Yeah, so I'm thanks a lot for having me and at this at this wonderful conference, of course We have really been different difficult times. So this is not an in-person conference, which is a bit sad Hopefully we all can meet again next year

But I what I saw so far from the event It really looks like an amazing event with wonderful speakers and great topics So I really happy to to be here to give this talk to you this today this morning So the topic is digital sovereignty and free software and GPL and how this all connects together

This is a bit of a bigger broader topic So Where I want to talk with you about that and I hope at the end

We still have time for some question answers because this is something that hopefully Stimulates a lot of discussions in our in our community Yeah, it's already already mentioned and my name is Frank college egg I'm a computer scientist I study computer science and tubing in Germany here

Contributed to lots of different open-source projects over the years are like over way over 20 years now Did a lot in the KDE community where I also was a board member and organized events and did all kinds of things and over the last few years I

Really did more and more in in the public sector to work with politicians for example, I'm a Organization you might know it's basically a lobby organization for open source at the European level I'm also happy to be an advisor to the United Nations regarding the intellectual

Intellectual property Policy and open source But most of you might know me and as mentioned before as the founder of own cloud and next cloud the successor But today I don't want to really talk about next cloud. I really think

That is a good opportunity now a community talk a little bit of a bigger bigger topic what we want to achieve here It's a free software and open source community So as an agenda, I want to talk a little bit about the cloud first what it means

What about where the term actually comes from which are very interesting Then a little bit about the term digital sovereignty That's a relatively new term that some of you might have heard already What it means and why this is relevant and then a little bit what we actually can do

To achieve this digital freedom and digital sovereignty together This is then relates to the Gaia X project and some other initiatives and then hopefully at the end We still have time for some for some questions So, let's get started Let's start with the cloud obviously, you all know that more and more organizations and companies and governments and

individuals move to the cloud We move our data or our application lots of our Computing that we do Into into the cloud that come back to this later what it actually means

But this is a trend you know for 10 15 years So the cloud is like the future of IT. That's what you read in the press, obviously But the thing is that you also read a lot of critical things about the cloud in the press for example, there's some

Research done Most of the of the research shows that the biggest concern of the cloud or cloud computing is security It's really like is my data secure with access to my data What about vendor login how this all work? There's a lot of concern about that

Here's another example of Of some research that that was done it also shows that security vendor login are the top concerns of Cloud users and again, this is by home users This is by government and it's also by by company. So basically all the cloud users

Here's another example, this is just some another survey of the users there are okay What are the three most important public cloud concerns and again number one security compliance? the network latency a little bit then like vendor login

compatibility and lots of other things but cloud Security is definitely one of the one of the critical topics here So if you if you're German if you follow the German news, there was a big story last week actually

At the Spiegel big news publication which reported that the German federal government alone just as paying Microsoft 178 million euros alone for IT services

I mean, of course they say here that this is for software But of course as you all know the Microsoft strategy nowadays is a cloud computing So lots of that is actually to pay for cloud services So and this is a big big trend and this is a lot of money

So a lot of people Nowadays realize that this might be a problem this new trend. We've moved everything to the cloud with all security and vendor booking Concerns and this basically

Spin off the term or created a term digital sovereignty That's something that was taught. It's really talked about a lot in the last one two years And this is basically a reaction to this cloud trend And I looked up some some definition what it actually means. Let's go through it quickly

Of course, this is like in my opinion like the official definition if you ask Microsoft actually a different definition of that Obviously, they're trying to fight this term and with their marketing But I would say that the official definition of digital sovereignty is that digital sovereignty or cyber sovereignty is the degree of?

Control and the individual organization or government has over the data that generate and work with with at local or net platforms And it's basically being control of your data of your digital future That's digital sovereignty And if you don't have to show the sovereignty and there are some problems associated with it some strategic risks

And here just some of them first is loss of control over data Represent represents a strategic risk for our society Individuals businesses or governments are surveilled and the data is monetized by foreign corporations And that's obviously a problem because you really want to store your data your applications in this cloud services

But instead what you and you do that But what happens is actually that this data is used by other players To surveil people to monetize it with advertising and do other things that you don't really want But that's like a consequence the result of this cloud computing

And this is obviously something that threatens digital sovereignty Another strategic risk is when societal debates take place on platforms owned by corporations and hosted in countries which are best in interest How can we trust their results?

This is this whole political discussion If like our personal digital lives moves more and more into the internet into clouds Then we really rely on them that we know what's happening that it's basically under control that it follows our laws and so on But this is just happening in the cloud somewhere without our control then that's obviously a big problem again

Digital sovereignty is not guaranteed yet Another thing is when nearly all commerce flows through a few selected platforms these levels control the price and capture most value so that's a That's a that's a more business aspect here, all right, so if

basically the fundamental infrastructure where our business our companies work are like Hosted somewhere else under different laws with different interests Obviously, this is a big threat for the for the economy of a lot of states we are just completely rely in different country to

have a prosperous economy Obviously and then the last thing is About innovation innovation are new technologies in machine learning and big data analysis depends on us data treasures that are available to domestic businesses Yeah, I mean if you don't really have control about this infrastructure about the data that is stored in these clouds

Then it's possible that you can't innovate anymore in the future I because if you if you want to do something with machine learning artificial intelligence You need like training data and if the training data is just stored somewhere else. You don't have access to it It's full of different laws different rules Then that's obviously a big and a big problem and also another threat of our digital sovereignty

So the good news is the good news is that this threat is Seen by by politicians nowadays, so I'm sometimes I'm sometimes speak with politicians in Germany or in France or from the European Commission or another mother

Another states mainly in Europe. They basically see this as a threat They see this as a threat to our digital sovereignty and they really think that something needs to be done here And that's something new. That's something that popped up the last one or two years as I mentioned

Honestly probably also a little bit triggered by By the by the president of the u.s. In the last few years, which made it clear that Maybe it's a bad idea to completely depend on a goodwill of another state So yeah digital sovereignty is a big topic a big term discussed in politics a lot, especially in Europe

That's for me. This is of course a little bit funny To see this discussion is now popping up because the whole idea is not new. It's actually very very old The whole idea of being in control of your software of your data of your digital life being sure

Sovereign is something that other people talked about for a long long time. For example, there's this guy Who talked about this whole problems like 35 years ago already? And of course you all recognize that this is Richard Stallman

And he basically basically talked about this problems Like 35 years ago literally so a long time ago Of course, this wasn't a context the word was a little bit different in a different context So what he talked about are the four freedoms

That's something he postulate in the 80s So the first freedom in his opinion is the freedom to run the program as you wish for any purpose Of course this came from a world where running a program Means running a program on your local machine that is sitting on your desk Like there were not cloud computing or software as a service at a time

The internet was was not really developed at the time No, that's not so basically running this application was running it on your machine that is sitting on your desk But of course it still means that if you you should be able to run the program for any purpose as you wish

Because then it you in control Because then you can run the program The thing is if the program is running in the cloud on a different server somewhere else Then you're not really in control anymore. All right, and that's of course a problem and you don't really decide which Cloud applications running where you can maybe not run it locally because it's just software as a service

You can use it or not use it, but you can't really control where the program is executed For example, you can't run it locally So yeah, the first freedom that he postulated here is already violated by most the most cloud Services and this yeah, it's violating the principle of digital sovereignty

The second freedom is the freedom to study how a program works and change it as you wish and obviously if you're just using some cloud service if you're using always 365 from Microsoft or Dropbox or some AWS API is you can't really study the software, right?

We just use the API you see use the features the service you pay for it and that's it You can't really study it the whole idea that he had at a time That there should be the right the freedom to study the applications you don't have that The third is the freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbors

That's of course a bit have funny at the time you had to help your neighbors with TV then floppy disk I guess nowadays everything is on the internet connected but if you can't really redistribute the AWS API if you can't really redistribute the Dropbox service or source code or application then you don't have this freedom, you know, this is what it's meant here

This is really what is what is meant that this give you a freedom and you definitely don't have this with modern cloud services And the fourth of course the freedom to distribute copies of your modified version this means that you have the source code you have complete access of

To the to the software itself and you can change it and then once you change it, you can redistribute Again, that's something that he wrote down in a in a world where this means distributing floppy disks But if you adapt this to the modern world to cloud services again, this is not and this is not really guarantees

So I really think that Richard Stallman here Completely understood the problems already and the four freedoms are still something we should have nowadays Obviously the world is a little bit different So at a time at a time it was quite simple

You had hardware you had a computer That you can buy or you get from your University or your employer or something, but it's a machine Usually without network and it's just a machine And you can get it and you put it on your desk or under your desk or something and that's just harder

And then if you install Software in it and in this case free software or open source software Then the combination of your hardware together with free software gives you a complete digital sovereignty because then the Data is stored on the local hard disk or the local floppies or whatever and your control the software and control the hardware

And then your as a result your control of your complete life So this was the world at the time of course nowadays the world looks a little bit more complex, so Nowadays the question is if this equation is still is still true that you have hardware plus software means digital sovereignty

Of course as you can imagine with this question mark I think this equation is no longer true because nowadays you need more additional components to be in control of your digital life The first is data

So to give you an example Let's say Microsoft who is running the office 365 or Microsoft 365 service Nowadays, and they run it on their servers on their cloud infrastructure And the software is proper. It's not open source free software, obviously

But let's assume you buy yourself some servers you buy the heart there It's possible you can go to some shop and buy some Hardware, right and then assume let's assume Microsoft open sources their complete software Then the classic free software movement would would say yeah victory great awesome now

We have the software now. We have one the problem is that we might not have access to the data And because maybe the data is just stored in the Microsoft cloud And it needs to be there because you want to collaborate with others somehow and You don't really have to digital sovereignty because you don't have access to the data

So that's a that's a problem. So I think for deep for complete digital sovereignty, they actually need Three things harder software and data and only then you in control which led to To something like that. It's called a user data manifesto

That's an initiative of some people Me together with some some other free software people a few years ago We came up with this user the data manifesto You can think about it as I don't know the GPL for data or something It basically defines what people should be allowed to do with their data

First of all, the user should be in control of their data So if I it is my date if it's my document my pictures my my chat messages everything That I should be in control of that I can I should be able to decide who has access to the data and who not Second is I should have the knowledge where my date is actually stored right? It's just floating around in the cloud somewhere

Then I'm that's not good, right? It's my data I want to know who bear all my pictures with access to the pictures who can read my check messages and so on and The and the third one is the freedom to choose a platform Right because if you are no longer

Want to give my data to like one service provider I want to be able to migrate to another service provider and this should be very easy. There should be open API's and open Specifications for that that it can just move your application new data around So that's obviously I think a missing component to reach like full digital sovereignty

But let's give you another example Let's say you want to You want to have one of those modern self-driving cars? But you want to have this with complete digital sovereignty

Okay so Let's think that for example, you want to buy I don't know a Tesla or something But you want to I have the Tesla Being complete control of what's happening there then again, what do you need? You need a heart there? That's relatively easy. You can go to a shop and buy the car then you have the heart there

Okay, then let's assume then Tesla is nice and open sources their complete software tomorrow Then you can study the software you can install the software and your car and it's all nice. The problem is nowadays Cars and lots of other applications, they actually use machine learning and machine learning requires training data

so Let's assume you get the software you get the hardware, but you don't have a self-driving car. It's useless You're not in control. You can't even use it yourself because what you need first You need to have the training data to do the machine learning to then have a self-driving car

Okay, so this means that you really need going back You really need harder and softer and later nowadays for a complete digital sovereignty But I want to go one step further because I think there might be another component Right. That's another component that you need for a complete digital sovereignty. For example, let's look into social networking

Let's say Facebook is very nice and they're also open source their complete source code tomorrow. Okay Then again great because I can buy some hardware just buy a server and put it at home in my basement fine

Then I get this nice new open source software from Facebook. It's available free software You take it install it in this machine nice Then you take the data Maybe I have all my chat Messages and my pictures and all my status messages and all my stuff there and I just also put it on this machine

Okay, great. Do I have digital sovereignty now? Not really because my own social network at home where I'm the only user is a bit lonely And if I'm the only user there, it doesn't really help So you really want to connect this to other users you actually want to have something like like the cloud

That something's I mean for social networking if it's communication for example then Basically isolating your system from others is not very helpful for communication. So something like the cloud is actually sometimes useful so now I want to Basically talk a little bit about the cloud

Why I think it's coming from and and what it means Some of you might might wonder where the term cloud comes from cloud Like what what's that what has cloud something to do with IT? So I did some research and my theory is actually it came from diagrams like that If you're like a little bit older like me and then you still remember like the 90s

And if you remember if you worked in IT in the 90s, then maybe you remember some of those PowerPoint Slides something like that where people were demonstrating the infrastructure. This is an example where you can see Hey, it's a computer. It's a fax machine

Here's a telephone Here's some other laptop something and then it's all connected with this red network cables And then left you see this cloud Okay, so this is one of the this cloud was one of the clip outs from PowerPoint And I think this is actually where the term coming from and this this cloud meant. Okay, here's something more

Yes, other stuff that's also connected to my network, but it's somewhere else. I don't know it It's it's running out of my control. It's somewhere else I don't really care but it is there and it's interacting with my system somehow I think this is actually where the better term is coming from or another another example is this network diagram also from the 90s

There you can see a bunch of servers and network switches and other components and again, there is this cloud This is this clip out from from PowerPoint I see okay this home our infrastructure is actually connected to something else to the internet to some other services

But there are no longer know what kind of cables and hard disk and switches are in there. It's just cloudy, right? I don't really understand it But it is definitely there and it's connected and it wouldn't work without it Of course nowadays the cloud looks a little bit different nowadays. The cloud is actually huge

so the cloud has like lots of applications lots of data lots of infrastructure and our local network as you can see here tiny on the right hand side are Just like very small tiny components are basically just access terminals to the cloud in a way So this is unfortunately how the wood looks looks nowadays, of course as you might know

The cloud is actually not this cloudy thing because they are actually hardware Behind it and there is this term also from the FSFE that there is no cloud. It's just someone else's computer It's exactly how it is The this cloudy clip art doesn't mean that there is nothing in it. Of course, that's the food infrastructure in it

It's just someone else's infrastructure and I don't really know it. So that's the problem here Okay, so where is this cloud? Where is this cloud? And because it is not in the sky, right? It's some service somewhere. I

took like a world map and I tried to Basically identify where or where this cloud really is In the world because it must be somewhere it is it is harder I was relatively fast because most of the cloud is actually there So this is California. This is Silicon Valley a little bit north and Seattle. There is the

Amazon and Microsoft, but it's basically this is like where all the cloud all the infrastructures. Okay? And this is the situation where we're living in and this is where the term digital sovereignty is So critical because we really depend on some infrastructure

Running by some people we don't really control Somewhere else and we are not really in control of our our IT anymore So yeah digital sovereignty, how can we get there? How can we achieve that? Because that's a free software conference here

And as I mentioned free software is a key to digital sovereignty, but it's not the only component. We need a little bit more so I To finish up my talk I wanted to Inspire you to talk a little bit about what we can actually do to reach The true sovereignty again as we had in the 80s where we had our computers on my desk together with the free software

So what do we actually need? So what are the components to reach digital sovereignty? I Should be a rich and decentralized infrastructure where this IT services can run

Okay, and this means that sometimes this infrastructure is in my basement. Maybe sometimes I decide to run it myself Okay, or in my company or university or my soccer club or whatever I bet if I want to run it locally, that should be possible

But if you want to run it like hosted by somewhere else in the cloud This should also be possible and that's fine. That's just an option but It is important that there are not only three providers in the world There should be like millions of different providers where you can choose And there should be very small and there should be very big ones

You can really you should be able to choose where you want to host your applications in your data And that's actually fine. And of course, you should be able to migrate between them obviously and There should this kind of infrastructure should be really decentralized and there should be providers in every region of the world So it's not really good to have decentralization

Okay, and this is actually where I'm happy That we have this initiative called Gaia X in the EU at the moment which tries to help Here a little bit. So Gaia X. What is it? It is actually an initiative by the German government by the French government and many other European

Governments at the moments mainly in European initiatives. The idea is to build a decentralized cloud infrastructure Okay So the idea is not to build like one big European cloud The idea is to connect all those different smaller cloud providers together into one virtual cloud

Basically make it completely interoperable And this together then should be an alternative to cloud service from the US and China There are like 200 members already from very small to very big and together This is this initiative to build this the idea is to have open standards interoperable standards between the different cloud providers to

basically enable everybody to offer those services There is also a little bit of a commitment to do everything as open source and free software I have this in brackets here because there are still ongoing discussions

I have lots of discussions with people and politicians about that where I stress that it needs to be free software Otherwise, it's useless But there's still a fight going on to basically have the full commitment that full Gaia X should be open source Just to be clear and what to sound like a fan of that it's just an interesting initiative

I'm actually very happy that the politicians understand the need for that to reach different sovereignty You need to have a better decentralized local cloud infrastructure and not depend on three big players somewhere else But of course, this is a project that is pushed forward by many organizations and let's see how it goes

But it it has a lot of potential The second thing I think we need To reach full digital sovereignty is that you always have to have the choice between on-premise

and off-premise Solutions so on premise of course means Hosted yourself in some data struct data center some server something you own you control And off-premise means to give it to someone else to pay someone else to do the services for you Which is totally fine in some situations, but you should have the choice

It's not good If some services only exist on a software as a service and don't exist as real free software That you can install yourself anymore. So it really should be On premise or off-premise you should be able to choose

The third requirement for a full digital sovereignty in my opinion is it really needs to be free software And I don't mean I don't have to repeat it You know, I think everybody here with listening knows the benefits of free software and open source Really as I mentioned before you can study the software you can learn from it You can innovate on top of it. You can check if there are any big doors

You can use it for any purpose and so on and so on So free software open source is absolutely key requirement for that. This is why all the Important components there should be free software alternatives And now comes the one the one Slide pitch for next month, obviously, sorry, I can't help myself

So with next love we try to help in some area. So we try to Provide an alternative to the services from Google and Microsoft and Dropbox and others basically the application layer So the food collaboration suite with office and file and chat and video calling proof and so on that you can run

on-premise off-premise where you want 100% open source, so that's something we we try to do But of course at the end what you really want is not like one implementation not only next load but you want to have like

different implementations for every component of the stack Alright, so I'm basically what you really need is different open source projects or different open source companies Providing different pieces of the stack and they're all exchangeable and maybe you had sometimes decided to use that one Then you decide to use another one

And this is how it should be that you can choose between them Maybe they're maybe it's also fine to have some proprietary alternatives to but there should be at least several free software open source Implementations to I think this is really really important for digital sovereignty So

What we really need is this this is rich free software product ecosystem that you can choose between different things One of the challenges I want to mention quickly here is the challenge of the of surveillance capitalism That's actually an interesting situation that If you're if you're doing open source and free software for a long time

As me then you remember that in the 90s and 2000s When I don't know these distributions or liberal office or Firefox and others that try to compete against the property of solutions We always had the benefit to be like the more free as in freedom solution, but we were also free as in VR

Nowadays, it's unfortunately a bit more complicated because lots of those cloud services you also get for free Because they do is surveillance capitalism where they're looking to your data They said we're advertising the cellular data to all kinds of other things. You don't want but that's something

That's something that's happening. So this unfortunately has the effect that Open source and free software is no longer cheaper Actually in some cases it is more expensive

Because let's look at next cloud for example, the next load is free You don't have to pay for it sure, but you need to run it somewhere You need to have a server or some cloud infrastructure some storage some compute some networking and so on to run it And you have to pay for that But if you used like the free version from Google or I don't know from Facebook

You don't have to pay for it. Actually you pay with your data So in an interesting way Proprietary software like the one from Google is now cheaper than free software So that's something to overcome. It's a bit of a problem to be honest

The next requirement I want to point out is open standards So I mentioned that we want to have different implementations that can be Provided and that can be replaced to each other and it's really important that we all follow the open same open standards because only then software components can be replaced

And this is like for everything. This should be like for basic cloud services. No social networking productivity infrastructure like AWS API's for all the for all the components That's really something we need to do. I'm also on a on a political level

To make this mandatory that there are actually laws that certain IT systems need to follow open standards I think this is not happening automatically By market forces. I think there are really laws needed to to make this mandatory And then the last thing I wanted to point out is I think we should have like stronger laws how data is handled

And this is like privacy rights. I think we still need to have stronger privacy Rights in Europe. We have the GDPR which is a good step forward but I think there should be more regulations and rules how our our privacy and our data is is handled and

Then the second thing is of course data portability This is actually funny because data portability is part of the GDPR but is widely ignored I don't know really know why the GDPR actually requires That you can export your data from one service and import it into another service

So there's definitely something that is really key to be to reach like full digital sovereignty Okay, I'm getting to the end of my talk Let's go to the summary already I think digital sovereignty is a mandatory thing for free and open society

If you just imagine that that you're not in control of your digital life You don't know what's happening with your data with your communication Everything is controlled by someone else and we have no legal rights to do something You can't really influence it. You can't innovate on top of it. You can't change it Then this is not a free and open society anymore

So your digital sovereignty for individuals and for companies and for governments is mandatory it's really important and I think we are Builders of these tools. We are engineers. We build this kind of internet services this software

I mean, this is a software conference here. And so we are we are we have the obligation to to shape the future of IT of computing in a way that Yeah, that enables us all to live in the free and open society again in 20, 30, 50 years and we have the

Opportunity to do it because we have the tools but we really also have to do that the internet and the cloud are This is all built by engineers, right? This is are not like this not that the internet is not nature, right? This is all human beings which also means that other human beings like us can change it and and we have to do that and

Free software and open source is really the key to that It's it's no longer just like yeah, it would be nice to look into the source code. No, it's a fundamental human right fundamental requirement for free society a Mandatory for digital sovereignty to have like free software implementations of all important components

So, thanks a lot This was my was my talk and now I think we might have stood five minutes for Questions, I hope yes. Thank you so much Frank that talk. That was wonderful. Yeah, we have a few questions

Coming in I see some that are on a similar topic. So I'll read these two out together The first one is the Russian government wants to control social networks in Belarus the power and force and just said that people should stop using smartphones because the USA is spying on them

Do you think that digital sovereignty? Would be just another term to not control over media inside countries borders so that Everybody could be punished by those who are in power and there's another similar question That's how do you see the concern?

Julia Rader raised yesterday that the term digital sovereignty Might also give room to nationalism. What can be done about this? Yes There are definitely connected the two things. This is a bit of a of a tricky thing Because if you have a new term like it's your sovereignty

People try to frame the meaning of it in different ways for example you have a You have the Microsoft of the world who say well if you buy Microsoft products Then you did a sovereign decision. You like Microsoft you buy it and then you just go southern because you buy it

That's of course a complete Spin spin of the meaning which is totally not the meaning of itself in the same way I think if if a government like Russia or China to

Decided to basically control all the services inside the country by the government and then called with digital sovereignty, then this is also like a spin and change of the meaning because digital sovereignty doesn't only mean that

Doesn't mean that the government can do what I want. It also means that every human being can do what I want It's not like I mean we have we have human rights, right and we all are humans and we are all like have human rights But governments don't have human rights right governments are just tools for the people right so digital sovereignty is something for

For the people and for everybody to control their digital life So and if everybody's in control that this is not nationalism And of course, I completely agree with Julia that we are living in this interesting

times where different organizations and spinning are spinning terms in different directions, so It's definitely At least in my opinion Doesn't mean that somehow I don't know There should be like a big firewall of Europe in the same way big firewall of China

Absolutely, nothing to do with the meaning of digital sovereignty So you think we should be very clear with what we mean Yeah, I think so But it's a bit of a that's always how it is with new words, right people try to spin it as they want

Unfortunately, yeah, okay. We have a couple more questions One is are you familiar with the unhosted? Organization who've been working since 2010 Yes, and they predicted a lot of current discussions on sovereignty in digital

Absolutely, actually some of the core members are friends of mine and We work together and for example, Michelle, I think which is At least one of the core people We work together on implementing some things and explore at the moment and also young who did the whole

UI UX of unhosted is also not doing the UI and UX of next class Oh, yeah difference and we share we share the same we share the same values and same ideas I think I can say and We definitely work together. Okay, great, and We have time for one more as well. Um

Do you see the way how to make the costs of surveillance capitalism? So you pay with your okay. Sorry. Let me read this again. Do you see a way? To make the costs of surveillance capitalism that you pay with your data more visible to users So that it's clear that there these services are not free

Yeah, this is one of the big questions right I Think I like the question because it is I like the way This is the direction of this question, I Don't have an answer to be honest. I'm thinking about this a lot what we can do here

It's really a tough challenge and tough not to crack If someone has an idea how to do that Happy to help. I Don't I don't have a good answer. I'm sorry Okay, but it's exactly but it's exactly the dilemma I agree with the question, but I don't have an answer