Stéfane Fermigier
Stéphane is CEO of Abilian, co-president of the French National Council for Free & Open Source Software (CNLL) and chairman of the Association Professionnelle Européenne du Logiciel Libre (APELL)
Stefane Fermigier, founder and CEO of Abilian, an open source software company in the field of collaboration and cloud, active for over 10 years.
We have several products in use or under development, including:
All our software can be deployed as SaaS, on various IaaS and PaaS on the market or on bare metal.
We have developed our own technology, Nua, which simplifies the deployment and maintenance of these applications, and which is now an open source project and a product in its own right.
Not at the moment. We are open to partnerships with cloud vendors and operators.
Our various solutions are obviously sovereign, and have been co-designed with their users to best meet the needs of their respective markets.
We rely on an entirely open source stack: Linux kernel, Python language, PostgreSQL and Redis databases, etc. We also focus on interoperability with open APIs, and on the use of open source software.
Moreover, several of our products - Abilian SBE, Abilian Lab&Co, Nua by Abilian… - are themselves open source and all our products incorporate hundreds of open source components. For these reasons, we take the issue of securing the software supply chain very seriously.
The application code as well as part of the business frameworks of our applications was developed by ourselves. This represents about 20 person-years of R&D.
In addition, we contribute, regularly or occasionally, to numerous open source projects upstream of our products.
Its flexibility and our obsession with the user and developer experience.
In France, we recommend in particular that the 2016 Digital Republic law be applied to the letter, which states that administrations must “encourage” the use of open source solutions. This is even more true in higher education and research, where open source software has been used “as a priority” since the 2013 ESR law.
We also recommend that the proposals of the Latombe report on digital sovereignty be taken into consideration, in particular proposal 52: “Impose within the administration the systematic use of open source software, making the use of proprietary solutions an exception”, proposal 26: “Give priority, in terms of public procurement, to the use of solutions from French or European technology players”, and proposal 30: “Develop the practices and legal framework of public procurement [In particular at the European level with a European Small Business Act]”.
We believe that all the technological building blocks useful for the sustainable development of a successful European software and cloud industry exist in Europe, either because they were invented in Europe or because they are open source projects with sufficient European contributors.
What is missing is both guidelines or incentives to use these technologies as a priority, in the name of strategic autonomy and resilience, but also a better ability for European actors to work with each other and to make their technologies and tools interoperable.
We therefore recommend the implementation of plans to encourage European companies to develop such connections, in parallel with directives requiring the use of demonstrably interoperable technologies and solutions.
For more information, please contact Jean-Paul, CEO of Nexedi (+33 629 02 44 25).