Nov 6, 2025

This edition definitely achieved to convince me and my team of VPs of one thing : the Open World Forum is unique and amazing. Our “Take Back Control” motto established an obvious link between the various topics, whether it’s Big Data, Open Data, Embedded, Internet of Things, Cloud computing, DevOps, Privacy, Security or all others. We proved that Free and Open Source software is leading innovation in nearly all the themes we developed. Targeting both enterprises and the civil society.

Even if we are expecting your feedback, it seems that the overall opinion was pretty positive. Every year is better than the previous one and apparently, the conferences quality raised up again this year. If I had to speak about my own experience, I would mention the following moments:

• Experimenting myself how to recover different kinds of data such as air and sea traffic or weather forecasts during an intense Internet of Things session
• Discovering concrete example showing that Open Source technologies have now as good results as proprietary ones in the Security track, a lot about Sec Dev.
• Finding out with all of the Privacy participants, that our open source solutions were way past the prototype phases, ready to be used!
• Being a part of the awareness raise amongst the students and youngster population
• Discussing Star Wars with the InMove robot and dancing with Poppy, almost as I’ve met C3PO twins !

One year of hard work, but I've been rewarded a thousand times : I have learned a lot, I have met very interesting people and above all I have been enjoying myself and I hope you share the same feelings :-)

Thanks to all of you, Florent ZARA, Open World Forum 2014 President

Oct 31, 2025

The Student Demo Cup, which has be held on October 30th during the Open World Forum, has awarded some student projects :

THINK category Martin GUBRL, for the project Measure Net Neutrality

CODE category Julien MOREAU-MATHIS, for the project Community Play 3D

EXPERIMENT category Simon BELBEOCH, for the project Intuitive Communication

Then, Julien MOREAU-MATHIS received the Public Prize for his projet Community Play 3D !

Congratulations !

Thanks to all our partners : Alter Way, Association Pascaline, Inno3, La Fonderie and Mozilla.

Oct 15, 2025

Interview: Gaël Blondelle, Embedded track leader

Can you describe to us in few words your track?

The Embedded Track is about initiatives to use Open Source in industries that create Embedded Systems like Automotive, Railway, Energy, Aerospace or Telecommunications. Even if Open Source has been well adopted for Operating Systems and a lot of IT domains for years, the adoption in Embedded Systems is still new. Initiatives like Genivi, PolarSys or the use of Embedded Linux are game changers as they set a common field for open source tools or middleware and enable users to « Take Back Control ».

What are the uses that you identify today and in the future?

Today, almost every tool or middleware exists or will soon exist in open source. In new domains like Internet of Things or Big Data, technology platform are directly created in open source. I would say that the present is already about Open Innovation enabled by Open Source platforms. In Embedded Systems, the futur is certainly with Open Hardware as promoted with the Babylonware project that aims at collaborating on open hardware designs for common parts of critical embedded systems. Examples include the controllers to connect to standard communication buses in cars or aircrafts. Another important part of such initiatives is at the core of « Take Back Control » when large companies use Open Source as a mean to adapt the tools to their processes instead of creating processes that work with the existing tools. Also, it proves to be the only model that guarantees the capability to support tools as long as they are needed when you create embedded systems that lasts for 40 years.

Does it remains technological challenges to overcome?

I was recently attending a meeting where people claimed that with new (open source) tools, they were able to gain 30% in productivity with better predictability and better quality. So definitely, there are new challenges but again, it is interesting to see that some new innovative approaches are directly created as Open Source platforms, even in the domain of Embedded Systems. Think about technologies that appear at Eclipse to develop or debug for multi-core technologies. Another challenge for open source is that some people still think that it is not possible to use Open Source in certified environments because you need to freeze the tools whereas in open source, you can always change the tools. Of course, you can answer that configuration management is also possible with Open Source, that you can « sign » a release to make sure you won’t modify the content, … But such questions are significative that we still have a lot of work to educate/evangelize the myths and reality about Open Source.

In which way the Open Source ecosystem is important in this subject?

First, the sustainability of Open Source solutions when you move from a proprietary model where you have to rely on a contractual relationship with a tools vendor to a model where you have to invest (either internally or externally) on skilled people. It is fundamental when you create systems that last for more 20 years. Sometimes,with no choices to easily patch the system (think about satellite for example). And a good open source ecosystem is the key to have access to more skilled people, to people who use the same best practices, to people who share a common culture both technical and in terms of practices. Second: Open Innovation. It is much easier for companies in Embedded Systems domains that use to use patents, NDA, … to collaborate on an open platform, including collaborating with academics that bring innovations in the platform. Of course, it starts on non core-business topics like development tools, … But as I said before, it will soon come to common hardware parts. Third, Interoperability. Embedded Systems developers have been used to have large migration projects from closed tools to other closed tools. Of course, Open Source does not remove the need to sometimes migrate to a new generation of tools or middleware But with open formats and open source to handle these formats, it is much easier to do such migrations.

Made by Laurent Séguin, French speaking Libre Software Users' Association President

Oct 6, 2025

Interview: Ori Pekelman, Big Data track leader

Big Data, what is it?

In a way, all data these days is big, or potentially big, simply because the standard technological stack (well, for those not stuck in the 90s) is starting to support this; You know, one of the rules of computing is that disk spaces occupation is always expressed in percentage never in absolute terms.. and that it is always above 90%.. even if your own data set is small.. when you want to apply Machine Learning techniques to it you often want to combine it with external data sources (you can extract median income from a zipcode.. which may give you more interesting models for example), basically : "hybrid data makes all data big"... If you'd like the canonical definition of big data stays the same (whatever dataish thing you can't do on your laptop..) only today a laptop can have 8 cores and 32GO and terabyte of SSD...

So with DataGeeks the informal bunch organizing the track with Olivier Grisel, Sam Bessalah and others, we are about data, not just the big kind.. its just that today everything is getting big; and from the multiple Vs that describe what big data is we are getting more and more interested in the Velocity V. We can do damn intelligent stuff with an enormous quantity of data, now we are learning how to do it in real time. A lot of the talks this year are going to be around that, how to mount large scale extremely nervous systems that are not only fast but that are also fault-tolerant allow fast iteration and produce real business value. Some of the stuff that we covered in earlier years as half-futuristic will this time be shown with hindsight as real use cases that were implemented successfully; We won't be even talking much about Hadoop.. subjects will center around streaming with talks about Kafka and Storm but as usual we will also have strong accent on the application of Machine Learning techniques at the scale and speed of these systems.

What are the uses today and in the future?

Again, we are beyond any specific use case. Anyone building a data system that can not scale (in time or in volume), is simply doing her job incorrectly. So for many it is going to be a big question of how do I transit my 90s era architecture to the current bare minimum. Not having a scalable infrastructure is going to put many companies at a serious competitive disadvantage. There will be those companies that are capable of doing dynamic real-time yield management and those whose prices will always be inadequate. There will be companies that apply machine learning algorithmes to supply chain management, and those that will simply get the products later. Some will be able to align their employee bonuses to the strategic goals of the company, some that will play it by the ear.

There is no specific domain.

Any technological challenges to overcome?

Of course, and many of the talks will focus on those. For example, Olivier Grisel will present a state of the art view on Machine Learning techniques... what can be used now, what is still science fiction.. we are far from resolving many of the algorithmic issues. But also operational and business ones.. I see companies building their "data lakes" to replace their datawarehouses... without really defining strategic goals, or trying to look how this plays over five years or a decade.

Working with streams vs working with batches is a change of paradigme, it changes how we do fault-tolerance, how we debug and identify the stuff that goes wrong how we recover from disasters... as always technological challenges are also cultural ones, even HR ones. I am note sure the same structure that applied to doing BI over legacy databases still applies to running a myriad of "small" algorithms in complex topologies. We are basically at the end of one cycle (putting in the infrastructure) and at the beginning of another... which is to make it productive.

As techno providers: "SMEs" and "big companies" what interactions? And as users?

As providers its quite ehtnousiasting, small companies can make huge projects in the big data world, because there is so much automation you don't need an army, you need extreme expertise.. and you can see the smarter "big companies" turning to the numerous big data startups for an edge. Still it is nice to see the bigger providers also develop a sens for the domain (even though often enough they push towards the "big big data solutions" instead of finding the smallest project that might possibly work and provide immediate business value... We must never forget that outside the traditional "enterprise" you have the tech giants that are an enormous source of innovation in the domain (be it Google, Amazon, Linked-In or IBM..).

Anyway, the balances has not yet tilted, and there is an enormous spaces to be occupied by SMEs and startups. We have not yet scratched the surface on what can be done in HR or Supply Chain Management, but also in marketing automation (and some of what we will be able to do soon enough is frankly frightening.. ). Let's not forget that the Big in Big Data is a close relative to the Big Brother one.

In which way the Open Source ecosystem is important for the Big Data?

Well, I can think of only a few solutions in the domain that don't have as a prefix "apache"; Big Data is very much an Open Source game, and I don't see any serious contenders from the proprietary world, anyway not on the infrastructure level. There will be providers in the "value added" chain, stuff around specific algorithmes (often coupled with proprietary data sources) and around "interconnects"; As always the "As A service" Crowd, which is becoming the more potent rival to Free software will be important (but most of them will run Open Source solutions in any case). Hey but nobody ever said there was no place for proprietary software. Well, as long as it stays the minority exception. There is a strong ethical reason we want to fight not only for open source but also for open data, because the advent of opaque systems with smart algorithms and an extreme amount of data on us (the proprietary data + as a service model) is not only going to be bad for our privacy, its going to have tangible effects on our livelihoods, on our place is society as it can introduce an extreme form of information asymmetry at a scale not seen before. It is possible that in this domain more then in others the actors of Free Software need to be more vigilant and by working with the other actors of freedom make sure we are not constructing the tools of our demise.

Made by Laurent Séguin, French speaking Libre Software Users' Association President

Sep 11, 2025

Open Law is a "legal co-creation program" organized by the OWF, DILA, Etalab and NUMA, launched Friday, October 31 at the OWF. It relies on Open Data datasets recently released in France and aims to stimulate and promote the reuse of legal data within a collaborative and open legal innovation that brings together the public and private sector.

The main objectives of this programme are:

• to think about the usages, practices and roles surrounding the law in our digital society;
• to increase the accessibility of newly released legal information Open Data datasets;
• to build a community of "law hackers";
• conduct experiments around the legal framework for this type of event.

It is intended to be fed for an entire year through a multitude of periodic events for deepening, prefigure and prototype individual projects.

Jul 11, 2025

« We need to be innovative in the area of innovation itself » 1

Open Innovation disrupts the traditional conception of innovation by establishing the idea of a social innovation where the aim is no longer to create first but to have better designs and more inventions with the help of others.

Transposed to technologic industry, this brand new paradigm makes the explosive growth of open source software possible by being its economic support. Formerly limited to a handful of developers, Open Source is nowaday a wide ecosystem in which big Companies, SMEs, searchers and entrepreneurs work together to create a faster, stronger, safer and more collaborative innovation.

While Open Source success stories are being revealed, in France and elsewhere, big players are adopting open, collective and collaborative innovation model. Moreover, the development of both vertical or horizontal partnerships helps create a virtuous collective dynamics for the profit of these common objectives, in the context of an ecosystem combining values from sharing & innovation.

Through the testimonials of various stakeholders, the track "Innovation and Open Source" will provide an overview of these new synergies & collaborations made possible by the Open Source, either through alliances between startups, large accounts and research centers. Their experiences will convince everyone of the benefits gained from the Open Source model as a driver of technological innovation.

1 Chesbrough H. W., Open innovation : the new imperative for creating and profiting from technology, Harvard Business School Press, cop. 2003

Jul 10, 2025

Date and duration: Friday 31 October 2014, 1/2 day

Session Organizer: Cedric Thomas, OW2

The Open World Forum Community Summit is an annual open workshop focusing on the growth and management of open source communities. This year, leaders and practitioners from free and open source software communities will discuss the evolution of the technical resources made available to open source projects.

Open source projects are collaborative by nature, they are always supported by some shared technical infrastructure. Open source developers now have free access to a number of online tools they could not have imagined years ago. GitHub, Bitbucket, SourceForge, ohloh, Cloudbees, etc. they all offer useful services to open source projects. While open source communities are not defined only by their technical infrastructures, the provision of tangible resources play a significant role in keeping them together.

Is the growing supply of free tools changing the role of open source communities and the way they operate? What evolution are we witnessing in our day-to-day operations? What is happening to the community as the place where a collective governance is implemented. Is it disappearing?
Are the community-less projects the future of open source collaboration? Now that development tools are freely available and in abundance, it may be that communities do not need to run technical infrastructures. If that is the case, what is the future of the 'infrastructure-less' community?

Who should attend:

• open source projects leaders and contributors
• open source business managers
• community members
• government policy makers
• strategic planning specialists
• students and developers

Come and share your opinion, your questions, your expectations and concerns in a lively, interactive session with practitioners of great open source communities including Apache Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, LibreOffice Foundation and OW2.

Jul 8, 2025

Open Source allows you to take back control

Open source licenses give you a lot of freedoms and powers, although they also come with some obligations. Still poorly understood or misunderstood, they are nevertheless essential to maintaining an open and collaborative system balanced. A constant outreach and popularization is necessary to ensure that the Open Source meets these promises to users while respecting the rights of contributors and editors.

This track considers various legal and licensing aspects of open source, both from a community and a corporate perspective. The track is a great opportunity for you to discuss legal and licensing aspects of open source with lawyers, decision makers, open source developers and other people who are interested in legal aspects of open source.
Come and discuss how open source licenses have helped you take back control and what legal issues you've encountered when adopting or contributing to open source.

This track will stand 31th of October. Possible topics include: Contribution policies, Contributor License Agreement (CLAs), Legal issues and the cloud, Open source and contracts, Open source and standards & Compliance processes.

Jun 12, 2025

THINK will be the occasion to understand how the innovation's and openness' combination could be as much as a solution to the issues from the past as the factor for success for the future stakes. Therefore, this model will be presented in its valuation side, from both private and public sector innovations. This following article is part of a bundle of short analyzes that will be published to illustrate the various topics discussed within THINK theme during the 2014 edition.

Open Access: for an Open and accessible to all Research ?

"Open Access is still the dream to pursue, [but] it must be accompanied by the necessary measures to avoid its current drifts" [1]

Completely free access to knowledge at early stage and unrestricted (re)use of research results : this is the ambition of « Open Access » advocates. Promoted as the necessary and evident consequence of Internet & our new information society, promoted by community initiatives, formalized by researchers during the Budapest Open Access Initiative, the concept had finally permeated policies, in particular at a European level. Taking widely over the content of the BOAI 10 and in accordance with objectives stated in the “Europe 2020” strategy, the European Commission insisted on its recommendations of July 17th 2012 on the necessity to make publicly founded research freely accessible, immediately or very shortly after it has been published.

There are several benefits: reduction of duplicated effort, limitation of the time spend on information research, facilitation of researchers cooperation, improvement of innovation quality, relevance, acceptance and durability... where the current system impedes research and innovation by limiting knowledge spreading.

Nevertheless, Open Access movement is challenged in many way and struggle to find its definition and tools. First of all, its development is slow down by the predatory strategy of some companies which intend to benefit from the movement whereas their behavior tarnish its the reputation and questioned the quality of the research it generates. At the same tame, this impetus for change born in reaction to the harnessing of scientific articles by a restraint number of private editors is held up by opportunist practices of those traditional stakeholders which remain impervious (blind ?) to its values.

Take some time to think about Open Acess implementation is essential to its recognition as a credible alternative model. The THINK thematic of OWF would bring the opportunity to find some answers to recurrent and primordial questions such as Open Access appropriate business model(s), infrastructures and legal instruments available and/or those to create and implement (licenses, libraries, …), strategic and governance aspects into research center, peer-reviewed process or research data and metadata ownership.

[1] Original version : « L'open Access demeure le rêve à poursuivre, [mais] il faut l'accompagner des moyens permettant d'éviter ses dérives actuelles », Jean-Claude Guédon, Liberation, « Open access: du rêve au cauchemar? L'avis de J-C Guédon », propos recueillis par Sylvestre Huet, le 4 octobre 2013

Call for paper is launched

May 16, 2025

For this 7th edition the program is build around the guidline “Take Back Control” and will show you how to take back control of your digital world, including IT/IS and (personal) data.

Classic and essential subjects as Cloud computing, Data, Internet of Things, Dev, etc. will be treated from a user's needs' point of view. We will also put a strong emphasis on trending topics : Security, Privacy, Trust and Mobility.

If you wish to submit a proposal about one of these topics and many more, please do so on the page dedicated to the Call for Paper.

May 15, 2025

Open World Forum is back for a whole new edition! It will occur on October 30th and 31th.

Last year's edition was a big success, and we are looking forward to another event with even more talks, more workshops, and more social networking.

This year's program will show you how to take back control of your digital world, including IT/IS and data, professional or not. Stop losing control and discover how Free and Open Source software may help you be more and more independent technologically, legally or financially.

The President of the Open World Forum, Florent ZARA, is pleased to introduce you the Vice-Presidents for this edition.

THINK: Benjamin JEAN

Co-organizer of the annual European Opensource and free software Law Event, Benjamin Jean is currently the inno³ company's CEO, an open innovation consulting firm focused on IP and collaborative project management . He also works as lecturer at Sciences Po Paris, teachs IP in several Masters and as consultant within the Gilles Vercken Law firm.

He is author of a book titled “Option Libre. The right usage of Free Licences", co-author of the “Open Source Guide” professional whitepaper published by the Syntec Numerique and is involved in several working teams about open source and Open Data governance and/or licensing.

During it past position, he created the first CJOS (Open Source Law Center) He also co-founded, a few years ago, a French (community) project, named Veni Vidi Libri, which aims to inform creators and developers about free/OS licenses and to help them using free licenses.

Finally, he is an active member of both professionnal association (like AFPIDA or PLOSS) and community ones (among them: Framasoft, Veni Vidi Libri or the April)

More information on Twitter and LinkedIn:

CODE: Nicolas VERITE

Currently Product Owner for a instant messaging/VoIP/Voicemail mobile app, Nicolas Vérité was first a DBA and a netops, then evolved towards Free/Libre/OpenSource Consulting.

Next, he became project manager then product manager at Process One IN the FLOSS community, Nicolas is president of LinuxFr.org, the number 1 french speaking website on Free software news. He also contributed to the XMPP community, being a board of directors member of the XSF (XMPP Standards Foundation).

He recently founded Nayego.

More information on Twitter and LinkedIn:

EXPERIMENT: Marc SALLIERES

After having assisted companies in the establishment of management solutions and business intelligence as a consultant or project manager in an international area, Marc SALLIERES, 25 years of experiences, founder of the Altic society, assists and supports companies in their analysis phases, restructuration and the re-engineering of their IT system.

Since 10 years, with his associate Charly CLAIRMONT, Marc SALLIERES has been defending free software and Open Source solutions as an alternative for organisations and companies for IT system. Member of most of the Open Source associations such as ASS2L, PLOSS, CNLL, OW2, April, HUG, he lead the Opendays during the two first Open World Forums, event dedicate to companies.

With his team, Marc SALLIERES spreads the Open Source, the free software and alternatives IT systems values in several Universities in Paris (UPCM, Dauphine, Jussieu, Paris XIII).

More information on Twitter and LinkedIn:

Community: Gaël BLONDELLE

Gaël Blondelle has a strong experience in Open Source, and more specifically in communities like OW2 and Eclipse.

Since summer 2013, he joined the Eclipse Foundation and is in charge of the development of the European ecosystem. Before that, he was Open Source Business Developer at Obeo and managed OPEES, an European project whose one noteworthy result is the creation of PolarSys, an Eclipse Working Group dedicated to Open Source tools for Embedded Systems.

Since he started in the software industry in 1996, he has been working mainly in Telco, Java and SOA Technologies. He started at Alcatel as a software engineer and in 2000, he became consultant and trainer on Java, J2EE, XML and Web Services technologies at Valtech. He then acted as a middleware architect at France Telecom where he started working professionally in Open Source sphere in 2003. In 2004, Gaël co-founded PetalsLink, the company that created the Open Source ESB Petals.

More information on Twitter and LinkedIn:

Key Users: Hubert TOURNIER

Hubert Tournier is currently serving as deputy to the CIO of Groupement des Mousquetaires (146 000 people, 39.9 B€ turnover, in the retail & food-processing industry) at STIME, the group shared IT department, where he is also deputy to the CEO.

An active member of the information systems community, he was co-author of 5 books on the subject, a teacher at universities and engineering schools, a presenter at many conferences, and was involved in several professional associations, notably as vice-president of the French Information Systems Audit and Control Association chapter (ISACA/AFAI), treasurer of the sourcing best practices association (Ae-SCM) and member of the information systems big French organizations association (CIGREF).

He started to work with Free/Libre Open Source Software at the end of the 80s, is a contributor to the FreeBSD operating system, participated to several projects, such as Prométhée, HeV and CompatibleOne, as well as the previous editions of the Open CIO summit, inside the Open World Forum.

For this year edition, he will serve as vice president user, helping the Free/Libre communities to link with information systems communities, and sharing his knowledge and vision of the current and future needs of corporate IT departments.

More information on LinkedIn:

Feb 28, 2026

The Open World Forum is proud to be amongst the firsts in this new digital age.

Beginning May you will find us at the openworldforum.paris domain name. Do not worry, our .org adress will still work

Dec 10, 2025

Florent Zara is a French & Canadian Engineer and has been heavily involved, both personally and professionally, in the FLOSS community since 1999.

Today he is an admin at Linuxfr.org and the COO of Henix.

Born in 1998, LinuxFr.org is the reference french-speaking, community driven website about Free and Open Source software. It is also open to subjects like DIY or Open Data. With more than 1,2 millions visitors per month, it is a real institution operated by volunteers and only financed by donations and « mécènes ». Florent is an active member since 2001 where he is top contributor, moderator and admin, partnerships and contests manager as well as a board member of the NPO representing the website.

As the COO of Henix since 2003 he is involved in Technical Qualification of Applications, he acts as an advisor in OpenSource Governance and License issues as well as taking an active part in internal Free/Open Source projects.

Stay tuned for more info about the next edition of OWF.

Oct 11, 2025

Look at this year's review of the Open World Forum, by the president of this edition, Pierre Queinnec.

Sep 26, 2025

Listen to what this year's edition of the Open World Forum has in store for your directly from the president, vice presidents, some of the track leaders and many more. We also have a word from Inria, our Diamond Sponsor.

If you still hesitate to attend, we now have the perfect solution for you: 14 teaser videos that will showcase some of the good things that will happen this year at the Open World Forum.

And don't forget to register!