The winners of the 2024 edition of the Free Software Actors competition were revealed at Open Source Experience last week.
Organized by the CNLL in collaboration with Systematic and Open Source Experience, the Acteurs du Libre competition has become an unmissable event in the French and European open source ecosystem. It aims to reward companies and entrepreneurs as well as innovative projects and associations which contribute through their actions to the economically viable development of Free Software and Open Source.
Six trophies were awarded:
- Prize for the best Open Source strategy: RTE
- Business Development Award: Quantstack
- Public-private collaboration prize: IGN and ESN Camptocamp.
- European prize, in collaboration with APELL: Passbolt
- Ethical and open digital prize: Commown
- Special jury prize: INSEE for its Onyxia platform
Find the details concerning the attributions in the second part of the dispatch.
Best Open Source Strategy Award : RTE, manager of the public electricity transmission network in France, receives the prize for best strategy. RTE has gradually invested in open source since the 2000s to today become a fully committed player which publishes code in around a hundred repositories inventoried by an OSPO and runs communities. The jury particularly appreciated the ability to bring together international energy players around the Linux Foundation Energy, created in 2018 at the initiative of RTE.
Business Development Award : the commercial development prize is awarded to Quantstack, a free software publisher specializing in scientific computing (projects such as Jupyter, Conda-forge, etc.). A company experiencing very strong growth (+25%/year turnover on average), Quantstack demonstrates strong consistency between its fast-growing business model and its community commitments on bricks widely used around the world, particularly via involvement in numerous events.
Public-Private Collaboration Award : This prize is awarded to IGN and ESN Camptocamp. IGN, a public player in cartography, actively collaborates within the framework of a long-term partnership with Camptocamp, as part of the Geonetwork-UI project and its flagship DataHub application. This project works to bring the geospatial data ecosystem closer to that of open data. Camtocamp supports IGN in its contribution to the DataHub through subcontracting and a financial commitment to support developments in the platform.
Prize for open and ethical digital : This prize is awarded to Commown, a cooperative company offering eco-designed electronic products for its adherence to the liberal culture at all levels of the company (in the devices offered, internal tools, and processes) and its action to reduce the carbon footprint of computer equipment. Commown has also formalized its procedures and obtained the Solar Impulse label.
European Prize (in collaboration with APELL) : The European prize is awarded to Passbolt, provider of an open source and collaborative password management solution created in 2016. Benefiting from very strong growth (+80% turnover in 2023), Passbolt is successfully leading a growth strategy while contributing to the development of emerging standards and actively collaborating with research.
Special jury prize : The 2024 special jury prize goes to INSEE, the national statistics institute for its Onyxia platform, a data science environment. INSEE is rewarded for having identified a need linked to the accessibility of professionals to modern statistical platforms. The SSPcloud initiative made it possible to provide an open source response to this need, while meeting sovereignty issues. This project is adopted today as far as Canada.
The winners were chosen by a jury made up of personalities from the open source ecosystem, member companies of the CNLL regional associations, representatives of administrations and winners from the previous edition. This jury is changed every year.
