The Open Source Summit, North America held in Vancouver BC, is presented by the Linux Foundation and features sponsors at various tiers: Diamond - IBM, Intel and Suse, Platinum - Red Hat, Gold - Amazon Web Services, CNCF, Google, Kenzan, Microsoft Canada, SAP, VMware, Silver - Datadog, Flexera, Influx Data, Linux Academy, Oracle, Storj.io, Synopsys along with bronze, community and media sponsors. The Linux Foundation kicked off this year's Summit with two days of security briefings and the main conference running August 29 - 31.
The Linux Foundation Open Source Summit connects the open source ecosystem under one roof. It’s a unique environment for cross-collaboration between developers, sysadmins, dev-ops, architects and others who are driving technology forward. Joining over 2,000 developers, technologists and industry experts to exchange ideas on the latest trends in open source and open collaboration, how to navigate the open source landscape, and how open source is shaping innovation.
Prior to the main conference we took time out to attend the Lightning talks and Diversity social sponsored by Google at Chewies Oyster Bar. The main conference opened with Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of The Linux Foundation welcoming attendees and kicking off the Keynote Talks. Jim shared the Linux Foundation key focus for 2018/2019: creating value and to achieve optimal continual upstream reinvestment and create infrastructure to make upstream open source projects great.
Big announcements were the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Science initiative to create an open source co-development environment led by major film and production studios, Automotive Grade Linux, and updates on the Cloud Native Computing Foundation - one of the fastest growing projects in the open source ecosystem.
Sarah Novotny, Open Source Strategy Lead from Google announced they are committing a 9M grant of Google Cloud credits to cover all of the testing CI/CD infrastructure and Kubernetes and the Zowe Open Mainframe Project was unveiled.
The Linux Foundation welcomes 51 new members. Jim's closing comment was aspiration and inspiring: 'Lets go solve big problems: one person, one project, one industry at a time'.
Shawn Wilkinson, Founder & Ben Golub, Executive Chairman, Storj Labs delivered a keynote talk Open Source and the Decentralized Web. The talk compared Open Source and Web 1.0 with the new Decentralized Web and highlighted the 23 M open source developers who are the major drivers behind cloud computing, database, AI and machine learning development.
Shawn and Ben highlighted how Storj is creating the world’s largest cloud environment without building a single data centre. Their environment currently holds 150 PB of storage data and unlocks better privacy, security and availability of data.
Imad Sousou, Corporate Vice President and General Manager, Open Source Technology Center, at Intel delivered the next keynote: the Virtuous cycle of Open Source Systems. Imad provided insight about Clear Linux the Multi-OS safety critical project for Linux OS developed by Intel.
Imad touched on Internet as a Service (IaaS) performance metrics, how integrating Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) achieved a 7x performance improvement and Apache Spark achieved an 8x improvement. Imad also highlighted 4x improvements in R Benchmark and 2x improvements in TensorFlow.
In response to a question from Jim Zemlin around ensuring a safety first approach in these advanced systems, Imad closed on the importance of bringing hard work, improving documentation and creating more modules and components.
The third keynote was a conversation between Preethi Kasireddy, Founder & Chief Executive Officer, TruStory and Jim Zemlin, Executive Director, The Linux Foundation. Trustory is building solution to validate claims made online using the community network effect and token incentives - aka a truth layer for the web. TruStory is backed by Pantera Capital and Coinbase.
Jim asked Preethi her story about teaching herself how to code. She answered while she had an engineering degree, her journey was guided by self learning followed up by a boot camp. If you’re at the beginning of your coding journey she recommends freeCodeCamp for their bite size projects and most importantly hacking and practice.
The highlight of day two of the main conference was the boat cruise which took attendees through Coal Harbour. Day three came with a few surprises including an impromptu meeting with Linus Torvalds. You can find more about Adam’s conversation with Linus in an upcoming article.
The Linux Foundation has over 1,300 companies and tens of thousands of developers from around the world representing billions of dollars. The Linux Foundation focuses on creating innovation engines and was recently recognized by the SD Times in 2017 for fostering excellence in both the open source and general technology and business communities.
The future it seems, is bright and open.