Event | Kubecon + Cloudnativecon Europe 2025
OpenSource again proves its value: now as an innovator of applying artificial intelligence (AI). The launch of Deepseek set the market on stilts. But the open source world has to show even better how reliable and crucial the technology is. There is also a role for the Linux Foundation. That stated that executive director Jim Zemlin at Kubecon + Cloudnativecon Europe 2025.
During the press meeting at the Kubecon conference, which takes place in London this week, the Linux Foundation director tells about his Déjà Vu. ‘Time and time again there is a tendency to take open source as an anomaly, but the technology always turns out to be a winner. Linux, Red Hat, Databricks, Cloud Native Computing, Kubernetes, to name a few. And with AI and OpenSource there is such a moment again. “
Zemlin points to Deepseek, the Chinese Gen-AI model that the market turned upside down Because this showed that developers can build an open source language model against a fraction of the costs of a proprietary product. ‘Deepseek indicates that with the use of open source the costs for both access to AI technology and the training can drastically reduce. Language models are available for the entire world; The total market can grow considerably. It is not without reason that the market leader OpenAi recently announced that they will come up with an OpenSource version. ‘
No surprise
The Chinese should not be called a surprise for those who have been working on this technology for a long time, says Zemlin. ‘China has been impossible since the late 90s with the adoption of OpenSource technology, for economic considerations. And it’s no longer about piracy. Chinese companies have now made major contributions to the OpenSource community, for example to the development of Linux and Kubernetes by groups such as Tencent and Alibaba. ‘
In fact, the Linux Foundation director emphasizes, “they no longer just look at the Western world but use OpenSource as a means to speed up innovation and to compete with each other.”
Give an account
In general, he finds it amazing how quickly open source continues to grow. ‘Although in 2025 I feel obliged to talk about artificial intelligence. We probably have to change all Linux Foundation URLs from .org in .ai, “he jokes. But in the current troubled Umfeld, the community must take into account the increasing cyber security risks, the sharper regulations (especially in the European Union) and the geopolitical, Techno-nationalist developments That perpendicular to the open character of the open source world. The Linux Foundation, the home port for cooperation at open source software, open standards, open data and open hardware, plays a pioneering role in this.
Zemlin: ‘More than a thousand organizations are affiliated with the Linux Foundation, fairly evenly distributed across Europe, the United States and Asia. We all have to ensure that the confidence in the reliability and transparency of OpenSource code remains strong and further increased. “
Crucial
The foundation sets up all kinds of projects for this. One of them is a collaboration with Harvard University to estimate business users of OpenSource. To ultimately make a ranking of the world’s most business -critical software. ‘There are five hundred million Open Source projects on Github, so to speak. After research, it appears that around one hundred thousand are crucial. And an even smaller subset of it is super interest. We then rank those projects to find out what support they need to be even safer and more reliable. “
Another example is the First Person Project recently started. This is a distributed ledger tool (LEDGER) with which open source developers can have their identity cryptographically anonymous verified by clients. They then know that they do not have to do with hackers. Such a tool increases the reliability of OpenSource AI projects and therefore promotes it in this way. “But,” Zemlin emphasizes, “it goes on a voluntary basis. OpenSource projects do not have to use these tools. Our most important starting point remains that everyone, wherever in the world, can participate in our community. “
Kubecon + CloudNativecon
12,409 visitors took part in the 2025 edition in London, about the same number Like last year in Paris. Next year the event will take place in Europe again in Amsterdam, in the RAI (March 23-26).
For the first time, the Linux Foundation is organizing a Kubecon + Cloudnativecon event in Japan (16-17 June) this year. The Asian country is working on a cloud of cloud and has a lively open source community.
