Attendees at the OpenInfra Summit in Paris were shown why open source IT infrastructure provides supplier flexibility and digital sovereignty
Attendees at the OpenInfra Summit in Paris were shown why open source IT infrastructure provides supplier flexibility and digital sovereignty
Geopolitical tension and its potential impact on open source was one of the main focus points during the OpenInfra Foundation European summit held in Paris on 16–19 October.
When asked about OpenStack’s resilience given the volatile geopolitical climate, Jonathan Bryce, executive director at the OpenInfra Foundation, said: “The thing that I love about open source is that once you open source a piece of software, it belongs to everyone forever. The true open source licenses are worldwide and perpetual, and those are really key and important terms.”
Nevertheless, there have been a number of instances where the open source community and commercial software providers appear to have adapted their policies as they try to second-guess the US administration. Earlier this year, the Linux Foundation effectively barred a group of Russian-based Linux kernel maintainers by removing them from the mailing list. Then, in the summer, Reuters reported that Indian refinery Nayara Energy, which buys oil mainly from Russia, had begun legal proceedings against Microsoft, following European Union (EU) sanctions on the company.
Discussing the impact of government policy, Bryce said: “We are a company, Microsoft’s a company; we’re a non-profit, they’re a for-profit. We have to follow the laws of the land, just like all companies do, and there are times when there are rules that we don’t get a say in. We try to influence policy in ways that are beneficial for open source because we firmly believe that the best way to do open source is by globally collaborating.”
He pointed out that over the course of the many decades that open source has existed, there have been many different government administrations in Europe, the US, China, Japan and Korea. “There have been laws that have been more encouraging for global collaboration and laws that have been discouraging for global collaboration,” said Bryce.
As an example, he said there were initially a lot of laws that limited the distribution of strong encryption, which had an impact on open source code.
