Lukas Kahwe Smith
Lukas Kahwe Smith is a long-time open source contributor: a release manager for PHP 5.3 and a former member of the Symfony core team, with two decades of building, shipping, and adopting open source in production. He is a regular speaker at conferences around the world.
At Bern University of Applied Sciences (BFH) he works at the intersection of open source and public procurement. He leads intelliprocure.ch, a platform that collects public-procurement tenders and makes them transparent by structuring them, with tooling planned to help authorities write better tenders, for example through procurement-criteria best practices. He also works on ossdirectory.com, the only open source catalog that connects projects with the vendors who support them.
Session
Europe has decided open source is strategic to its digital sovereignty. The CRA, NIS2, DORA, the AI Act and the 2026 Cloud and AI Development Act all lean on it, and the Commission's revised Open Source Strategy names software catalogues directly. Yet in procurement, open source still loses — not on merit, but on paperwork. A proprietary vendor arrives with a pre-packaged evidence apparatus: one sales contact, reference lists, compliance and accessibility documentation. The equivalent open source project arrives with a repository, a README and other scattered resources. Buyers who would choose it cannot easily establish what exists, what meets their criteria, or who can deliver — so decisions collapse to price.
This talk presents the instrument to flip that asymmetry: a decentralised evidence layer built on publiccode.yml — the standard already mandatory in Italy, live on Germany's openCode.de, and required by the EU Open Source Catalogue (640+ projects). Evidence of supply chains, upstream contributions and real-world use becomes verifiable and queryable: no central gatekeeper, no imposed scores. What the evidence means stays with buyers and their jurisdictions.
The result is something no fragmented proprietary landscape can offer: one queryable, openly contributed evidence commons. You will leave knowing what already runs today, what is missing, and how to engage — as a vendor, a public buyer, or a catalogue operator — without waiting for Brussels to finish.