On June 12th and 13th, Orange Gardens hosted OW2’s annual conference under the theme “Open Source: toward Industry Maturity”. The event gathered nearly 300 participants and 60 speakers from 13 European countries, highlighting the importance open source and OW2 now have for industry. And present an opportunity for Orange to showcase its significant involvement in the field of open source.
Orange is proud to have co-organized once again OW2’s annual conference; an annual event for open source experts, software architects, developers, and project managers from industry and institutions.
Opening the event saw Christian Paterson (Head of Orange Open Source Governance) and Koen Vermeulen (Orange France CIO) provide valuable insights into the state of play of open source within Orange and the wider community.
Beyond Orange, several other large industrial groups also presented their vision of open source (Siemens, Nokia, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, Wipro and IBM), as did several institutions (Inria, La DINSIC, The Document Foundation, The Free Software Foundation Europe, …). Of notable interest amongst the multiple themes covered, the positioning of open source in business models and corporate strategy.
Key messages from the 2 day event:
- Within Orange France, 95% of new projects are conducted with open source components: “open source is our default option” declared Koen Vermeulen.
- Investment in open source comes primarily from American and Chinese stakeholders. The relative low visibility of European players was raised as a concern.
- Leveraging open source successfully takes effort; it should be a conscious and explicit decision. At an organisational level, open source program offices (or governances) are vital to encouraging, fostering and guiding these efforts. The apparent paucity of these structures within industry is still surprising.
- Using open source is another way of working together; open source supported collaboration is what our customers expect.
- At a time when countries are rentrenching national industrial policy, open source helps developers cooperate without borders.
- Globally, 60-80% of ICT projects include open source components: managing the risks in terms of compliance and security is becoming increasingly complex.
Project workshops and demonstrations were organised throughout the day to add some tangible illustrations.
Well done to Bruno Dillenseger who won the 2019 “OW2 Market Award” for the CLIF project, a load and performance measurement testing tool.
This conference was an opportunity for me to present a particularly noteworthy use case of CLIF, the Free performance test software as part of the Orange Connected Home project.– Bruno Dillenseger.
Watch the interview videos of Christian Paterson and et Koen Vermeulen!