Bitkom Forum Open Source 2024 in Erfurt

Triggered by a provocative announcement for their The Cuckoo in the Tendering Process: When the vendor loses to itself panel discussion by Peer Heinlein (Heinlein Support) and Johannes Loxen (Sernet) on LinkedIn, I attended the 10th Bitkom Open Source Forum in Erfurt. This free one-day conference on open source in a business context has become a highly informative event - that is well worth attending. This year's motto of The future of open source - fair, regulated, intelligent was exactly what I needed at the moment, and I spent the whole day in the Open Source - regulated track.

Cockoo or What Is My Business Model?

The panel discussion was about the challenges Peer faces in marketing OpenTalk, the open source videoconferencing software that Heinlein Support has developed over the last few years. Competitors seem to be offering OpenTalk hosting packages in public tenders, even though they don't contribute to the code or fix bugs. In the end, Peer cannot compete with their low prices and feels squeezed out of his own business. Johannes, on the other hand, has managed to build a functioning business around selling enterprise distributions (Samba Plus) of the open source Samba server. In the discussion that followed, it was suggested that perhaps the problem is the business model, not open source itself. My view is that good open source software will win out in the end, but companies without a good business model may struggle.

Cyber Resilience Act

The Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) is of course the main topic, and it was looked at from different perspectives, to name just a few examples:

Dr. Hendrik Schöttle (Osborne Clarke) gave a very concise but thorough overview of the CRA and how and when it applies to software - and specifically to open source specifically. My personal key take-away is that a "product" needs to have an "online component" to fall under the CRA, and luckily my Relax-and-Recover open source project for bare metal Linux restore / disaster recovery doesn't really have an online component 😁 So it seems we don't have to deal with the CRA as a project.

Lars Francke (Stackable) gave an insight into the struggles of an open source software distributor to comply with the CRA, specifically how to "stick a CE logo" on an open source software distribution. Stackable is a small startup that specialises in providing open source software for data lakes and other data-related topics, packaged to run on Kubernetes. As such, they naturally have to take upon themselves the full responsibility of a software distributor under the CRA. I'm really impressed with how much effort they're putting into this open source compliance issue!

I'd urge everyone to check out the presentations at bitkom.org/bfoss24 (it may take a while for them to be available).

All in all it was a good day, time well spent, catching up with old friends and making new ones. I'm looking forward to next year's event, again in September.

Are you interested in learning more about the topic of NIS2, DORA, CRA or Open Source in your company, or with Linux disaster recovery & bare metal restore? Together with my colleagues from Tektit Consulting I'll be happy to support you!

Location: Erfurt, Germany

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