Open Source Summit Europe 2025

This session examines the proposed EU Sovereign Tech Fund (EU-STF), a mechanism inspired by Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency to address critical maintenance gaps in open source components underpinning European digital infrastructure.

Technical findings from a June 2025 feasibility study will be surveyed, which reveal the economic, legal, and political arguments for implementing an EU-wide Sovereign Tech Fund. Then, expert panelists will unpack the technical architecture of this maintenance crisis, demonstrating how the proposed EU-STF creates practical mechanisms for collaborative public-private efforts, as well as key use cases.

Attendees will learn implementation models that bridge the gap between how developers understand maintenance challenges (technical debt, security vulnerabilities, dependency management) and how policymakers frame these issues (resilience, sovereignty, compliance). They will gain actionable insights into:

-- How public FOSS funds need to be designed to reach critical but under-resourced components

-- Aligning the goals of FOSS maintenance funding to the needs of developers and policymakers

-- How to help make the EU-STF a reality

The EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) has been adopted, and the new obligations for manufacturers and open source software stewards will come into effect in 2026 and 2027. This joint session between Linux Foundation Europe, LF Research, and the OpenSSF will describe how the Linux Foundation is seizing the opportunity for an improved state of the union in cybersecurity that the CRA offers, and is steering necessary adaptations for the benefit of our members, projects, and contributors.

Specifically, this session will describe CRA implementation progress, commencing with the Linux Foundation's stewards and manufacturers workshop in December 2024, new working groups at the OpenSSF, and research projects, to provide guidance and raise awareness within our ecosystem. It will end with an interactive panel discussion where questions about the impact of the CRA on our collaborative development efforts will be addressed.

Every open source project has bugs—but what happens when you have more than 7k bug reports? The FreeBSD Project, a popular Unix-like OS that’s 30+ years old, faced a mounting backlog that risked overwhelming its contributors and users alike. Closing issues at random or based on age wasn’t an option. Instead, as part of work contracted by Germany’s Sovereign Tech Agency, the FreeBSD Foundation teamed up with Bitergia to build a smarter solution.

This panel discusses how the team used the OSS tool GrimoireLab to create customized dashboards to visualize FreeBSD’s Bugzilla backlog in new and actionable ways. You'll hear how metrics like the Backlog Management Index (BMI) and new bug categories like "unattended" and "abandoned" helped the team move from firefighting to focused bug triaging. We’ll also talk about technical challenges, like deploying GrimoireLab on FreeBSD itself, and the broader impact of contributing new features back to the CHAOSS open source community.

Whether you're drowning in bugs or just love data-driven engineering, this session shares practical tips, reusable metrics, and open source tools to improve bug management. Bring your questions—we’re excited to chat!

he fear of "vibe coding" (non-developers using AI to write software) mirrors historical fears about DIY home improvement. Yet Home Depot built a trillion-dollar market by recognizing that proper tools, education, and boundaries enable regular people to tackle appropriate projects safely. This session shows how open sourcecommunities can lead the citizen development revolution by applying the same three-pillar approach that made DIY construction successful. I'll share real examples of where citizen development works, where it fails, and what we learned about building guardrails that actually work. You'll see how open source principles of visibility, community review, and shared knowledge create natural boundaries that keep people in their lane while unlocking massive productivity gains. Beyond just faster development, we found citizen developers actually help their IT teams get unstuck from endless backlogs and start shipping things that matter. Join me to see practical examples of how open sourcetools and governance models create a blueprint for democratizing software development without the disasters.

Travel retail, shopping and booking stays, activities, or trips, is ripe for disruption using open source. Fifty years on from its inception, the process of shopping and purchasing travel products has been computerized and exposed online but works largely the same as it always did. Even as some legacy components have been replaced, their limitations are still present embodied in workflows and policy. Stateful, transactional, processing is still the order of the day. It all needs to be overhauled to move into a stateless, cloud based, digital world. Travel retail is unaffordable in its current form, open source is the obvious answer. As a community, make one investment to create the needed foundational capabilities such as offer/order management, security, identity management, event management, rules processing and much more. Noncompetitive functions everyone needs to create traveler solutions such as end to end trip solions and management via an AI powered app. The Open Travel Alliance is working with the Linux Foundation to form the Open Travel Foundation. This session will explain how this new foundation will transform travel retail.