Open Source Has a New Audience. Are We Ready?

Open source is no longer a niche for technical pioneers. With a $46 billion global market, 61% enterprise adoption and growing policy momentum across Europe, it has become mainstream infrastructure. But mainstream users bring mainstream expectations: polished interfaces, zero-friction onboarding, integrated experiences, and security by design backed by regulation like the CRA and NIS2.
Are open source projects ready for this new audience?
This talk looks at four landmark forks — Nextcloud vs ownCloud, OpenSearch vs Elasticsearch, OpenTofu vs Terraform, Valkey vs Redis — to show that funding alone never decided the winner. What mattered was customer business: the value delivered to citizens, customers and employees. The projects that listened to their users survived. The ones that didn’t were acquired, forked or abandoned.
With this new audience in mind, the talk proposes two paths forward. First, designing for customers: applying proven product doctrines — Customer Discovery, Lean MVP, UX-first development and open governance as a validation channel. Second, supporting customers inside open source through OSPOs, turning scattered adoption into a structured, governed capability.
The talk closes with three policy actions Europe can take to support this shift: simplifying procurement for open source models, funding OSPOs in public administrations and SMEs, and using CRA Attestations as a trust-building mechanism that also drives sustainable funding.