LF Europe Launch - News Roundup

The LF Europe launch received welcoming coverage from the press across the European continent and beyond. We’ve pulled out a few key highlights for you below.

Watch interviews with Gabriele Columbro

If you haven’t already, do watch this interview (16 mins) with Gabriele Columbro, the new Executive Director of LF Europe, in which he tells TechStrong.tv the three key reasons for launching LF Europe. 

1. The presence of the European Union will help align disparate initiatives: “Europe is the only region where there is a supra-national entity…that really defines common goals in terms of innovations as well as the rules of the road for collaborations across nations.”
2. Europe has a strong grassroots open source community and “open source forward” interest in building “the digital commons.” If this was not already clear before, this was made loud and clear by the World of Open Source: Europe Spotlight 2022 research report, which provides a comprehensive picture of “the state of open source” in Europe.
3. Through LF Europe, we hope to open up new collaboration opportunities that were not possible before between OSS developers, the private sector, and the public sector. 

Our message to Europe is simple: We are here to support the European open source community and we look forward to unlocking new opportunities together. As Gab put in his Ditto.tv interview, “as an Italian born, I’m extremely excited to be able to focus on my mother region”. 

LF Europe in the press!

LF Europe was launched at Open Source Summit Europe, which brought together over 1,500 open source community members in Dublin on 13–16 September, along with 800 online participants tuning in online from around the world. 

As reported by Computer Weekly, at the launch, Gabriele Columbro told the audience, “Our mission is to accelerate the growth of thriving open collaborative efforts throughout Europe and help elevate European open source efforts to de facto standards on a global scale.”

Another British outlet, The Register, welcomed the LF Europe in the following generous terms:

“Sometimes, attending a European trade show – even virtually – can give you a slight feeling of being a supporting feature, with the main act happening in North America, usually some time earlier. So the launch of the Linux Foundation Europe in Dublin last week was a welcome change. After all, the Linux kernel itself was originally a European project, from a member of Finland's Swedish-speaking minority.”

The Irish outlet, Silicon Republic, spoke with Stefano Maffulli, the Executive Director of the Open Source Initiative, who commented that the launch of LF Europe “is a long time coming” and demonstrates “the importance of Europe” in the world of open source software.

Meanwhile the French outlet, Le IT Mag, welcomed the launch, citing the fact that after all 31% of the members of the Linux Foundation are European companies and the German outlet, Heise, reported that the creation of LF Europe pumped momentum back into the Open Source Summit Europe after a 3-year pause due to the pandemic. The Belgian outlet, DataNews, welcomed the launch with the new headquarters coming to its capital, Brussels.

Beyond European soil, the US-based outlet, The New Stack, reports that part of LF Europe’s mission will be aimed at increasing awareness amongst organizations across the continent of the value of taking an open source friendly approach. This priority is informed by the World of Open Source: Europe Spotlight 2022 research report which found that only 29% of survey respondents had seen an increase in contribution efforts at their organization over the last year.

More exciting news in the press!

Also during the Open Source Summit Europe, in partnership with Meta, the Linux Foundation announced that PyTorch is transitioning over to the foundation alongside founding members AMD, AWS, Google Cloud, Meta, Microsoft Azure, and NVIDIA to form the PyTorch Foundation. 

Some key quotes from the press:

• Engadget: “Over the last half decade, Pytorch has grown to become a leading standard for the AI research community with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg noting in Monday’s press release that some 80 percent of “researchers who submit their work at major ML conferences, such as NeurIPS or ICML, harness the framework.”
• SDTimes: “Under the Linux Foundation, PyTorch and its community will gain access to many programs and support infrastructure such as training and certification programs, research, and local and global events. Additionally, the LFX collaboration portal will enable the PyTorch community to identify future leaders, locate potential hires, and observe shared project dynamics.”
• ZDNet: “Even before this move, Meta was inviting everyone who wanted to join it in its PyTorch efforts. As Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin said at Open Source Summit Europe in Dublin, Ireland, ‘PyTorch has grown to include a massive community of contributors and users under their community-focused stewardship. The genius of PyTorch (and a credit to its maintainers) is that it is truly a foundational platform for so much AI/ML today, a real Swiss Army Knife.’”

Please help spread the word!

This is only the start. Please help us spread the word about LF Europe. 

Stay up to date with what we’re up to by signing up to our LF Europe newsletter or consider joining LF Europe if you haven’t done so already! 

Feel free to reach out to info@linuxfoundation.eu for any more information about LF Europe.