">CrowdSec</a> project aims at providing a crowdsourced approach to common infrastructure defense problems, by distributing free &amp; open-source software allowing to protect yourself and share information about malevolent actors. These software components, of which Crowdsec is the main piece, work by processing logs and enriching them, to apply behaviour-based scenarios (heuristics) that will identify attacks pattern. One of the core ...
2/5/22
Miscellaneous
Christian Adell Querol
M.misc
<p>Network Automation has evolved a lot on the last years, adopting a lot of the practices from SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) but with the intrinsic constraint of networking services. In this talk you will learn about which are the challenges and common use cases around network automation, for instance: configuration management, user-driven workflows, infrastructure as Code (for hybrid and multi clouds) or close-loop automation using Telemetry. You will realise how a lot of open source ...
2/5/22
Miscellaneous
Colin Finck
M.misc
<p>Time has come to rewrite our system software in Rust and leave the pitfalls of C behind. This also includes basics such as filesystem support. I took on the challenge to implement NTFS, the primary filesystem used by Windows, in a Rust crate that is equally usable from the firmware level up to user-mode.</p> <p>While Rust has been conquering the system software landscape for the past few years, there are next to no examples for implementing filesystems. Likewise, NTFS only has a single major ...
2/6/22
Miscellaneous
Amanda Brock
M.misc
<p>The FOSS Communities have been debating how to manage security, sustainability and funding of FOSS for years but today a global and political lens is being shone on them.</p> <p>Commercial debates over licensing and revenue models around FOSS based businesses peak in 2021 with the Elastic transition away from FOSS to an SSPL licence and the fallout and debate from this.</p> <p>The European Commission's Digital Decade is clear that its basis will be a FOSS infrastructure and Europe has been ...
2/6/22
Miscellaneous
Matt Yonkovit
M.misc
<p>The changing landscape of the open-source industry has taken a potentially dark turn in the last few years. Instead of focusing on inclusion, innovation, and collaboration a new generation of so called open source drive companies has emerged flush with investor money and looking to maximize the returns for their investors and shareholders at all costs. In an effort to accelerate “revenue” and “profits” these companies are looking to rewrite the definition of what they consider open ...
2/6/22
Miscellaneous
Vadim Belman
M.misc
<p>The Raku language, formerly known as Perl6, sometimes gets incorrect coverage when it comes to "expert opinions". In this talk we will consider the common misconceptions about the language, what's wrong about them, and why your impression about the language might be wrong. Let's see how we can make it much better!</p>