FOSS Backstage 2022 — A True Community Conference

Attending the FOSS Backstage 2022 conference on "Community, Management & Compliance In Open Source Development" was a real highlight for me:

  • A conference
  • About Open Source
  • In Berlin
  • In person!

I fondly remember the first edition in 2018 (YouTube Archive, Flickr Photo Archive) which actually helped with my Open Source work at DB Systel. Given the ongoing COVID pandemic, the conference was very small, with only about 60 people attending in person and 200 additional remote participants. That, and the conference location in a co-working space, gave the event a very intimate and personal feeling. More like a true community meet-up than a polished commercial event.

The 2022 edition put the major focus on major Open Source related initiatives and community topics, but it didn't talk much about the practical sides of Open Source compliance, e.g. the OpenChain Project. I spoke with the organisers about that, and they indicated that future FOSS Backstage events will again showcase best practices and help companies to be good Open Source users.

The conference will soon make slides and recordings of all talks available.

My Impressions

These topics made a special impression on me:

Merzedes-Benz FOSS

I met a senior representative of Mercedes-Benz (or Daimler) at the FOSS Backstage in 2018 and we had a very interesting chat about the requirements for Open Source policies, mostly from a legal/compliance perspective. Back then it sounded as if the company was very guarded about Open Source. In 2021, just 3 years later, they have a a FOSS Competence Center under their CIO, a FOSS manifesto and they employ a FOSS ambassador and community managers.

And in 2022 Mercedes-Benz FOSS Ambassador Dr. Wolfgang Gehring talks openly about Open Source sponsoring, a topic which typically doesn't come first in the list of priorities. While Wolfgang couldn't disclose the amount that his company donates to OSS projects, the fact alone is already a major achievement for a big corporation in Germany. They are also early adopters of GitHub Sponsors and use that to pay out some of their funds.

I am deeply impressed and with Mercedes-Benz a lot of success with their future Open Source work!

The Sovereign Tech Fund of the German Government

In recent years there is a new trend to see Open Source tools and libraries as part of our critical software infrastructure. Major security issues like Heartbleed and Log4Shell helped a lot to make everybody recognise the problem. Thomas Fricke talked about the ongoing efforts of a group of very dedicated Open Source people to work with the German government on establishing the Sovereign Tech Fund. This would be the first time ever that public money would go to support important Open Source projects! And even more amazing, this is not only a stop-gap measure, but about creating a sustainable software ecosystem.

Again, this is an impressive development and was considered unthinkable just a few years ago. I can only hope that this and similar projects will be successful.

Open Source Project Lifecycle

Several talks addressed the topic of unpopular changes or even leaving an Open Source project: Richard Bowen talked about the end of life of the CentOS Linux distribution and Florian Gilcher talked about leaving his leading roles in the Rust programming language. As I also stopped to play an active role in the Relax and Recover project, their talks also touched some of my thoughts.

The U.N. on Open Source

Heath Arensen, Director of Open Source Programs at the UN Foundation’s Digital Impact Alliance, talked about Open Source technologies and principles being the base for a lot of their work.

I am really happy to hear how these organisations embrace Open Source.

Thank you Forto

Finally I would like to thank my employer Forto for sponsoring this conference. Forto was the only Berlin-based company to sponsor. I'd like to call out to all other Tech companies in Berlin to go and check your Open Source adoption, your policies and your ability to sponsor Open Source projects and communities.

Location: Berlin, Germany

Comments

Post a Comment

Like this content? You could send me something from my Amazon Wishlist. Need commercial support? Contact me for Consulting Services.

Popular posts from this blog

Overriding / Patching Linux System Serial Number

Image
I'm a big fan of test driven development  (TDD) for infrastructure components. I'm currently working on a hardware-related topic where we also use the system serial number as identifier. To create a proper integration test, we need to be able to start a system and set the serial number to a known value. This can easily be done with the help of virtual machines like in VMware or VirtualBox , but I couldn't find a way for changing the system serial number on hardware boxes, cloud VMs (e.g. on Alibaba Cloud) or other Linux system. Problem Analysis I was thinking: Linux is the operating system where I can potentially do everything . So how hard can this be? After some digging around I found out that there are those main sources for the serial number on Linux: /sys/firmware/dmi/tables/DMI contains a binary blob of Desktop Management Interface data provided by the kernel and the dmidecode utility is commonly used to decode
Read more

The Demise of KaiOS - Alcatel 3088X

Image
I was really excited, when Firefox OS became commercially available as KaiOS for "smart" feature phones. Unfortunately the high hopes I had put into this platform have been utterly shattered. I was recently looking for a button phone that had only three requirements : very good battery run time, at least several days or a week of standby without charging easy backup or even synchronization of the contacts VoLTE support to benefit from LTE coverage  In Theory... On paper, KaiOS phones look like the perfect match for those requirements. PhoneCopy for KaiOS is a cloud synchronization service that comes with an app for KaiOS (and many other platforms) to synchronize contacts and other phone content to the cloud (and back). With batteries of 1500 mAh and more , KaiOS phones have the potential to deliver outstanding battery performance. The Alcatel 3088X , for example, boasts "up to 300h standby and more than 7h talk time" with a 1530 mAh battery: Battery specification
Read more

A Login Security Architecture Without Passwords

Image
Following up on Lifting the Curse of Static Credentials and Eliminating the Password of Shared Accounts , I have many discussions about why we would benefit from removing password prompts for website logins. Let's dig deeper into the details and show why removing password prompts leads to a  safer security architecture . Update 11.03.2022: Added more details about business vs. consumer websites and additional security suggestions surrounding WebAuthn Problem Space For context, imagine a website that needs to identify online users via their email address. We assume that the website in question is not the primary email system of a user but some other website, e.g. an e-commerce shop system or a collaborative productivity tool. As a User As a user of that website I want to easily sign up for an account have an easy way to login into the account be sure that my account is protected from others or attacks be able to easily recover access to my account i
Read more