Gaël is 50, based in Toulouse, France, and he is Chief Membership Officer of the Eclipse Foundation. He has been involved in the software industry for over 25 as a developer, a business developer, and an executive.
Gaël started his open source career in 2004 as a co-founder of a European open source startup that was a founding member of OW2, before joining the Eclipse Foundation 10 years ago, to dedicate all his time and energy to building bridges between individuals, small companies, larger organizations, and research institutions, mainly in Europe.
Recently, Gaël has been leading several strategic initiatives, starting from being a leader in moving the Eclipse Foundation to Europe in 2020, and including the creation of the OSPO Alliance, the open and transparent initiative, helping companies discover and better understand open source, and approach the creation of an OSPO. The OSPO Alliance was founded by several European non profit organizations, with a specific goal to help all sorts of companies (and not only big tech companies) grow their skills in open source in order to benefit more from open source, and to become more influential in the different open source ecosystems.
In 2021 and 2022, Gaël has been the program chair for OpenSource Experience in Paris, which is one of the main Open Source events in Europe.
In his keynote at the 2023 OFE Policy Summit, Gaël called for more involvement of large companies in the global open source ecosystem, not only as users, but as supporters, protectors and leaders of open source as an innovation model.
How the candidate will contribute to the board
Gaël will contribute to the OSI board on three main topics:
– Over the last 5 years, open source has been threatened by organizations that want to use the term “open source” to name licenses that are not OSI approved and don’t comply with the OSD. As more and more people and organizations claim to be doing open source, some of them lose sight of the OSD, and how the capability to use, study, modify and redistribute code enables the free flow of technology worldwide and enables better collaboration and faster innovation.
As a board member, Gaël wants to help the OSI reinforce its position as the trusted organization that holds the definition of open source. This covers two aspects: First, we need to educate newcomers, including large open source user companies such from the traditional industry, to the values of open source and how they provide the foundation for successful collaboration. Second, we need to make sure that the words “open source” refer to the OSD, are not diverted for the benefit of companies that develop strong vendor lock-in on their OSS technologies, or want to monetize their patent portfolio.
– More and more regulations directly or indirectly address open source, and can have unintended consequences on the global open source ecosystem. We have a strong example with the CRA in Europe. Specific organizations, like OpenForum Europe, advocate for open source in their region. Regularly, we hear key stakeholders telling us that the open source community doesn’t fight enough for its interests. OSI is already significatively active on policy topics, but I want to support OSI as a board member in leading on policy topics, and in coordinating the specialized think tanks across geographies.
– As a European, I support the idea that open source can be a powerful instrument for digital sovereignty. This is not only true in Europe but in all other places. And this is not about protectionism but about a super power of open source technologies: With open source, every country, every geography can move the needle from having access to proprietary software to training the skilled people to adopt, use, and improve OSS technologies. I think that the OSI should play a stronger role in promoting this worldwide.
Why the candidate should be elected
For the last ten years in his position at the Eclipse Foundation, Gael has been helping dozens of projects establish themselves within the Eclipse community, along with helping many companies, large and small, adopt, use, and sustainably succeed with open source.
When bootstrapping the OSPO Alliance, Gaël has demonstrated to have the right set of values to work for the interest of the global open source ecosystem.
Finally, as a European software engineer, concretely involved in growing adoption of open source by different stakeholders that are not only new to open source, but sometimes new to software, Gaël brings concrete ideas on the three main topics listed before to help grow the visibility of the OSI to a new group of organizations.
Thanks for your time in reading this. If you have any questions, you can contact Gaël on Mastodon or LinkedIn.
3 thoughts on “Gaël Blondelle”-
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Questions for the candidates received from Luis Villa:
Your time: You have 24 hours in the day and could do many different things. Why do you want to give some of those hours to OSI? What do you expect your focus to be during those hours?
Licensing process: The organization has proposed improvements to the license-review process. What do you think of them?
Broader knowledge: What should OSI do about the tens of millions of people who regularly collaborate to build software online (often calling that activity, colloquially, open source) but don’t know what OSI is or what it does?
Regulation: New industry regulation in both the EU and US suggests government will be more involved in open source in the future. What role do you think OSI should play in these discussions? How would you, as a board member, impact that?
Solo maintainers: The median number of developers on open source projects is one, and regulation and industry standards are increasing their burden. How (if at all) should OSI address that? Is there tension between that and industry needs?
OSI initiative on AI: What did you think of the recent OSI initiative on AI? If you liked it, what topics would you suggest for similar treatment in the future? If you didn’t like it, what would you improve, or do instead?
Responsible licensing: There are now multiple initiatives around “responsible” or “ethical” licensing, particularly (but not limited to) around machine learning. What should OSI’s relationship to these movements and organizations be?
Your time: You have 24 hours in the day and could do many different things. Why do you want to give some of those hours to OSI? What do you expect your focus to be during those hours?
GB: Good point! I am very lucky that my personal interests are fully aligned with my responsibilities at work in my position at the Eclipse Foundation. My candidacy comes not only from my strong wish to join the OSI board, but also from the commitment of the Eclipse Foundation to support OSI.
My focus will be the three topics described above and more specifically:
1- Educating, advocating and protecting the importance of the OSD and of the OSI as the trusted organization behind the OSD.
2- Grow the OSI in a role that coordinates organizations in the different geographies to make sure new regulations don’t put open source collaboration at risk.
Licensing process: The organization has proposed improvements to the license-review process. What do you think of them?
GB: The effort of clarifying the license approval process is great to help. And the decision to accept licenses that only fill a gap that currently existing licenses do not fill is very important as I think that we all suffer from the existence of too many licenses. Categorizing licenses between rejected, approved, and preferred will hopefully help limit the dispersion of license and limit compatibility issues.
Broader knowledge: What should OSI do about the tens of millions of people who regularly collaborate to build software online (often calling that activity, colloquially, open source) but don’t know what OSI is or what it does?
GB: As mentioned earlier, I’ll focus on this topic: in my opinion, we pay a high price for having so many people using the term open source without knowing about the OSI. Of course, everybody can use open source and should be able to contribute to open source without understanding the ins and outs of it. But there have been several stories where organizations call open source something that does not comply with the OSD, to the detriment of the users.
Some time ago, I started to float the idea that we should make sure that every graduate in software has contributed to an open source project. The idea comes from the fact that in France, master students have to get a minimum score at TOEIC to prove understanding of English before they graduate (sounds like a joke, I know ;)). Without pushing so far, I hope we could design a program that scales enough so that students can prove that they have a basic understanding of what is open source, and they have made a contribution to an open source project.
Regulation: New industry regulation in both the EU and US suggests government will be more involved in open source in the future. What role do you think OSI should play in these discussions? How would you, as a board member, impact that?
GB: This is one of the pillars of my candidacy. A few years ago, open source was rarely impacted by regulations. But since software ate the world, and since open source has won too, every regulation can have an impact on open source. I think that role of the OSI should be to coordinate, with the local organizations like OpenForum Europe, to ensure our ecosystem understands what’s going on in terms of regulation, and is able to contribute when relevant or respond when necessary.
Solo maintainers: The median number of developers on open source projects is one, and regulation and industry standards are increasing their burden. How (if at all) should OSI address that? Is there tension between that and industry needs?
GB: There is so much to do, and I am afraid that addressing this burden at the OSI should be coming later. I think that some collaboration platforms like GitHub and Gitlab will help developers support a part of the burden, and established foundations are also upping their game in several domains to help their respective communities. At some point, the OSI may want to share a role
OSI initiative on AI: What did you think of the recent OSI initiative on AI? If you liked it, what topics would you suggest for similar treatment in the future? If you didn’t like it, what would you improve, or do instead?
GB: The positioning of open source and AI is very important, and the content created by the OSI on the topic, like the podcasts and the report was great. Beyond AI, software and data are more and more intertwined. In Europe, we talk a lot about data spaces and this covers software topics, data topics, and AI topics. In the future, it may be interesting to address other related topics like open source and open hardware, especially when some parts of the open hardware ecosystem seem so close to open source software by using specific languages like VSDL.
Responsible licensing: There are now multiple initiatives around “responsible” or “ethical” licensing, particularly (but not limited to) around machine learning. What should OSI’s relationship to these movements and organizations be?
GB: From my perspective, clause 5 and 6, respectively “No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups” and “No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor” are two important pillars of the OSD. Other groups may be more comfortable with other kinds of licenses, and as long as they don’t try to confuse users and adopters, that’s fine.
That said, I think that OSI should try to engage with those new initiatives, as we may want to join forces on some topics. Ideally, we could collectively try to document our convergences and our disagreements so that the larger ecosystem can better understand it.
An additional comment as Luis asked us a new question on Twitter at https://twitter.com/luis_in_brief/status/1635297494933598209: “I believe the org is working very well right now. So non-incumbent candidates: what will you do better than the incumbents?”
I agree that org is currently well managed by its board and staff and I don’t think the OSI needs any kind of revolution. Part of my interest in joining the OSI board is to work with the other board members and with the staff.
Instead of “doing better than the incumbents”, I want to “contribute to” the effort.
I see my contribution as bringing my perspectives as a European who has spent the last 18 years engaging with the European community in Europe and who is looking for ways of growing the understanding of open source to new people and organizations (globally) that are just getting through their digital transformation and don’t have the background to understand the ins and outs of open source.