A group of developers (mostly based in Germany: Peer Heinlein, Markus Michels, Dennis Kalbhen and more) launches OpenTalk, a new, modern architecture Video Conferencing solution that is presented as the Open Source and EUPL licensed European alternative to Zoom, WebEx (Cisco) or Teams (Microsoft).

OpenTalk aims to demonstrate that quality, performance, usability, and security can be achieved without having to rely on a US-based cloud infrastructure, they said. “It’s the only way to ensure digital sovereignty and full transparency, because we have published the source code of OpenTalk under the European Union Public Licence, on the "OpenCoDE" platform at https://gitlab.opencode.de/opentalk.”

As it is quite common in commercial open source projects, OpenTalk practises dual licensing, which is perfectly inline with the EUPL provisions:

• There is a “Community release” than can be used for free under the licence granting transparency and reciprocity, allowing adaptations to meet individual needs and anyone interested to actively participate in and contribute to the further development of OpenTalk.
• There is an “Enterprise Edition”, which is aimed to ensure business sustainability to the project and provides more advanced functionalities, including up to 24/7 support support for maintaining reliable operation in production environments.
• In addition, a cloud solution "OpenTalk-as-a-Service" is announced to be launched in the near future.

In case providing complete and efficient functionalities and after the adoption of the Interoperable Europe Act Regulation (proposed in November 2022), a solution like OpenTalk could be a candidate of choice for receiving the label of "Interoperable Europe Solutions" (IES) that will be delivered by the Interoperable Europe Board (IEB), which will be empowered to deliver labels to European third party solutions distributed under the EUPL or similar open licence.

More information: https://opentalk.eu/en/news/opentalk-now-open-source-under-eu-public-licence

OpenTalk was presented in January at the Univention Summit 2023 in Bremen and will be present in March (11-12) at the Linux-Tage 2023 in Chemnitz: OpenTalk at the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2023.