European regulators cast their eyes on maturing OSS communities

SFSCON 2023, Bolzano, Italy

As open source software becomes the foundation to build digital products, to run the backbones of ICT infrastructure and to ensure digital sovereignty and cyber resilience, both the technology as well as the communities that develop it inevitably move into the focus of regulators. The European Union is advancing a number of policy initiatives that regulate liability, cyber security, data handling and AI applications in digital products, among others. This is a challenge for the still quite decentralised and globally operating open source community. How could the open source community participate in legislative processes, and what may be the potential impacts of the upcoming regulation on the open source development process and community dynamics?

Mirko Boehm
Mirko Boehm
Open Source

Political Economics of Open Source and Intellectual Property.