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.