Report From the EU Open Source Policy Summit

Important Discussions With TYPO3 Sponsorship

I joined the one-day event in Brussels together with Daniel Homorodean, leader of the TYPO3 Community Expansion Committee, and Crystal Dionysopoulos, president of the Joomla project's legal entity, Open Source Matters. We also met other CMS friends, such as TYPO3’s former community manager Ben van 't Ende from the open-source communication company Age of Peers, and the chair of the Dutch Drupal Association, Bert Boerland.

The TYPO3-sponsored event was well-managed, with strictly timeboxed podium discussions interspersed with short presentations by sponsors and officials. With this setup, the organizers managed to fit in an astounding amount of topical diversity.

The afternoon was especially lively, with interesting topics and lighthearted exchanges on stage. You can watch all of the sessions online.

A Popular Venue for Exchanges With the EU

It is clear that the work with the CRA has not only been a wakeup call for us in the open-source community, but also made the EU's many bureaucrats and politicians understand us better. This is positive news and a good result after just half a year — although we are only at the beginning of a process involving many more pieces of legislation.

Interest in the EU Open Source Policy Summit must have grown a lot lately. Getting a ticket to the physical event was not easy, with 150 attendees at the Royal Flemish Theater in Brussels and maybe ten times as many joining online. I'm hearing they're looking for a bigger venue for next year.

CMSs Have an Important Role to Play Here

In my opinion, TYPO3 and open-source CMSs should continue to attend and support this event. It is a great meeting place joined by countless major open-source projects and foundations, as well as the public administrations and telecom and automotive companies that are also heavy users of open source software.

If the EU creates a €10 billion fund to support open source, as was suggested during The Case for a big EU OSS Fund session, it will certainly be thanks to events like this one and continued open-source collaboration with and around the EU.

At this event and elsewhere, I heard many people state that “open source has won.” That is not true where I come from. I believe we can add important perspectives gleaned from our work, interfacing directly with the small and medium-sized business space, where open source is still far from universal.