Read Saranjit’s open source journey at the European Commission

Leaving rainy London, on 10 December 2017, I arrived at one of DIGIT’s offices at the European Commission in Brussels to work on a six month assignment. It was snowing, and was actually quite magical - a bit like in a christmas movie! Brussels was very different from London - in its architecture, the European accents, the shop signboards in Flemish and French, all the EU institutions I saw in the news, so close. It really felt as if I was in the heart of Europe.

I received a warm welcome and soon settled into my project EU-FOSSA 2 (Open Source and CyberSecurity), which I was leading as an external project manager. The EU-FOSSA initiative was set up after the €500m damage caused by the “heartbleed” bug, and concerned protecting the Commission from such hidden vulnerabilities in our vast open source.  After the success of the EU-FOSSA pilot, EU-FOSSA 2 was formed with a larger budget and a wider range of activities such as bug bounties, hackathons, and interactions with software communities large, medium and small across all parts of Europe - so it needed a full time project manager who knew what he was doing!

Of course I already knew about supplier management, open source and security, so I thought it would be good fun. What I didn’t expect was the sheer scale of the problem - how do you find lurking vulnerable software within probably millions of libraries that an organisation uses! Fortunately, EU-FOSSA 2 was a resounding success, with the project breaking new ground by using public money for hackathons and bug bounties. In fact it was so effective, that using government money for such purposes was seen as a very smart thing to do! We also met tens of open source communities and listened to their needs.

The search for hidden vulnerabilities and public sector open source in general is very long and still continues. Over the next seven and a half years, I was lucky enough to take this subject matter to the European level, raising awareness of what we called Critical Open Source Software, and encouraging the EU27 member states to cooperate on the topic of open source via the FOSSEPS initiative. One manifestation of this cooperation is the recent launch of a European Open Source Solutions Catalogue - business applications built by and for public administrations, with the aim to foster reuse, potentially saving hundreds of millions of Euros. Another manifestation continues the hunt of Critical Vulnerable Software, this time across Europe’s public sector! We also conducted a study on funding open source, specifically looking at software maintainers and the smaller developers.

Open source is fundamental to the world we live in today, and it’s crucial to the European and world economy. It is also the most crucial component for Digital Sovereignty. Along the way, I have met several giants and founders of key open source projects, and made some really good friends. You will not believe the selfless way they work and contribute to the world.

One of my ex Directors at the Commission once said that it was actually a privilege to be able to serve and do some public good by working at the Commission. I couldn’t agree more - and this sentiment has sustained me in difficult bureaucratic times. My time at the Commission and within the heart of Open Source has transformed me, and my business ventures will be rooted in delivering value using open source and AI.