State of Open Con 2025

Open source companies have to be able to compete both against their own open source project as well as with pure proprietary solutions in order to succeed. They also have to make their open source project into a competitive advantage, when if managed incorrectly it can instead be a massive risk. Emily Omier will talk about how open source companies need to think about their positioning in the ecosystem, their ideal users and ideal customers, and the relationship between their open source software, their commercial product and the business outcomes project and product are supposed to deliver if they want to succeed. Attendees will leave with a framework for creating a strategy to win, even in a cutthroat software market, with concrete examples of how successful open source companies have won in their markets.

Imagine waking up one morning to find out that your beloved open source tool, which lies at the heart of your system, is being relicensed. What does that mean? Can you still use it as before? Could the new license force you to open source your own business logic?

This doom’s day nightmare scenario isn’t hypothetical. It is, in fact, very real, for databases, for Infrastructure-as-Code tooling, and for other OSS, with several examples over the past year alone.

On this talk Horovits will review some of the less known risks of open source, and share his lessons learned facing such relicensing moves. If you use OSS, you’ll learn how to safeguard yourself. If you’re in the process of evaluating a new OSS, you’ll learn to look beyond the license and consider additional criteria.

Many popular OSS projects are owned and driven by corporations, and in today's difficult economic climate, those companies are under increasing pressure to protect their businesses or show stronger returns for investors. One response to this pressure has been the relicensing of popular projects to more restrictive licenses despite there not being consistent evidence that this generates improved financial outcomes. In some cases, this relicensing has resulted in a hard fork of the original project. Both the relicensing and the resulting fork create turmoil for the users of that project and the community of contributors. The audience will gain an appreciation of why relicensing results in hostile forks and how to think about this issue when selecting projects for contribution or usage.

Many open source creators, consumers, and participants are concerned with the general state of open source sustainability. But is this something we can quantify outside of our feelings or targeted examples? Perhaps if we can identify and calculate metrics that characterize and quantify this concern, we can collectively work to address this issue. In this talk, we will explore and interpret available data, identify gaps in knowledge, and discuss opportunities to work together to improve open source sustainability.

The EU’s Cyber Resilience Act creates a novel category of ‘open-source software stewards,’ creating a ‘light touch’ regime for designated entities. It has proven controversial, sparking debate about who may benefit – or not. Whilst the EU is yet to clarify what ‘stewardship’ shall entail, likely in 2025, there is little past practice as an internal governance principle within OSS.
Drawing upon key international law contexts where the ‘stewardship’ concept shapes governance regimes and informs stakeholders’ responsibilities, the presentation critically analyses potential implications of this approach for the future of OSS governance in the EU and beyond. For better or worse.

Corporations co-evolved with the global market economy, but Open Source is a gift economy. How might we continue evolving our corporations to participate more fully in Open Source?

After a quarter-century of artisanal, human-centric coding, open is going to be radically changed by regulation and new tools. How can we see this as a fresh start, rather than an end?