BERLIN. At the long-awaited reunion of the German open source community on November 10 in Berlin, the focus was primarily on the exchange with politics and administration. As a member of the Open Source Business Alliance (OSBA), SVA and many individual colleagues who are personally involved through their active participation in working groups and projects of the OSBA, support the association in promoting sovereign alternatives and ultimately realizing them in concrete solutions.

Following meetings of the Working Groups, the Association first had to pass new elections to the Board of Directors in accordance with the Articles of Association and amendments to the Articles of Association that had become necessary under association law. The General Meeting unanimously expressed its confidence in Peter Ganten as Chairman of the Board and his Board team. Afterwards, the Open Source Day started with numerous guests. Andreas Reckert-Lodde from the Federal Ministry of the Interior reported on his work as head of the project group to establish the Center for Digital Sovereignty (ZenDiS). The community discussed the weal and woe of digital sovereignty with the deputy chair of the Digital Committee, Anna Kassautzki MdB. In his role as co-spokesman of the Public Affairs Working Group, SVA colleague Thomas Köster called for established open source solutions to be marketed even better and for successful use cases to inspire more trust in politics and administration: "Digital sovereignty knows no political color and, more than almost any other digital policy issue, is in line with our economic and social image of a social market economy."

Meanwhile, the positive development of the OSB Alliance is gaining momentum: The number of members is steadily increasing to now 200 companies, more and more volunteers are getting involved in working groups or task forces of the federal association, and the Sovereign Cloud Stack, a funding project of the Federal Ministry of Economics for an open, federatable and modular cloud and container platform, has been launched. Peter Ganten, old and new Chairman of the Board of the Federal Association for Digital Sovereignty: "The contributions of the OSB Alliance to sustainable digitalization that enables control and design have now reached the center of politics. This has become clear, for example in the coalition agreement of the current federal government, in the digital strategy, in the launch of ZenDiS and Sovereign Tech Fund, but also by the fact that we were listened to in the budget deliberations."

Together with OSBA, SVA promotes the use of open source software and actively contributes to the collaborative development of these solutions. Many SVA colleagues contribute code to various projects in open code repositories. SVA also maintains high-quality partnerships with the major manufacturers of open source as well as community products that have established themselves in the market around DevOps, Cl/CD pipeline, configuration management, lnfrastructure as Code and containers. In addition to technical quality, we also focus on enterprise aspects such as longevity and support. We are continuously expanding our expertise and evaluating relevant vendors.