Like coming home

It felt like coming home, when I joined APELL in September 2024. After having worked on civil rights, consumer protection, and digital regulation in the European Parliament for close to nine years, starting to represent Open Source businesses in Brussels was not that big of a change for me: because even when policy and regulation did not on the surface impact the FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) ecosystem, there were parts in many dossiers I worked on that subtly could have been to the detriment of an ecosystem of communities.

tl;dr: Today, I’m announcing that I will be leaving my role at APELL by end of October. From November, I have the honour of starting as Ecosystem & Partnerships Manager at the Digital Commons EDIC in Paris.

My journey with Free and Open Source Software started back when I was still in high school, teaching myself enthusiastically how computers and operating systems worked. Installing my first Linux distribution in something like 1997 (hi fellow kids) took me much further than I could have ever imagined.

Free Software and Open Source always meant digital sovereignty, only we didn’t call it that at the time. That is what I find so exciting about the fact that the points we as an ecosystem of businesses and communities have been making for decades: receiving the freedoms to use, study, share, and improve technology is what has been driving innovation, research, and education in the digital sphere since computers had been invented.

I am extremely grateful to APELL and the fantastic people involved that bring so much enthusiasm and personal engagement to this organisation and our national member organisations. I wish APELL well and, having said that: please keep sending your applications, we are studying them as we speak and hope to invite you for interviews soon: apell.info/jobs/