State of Open Con 2025

Software is eating the world, and AI is eating software, transforming the way we build and use technology. Open Source has been at the heart of this transformation, ensuring openness and enabling innovation for the past 25 years. However, modern systems increasingly depend on non-code components such as datasets, models, and APIs—creating challenges to completeness that the Open Source must now address.

This session will outline Open Source 2.0: a vision for evolving to global governance and refining—not redefining—the Open Source Definition to ensure that modern systems remain open. We'll discuss how achieving clear community consensus, similar to a constitutional amendment, could ensure that any updates to the definition don't change its meaning for existing systems and avoid the fragmentation of new and conflicting definitions.

By addressing these challenges, Open Source can fully preserve the four essential freedoms of Free Software and thrive in a world shaped by services (cloud) and data (AI).