The Future of Open Source is Collaborative! | Daniel Conn, Sonatype @ State of Open Con 2023

The State of Open Con 2023 has just kicked off in London and the EM360 team was there to interview business leaders and industry experts about everything open source. 

Yesterday, we spoke to Daniel Conn, developer and advocate for Sonatype, about the latest trends and biggest challenges for the open-source industry and the future of open-source software within the enterprise landscape. 

Recent EU laws pose new challenges for open source 

When asked his thoughts about recent data privacy regulations introduced as part of the EU’s data privacy act, Mr Conn says that rules are restricting the open source community. 

“I think one of the particular things that came out with the EU was incredibly restrictive, putting the onus on open-source developers.”

I'm glad that they're looking, it sounds like, to be moving back from that. But I think legislation if it's not very well thought out, could cause huge problems in the actual practice of running it.

To adhere to new legislation, Mr explains that organisations must make use of the right tools so that they can react to new security postures. 

“Tools will help in that sense to hopefully take away that burden. Certainly, that's what Sonatype will be doing in the future.

“But yeah, that's the biggest problem is just keeping up with legislation, trying to find good legislation that's thought about well.”

Collaborative efforts on open-source data will immensely improve data security

When asked about some of the future trends for data Mr Conn explained that collaborative efforts to improve data security will allow data to be stored more securely. 

“It's going like there are a lot of collaborative efforts. There's the OpenSF, and actually, the British Computer Society is actually doing immense work in terms of security at the moment and in turn sharing data between them.”

“I think that more and more data that can be shared, I think a lot more collaboration will happen in the future,” Mr Conn said.