September 2024 Newsletter

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[OW2 Newsletter - September 2024 - From the OW2 Management Office]

Dear OW2 Members, dear All,

Welcome back, after a well deserved summer holiday!

Looking back at the last 9 months, we can be proud of our achievements: OW2Con was an unprecedented success and all videos are now published, our new AlpOSS event in Grenoble is so promising that we will renew it in 2025 in partnership with our member Linphone and the City Hall of Echirolles hosting it, and our Open Source Webinar series is on track, with the next one on September 26 - featuring the PrestaShop e-commerce platform and OW2 member, and ALLMA, a NGI funded project by Murena to support AI LLMs on /e/OS.

Talking about NGI, the EC funding scheme that helped so many projects in the last 5 years, news are more contrasted: the NGI0 Commons Fund we participate in is up and running until 2026, so you may apply for funding with any open source technology or digital common that could make the internet more friendly, private, sovereign and secure - more human.

But NGI is also threatened to see its budget cut: it is already for 2025, despite more than 1.000 projects funded in the last 5 years. The list includes Mastodon, Jitsi, BBB, NextCloud, LibreOffice, Wordpress, Blender, CryptPad, /e/OS, Tor, WireGuard, F-Droid, and commons like Open Street Map, Open Food Facts, the Wikimedia Foundation or Software Heritage - plus many businesses or academics that provide open source solutions, making NGI the most efficient EU Horizon funding ever in terms of impact and exploitation!

Reasons are unclear : more "strategic" funding is supposedly priviledged - understand "AI" - but the answer can't satisfy anyone, given the small budget of NGI: around 20 MEUR/year as a whole, the cost of one single Horizon project in recent AI calls!

Of course, we and the community at large are struggling to bring NGI back: the first step was communication and protest, with some success, including the Open Letter initiated by the Belgian "Petites Singularités" association, translated in English by OW2 then signed by around 200 organizations including famous ones like the German Chaos Computer Club or French Framasoft association.
There was also an important press coverage: you may check my own interview in TheRegister, a German press article from FSFE in Netzpolitik, or a French + English position from CNLL, the French chapter of APELL FOSS businesses union - among other many examples.

So: it is time to defend NGI at all levels, and anyone can take part of it, by signing the Open Letter, contacting MEPs, publishing a statement or press release, posting on social networks to make the information as public as possible.

Sure OW2 will be part of it, also to find alternatives - private or public - to fund FOSS projects: our resilience, sovereignty, and civil rights depend on open source, and this has to be repeated tirelessly!

Thanking you so much for your ongoing support,

The OW2 Management Office

PS: Project leaders: Please use your project dashboard to publish your updates. Your news will appear on our Project Marketplace home page and in this newsletter.

Project News

Project Updates

BlueMind v5 technical details are summarized in a recent article in Linux.fr. The free software suite (AGPL v3) for enterprise messaging, calendaring and collaborative working offers significant gains in resource consumption, especially RAM.
LemonLDAP::NG is "one of the most flexible and powerful open source single sign-on (SSO), federated authentication and identity-based access control solution", according to this Brasilian article in Inova Techy.
Rocket.Chat version 6.11.0 brings an exciting new feature: video conference persistent chat. This feature is currently supported by the Pexip application.
XWiki recent releases (16.6.0 and 16.7.0) brings UI improvements, important bugs fixes and official Jetty 12 support for XWiki standalone distribution.
LemonLDAP::NG published version 2.19.2 with some security issues and bugs fixes.
DeviceFarmer STF, the web application for remotely debugging smartphones, watches and IoT devices through a simple web browser, has released version 3.7.0 with some bug fixes and dependencies updates.
CryptPad latest version is fixing issues related to calendar events display, OnlyOffice documents not openning and code/markdown documents printing. Also if you want to learn more about the future of CryptPad checkout this video of Fabrice Mouhartem presentation at Pass the SALT conference.
PrestaShop Autoupgrade module is now available in version 6.0.0. This version brings a number of improvements to streamline PrestaShop updates.
OCS Inventory Server has a new minor release that fix several issues (including security) and brings also some improvements. Take a look at the release notes to get the details.
Jeka the Java build tool (and actually much more!) is under active development to get the future 0.11.0 version out (beta 7 is available). If your are looking for an alternative to Maven and Gradle or just curious about the key features of Jeka checkout jeka.dev.
Waarp Gateway version 0.9.0 is the first major version released in 1 year. This version brings significant new features such as support for FTP and FTPS protocols, authentication configuration uniformization, some preparation work for cloud storage and more!

Project of the month

Mercator is September 2024 OW2 Project of the month. As a new comer within OW2, Mercator is used by many hospital centers and seen as a promising project. The project won the OW2con'24 Community Award. More.

Community News

Open Source by OW2 Webinar Series, September 26, 16:00 CEST

This second episode will showcase Prestashop eCommerce software platform and the ALLMA project integrating a selection of LLMs to /e/OS, the privacy-by-design fork of Android. Details and free registration online. More.

SFScon, November 8-9, Bolzano

OW2 is Partner of SFSCON 2024. The RIOS (Rete Italiana Open Source) OW2 Associate organization will be on-site and represent both OW2 and the OSPO Alliance. More.

Open Source Experience, December 4-5, Paris

We still have some available room on the OW2 Community booth with a great location (#C20) and an attracting cost for members. Contact us quickly to reserve your pod. More.

Feedback on past OSPO OnRamp webinars

If you want to learn more about the OW2 MRL (Market Readiness Levels) methodology, watch out the replay of April 2024 webinar: How to select the right open source solution? Get inspired by OW2 MRL! More.

Great OSPO experience testimony from the Italian Public Sector with PagoPA e-Gov platform: watch the replay of the June 2024 OSPO OnRamp webinar by Leonardo Favario, Head of Open Source Program Office at PagoPA. More.

Job Corner

We are glad to share with you several dozens of jobs offered by OW2 members at alter way, CEA List, INRIA, FactorFX, Linagora, OpenStudio, Orange, Prestashop, Worteks, XWiki, BlueMind and Engineering Group (jobs mostly located in Italy).

In the OW2 Ecosystem

The "Acteurs Du Libre" contest 2024 is open (deadline Sept. 30). Proposed by the French CNLL, this contest aims at awarding open source successful stories. Prices will be given during Open Source Experience. More.

In the framework of the conference "Numériques en communs" organized Sept. 25-26 in Chambery, an "off-conference" on Sept. 24 will focus on open source in the ecosystem of "La suite numérique". More.

The Mindtrek conference supported by OW2 Associate Organization COSS will take place in Finland on October 8 with a track on the future of open source business. More.

Several OW2 members will be speaker at the Forum Cloud Security, October 9-10 in Paris, including Clément Oudot, Worteks/LemonLDAP::NG, and Michel-Marie Maudet, Linagora/OpenLLM. More.

Feedback from the OSPOs for Good 2024 conference, July 9-10, New-York: Read the opensource.net follow-up article or Stéfane Fermigier blog post. More.

In our Research and Funding Projects

Fuel your open source software project thanks to the new NGI Zero Commons Fund. Apply to the current open call, by October 1st. See the French video. More.

The 5th Open Call ended last July. Beneficiary innovations will be revealed soon. More.

The beta-testing platform remains open to OW2 members, research projects and SMEs wishing to collect feedback for their latest beta release or use cases. More.

Outlook

We are happy to announce that AlpOSS will come back in 2025 ! More details will come soon, stay tuned!

Disclaimer: The OW2 newsletter is intended for general informational purposes only. The contents may not be comprehensive or up-to-date. OW2 makes no representation and gives no warranty as to the accuracy of the information in this document and accepts no liability for any errors, misprints or omission herein (whether negligent or otherwise).

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