FOSDEM The Open Source Policy Summit is an annual event which attempts to explain the importance of software freedom to governments and policy makers.
The Policy Summit is an annual event organized by the Open Forum Europe, a Brussels nonprofit which describes itself as an "independent think tank which explains the merits of openness in computing to policy makers and communities across Europe."
This is an important job, but you might be forgiven if you've not heard of it before because it has a rather different focus to commercial or community events. While businesses are concerned with things like cost-effectiveness and service-level agreements, the public sector needs to think more about issues such as digital sovereignty.
The governments of nation states need to consider different priorities. For example, if you choose some cloud application for communications or storage, you need to think about where the servers are on which those apps will actually run, and where your data will be stored. Much of the software industry is American, and many PaaS apps use AWS and other cloud providers which are also primarily based in the USA. Given that the largest war in Europe since 1945 is under way not far from the eastern borders of the EU, this is focusing legislators' minds somewhat.
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Open Source Policy Summit: Where FOSS and government meet#
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Sometimes it takes a war to make people pay attention
