Ten-Year Anniversary Testimonials

OW2 hits 10 years! A young age in the real world but an age of maturity in the IT world and an eternity in the digital world. In a fast-changing world, with its hopes and challenges, this is the occasion to extend our thanks to OW2 for the help it gives the public sector, notably the City of Paris, in placing open source centre stage in digital strategies for enhanced sharing and transparency.

"10 ans pour OW2, l'âge de la jeunesse dans le monde réel, l'âge de la maturité en informatique, une éternité dans le monde numérique. Dans un monde qui change, avec ses espoirs et ses menaces, merci au consortium OW2 d'aider les acteurs publics, notamment la Ville de paris à mettre l'open source au cœur des stratégies numériques, pour plus de partage et de transparence."

Congratulations, and thank you, to OW2 for their ten years of success as a champion of open source in Europe, promoting software freedom among developers, businesses, education and government. While OW2's tremendous achievements over the past ten years are reason enough to celebrate, it is their future, and the opportunities ahead, that should spark the greatest excitement across the open source software community.

Arguably, even more important today than when the open source movement first emerged — as interest grows, projects expand, and implementations spread across industries — is OW2's comprehensive work to cultivate and educate those organizations just realizing the value of open source projects, and promote an open ethos within the communities of practice that support them.

If indeed, as many now say, "open source has won" then we all should thank OW2 for playing their part over the past 10 years as a visionary, innovator and leader. All the best for the next ten.

Congratulations to OW2 on their tenth anniversary! The Eclipse Foundation and OW2 have worked closely together for the past decade, and it has always been a pleasure. OW2 is a both a staunch representative of open source and software freedom in Europe, and a cordial and professional organization to work with. I look forward to the next ten years of collaboration.

Inria is delighted to see how OW2 has developed over the years. Back in 2002, Inria was one of the founders, with Bull and France Telecom, of the ObjectWeb consortium that preceded the launch of OW2 in 2007.OW2 provides a robust and active platform to leverage open source for collaboration and innovation. It helps structure and nurture communities around R&D projects by connecting research and industry to pave their way to success.Inria wishes OW2 a bright future, with the same energy and commitment in the pursuit of its mission.

When I started to work at OW2 from its foundation, I was expecting to find out from the inside how the open source community operates in a multivariate and international context, and to open to a wide network of contacts. This membership not only satisfied these expectations, but it also caused Engineering Group - the company I represent - to grow both in leadership and awareness inside the open source community. It helped to strengthen human and work ties between its members too.

Today, OW2 is a mature and lively community with a clear vision of the future, where its members daily design and implement activities that contribute to support and keep the spirit of the ground values of open-source alive. OW2 leads projects to become effective key players in the market, adopting an attitude of simplicity and effectiveness without presumption or arrogance. Plus, it is still a big community of friends. These two characteristics will assure it the role of key player for a long time.

As one of the co-founders of OW2, I am very proud to witness its 10 years of development. OW2 helps us increase our open source visibility and promote our projects. I believe OW2 contributes to a more brilliant future for us all.

So many memories and great people met at OW2!Thanks to all: founders and pioneers of ObjectWeb and OW2

Depuis nos premières collaborations avec OW2 jusqu'à ces dix années, il s'est passé beaucoup d'événements, de difficultés, de joies. Mais toujours la volonté de promouvoir le logiciel libre professionnel dans toutes ses composantes. Continuez ce travail indispensable!

OW2 is the best incarnation we have in Europe of independent non-profit organization focused on the business side of free, open source software for its members. Celebrating 10 years and still pushing for new challenges. Keep going for the next 10!

Congratulations for OW2 10 years history. We are witnesses of the effort and the success of the OW2's action. For a better world, we need more work from OW2 with free software.Free greetings,

OW2 was one of the first organizations to recognize the growing use of open source software by companies, and has done a great job of building a community that helps open source producers and consumers work together. Congratulations on 10 years of success, with best wishes for many more.

We were proud to have OW2 as one of the first partners in the OpenStack ecosystem. Cedric and his team's knowledge and support was extremely helpful from the very beginning. OW2 has become an important pillar for the open source community worldwide and I look forward to continue working with them for years to come.

OW2 provides open, reliable and European platform for numerous major open source projects. By enhancing their public image, their success is frequently accelerated, which is invaluable. So, congratulations to 10 years of OW2! Keep up and expand the good work! We very much look forward to future opportunities for cooperation.”

Ow2 made me think about opening my mind for open source and it provides many great possibilities to improve your skills.

Congratulations to OW2 on a decade of successfully walking the governance tightrope between software freedom and business effectiveness!

OW2 has played a key role over the past ten years in growing a professional, mature open source ecosystem around a broad range of open source software project. It provides infrastructure, technical and strategic advisory to a growing community of members that now spans several continents, and has been for quite a while a significant player in the selected world of open source foundations. I had the pleasure to work closely with OW2 while setting up and running the Free Software thematic group in the Paris area, that is also almost ten years old, and I particularly appreciated the great skills of the many individuals that make up OW2. A special thanks goes to Cedric Thomas, that has constantly put all his energies at the service of the community and helped OW2 thrive. Looking forward for more than ten more years of fantastic achievements: happy 10th anniversary, and long live OW2!

OW2 is unique therefore essential. My commitment to open source values comes from a time where few people really were doing business with it. How glad I was when I first came across OW2 and found a place where individuals, companies, researchers can work together to develop open source ecosystem !Over the past 10 years OW2 definitely helped shape the open source ecosystem. I believe it has the capability to embrace the upcoming transformations of the digital world and continue to transform it thanks to the values of open source. Congratulations on your 10th anniversary and long live OW2!

Free/Open Source Software is now used everywhere in business. But the culture of how to create freedom-respecting software products and non predatory business models around them has still a long way to go. In its first 10 years of existence, OW2 has gone a long way to create a community of actors that are competent on these topics and help each other succeed with Free Software. May OW2 keep up this good work for the next decade and beyond.

Happy ten years’ anniversary OW2! Thank you from us all to foster R&D in Europe the way you do and to promote Open Source adoption by the whole community! OW2’s open source collaborative innovation projects show how many successful results can be achieved working together with you, with such enthusiasm, guidance, expertise and passion. OW2 teamwork spirit, determination and engagement is such a lesson and example.

We met during the FP7 project OSSMETER (Automated Measurement and Analysis of Open Source Software) funded by European Commission for the improvement of the state-of-the-art in the field of automated analysis and measurement of open-source software back in 2012. And it is a great pleasure to me to keep working together since then in new collaboration projects to help the European open source community. Congratulations OW2 team, big big ones.

For 10 years OW2 has done a great job as a truly independent home for many interesting FLOSS projects. Today it is more important than ever before to have alternative hosts for free software outside the US and without the strong domination of the IT industry big players.

Congratulation to OW2 and Cedric for this 10-year anniversary. It’s nice and a great pleasure to work with Cedric at the Systematic Open Source steering board and to be able to share with him his vision of open source. I wish OW2 all the best for the future.

OW2 is a great example for open source makers: initiative, project incubation, project maturity, management of community aspects. I appreciate the OW2 community for its friendly approach in bringing together developers, academic and industry partners to define state-of-the-art open source projects. Happy anniversary OW2!

What a great adventure for early ObjectWeb developers like me! What? 10 years old? OW2 is bigger than that, because it did not start from scratch! ObjectWeb and then OW2 have been hosting so many of my lines of codes throuhout so many technological innovations: mobile agents, component-oriented programming, autonomic computing, and now... cloud computing. OW2's infrastructure is also following similar evolutions: web 2.0, videos, wikis, CVS to SVN and then Git...I'm really grateful to the whole OW2 management team, providing a very efficient infrastructure day by day, pushing and pulling developers to stop coding for a little while and to present their software, and proactively holding OW2's communication strategy, with an absolutely friendly state of mind. Thank you, and let's go on!!!

As a discreet observer and contributor to the Free software and Open Source community, I watched OW2 grow over the years. It's not as loud as other communities, but it has proven to be a very effective and productive one filled with great and strong projects. Everyone of them meets high standards of quality. It is not another one-upmanship forge hosting nearly anything, but carefully chosen enterprise software with added value. Furthermore, OW2 is not only about projects. Beside the OW2con conference there's a living community prone to work closely, harmoniously and openly with others, always in a positive and enthusiastic mind. For example, it supported me a lot while I was President of the 2014 edition of the Open World Forum, which was far from a sinecure.Live long and prosper OW2. I'm sure you'll still be there in another 10 years !

Congratulations and thank you for championing open-source in Europe! We have been following OW2 progress since 2010, when we were taken by its community and the passion of the individuals participating in it. One of its main achievements has been to position open source as a meeting point between users and innovators, both from industry and academia, where they can freely share resources and knowledge.

OW2, one of the top independent Open Source organisations worldwide, represents freedom for the software designer and global visibility for the project leader. Wow, so its 10 years already, it seems more like 20. Workshops, exhibitions, presentations, people, places, ideas, and not to forget the beer. So many great memories of all we have been through together. So many ideas for what we can do next. Keep it happening, please, for all of us.

LemonLDAP::NG has been in the OW2 ecosystem for several years now. It all began with a research project called FederID, which delivered a first bundle of free software tools for Identity Federation. Since then, OW2 has always been here to help the LemonLDAP::NG community to grow. We are keen to leverage opportunities such as conferences, awards and other communication activities and resources offered by OW2. Today I am pleased to be able to say thank you OW2 by working closely with the Management Office to integrate LemonLDAP::NG in the technical infrastructure so as to provide SSO for all OW2 users!

First let me pay tribute to each of the many people - and the list is long - who participated in the OW2 adventure. What they achieved is more than just the addition of a bunch of software but an assembly of men and women from various origins and with heterogeneous cultures. Altogether took the challenge of raising a world of freedom and openness sustained by collective intelligence and shared technologies. Let us hope the next decade will be as exciting as this one was rewarding.

Une dizaine d’années, des douzaines de souvenirs et des centaines de camarades Permettez moi de rendre hommage à chacune des nombreuses personnes (et la liste est longue) qui a participé à l’aventure OW2. Ce qu'ils ont réalisé, c'est plus que l'ajout d'un tas de logiciels, mais une assemblée d'hommes et de femmes de diverses origines et avec des cultures hétérogènes. Ensemble ils ont relevé le défi d'ériger un monde de liberté et d'ouverture soutenu par l'intelligence collective et les technologies partagées. Souhaitons que la prochaine décennie sera aussi passionnante que celle-ci fut enrichissante.

We've been working with open source software since 1997 at first as users and later on as a consulting business. From the beginning we were looking for a gathering place of people that take this not just as developers but also with an industry perspective. After we found OW2 we were enriched with many good ideas and shared experiences that took us into interesting new directions regarding business models and products. Cedric Thomas has been really helpful with his accumulated business expertise and his vision of the open source market and its future evolution.

OW2 is central to a unique European ecosystem of open source people and organizations cooperating in sharing technology and best practices. Microsoft always welcomes cooperation opportunities with OW2 members, for example events, communication initiatives and cloud computing. I will always remember an unexpected session at OW2con'14, with a majority of Microsoft attendees listening to Roberto Di Cosmo! Congratulations OW2 on your tenth anniversary and lets do this again in ten years!!

OW2 brings together serious researchers, developers, academic and industrial partners in advanced, state-of-the-art open source projects. I have worked in an OW2 project in the past and sincerely hope to have an opportunity to do this again in the future!

Congratulations to OW2! In a world where open source, middleware and infrastructure software are everywhere, OW2 does the best for every player in this game. Making it possible to publish projects on its marketplace, OW2 gives opportunity to the best open source software, best developers and best ideas to participate in a competitive market where innovation is the name of the game.

We started with OW2 in 2009 and our motivation was innovation. We found that OW2 helps open source entrepreneurs to achieve innovation to improve their solution for a best offer to the market. If you think of innovation, open source, middleware and infrastructure software, you should take a look at OW2.

As OW2 gave us a good example on open source world, I wish OW2 will take on these IoT and AI waves that will transform our lives. May The Force Be With You OW2!

I was appointed as OW2 CTO while I was team leader at Orange. OW2 has brought me the great experience of working within the Management Office team, the rich and varied daily work of the small team which makes OW2 happen "behind the scene" (people don't always realize what makes OW2 happen), many rich interactions with the OW2 community and the open source community in general, and trips throughout Europe, and to China and the USA.

The OW2 community is a friendly one, like a large family, made of heterogeneous people who enjoy working together, sharing common interests in Open Source software. It is thanks to OW2 that I have found my current position with UShareSoft, an OW2 corporate member. An anecdote: I once ran the OW2 booth at OSCON in Portland. As I was on my own I was very pleased to be helped by someone I had never seen before setup the OW2 booth, just because they knew about OW2, and many other people came to the booth to have their picture taken, knowing about the OW2 OSCON booth picture ritual.

A wish: I wish OW2 a long lasting future, regular new members and projects. A dream: We've always wanted to have Himalaya, a construction made of all OW2 projects integrated with each other. It's a never-ending process, let's hope that we can bring more synergies between projects in the OW2 code base.

I joined OW2 with the SpagoBI Project. I'm happy and proud to have made my first steps in the open source domain with OW2. We have gone through a long and stimulating road, meeting a lot of curious fascinating and professional people, and building true friendships. I will never forget all the open source conferences where we were close one to each other (OW2 Conference, Solution Linux, Paris Capitale du Libre, Open World Forum) and especially the happy moments and the awards, like the Innovation Award 2011 won together in the OWF Demo Cup. Et, pour moi, c'était l'occasion aussi de pratiquer à nouveau le français à l'oral. JOYEUX ANNIVERSAIRE, OW2! The pioneer's time is over. Sometimes, we are looking back with a bit of "nostalgie", but the future is bright. And only people who have the courage to change can push innovation forward. I look forward to meeting all OW2 friends in Paris for the OW2 Annual Conference where we will introduce you to Knowage, the evolution of SpagoBI. Tout évolue, tout se renouvelle pour le succès d'OW2 !!

10 years and so much accomplished by OW2! The spectacular success of open source software owes a lot to communities such as OW2. Adopted by major players, open source has and continues to foster the success of countless smaller ones. As a tireless observer of the IT industry, I remember the early days of open source communities back in the early nineties and the excitement of some consultants – specially one Cedric Thomas! – at my company PAC. I confess I was quite sceptical, but they were proved right!

Happy anniversary OW2, and see you in an ever more open world in 2027!

OW2 is at the forefront of open source strategic thinking. OW2 is one of few foundations to have taken into account the innovation dimension in the management of open source projects and to have weaved strong links with the research community in Europe and particularly in France. OW2 understands that incubating an open source community around collaborative R&D projects had to be done right from the beginning of the development activity and starting with the project partners. OW2 built a real value proposal here.I personally discovered OW2's commitment in terms of delivery deadlines and quality in fostering a community project while contributing to the OW2 Open Source Cloudware initiative.

OW2 est à la pointe de la réflexion stratégique sur l'open source. OW2 est une rare fondations à avoir pris en compte la dimension innovation dans la gestion des projets open source et à avoir tissé des liens forts avec la comunauté de la recherche, en Europe et tout particulièrement en France.OW2 a compris que l'incubation d'une communauté open source autour de projets collaboratifs de R&D devait se faire dès le démarrage des développements et en premier lieu avec les partenaires du projet. OW2 a bâti ici une réelle proposition de valeur.J'ai personnellement découvert ce que revêt l'engagement d'OW2, tant en terme de qualité que du respect des délais, à développer un projet communautaire en contribuant à l'Open Source Cloudware Initiative d'OW2.

OW2 is a flagship international open source organisation. Contributing to OW2 is always a driver for sharing and progress for the City of Paris. This enables us to generate synergies between open source projects and stakeholders (innovative companies, public sector, open source software vendors, etc.). Two City of Paris Deputy Mayors, Jean-Louis Missika and Emmanuel Grégoire, are notably committed to OW2, as they are to the Paris Open Source Summit.

"OW2 est une instance internationale de référence au sein de l'opensource. Y contribuer est toujours un levier de partage et de progrès pour la Ville de Paris. Cela permet notamment de créer des synergies entre les acteurs et les projets de l'opensource (entreprises innovantes, acteurs du secteur public, éditeurs opensource,...). Deux maires adjoints de la Ville de Paris, Jean-Louis Missika et Emmanuel Grégoire, sont particulièrement investis dans OW2, comme dans le Paris Open Source Summit."

I discovered OW2 through the FP7 project named RISCOSS for which I acted as project coordinator. I was recommended to invite OW2 for providing insights on the topic of the project, for contributing with a pilot case for the project and to take care of dissemination issues. OW2 brought all this value to the RISCOSS project.

The OW2 vibrant community (as I perceived it when attending OW2con during these years) was a crucial asset in the success of the project, allowing to inject the risk framework created in RISCOSS into the SQuAT quality framework. All of this with the right balance of rigour and passion! Looking forward to share new experiences with the community.

OW2 allowed us to integrate an ecosystem of incredible richness and offered unexpected visibility for a small team like Joram. I have discovered free software thanks to OW2 predecessor, ObjectWeb, Joram was one of its first projects with a public release as early as May 2000. I hope the next 10 years will see the emergence of many more innovative projects.

OW2 and ADULLACT share a long history based on the values of free software. We are happy to be cooperating with OW2 on an innovative approach to rating open source software. Based on the RISCOSS project, we look forward to integrating it into the ADULLACT Comptoir du Libre marketplace for local government software.

But ADULLACT and OW2 are also about people. I have known Cédric Thomas (CEO OW2) for many years now and remember working with him on developing open source start-up Linbox. Every day sees a new page of history!

As a person deeply interested in free / open source software (FOSS) I have been following the progress of OW2 since its inception. I have learned a lot from them about how to manage a community of companies interested in FOSS, and about how they create technology together using FOSS as a common platform.

C'était au siècle dernier, l'open-source sortait de la préhistoire : les futurs fondateurs d'une organisation nommée "ObjectWeb" me proposent de les rejoindre, avec du code libre que je diffusais sur un vieux serveur moribond. J'aurai donc la joie de vivre de l'intérieur l'avènement du consortium : mise en place de la gouvernance, entrée de nouveaux membres et projets, naissance d'OW2, ponctuées de voyages épiques et discussions parfois houleuses, auront marqué mes 10 ans de mandat au board. Et si j'ai depuis passé la main, c'est toujours avec intérêt et émotion que je regarde évoluer ce "petit" projet devenu grand !