Open Source Summit Europe 2025

There are so many open source projects and not enough contributors to sustain them all over the long term. With many open source projects desperate for contributors, how do we educate the next generation of open source contributors to grow the contributor base for all of us?

In this panel, we’ll talk about education programs for school children and university students. We’ll discuss the landscape of open source contributors in the different regions along with the motivations for participation in open source and how those differ across regions. Because we want contributors who will continue contributing, we’ll also talk about some challenges that prevent sustainable contributions over the long term.

Our panelists have experience teaching open source to university students, school children in New Zealand, and building new open source communities in Africa. In this panel, we’ll talk about what we’ve learned, what’s worked, and provide tips for you to grow the next generation of contributors from within your local communities.

In heavily regulated financial services, automotive industries or other large enterprise institutions, developers can transform from open source "takers" to strategic "makers." 

This presentation showcases GitLab's Co-Create program as a proven contribution framework for organizations. We'll also teach oyu how to reproduce this program for your OSS project or company.

This is not a product pitch. Rather, Nick is drawing from 15+ years in open source communities and experience as an OSS foundation board member, he will present a model that could inspire other open source projects to engage regulated industries often excluded from contribution ecosystems.

Attendees will discover how structured onboarding, engineering collaboration, CLA frameworks, and maintenance-free contributions create sustainable participation models that maintain regulatory compliance while driving innovation.

Through case studies from Thales (where "two developers saved time for 30 million users" in just two months), Siemens, Scania, and a FinOS member, I'll demonstrate how structured contribution programs deliver measurable value while addressing the unique compliance, security, and innovation challenges.

Open Source Software (OSS) is increasingly recognized as a crucial enabler of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and digital transformation across the globe. Yet, adoption and contribution remain uneven, with certain regions and actors underrepresented, especially in the global south.

With initiatives such as the UN’s Digital Global Compact and Open Source Principles, there is growing momentum and an opportunity to better understand and measure OSS’s role in digital infrastructure and government strategies. As part of this effort, we are exploring the development of an Open Source Adoption Index, published annually to track adoption trends, highlight successes, and identify challenges faced by UN Member States.

The adoption index will be collaboratively designed through a series of geographically distributed workshops to collect dimensions relevant across various contexts and use cases. In this panel, attendees will be actively engaged, as part of this extensive co-design process, and be urged to provide thoughts and feedback to the panel of representatives from the UN, researchers and stakeholders.

Several high-profile incidents have raised global awareness that single-maintainer projects can become single points of global risk. However, a similar risk exists among established and mature projects – the attrition of a small “core” group of maintainers can be just as damaging to downstream dependencies.

Today, many established projects are facing significant maintainer attrition while vibrant and younger communities have formed around derivatives and forks. Meanwhile, entire new ecosystems have emerged and become characterized by generational divides.

Why is this happening, and what can you do to prepare to pass the mantle of project leadership?

We will discuss factors contributing to a rising participation barrier, then explore strategies for community growth and educate policymakers on ways to support the longevity and security of mid- and large-sized open source projects.

Launching an open source initiative within a company is more than just publishing source code. It involves shift in mindset to foster a culture of openness, gaining support from leadership, establishing governance policy and infrastructure to facilitate it. In this talk, we will share how our OSPO enabled teams to take their first steps to open source, from internal advocacy to successfully publishing their repositories. We will dive into the key challenges like promoting a collaborative-development mindset, leadership buy-in and bringing enablement teams together to set up necessary process ensuring security. We will share the strategies that worked - teaming up with the right pilot team, building InnerSource maturity internally, recognizing contributors and maintainers of open source and innersource projects, gaining support from the leadership, conducting events like InnerSource hackathon to spread awareness about reuse and co-creation. Whether you are looking to start an open source initiative in your organization or to improve existing processes, this talk will give you insights on innovative strategies that worked for us and that can be leveraged by other organizations too.

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.

Each year, LF Research fields a survey in the Linux Foundation community investigating the major open source trends, obstacles, and priorities around the world. These survey findings are key annual markers of progress and opportunity in this area and are crucial for policy, business, non-profit, and academic audiences alike to set their strategy for the coming year. This panel will focus on the findings from Europe, presenting the key findings from the survey. The panelists will discuss the relevance and context of these findings given their work in Europe and focus on priority topics such as AI, security, and the public sector. LF Research panelists will present the most salient quantitative insights and how they relate to other research coming out this year. Mirko Boehm and Cailean Osborne from LF Europe will share qualitative insights from expert interviews in the context of their work in AI and cybersecurity regulation. A community expert will also join the panel to discuss the findings in light of their work in open source in Europe.

In this panel discussion, founding members and leaders of the NeoNephos Foundation will share how their organizations drive open innovation through collaborative, vendor-neutral open source development. As a newly formed initiative announced at KubeCon London 2025, NeoNephos (neonephos.org) aims to support the creation of a resilient, interoperable cloud-edge continuum for Europe and beyond.

Panelists will share the story behind the launch of NeoNephos, what inspired its creation, and how it brings together industry, public sector, and open source communities to solve shared challenges. They will reflect on what it means to build a foundation from the ground up, the values driving the initiative, and how NeoNephos plans to support collaboration at the intersection of cloud, edge, and European digital sovereignty. The discussion will also highlight key projects hosted by the foundation—such as Project Gardener—and explore how panelists’ organizations contribute to and leverage these solutions to drive innovation within their ecosystems.

European digital sovereignty has become one of the dominant narratives for the development of European public digital infrastructure. This panel will make the case that a Digital Commons approach provides scalable, open source alternatives that enhance choice and technical control, while providing viable options for policymakers implementing digital sovereignty initiatives.

In the session, technical experts will share examples of how initiatives like the proposed Open Internet Stack and EuroStack are creating amplification opportunities for developers. The session will explore proposed Technological Building Blocks – such as network infrastructure and identity frameworks – and show how Digital Commons mapped to these Building Blocks can be integrated into workflows.

In doing so, the session will show that Digital Commons projects enable true interoperability through open design, access, community governance, and APIs – essential elements for resilient and maintainable infrastructure. Participants will gain insights into leveraging these tools, understand patterns, and learn about European Commission funding mechanisms supporting open, sovereign infrastructure development.