Nithya Ruff’s Post

Open source isn't just a cultural preference; it's a strategic business imperative! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked, "Why should we contribute to open source if we can use the code for free?". It’s a question that has been debated in boardrooms for decades. I was intrigued by the latest report by the Linux Foundation on the ROI for Open Source Software Contribution, and the data finally provides the evidence we've needed to move beyond "gut feelings" about open source strategy. Here is what I gathered: > Organizations that contribute back to open source see a 2x to 5x return on investment compared to those that don't. > Companies that rely on private forks or internal workarounds face hidden costs reaching up to $3.5 million in technical debt and extra labor. > The study found that code contributions specifically deliver a 3.6x return, while community engagement provides a 3.2x return. I attended an interesting presentation by Frank Nagle at the Open Source Summit where he announced that organizations will be finally "armed with calculators and data" to explain the value and health score of open source repositories. #LinuxFoundation #OpenSource #OSS https://lnkd.in/gavW-WRZ

Thank you again OpenForum Europe for hosting an excellent EU Open Source Policy Summit and for inviting me to represent the Digital Public Goods Alliance. I fully stand by my remarks in the video that digital sovereignty and open source are absolutely not a dichotomy - indeed, they go hand in hand and are intrinsically linked. And if Europe chooses to take an open source approach to building and evolving its digital foundations, this will also show normative leadership 🌟 💪 and directly benefit other regions 🌍

Open source gives a true way to ownership of code and data. In Ecommerce, SaaS leaves merchants not owning their data and code and at the mercy of the platform - the ruse being a very excellent uptime and simpler interface. luroConnect is committed to help merchants on Magento and other open source Ecommerce, a taste of true ownership without the pain!

Open source generates $8.8 trillion in value each year. Estimates suggest that 96% of commercial codebases contain open source components and the vast majority of organizations plan to maintain or increase their open source adoption. Open source has become the invisible infrastructure that powers the global digital economy and freedom for more people to access high quality software code. It is the backbone of the internet, yet remains under valued and misunderstood. However without coordinated protection, the resource depletes. Today, we're releasing a white paper developed with support from the Open Source Initiative (OSI). This paper makes the case for treating open source as the public good it is. We set out what a public policy response could look like, and set out how we think open source can be protected as the critical infrastructure that it is. If you're a policymaker, regulator, developer, or advocate with a stake in the future of open source, reach out at opensource@block.xyz. Open source is a civic resource and a public good. Let's make sure it's treated like one. Read the full paper: https://lnkd.in/eVguS4Ai

The DNA of Open Source at Amazon Last week I shared thoughts on what success looks like for open source in a company—it's when open source becomes part of the organizational DNA, not just a special team's responsibility. This week, as I transition out of Amazon, I want to acknowledge the open source DNA that remains strong across the company. While the core OSPO team that built compliance frameworks and operationalized open source practices has largely moved on, the foundation we built continues to remind the company of its deep entanglement with and dependence on open source. The ecosystem that remains is strong: The Open Source Strategy and Marketing team continues as an active part of AWS and remains an excellent resource for events, community engagement, and communications. Leaders like Stormy Peters, Libby Clark, and Tom Callaway bring deep community expertise and are fantastic partners for open source work. Our legal team includes some of the best IP and open source attorneys in the industry. Dave Platz and Lauren Hockett provide practical, business-minded legal counsel that helps teams navigate open source complexities with confidence. In Public Policy, advocates like Alla Goldman Seiffert and Hila Hanif understand open source deeply and work to ensure sensible policy development that supports both innovation and the open source ecosystem. But the real work happens in the engineering teams across the company. Individual engineers quietly contribute to the projects they depend on. Teams like Joseph Conway's PostgreSQL team contribute substantially to upstream projects. Our security teams have developed sophisticated understanding of open source supply chain risks. Infrastructure and tooling teams have embedded compliance into build pipelines. This distributed model is both our strength and our challenge. I take comfort knowing that open source knowledge and practices are distributed across Amazon rather than locked in a single team. This is the legacy of the Amazon OSPO—we embedded open source into how the company operates. What does concern me is losing the dedicated team that spent 100% of their time staying ahead of evolving practices, emerging risks, and regulatory changes. Functional and engineering teams rightly spend only a fraction of their time on open source. They can't always be deep experts, look around corners, or anticipate what's coming next in community expectations or regulatory requirements. What I hope for: I'd like to see open source voices represented when we write PRFAQs or OP1 plans for services heavily dependent on open source. We need leaders at every level who understand that open source isn't just about license compliance—it's about community relationships, ecosystem health, supply chain security, and strategic positioning. We have some of this leadership. We need more. To everyone still doing this work at Amazon: thank you. The foundation is solid. The DNA is there. Keep building on it. Thank you!

It’s been three weeks since the EU Open Source Policy Summit brought together policymakers, open source industry leaders, major IT users, and public administrations to explore how open technologies can strengthen Europe’s competitiveness and digital sovereignty. To relive a day full of important dialogue and collaboration, we’ve created an aftermovie that captures the energy of the Summit. It highlights the full day and features: 🔹Aura Salla (Member of the European Parliament (EPP)) 🔹Thibaut Kleiner (Director, DG Connect, European Commission) 🔹Liv Marte Nordhaug, (Secretariat CEO, Digital Public Goods Alliance) 🔹Sachiko Muto (Chair, OpenForum Europe) The Summit brought together over 40 speakers across 18 sessions and welcomed our largest audience to date, including policymakers, open source businesses, advocates, and academics, both online and in person. This strong engagement highlights the growing importance of high-level policy dialogue on open source’s role in shaping Europe’s digital future. With open source at the heart of the EU’s digital ambitions, the 2026 edition focused on governance frameworks to fully unlock its value across the continent and explored practical steps policymakers can take to accelerate open source adoption at scale. The EU Open Source Policy Summit 2026 was sponsored by Gold Eclipse Foundation, GitHub, Linux Foundation Europe, Red Hat, SUSE Silver IBM, Open-Xchange Bronze APELL, Collabora, Drupal Association, Element - creators of Matrix, Linux Professional Institute (LPI), Heinlein Group, TYPO3, Nordic Institute for Interoperability Solutions (NIIS) Production partner BigBlueButton Cocktail Sponsor Nextcloud Coffee break sponsor European Open Source Consortium Networking partner think modular GmbH

A great summary of why the recent EU Open Source Policy Summit hosted by OpenForum Europe (OFE) was timely. We are at a critical time for European technology infrastructure, with real concerns about sustainability, security and independence. An open dialogue, a focus on open innovation, and a commitment to collaborate are key to ensuring progress. With the leadership provided by Executive Director Laszlo Igneczi and Chair Sachiko Muto, OFE is in an excellent position to make a positive contribution.

You're not saving money by not contributing to open source. You're deferring the cost. Most engineering teams treat open source as infrastructure. Pull it in, ship your product, repeat. The contribution conversation gets tabled for later. Later never comes. The Linux Foundation released research that puts a dollar figure on exactly what that costs. Over 500 IT leaders surveyed. The findings are direct. Organizations actively contributing to open source are generating 2 to 5x ROI. Code contribution returns 3.6x. Community contribution returns 3.2x. Financial contribution returns 2.4x. Foundation membership alone delivers 4.8x. These are not projected figures. These are reported outcomes across hundreds of organizations. Now the other side of that equation. Teams that fork privately and build internal workarounds instead of contributing upstream are spending an average of 5,160 labor hours per release cycle to maintain that divergence. That is $258,000 per cycle to manage debt you introduced yourself. On top of that, internal workarounds for missing features are costing organizations $670,000 annually on average. For functionality that upstream communities would have built regardless. Beyond the financials, 68% of contributing organizations say open source involvement directly improves hiring and retention. 84% successfully influence project roadmaps. 66% receive faster maintainer responses on security vulnerabilities. That last point matters more than people realize. You are not getting faster bug fixes. You are getting prioritized attention on your security surface because you are a known participant in the ecosystem, not an anonymous consumer of it Passive consumption has always felt like the pragmatic choice. The data shows it is actually the expensive one. Worth reading :) https://lnkd.in/edyyGY54 Kudos to Sam Boysel & Adrienn Lawson for the detailed report :)

🛒 [Procurement will shape the Future of Open Source from Europe] I returned from a tremendous European Open Source Week in Paris and Brussels. My key takeaway: 🌟 Open Source is Europe’s guiding North Star for our digital future 🧭 Strategic procurement will be its compass I engaged with European Commission leaders (Thibaut Kleiner, Monika Sowinska), foundation heads (Roberto Di Cosmo), visionary CEOs (Yann Lechelle), and hundreds of Free and Open Source Software Fellows. Policymakers, Open Source Foundations, OSPOs, vendors, service providers, committers, maintainers, and developers—all aligned on delivering Digital Public Goods accessible to everyone, everywhere for ever. Kudos to United Nations (Omar Mohsine) for the UN Open Source Principles: RTE Réseau de Transport d'Electricité proudly endorsed them in March 2025. What about you? 🇪🇺 Two Strategic Pillars for Europe: 1. Public & Private Procurement as the investment vehicle 2. Production-Ready Open Source Catalogue – mapping existing (and emerging) commercial and production grade digital assets (see the attached draft matrix to identify the potential for common and coordinated EU investments). This approach will spawn European Open Source Champions, offering robust SLAs to replace proprietary vendor lock-in. Without inventory and coordination, there is no demand—and thus no supply. Let’s launch a virtuous cycle for reinvesting European funds into research, development, innovation, and cutting-edge production-grade open source, open data, open research, open AI, ... open digital services. Digital Service Providers—alongside internal teams—would contribute back Upstream in respect of FOSS values: • Financial support to FOSS communities • Code of conduct compliance • Anti-trust & copyleft respect • Standards implementation • Comprehensive documentation  • Healthy technical debt management  • ... 🛟 Should challenges arise? Forking remains a FOSS safeguard. Also, our future European champions on Open Source could face a global demand from every continents 🤗. 🇪🇺 Result: True product and vendor freedom choice for clients through interoperability, transparency, traceability, and durability. Some, call this Digital Sovereignty, we call it aDRI / IRN – A Digital Resilience Initiative. The replay of our tremendous panel session Claire Pershan, Christopher Brewster, Tobias Augspurger ᴾʰᴰ and me is already online: https://lnkd.in/edtZrbbn FOSDEM team: this event is the most beautiful existing in the entire world 🙏🏻 Université libre de Bruxelles 🙏🏻

The world runs on open source software. It provides the foundation we all depend on. From Linux to Kubernetes, it underpins a huge proportion of modern government services. The question is whether government should actively favour organisations that invest in and sustain those projects, rather than companies that simply consume the code and commercialise it without contributing back? Across government, there are countless proprietary implementations of Kubernetes. We suffer from platform sprawl. Significant public money is spent on platforms built on open source, yet very little of that investment flows upstream to support the security, resilience, and long term sustainability of the projects themselves. Enterprise open source offers a better model. It aligns commercial value with upstream contribution, security hardening, operational stability, and long-term stewardship. When government buys enterprise open source it isn’t just buying software. It is investing in the health of the infrastructure we all depend on. There is also a strategic dimension aligned with digital sovereignty. When critical platforms are built on open technologies, shaped and governed through trusted partnerships, government retains influence over standards, security, and roadmap. When they are not, that control is outsourced. Favouring enterprise open source is a practical, strategic choice about resilience, security, and long term national capability. Surely it's a no brainer?