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7-9 October, 2026
Prague, Czechia
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Keynote: Open Source at a Crossroads: Geopolitics, Sovereignty, and the Fight to Stay Open - Nithya Ruff, Chair, Linux Foundation Board & Johan Linaker, Senior Researcher, RISE Research Institutes of Sweden & Adjunct Assistant Professor, Lund University
Wednesday October 7, 2026 10:15 - 10:30 CEST
Congress Hall (Floor 2)
Open source was built on one belief: code has no passport. Nation-states are testing whether that holds.
The EU’s Cyber Resilience Act burdens the ecosystem it depends on. US export controls threaten to erase the line between open and proprietary code — a protection open source has relied on for decades. China has made open source AI a national strategy pillar, building a parallel ecosystem resilient to Western sanctions. The 2024 removal of Russian Linux kernel maintainers showed that open source is no longer above the law of nations.

None of these actors set out to break the commons. But their decisions often made without open source expertise create tensions governance was never designed to handle: sovereignty-through-openness vs. sovereignty-through-restriction; what “open source first” means for companies that relicensed; what neutrality means when contributors face conflicting national laws; and whether open source AI becomes a geopolitical battleground or shared resource.

Engage policymakers before they damage the ecosystem, build governance for a fragmented world, and recommit to the principle that openness is not a vulnerability — it is the source of our strength.
Speakers
avatar for Nithya Ruff

Nithya Ruff

Chair, Linux Foundation Board, Technology Executive, The Linux Foundation
Nithya has been in open source leader for over 25 years. She is a bridge builder working with companies large and small to create productive and strategic paths to working with open source. She led the Amazon OSPO & prior to Amazon, she started and grew Comcast and SanDisk's OSPO... Read More →
avatar for Johan Linaker

Johan Linaker

Senior Researcher at RISE Research Institutes of Sweden and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Lund University, RISE Research Institutes of Sweden
Johan Linåker is a Senior Researcher at RISE Research Institutes of Sweden and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Lund University, working at the intersection of empirical software engineering, open technologies, and digital sovereignty. His work focuses on how public and private... Read More →
Wednesday October 7, 2026 10:15 - 10:30 CEST
Congress Hall (Floor 2)
  Keynote Sessions

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