The Future of Open Source Business in Europe


Date: Wednesday 21st of June, 2023
Place: Maria 01 (Address: Lapinlahdenkatu 16, Helsinki, Finland)

This one day conference brings together European open source business leaders (owners and C-suite) in a time of increased demand and expectations on our industry. Governments and other customers are looking to open technologies to deliver a digital transformation that both secures autonomy and competitiveness. For the European open source industry to deliver, however, capacity-building is needed.

Participants of this ideas conference will be asked two overarching things:

  • Identify the business strategies to overcome barriers to industrial capacity-building
  • Elaborate/co-construct proposals to the European Commission and the Member States for a European industrial policy for open source

The ideas developed will be gathered in one or more synthesis documents, on which the work of APELL and its national business organisations will base their work in the coming years.

Keynote Speaker

Heikki Nousiainen, Field CTO & Co-founder, Aiven

Heikki Nousiainen is Field-CTO and Co-founder at Aiven, a managed cloud services provider for open source data management technologies. With over two decades in software engineering and information security space, Heikki is passionate about developer productivity, open source and open standards and data management at scale.

Programme

Conference at Maria 01

9:30 Check-in & Morning coffee
10:00 Program starts
10:00-10:45 Opening keynote: Heikki Nousiainen, Field CTO & Co-founder, Aiven
“Aiven – The trusted open source data platform for everyone”
10:45-13:00 Working Groups
13:00-14:00 Lunch at Starter
14:00-16:00 Working Groups (contd)
16:00-16:15 Coffee break
16:15-17:00 Panel of the rapporteurs
17:00 Program ends

Networking and Evening event

18:30 –> At Restaurant VENN Helsinki (Address: Mikonkatu 4, Helsinki, Finland)

Working Groups

The participants are asked to rank which Working Group they would like to participate in during the day in the RSVP form below.

Each working group will be led by APELL member representatives, who will act as rapporteurs and report to the plenary the ideas shared and discussed. The topics of the Working Groups are interlinked, and findings are meant to be synthesised in a final conference report.

Working Group 1: How to fund OSS policy work in Europe?
The stakes for open source software as an innovation model are high, but reality is that the policy work around open source is critically underfunded. The funding coming in, and it is increasing, is almost exclusively from large software vendors with mixed open source credentials. How can we make sure that APELL members are effectively represented in the policy discussions in Europe at the early stages?

Working Group 2: Software will be regulated: what are the implications and priorities for Europe’s OSS industry?
Software is going to be regulated in the future. What kind of impact will software regulations have on the OSS industry in Europe? How it might potentially be beneficial for the industry? What kind of challenges the industry might face for example regarding intellectual property rights and open source licensing? We need to ensure that the regulations can be balanced with the need for innovation and the promotion of the OSS industry in Europe. We must also identify strategies for complying with the software regulation and adapt to changing regulatory environments.

Working Group 3: EU Elections 2024: what should we do?
The next elections to the European Parliament will be held and a new commission formed in 2024. How could APELL make an early input? What kind of topics such as awareness and adoption, OSS advantages, digital autonomy and citizenship participation should we try to push forward in the debate?

The number of participants is limited.

To reserve your place at the event, please fill in the form below to RSVP.

The registration will end on Tuesday 13th of June or when the event is full.


The registration has ended.