Geopolitical tension and its potential impact on open source was one of the main focus points during the OpenInfra Foundation European summit held in Paris on 16–19 October.
When asked about OpenStack’s resilience given the volatile geopolitical climate, Jonathan Bryce, executive director at the OpenInfra Foundation, said: “The thing that I love about open source is that once you open source a piece of software, it belongs to everyone forever. The true open source licenses are worldwide and perpetual, and those are really key and important terms.”
Nevertheless, there have been a number of instances where the open source community and commercial software providers appear to have adapted their policies as they try to second-guess the US administration. Earlier this year, the Linux Foundation effectively barred a group of Russian-based Linux kernel maintainers by removing them from the mailing list. Then, in the summer, Reuters reported that Indian refinery Nayara Energy, which buys oil mainly from Russia, had begun legal proceedings against Microsoft, following European Union (EU) sanctions on the company.
Discussing the impact of government policy, Bryce said: “We are a company, Microsoft’s a company; we’re a non-profit, they’re a for-profit. We have to follow the laws of the land, just like all companies do, and there are times when there are rules that we don’t get a say in. We try to influence policy in ways that are beneficial for open source because we firmly believe that the best way to do open source is by globally collaborating.”
He pointed out that over the course of the many decades that open source has existed, there have been many different government administrations in Europe, the US, China, Japan and Korea. “There have been laws that have been more encouraging for global collaboration and laws that have been discouraging for global collaboration,” said Bryce.
As an example, he said there were initially a lot of laws that limited the distribution of strong encryption, which had an impact on open source code. “Eventually, we saw the technical value of collaboration ultimately work out and those laws changed,” said Bryce. “The reality is that these policies come, they go, they change. We have to abide by them while they’re here, and what we do is try to influence them for the good of global collaboration.”
While there is always a risk that open source collaborators may face restrictions if the countries they live in are deemed hostile by a government, leading to fragmentation of projects, Thierry Carrez, general manager of the OpenInfra Forum, does not believe this will happen. Given the way geopolitical issues are being handled so far, he said: “In the end, I don’t think this is going to fragment the open source community.”
Open source and the European Commission
Digital sovereignty in Europe was another of the focus areas at the conference. European users and providers such as Telekom Cloud, OVHcloud and VanillaCore demonstrated how open technologies can be used to deliver portability, transparency and control to meet emerging policy and compliance requirements across the region.
Carrez said the European Commission now has a deep understanding of the value open source is providing. “It’s really changing over the last three years, and now they [EU commissioners] understand, and are talking directly to, the open source community,” he added.
This includes policymakers talking to the people that are actually building open source projects in the open. Carrez said the OpenInfra Foundation has been able to benefit from the EU policy work from the Linux Foundation.
“Right now the world needs sovereign, high-performance and sustainable infrastructure that remains interoperable and secure, while collaborating tightly with AI [artificial intelligence], containers and trusted execution environments,” he said. “Open infrastructure allows nations and organisations to maintain control over their applications, their data and their destiny while benefiting from global collaboration.”
Carrez added that contributors and organisations across industries were working together to define the next decade of resilient, AI-ready, open infrastructure.
The VMware opportunity for digital sovereignty
The messaging coming out of the OpenInfra Summit is that Linux, OpenStack and Kubernetes enable the community to remain resilient. The three come together as the OpenInfra blueprint, which aims to offer IT infrastructure resilience against the impact of government policy, and, just as significantly, allows organisations to move beyond being tied to one software provider for key technology.
This was the topic of discussion at the VMware Migration Day that ran on the first full day of the summit. Canonical, Rackspace and Red Hat were among the companies that gave live VMware-to-OpenStack migration demonstrations, to show delegates real-world pathways to OpenStack-based virtualisation.
Rackspace demonstrated using the Coriolis tool from Cloudbase Solutions to migrate a VMware private cloud to a public cloud. According to Ken Crandell, senior strategic project manager at Rackspace, 80% of the organisations Rackspace sees are migrating from vSpehere, the last perpetually licensed version of the VMware product.
Canonical also used Coriolis to build a cloud-native automated environment, to lift and shift VMware environments over to OpenStack.
Pedro Navarro Pérez, product manager at Red Hat, demonstrated the Red Hat OpenSack VMware migration toolkit, which uses Ansible Automation Platform to provide what he claimed was “consistency and orchestration”.
What the weekend spent at the Paris summit shows is that the OpenInfra Foundation is adapting to a world of political and IT supplier uncertainty. While as an organisation it needs to comply with the laws of the countries it operates in, the message from the OpenInfra Foundation is that with the help of the Linux Foundation, it is able to work with policymakers in Europe to ensure the voice of the open source community is heard.
As for supplier relationship management, on more than one occasion over the weekend, attendees were warned about the risk of “putting all your eggs in one basket”, referring to the state of enterprise IT’s heavy reliance on VMware.
Digital sovereignty also means not being locked into one supplier’s product family. And while there are VMware alternatives like Nutanix, OpenInfra sees an opportunity to promote the benefit of a truly open platform that avoids being locked into any one IT supplier’s products.
