Will Open Source Fail?

0:00 Donc là on avait vraiment du no bullshit, de la transparency, on va avoir du sharing, le partage, le fait que tout le monde collabore, tout ça c'est génial, c'est une promesse qui fait envie, non ? Ça vous fait pas envie ça, que tout le monde collabore? Je sens que vous aussi vous avez mangé des tomates farcies comme moi, et un petit côté digestion là, qui s'organise, donc on va essayer de remédier à ça assez rapidement. On va regarder donc justement comment ça se passe cette collaboration dans les services avec Amanda Brock, qui est la CEO d'Open UK. Amanda Brock, s'il vous plaît. Nice to meet you, Amanda. Do you need the remote? Okay. Good afternoon, everybody. I'm Amanda Brock. I'm the CEO at Open UK, and I'm absolutely delighted to be here with you today in Paris. A few years ago, 20 years ago, actually, I used to work in Paris quite a lot. I used to be here two or three nights every week.

1:01 But I was just speaking to the people backstage and explaining I can't speak French because whenever I spoke French, everybody in Paris responded in English. So today you're going to have a presentation in English. Thank you very much for bearing with me. So I'm going to talk to you today about open source and will open source fail. And I'm going to talk to you a little bit about who I am, what OpenUK does. I'm going to talk to you about what open source is, why that matters, and why you should all be concerned about whether or not open source is going to fail. So I got involved in open source, which is something that not a lot of women do. And you look around the audience today, it's fairly male-dominated in tech generally. But when you look at open source, it's normally about 10% to 17% female. And I got involved in open source through joining the company Canonical back in 2008. Have any of you heard of Canonical? Oh, that's good. Okay. So Canonical's generally...

2:02 really known as the commercial sponsor of the Ubuntu operating system. And I spent five years working on that. I was the first lawyer in Canonical. I ran the legal team and I was employee 165, so really early stage for Canonical. And I was a commercial lawyer. I had 15 years experience. I'd worked across the dot-com era and it was expected that I would go in and I would do commercial stuff and help build the business. And what wasn't expected was that I would absolutely fall in love with open source. And what I find when I joined Canonical was it was the first place that I'd ever worked where I really felt at home. But also that the people around me, the software engineers around me, had my value set. We believed in the same things. And that was a real revelation, a bit of an epiphany for me. And I've spent most of the last 15 years working in and around open source. A lot of that has been around the governance side of it. So even when I've had jobs that haven't been purely focused on open source, I've stayed involved in projects. And it's not just engineers, obviously, that contribute to open source or software developers.

3:05 There's a whole ecosystem of people who are building out communities. Building out governance, building out the structure that makes open source work. And I've sat on a number of different organizations as an advisor. My favorite is probably for the United Nations, and I worked on their innovation labs. I led a, I chaired a group for them on IP and open source. I have a couple of government appointments. One of them is with the Open Standards. board and I'm now on an advisory board to something called Exascale on quantum computing. And I was for a couple of years a member of the board of the Open Source Initiative, which I'm also going to talk to you about today. So probably the worst thing I've ever done was edit this book. And it took five years. I have ADHD and the book is 640 pages long and it's written by 26 different people, mostly lawyers. So it's a pretty dense job. For me to get to that final edit took four days of review.

4:10 Each time and five times I had to review it. So it was a pretty full-on task, but the book is something that I think all of the authors are very proud of. And one of the things we're most proud of is the fact that it's open access. So that QR code isn't trying to sell you the book. The QR code is taking you through to a website where you should be able to download it free. And make use of it, make use of that expertise. It's quite frustrating because we spec'd the book about six years ago, and at that time, knowing about open source wasn't really, knowing about AI wasn't really relevant. It wasn't a big concern in the open source space. So we do not have a chapter on AI and open source. And you'll see, as I talk to you today, why that's so relevant. But one of the key things there, and one of the big concerns, is that we need to understand open source in the context of AI. And it may be that although I've sworn blind that I will never, ever go back and work on the book again, it may be that we release another version next year. When we launched the book, we did it in Raleigh at All Things Open, and we had a bunch of the female authors take part in a panel.

5:19 And it went viral on the internet in China. So it's now being translated into Mandarin, and the Mandarin version will be out early next year. And I spend a lot of my time sort of traveling around speaking at events like this. This year, and this is not so much about me as it's about open source in the UK, this year I was recognized in a couple of different UK publications around tech, one that put me in the top 100 leaders in the UK. And another that ranked me 37th. I know it's a strange number, but I'm the 37th most influential woman in UK tech, according to this publication. I didn't mean it like that. The point for me of this and the importance of that is that it shows that there is room for open source in our tech ecosystems, and there is room for it to be recognized as something that's very important to those ecosystems. And that's only right, because when we look at the stats around open source in 2023, what we see is that 96% of all software has open source software dependencies.

6:26 So it either contains open source or it needs open source for it to run. The organisation I lead, Open UK, is absolutely unique. It's a country organisation, it's almost an industry organisation, except we made a decision four years ago not to focus on companies, but to focus on people. So what we don't have is we don't have members who pay to be a member. Anybody who wants to join, anybody who wants to contribute and be part of it can. And we don't focus on companies, we focus on people. So we run it with a very lean staff. We have four employees, two part-time, two full-time. And we have all of these different people. There's about 200 in total who take on leadership roles. And those leadership roles allow us to create all the outputs that Open UK does, to hold all the events we do, and to do all the sharing of data and the learning and the teaching in the communities.

7:27 So we have this massive group of volunteers and the style of a true open source project. And I think we are the first project or organization in the world that runs a community like that, which doesn't have a software output. And one of the things we've tried to do is to keep belonging at the center of what we do. So you'll see, if you look at anything that Open UK does, we're a very diverse organization and probably... If not the most diverse organization in open source, we'll be very close to it, and one of the most diverse organizations in UK tech. So the way we operate... great is that we have three pillars, community, legal and policy and learning. And this community piece is about bringing together everybody across the UK who contributes to open source software and creating a voice for that community, a cohesive voice that can be impactful and have power. And we've done that through things like award ceremonies. We've had four now. And we do a very British thing, a New Year's honours list. I don't know if you've ever heard of the Queen's or now the King's honours. So at the end of every year. Well, on Brexit, we thought we would cheer everybody up because what could we do, you know, on the 1st of January that year?

8:33 And we had an honours list that we thought was, you know, just a bit of fun. And it really took off and we had over half a million impressions on Twitter. So we decided we would keep doing this. And this is our fourth year this year. And we will we will honor contributors. So in the past, we've looked at influence and social media presence and press awareness. This year, we're purely looking at contributions to code. And we take that community and we use their voice to have influence. And we have a group of very experienced lawyers around the open source space, and those lawyers respond to legislation, they respond to proposed legislation, not just in the UK, but in Europe and across the globe. That was something we did in the US. On the policy side, we do a bunch of different things. So we pull together different societal issues and tech issues, and we pull those together and we create projects. that we think are useful across the board. And they're always shared on a Creative Commons basis so people in other countries can use them.

9:36 So sustainability was a big deal for us, and we think that open technologies, open source software, open hardware and open data, increasingly open standards and open AI can help on that front. So we've done quite a lot with that. And we also... Produced for COP26, which was held in the UK, a data center blueprint, pulling together all those technologies into a blueprint. And then last year, we... We did one on EV charging. Security is obviously key in open source, and we've done quite a lot around that. Now, we realized if we wanted to really have influence, that we had to bring together data for the politicians and the public servants who we wanted to have influence with. And we started reporting three years ago. This was our first year of reporting. Second and then this year our third year we've actually pulled together four reports and you'll see if you look at the the summer reporting the middle one there's two that are almost identical and the intention had been that we would do a report as we do every year on the economics of open source in the uk and we cut data in a way that no other country in the world is doing we've got

10:41 much more detailed data than anybody else in any other country. We'd love other countries to do the same, and it would be great to be able to compare. What we know is that the UK is number one by lines of code contributors and number one by number of engineers, developers. When you look at Europe, and we're probably about fifth in the world, we generally come across as that. And when we were doing that report, we thought we would do a very quick update on AI, and we'd do maybe half a dozen pages. And of course, by July of 2023, that ended up being a whole report in itself, so 60 pages of each. And I'll talk to you a bit more about AI as we go through this. And our third thing is about learning and education, and we've done a couple of kids'camps. They'll be reissued next year, and we've also done some adult training for people in business. So our first conference was held in... the spring this year in February, and our next one is February 6th and 7th in London. It's called State of OpenCon, and it's completely unique in that it sits at the intersection of business, engineering, and policy, and it brings all of those people together in one place.

11:46 I've mentioned EDI to you, I've mentioned the diversity, this concept of belonging, and I think our stats are probably absolutely unique and sort of provable that it's possible. Almost 40% of our speakers were female, and if you look at our delegates, the interesting thing about our delegates, our attendees, is the ethnicity. 49.3%, I think it was. Are not white and I don't think I've ever seen that at anything in tech before. So what is this open source and why do we care about it? We care about what it is because as we look at regulators and how regulators are regulating, what we're seeing Yeah, it's feedback. Do you want me to put it on hold? Probably broken your mic.

12:55 Right. Thank you. So what is open source and why do we care? Well, Friday afternoon. You got my voice? You can hear me? So right now we are seeing regulators across the planet trying to regulate open source. And I'm going to say to you later that my concern is that what they're doing is they're applying regulation that would apply to a bicycle, to a car, and to a car, to a bicycle. Because what they are talking about when they talk about open source is something slightly different from what open source really is. So if you wanted to ask the open source community what it is, what we would do is we'd go back to the open source definition. And any software that is distributed with the source code available also should be distributed on an open source license. And that license is one that's approved by the Open Source Initiative and meets the open source definition.

14:01 So if I was in a room where I knew everybody was an open source engineer, I would say, why don't you join me and we will recite the 10 points of the definition. And nobody would say anything, because the reality is that none of us know it. There are 10 quite complicated definitions, but the licenses that we know that OSI has approved meet those definitions and keep our code free and available. For me, in the definitions, five and six are what we really care about. And we care about them because those are the things that allow the free flow of the software. And what they say is that anybody can use the code for any purpose. So you can't restrict a category of people or an individual from using your code. And you can't restrict the purpose, which means that you can't say you can use my code unless you use it commercially or unless you do X, Y, or Z with it. And that's going to be important as we go through this. The thing that is universal, across all of the licenses, as well as that free flow, is that the developers all say they are not responsible for the code.

15:08 I give you this code, I gift it to the world, but when you use it, you need to use it in a way that I have no liability for. So I give you, I disclaim all my liability to the extent I'm allowed to legally. Back in 2008, when I joined Canonical, it was pretty tough. We were knocking on doors, we were trying to sell open source software, we were trying to sell services around open source software, and it was very difficult. That has changed. I mentioned that today 96% of code has open source software dependencies. Well, what that means is that there has been a shift. And I think there's been maybe three major reasons for that shift. Across all of these are digitalization. We live in a digital world where everything we do comes down to software. It's software defined. You're either creating your products and services, distributing them, or having them consumed through software. What we see, therefore, is that engineers have got a much stronger position, much more authority than they used to have.

16:13 Then we've seen the rise of Git. Git's not a language, it's a tool, but it's allowed GitLab, GitHub to become something where we can work in a distributed way, where we can collaborate and we can follow what's going on across projects. What that also does is allow open source software to allow be placed on GitHub and taken into organizations on standard licenses without legal approval. And what we used to find was the blocker when we were trying to get open source into companies was legal compliance, finance, procurement. And those people were able to block the code because they didn't really understand what the risks were. And today that's shifted and the code goes in through the engineering teams. And that's possible because of GitHub, GitLab, etc. And then the third thing is really cloud computing. And if we think about cloud, the whole of the public cloud infrastructure is based on open source. So today the infrastructure we have as a society is based on open source. Now, when I joined Canonical, Microsoft was pretty much public enemy number one.

17:17 Steve Ballmer had said that open source was a cancer, and I think it was the first bug on Launchpad was the destruction of Microsoft. Fast forward to 2018, and what you find in 2018 is that Satya Nadella is asking to be forgiven. Microsoft has been on a journey. And that journey, according to my friend Steve Wally, giving this keynote in Edinburgh in 2018, is for three reasons. Firstly, you can't employ an engineer who's learned to code in the last 20 years unless you let them do open source. They want to recycle, they want to reuse, they want to build on the shoulders of giants. Secondly, customers are specifically asking for products that are only available open source because it brings the best innovation. And then thirdly, back to cloud. If you want to run Azure or any other public cloud service or business, you can't just use it. You also have to engage. And you have to engage with the community to develop skills, but also to have influence and to be able to do things like have features developed.

18:23 And that journey is one that we don't just think Microsoft has been on. We're seeing every company, every company that's going through digitalization following that journey. And it's not just companies. It's not just enterprises. It's also the public sector. It's our governments. It's our public services. The UK was the first to have an open source first policy in 2011. And since then, we've seen things like the COVID apps across the world. We've seen the back ends across the health care service, and we've seen the energy sector move to that. So I mentioned this 96% figure. We've won, right? Time to go home. Who cares if open source is there tomorrow or not? It's won. But the reality is that when a sector has open source adoption, what that does is disrupt the marketplace. Now, if you're a company who's being disrupted, you're not going to be happy. You're going to lose your revenue streams and you're going to fight back. At the moment, one of the sectors we've seen in the same way as maybe 10 years ago, Microsoft was fighting open source.

19:23 One of the sectors today is mobile. We saw at Mobile World Congress in February the launch of the GSMA API product that's open source. And we've seen the mobile companies like Qualcomm, like Ericsson, like Nokia, fighting back and trying to redefine what open source is, trying to change the licensing. And the thing that companies are always worried about are those provisions I mentioned to you, five and six, because what five and six are about is the free flow. And what companies who are not sure about this are concerned by is the inability to restrict commercialization. My old boss at Canonical, Mark Shuttleworth, once said that what you're doing is enabling your competitors with your innovation. And it's the bottom line, it's what open source is. So we're seeing this issue in mobile because a lot of the mobile companies have patents. And the patents that they have are available on a FRAND basis, fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory.

20:25 But despite FRAND, they all have a royalty attached to them. And that royalty has to be paid, and the license and the payment disrupts the free flow of open source. So what we see is that it's not compatible. With open source software and as these are incorporated into standards and anybody who's dealt with the telco sector will know just how much they use standards when you see that you have a problem and there's this friction between the SEPs the standard essential patents in the standards and the open source licensing So, you know, to fix that, open standards are the solution. But what that would do is disrupt that market by taking away the SEP royalty, which can be billions of dollars a year for a company. We've also seen it not just in the sector, but sort of within our own, within open source. Many of you will have seen the issues around cloud computing, and Amazon gets picked on because it's the biggest, but there is this concept of strip mining.

21:26 And the idea is that if you are an open source, source company, you have a product that you've developed and the cloud companies can freely take it, there's a sort of discrepancy between what the cloud companies earn and what you earn. The cloud companies may make a huge amount of money out of your product and may not share it with you. And the issue here is going back to what Mark said about enabling your competitors with your innovation. You have no way to stop them doing that. What the cloud companies are doing is effectively okay. Morally, ethically, different thing, but from an open source perspective, they're able to do it. And we've seen our own sector, the open source businesses, reacting to that, pushing back. And the problem here is that they're shifting away from the open source definition and the open source licenses to licenses that restrict commercial usage. But companies that have relied on open source contribution to build their products don't really want to admit that. And quite often what they are is disingenuous. They're implying like this with Shea Bannon writing this blog post when Elastic switched to SSPL.

22:32 They're implying that they're doubling down on open. They're being more open than ever. When in fact what they're doing is shifting away to proprietary software. Because the opposite of open source, and you have to think about this, the opposite of open source is not closed source. Effectively, what we've got is three categories of software. We've got open source that meets the definition. And then we've got proprietary. And anybody from an open source world will tell you there's two. kinds of proprietary software. There's proprietary software that shares the source, and there's proprietary software that has closed source. And that's at the heart of all the issues around open source at the moment. So regulators will often think the opposite of open source is closed, and what that means is that code that meets the definition and is freely available and code with restrictions, both are treated the same way as open source. And that's where you go back to my idea of you're trying to regulate a bicycle and a car with the same regulation, which will never work.

23:33 But trying to get that as something that... A regulator or a policymaker who's quite new to tech or who doesn't even understand the nuance of what open source is, trying to get them to understand it is very difficult. And you'll see why it's very important to society, but also why it's very important to the regulation that's coming down the line quickly now. And we've not just seen that with these problems of commercialization, you know, a couple of years ago with Elastic. The most recent was HashiCorp, open source heroes, moved to the BSL, sometimes referred to as the bullshit license, in the last, what, six months. So it's not a problem that's going away. Something that I do want to check, and I've never actually fully researched, is whether or not the companies that do this have always IPO'd. Because the reality is they're driven by shareholder value because they're companies, because that's the requirement. That's not their fault. That's the reality. And what that means is that revenue and max. Your revenue is critical and at the center of your business. And that's what drives these changes.

24:36 And it's not just about money. So we've seen this in Ukraine and the war in Ukraine, and it's been quite heartbreaking, to be honest. At the start of the war, a large group of Ukrainian software developers, open source developers, held this great space on Twitter. And they were talking about, you know, putting down their keyboards and picking up arms. And it was really heartbreaking. And some of them approached a number of... as in the open source community, and wanted us to support restricting the Russian use of open source software. And of course, you can't do that, because it's exactly the same as commercialization. There can't be any exception, even if it's for a good cause, because as soon as you make one exception, you start a waterfall, you start a cascade of exceptions and making moral decisions. And I think one of the things that I liked about open source when I got to Canonical was there's no judgment. I don't judge how you use it, you don't judge how I use it. So long as you comply with legal rules that trump the licensing, that's enough. So, open source, 96% of our software today, FUD, fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

25:42 The kind of stuff that's spread by companies that are being disrupted, who are worried about their revenues, and which has an impact on governments. I've mentioned that we're living in a digital world and with digitalization comes not just enterprises, but our whole infrastructure, our public sector, things that we used to rely on in bricks and mortar, hospitals, infrastructure like roads, railways, all of it now dependent on software and increasingly dependent on open source software. And that has caused a slight panic amongst policymakers and regulators as they've tried to work out who's going to be responsible. Where is the risk and who's going to bear the burden of that risk? And we saw the White House over the last couple of years take a lead. And we've seen... In the Cyber Resilience Act in Europe, I don't know if any of you have been following this, it's been a bit controversial, to put it mildly. The OSI has pulled together a whole load of things about why it's not good. And then last week we saw some changes which make it better, which mean that the foundations that hold open source code will probably not be liable for it.

26:50 But there's still a whole load of questions to be answered. Questions about small businesses that open source, small open source businesses making money out of open source and whether they'll be liable for putting code into Europe. And it really has the potential to dramatically impact the EU, to dramatically impact the code that people are willing to share into the EU to distribute here, and whether they'll be able to take the risk of doing that, and whether that will detrimentally affect more and more code being created in Europe. So I mentioned FUD. Lots and lots of myths and rumors, lots of confusion. It's very easy when something is complicated. And the way that I've explained to you that there's actually three types of software, not two. Very, very easy to cause confusion. And this year, it's really come up the agenda. So what we see is AI. And AI is quite different from anything we've had before because we're not just looking at software, we're looking at models. We're looking at weights, we're looking at data as well as software, and we're bringing all of those together.

27:57 This is where it becomes absolutely critical to understand what is and isn't open source. So if you distribute something like Lama on a Lama community license, which is what Meta did in July, what you see is code that is restricted. So you can freely use it until you have 700 million users. And at the point at which you have 700 million users, you have to go to Meta and get commercial license. Who knows what the terms of that will be? You can only assume that there will be a commercial revenue share for Meta at that point. But by opening it up, they put themselves at the center of an ecosystem and encourage use and encourage their LLM to be the most popular. So why would they want their LLM to be the most popular? Well, there are good reasons for that. So back in March, we saw... Chat GPT-4 come out and everything shifted. Everybody everywhere was suddenly interested in AI and wanting to use generative AI in their businesses and their personal lives.

28:58 Elon Musk claims to be responsible for OpenAI being called OpenAI because it was to be a foundation. And I'm sure you've all watched the in-out, in-out that Sam has been doing over the last few weeks. But it was set up to be a not-for-profit, and it was set up with the idea of being open, but it's anything but. There is nothing open. It is entirely proprietary enclosed software. However, back in March, April, Lama 1 was leaked. And the leak of Lama 1 saw the open source communities surround the LLM. and get the piece that was missing in the jigsaw for the open source communities to be able to develop at scale. Now, very quickly after that, we saw this memo come out of Google, this leaked memo. And of course, it's only the opinion of one individual employee in one company. But what it says is really important. It says we have no moat. And by that, what they mean is there is nothing surrounding our IP. There is nothing surrounding our business, our investment in this AI.

30:00 that will allow us to differentiate ourselves and sell to customers. What the open source community have done, what they're able to create, might not be quite as finessed, but nobody's going to pay us for what we've got versus that. And that goes to the heart of the problem here. Building an LLM costs hundreds of millions of dollars, and you can understand that a business wants to be recompensed for that, that they want to protect their IP, they want to keep that closed. On the other hand, we look at a world where 90% of compute sits in eight companies in two countries, and none of them are in Europe. So when we think about that, if we want to be able to innovate, if we want democratization of technology, if we want competition, that's not going to work. So we get to this concept of open source and opening up AI. Open source may well eat the lunch that Google has been working hard on and Meta and others have been working hard on. But when we think about it, what matters here is this definition of open source and understanding what open source is.

31:06 So if we have Lama 2 being distributed on a license that is effectively proprietary with restrictions, and we regulate that in the same ways we regulate something like Falcon or Bloom, then we're going to end up with huge confusion. And Meta themselves know this. So we supported the launch of Lama 2 at Open UK, and we supported it, described it, as it is on their website as open innovation. And that's what the whole build-up was about, and everybody understood it was not open source, it wasn't open source software. But on the launch, we had Mark Zuckerberg immediately post about it being open source, and Jan LeCun, the head of product, has regularly talked about how open source is the answer and built support for this. So we see the open source initiative doing deep dive and looking at whether we need a new definition. And we see governments starting to try to work all of this out. And we had this huge AI summit in the UK, the AI Risk Summit. World leaders were brought across the globe to Bletchley Park to talk about AI.

32:10 It's really interesting. So the UK did not raise open source as part of the agenda for that. The French did. The Chinese did. But the UK did not. And at the end of it, we saw our deputy prime minister probably going off on a frolic of his own, saying that he thought open source was fantastic and the future of AI, but the UK technically still has no policy on whether or not we open source AI. It is interesting that the French did, and I mentioned that we collect and cut a lot of data for our reporting, and that the UK is number one, and you won't get me to say anything else, but the French are the fastest growing in Europe. So if we look at the UK, we had something like 8,200 individuals who had commits accepted in open source projects. We've got 3.2 million people with GitHub accounts, 4.5% of the population. Think about that when you scale it down to 8,200, and 1,700 of those were first-time committers, just over 20% first-time committers. So what you're seeing is more and more people realizing the value and the importance of open source as a way of developing their skills.

33:17 Now, this is something that governments are also starting to think about, because when you have individuals who are sitting in your nation who have skills, who have tech skills, what normally happens? They normally move to the Bay Area. They don't stay in your home country for very long. You have talent migration, talent flight, and it's a constant problem. And it stops countries from building their own tech sectors. And what we see is that open source potentially has the ability to keep people at home. Because we're distributed, because we're global, because our companies are based in a country, but the employees are based across the planet, and our projects are through GitHub, GitLab, spread across the globe, individuals can sit anywhere they want to sit in the world, so long as they have connectivity and the ability to fly to meetings and be in a group for conferences, all hands, sprints, whatever. So long as you have those two things, you can sit in rural France or rural England or the islands of Scotland and contribute to open source projects. And it's something that I know the French government are becoming aware of.

34:20 I know because I keep banging on doors and telling them that the UK government is becoming aware of it. And we're also seeing it particularly in the global south. In countries that have the opportunity to build a tech sector that are just starting their journey. And I think you'll find that open source will make a significant difference there. So it may well be considered something that's very important. So from all of that, open source is one. But are we going to have open source for very much longer? Is it sustainable? What's the future of open source going to be? Well, to my mind, you see all of this contribution being pulled together into an ecosystem that has a value. It has a value that's difficult to... make money out of because you're actually enabling your competitors with your innovation. It's really difficult to make a business waddle around open source work and that's why we see the shift away when companies need to make money, when they're forced to meet requirements of shareholder value, we see a shift away in the licensing and we see them shift to licenses that restrict commercialization.

35:24 And I think that we're at a stage where The world is so dependent on open source software, what we idealistically need is to see it redefined as a public good as well as part of the commons. We need to see economic contribution from governments, and we need to see that not on a siloed basis, but across geopolitical shift. We need to see it across borders. Effectively the equivalent of a UN for open source. I had no hope that that would ever happen. However, I think when you look at the AI summit and the way that governments are starting to recognize that AI requires legislation and economic efforts that are cross-border, I think there's a potential for governments to finally realize that the tech sector isn't geographic, it isn't nation-based, but it's something that crosses borders. And if we can get them to do that in AI, the hot topic in AI is, of course, open source. So with a bit of luck, we will be next in line. However, what we see is the speed at which open source has been adopted in the last 15 years.

36:31 That moving to 96% from very, very low numbers, we see that that hasn't been matched by the pace of understanding. And I don't just mean the understanding of the definition and the three kinds of software, not two, but actually how to use it. And one of the key things that we need to shift if we want open source to survive is that curation, that governance and technical hygiene and making sure that users know what they're doing. So open source does create value. How we show that value is difficult. And how we create the value economically in our business models are difficult. But all of that means that we're in a situation where we have this software that is fundamental to society today, but who knows if we'll have it tomorrow. So when I put a title with a question mark, I'm told that what that normally means on social media, or if you're giving a clickbait type title, is that the answer is going to be no. Will open source fail?

37:31 And you're probably expecting me to say no. Well, I'm not going to say no. When I first started giving talks around this subject a year ago, I said 50-50. Right now, the answer is full of ifs and buts. So it may be that it's only ever meant to have been something that was short-lived. I think of it as a correction. We've applied copyright to code. We allowed big tech companies to own our infrastructure. Something like eight companies own the whole infrastructure. that we're all reliant on in our public sector and in our enterprises. And the question really is, where is that going? Are our governments going to ensure that enough of that is opened up, particularly as we focus on AI, to ensure that the future is open? Or are we going to allow that close to continue? And if we allow that close to continue, the likelihood is that open source won't survive. So 50-50, maybe less. But certainly, I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that open source will survive. So I think I've said more than enough to you.

38:33 I'm sorry about the microphone glitches. I hope you heard some of what I said in the beginning. Questions? No, it's okay. So first applause and then questions. And thank you so much for this talk. It was very interesting and passionate. So we have the 37th most influential woman in the UK. So wow. It's like a red carpet for us. Thank you so much to be there. So we have some questions here. Au fond, là-bas peut-être, s'il vous plaît, à gauche. Et à droite. L'autre gauche. Je faisais une petite blague pour détendre. Alors? Hi, yeah. My question is related to the pressure points towards the French government and the UK, well, not really the UK, but the EU in general.

39:36 As individual developers, as companies, what are the pressure points for us to ensure open source? And what are the pressure groups we can sign up to to ensure that the ecosystem thrives, in your opinion? So I think the pressure points right now, there's sort of three pieces of legislation in Europe. There's the product liability directive. The AI Act, and I don't know if you saw, there was a leak this morning. I was sitting back there writing comments about it. There was a leak this morning on the AI Act and the CRA. And we haven't got a copy of the CRA yet. We've got to see what it actually says about individual developers. It says you're excluded, but then it says if you make any money. you're not excluded. And what they've done is they've lifted the kind of principles you have for trademarks, where you have the first distributor being liable. And if you decide that you're not going to distribute your code in Europe and a 404 message comes up if you're trying to download it in Europe, What that means is other bigger entities will incorporate your code and build on it, and you'll end up only with those big system integrators responding and circulating it.

40:45 So the CRA, the Product Liability Directive, and the AI Act. And with the AI Act, there was something interesting around the leak today about open source being excluded. But you come back to that, what do they mean by open source? Are they talking about Lama 2? Is that going to be excluded? So is all you have to do call it open source for it to be excluded? Or is it actually going to be open source that meets the definition? So it's really interesting, I think, to see where that plays out. I think possibly right now in the UK we're in a better position than you because of Brexit, frankly. We're slow and we haven't regulated and we're watching what's going right and wrong. wrong everywhere else and trying to lift and shift the things that work and our regulators are listening to us about what open source is which is really helpful they're on a journey they're early stage if i was sitting here um there are country organizations but they're very much focused on businesses you don't have an equivalent to open uk i would consider setting something up so that you can collectively have a much stronger voice

41:53 You can take anything we've done. So all of our stuff is on Creative Commons licensing. And we're about to publish in January something we're calling the Open Manifesto. And we're asking for support on skills. We're asking for support in the public sector and on AI. So those kind of things that you can lift and try and use and reuse. And what we'll be doing is asking individuals to send it to their MPs, their members of parliament. And we'll have a standard letter and things that they can use to make it simpler. But I think the key to it... I've got a couple of minutes? Yeah, okay. We have two questions and only one minute. This is an important question. So we just did a report on skills, and we did a report in the summer on economics and open source businesses, and we described open source as the submarine under the digital economy. And I've talked to you about how you can live in a rural area and work in a global company. The reality is nobody knows you're there, right? Your own country doesn't recognize you because you're part of the global tech sector and you're working on that really important.

43:00 innovation and your own country doesn't know you're there because you're not working on the local stuff and it's really important to get that voice heard and to raise it above the parapet so if you want to talk afterwards about how you can take our stuff i'm happy to but that submarine has a crew and that's all of the people contributing to open source and what we're trying to do in the uk is get them to be visible within government and get them across so i have um the home office, DCIT, different government organizations will come to our conference in February and they're actually going to hold consultations with the open source community through the conference. I don't think that's ever been done before. So it's a big step forward in trying to get the regulators to understand how tech really works and who the people they need to talk to are. But we should talk offline. Sorry. Yeah, no, we have just two more questions. You, I think, and you. But maybe we can do, yeah. No, you quick, yes, would be nice. But the two questions at the same time so that we can save time.

44:00 Your question, please. No, there was a second question there, I think, right? It's me. I'm sorry, I have some vision trouble. Two days after, I'm quite tired. It won't take very long. Would you mind to repeat which answer you gave to Ukrainian developers when they were asking you to stop having Russian developers having access because i'm not sure about what what you said so what the there's a lot to get through in a short time so i possibly wasn't very clear what they wanted to create is something that's called protest wear so it just won't work in the other country and they asked me i won't say who else they asked but they asked me to be involved in it and i said no and it absolutely broke my heart um i have friends i've worked in ukraine i have friends there so it was really difficult but if we did that there'll be other wars as we're already seeing there'll be other situations where somebody's moral and judgment values need to restrict it and it's a floodgate You just can't do it.

45:01 You have to keep that blanket freedom and openness for it to work. And as soon as you start to make restrictions, the whole thing falls apart. If we allow it for protest wear, we allow it for commercialization, and then you get back into this thing where you can call anything you like open source. Thank you so much, Amanda. Yes, and sorry for the microphone attack.