State of Open Con 2025

Although I'd previously helped maintain more well-maintained projects, moving into this project, with one other overworked maintainer who was largely working in the very little spare time they had, I found that my work was cut out for me.

It didn't help that this was also one of the most widely used Go libraries in a fairly well used niche, and a very regularly discussed and recommended option, but the complexity of the domain led to a lot of difficulty in predicting the way that the library is used, and we (as maintainers) are actively driven by the use-cases from our users.

It's taken a couple of years of work to improve our triage process, documentation and re-testing old issues to see if they had been fixed in the meantime, and we've still got _so much_ more to do.

You'll hear some first-hand examples of the difficulty of being an Open Source maintainer, and some tips you can follow as a good Open Source citizen, to improve life for the maintainers of projects you use.

For seasoned maintainers, this will all be very familiar. For folks who are primarily users of Open Source, you'll learn some behind-the-scenes insights into what it's actually like behind the issues/PRs.

What is the impact on contributors when maintainers fight, aren't welcoming, or don't lead inclusively? We are a community of doers who enable open source projects including Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, and many others, but conflict between maintainers and contributors can negatively impact our projects and lead to resentment, drive contributors away, and in the worst of cases can escalate to code of conduct issues. When we maintainers don't have each other to lean on, what can we do? Sunlight is the best disinfectant and reflecting on these interactions can help us all do better and help our projects be more successful. In this talk, Kat and Jeremy will share some examples where communications went wrong, talk about the impact on contributors, and share a framework we can all use to do better.

With a month's notice to transition to a new workflow for managing incoming security reports for our open source project, join us to learn how we implemented GitHub's built-in security reporting feature in the Mautic project, and explore the highs and lows of collaborating with researchers, contributors and our security team using this system.

The European Commission has clearly identified open source as an strategic tool for bringing some balance to an EU cloud market currently dominated by a handful of non-EU hyperscalers. Part of that commitment comes through a series of ambitious, multi-million EU projects like the COGNIT project and the multi-country “Important Project of Common European Interest on Next Generation Cloud Infrastructure and Services” (IPCEI-CIS).

For the first time in the history of the European Union, it is the EU industry who will be leading large-scale open source projects aimed at building European strategic technologies.

In this talk we will explain in detail how specific European open source technologies are being brought together as part of some of those projects to start building Sovereign Multi-Cloud solutions that ensure interoperability and digital sovereignty for European users while preventing vendor lock-in in the cloud market, opening up competition in the emerging 5G/edge.

As platform engineering continues to gain traction within the tech industry, the role of internal developer platforms (IDPs) is becoming essential in streamlining application delivery. According to Gartner, by 2026, 80% of large software engineering organisations will have established platform engineering teams. This prediction is already materialising, with the latest State of DevOps Report by DORA revealing that 89% of organisations are using some form of internal developer platform.

However, as Gartner positions platform engineering at the peak of its hype cycle, it raises the question: what comes next? Will the industry face the "trough of disillusionment," or will platform engineering continue to evolve and mature? This panel discussion will explore the future trajectory of platform engineering, examining current trends and their implications for the industry.

Key questions we will address include:
- Where are current trends in platform engineering taking us?
- Will the market see a proliferation of new tools, or will we see more consolidation?
- Will organisations move toward a single, unified platform, or will multiple, specialised platforms emerge to meet different needs?

Join our expert panelists as they share their insights and discuss what the future holds for platform engineering.

Regulators are coming for you if you're not looking after your customers' (or your employees'!) Personally Identifiable Information (PII). Luckily, Open Source, coupled with Confidential Computing, can give you a chance to be star baker. And while this session doesn't promise a Paul Hollywood handshake, let's at least try to avoid a soggy bottom to your security and risk policy.

In the past few years, the open source ecosystem has seen transformational innovation in the way we measure and analyze open source world - from development to community engagement, usage, economic impact, and beyond. In this panel, we gather the experts to discuss the state of open source from the hard numbers. We will discuss which indicators to watch, what we can learn from them, and what they might suggest about the future of open source as we know it.

EQUIP (Ensuring Quality in Psychological Support) is a World Health Organization & UNICEF project using Drupal to deliver mental health support training and assessments in low and middle-income settings with low connectivity. As of March 2024, EQUIP's digital platform had been used in 794 training programmes in 36 countries with 3,760 trainees resulting in 10,001 competency assessments.
This case study will show how EQUIP was built using an human-centred approach to product design and Drupal-based open source technology, to provide an open-access platform for NGOs around the world.