Open Source Summit Europe

Linus was born on December 28, 1969, in Helsinki, Finland. He enrolled at the University of Helsinki in 1988, graduating with a master’s degree in computer science. His M.Sc. thesis was titled “Linux: A Portable Operating System” and was the genesis for what would become the most important collaborative software project in history. In August 1991, Linus announced that he was developing the Linux kernel, proclaiming, “it won’t be big and professional.” Never in the history of technology has someone been so wrong. In spite of his humble proclamation, Linux has become the world’s most pervasive operating system.

Today the Linux kernel forms the basis of the Linux operating system and powers billions of Android devices, powers ChromeOS, and has permeated almost every industry and form factor. Smartphones, TVs, appliances, cars, nuclear submarines, air traffic control, stock exchanges, and scientific research all run Linux. Linux also provides the underpinnings of the internet and the cloud computing industry. In 2005, citing a lack of free and open-source version control tools that met his needs for performance and scale, Linus famously created Git in only 10 days. Git is widely used in software development and for other version-control tasks such as configuration management and has become popular as an integral part of the DevOps culture.

In 2000, Linus was listed by Time Magazine as Number 17 in the Time 100: Most Important People of the Century. Again, in 2004, Time Magazine named him one of the Most Influential People in the world. He was honored in 2008 with the Millennium Technology Prize by the Technology Academy Finland, “in recognition of his creation of a new open-source operating system for computers leading to the widely used Linux kernel.” He is also the recipient of the 2014 IEEE Computer Society Computer Pioneer Award. A true tech titan, he was admitted to the Computer History Museum Hall of Fellows, joining the ranks of the tech elite including Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, Tim Berners-Lee, Gordon Moore, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Steve Wozniak, and others. Torvalds remains the ultimate authority on what new code is incorporated into the standard Linux kernel.

Emily Fox is a DevOps enthusiast, security unicorn, and advocate for Women in Technology. She promotes the cross-pollination of development and security practices. She has worked in security for over 14 years to drive a cultural change where security is unobstructive, natural, and accessible to everyone. Her technical interests include containerization, least privilege, automation, and promoting women in technology. She holds a BS in Information Systems and an MS in cybersecurity. Serving as chair on the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s (CNCF) Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) and co-chair for KubeCon+CloudNativeCon China 2021, Europe 2022, North America 2022, Europe 2023, and CloudNativeSecurityCon 2023, she is involved in a variety of open source communities and activities.

Dirk is the Head of the Open Source Program Officer at Verizon. Prior to that, Dirk was VMware’s Chief Open Source Officer, where he lead the company’s Open Source Program Office, directing the efforts and strategy around use of and contribution to open-source projects and driving common values and processes across the company for VMware’s interaction with the open-source communities. Before joining VMware, Dirk spent almost 15 years as Intel’s Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist. Before that, among other roles, he worked as Chief Technology Officer of SuSE and Unix Architect of Deutsche Bank.

Dirk has been an active developer and contributor in several dozen open source projects since the early 1990s, today most of his work is on the Subsurface dive log project and many of the related open source projects around that. Dirk holds a degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Würzburg, Germany. He lives in Portland, OR.

Omar Mohsine is a member of the Office of the United Nations Special Envoy on Technology. He additionally leads the open source team within the UN Office of Information and Communication Technologies and serves as the co-chair of the UN Open Source Community of Practice. In this role, Omar is the primary organizer of the annual “OSPOs for Good” conference held at UN headquarters.

With over 15 years of experience working in various capacities across different continents, Omar has spearheaded numerous projects for the UN, focusing on public-private partnerships and innovation management. He has also designed UN open source competitions aimed at achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Omar is deeply committed to building new partnerships with technology stakeholders to support the United Nations’ mandate.

Alice is part of the Android Rust team at Google, where she works on introducing the Rust programming language to the Linux Kernel. Alice has worked with Rust since 2015 and is also a core maintainer of Tokio, an asynchronous runtime for Rust. She lives in Denmark.

I’m a digital transformation expert with a deep passion for technology and economics, I have dedicated my career to harnessing these fields as catalysts for social and political change. I firmly believe that technology is not only an innovative tool, but an essential transformative force in shaping a more progressive and equal society.

I worked for Canonical, Deutsche Telekom and from 2018 until end of 2022 held the position of Chief Technology Officer at the Italian Government in the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, where I’ve focused on integrating technological advancements into wider government strategies, particularly in digital identity, cybersecurity, and cloud technologies.

Today I work for the European Commission, where I am at the forefront of policy development for technology of trust services, and the European Digital Identity Wallet, viewing these innovations not just as technological milestones but as catalysts for policy and societal advancement.

Jonathan Corbet is the kernel documentation maintainer, co-founder of LWN.net (and the author of its Kernel Page), a member of the Linux Foundation’s Technical Advisory Board, and the lead author of Linux Device Drivers, Third Edition. He lives in Boulder, Colorado, USA.

Abhishek Arya is the Director of Engineering for Google’s Open Source and Supply Chain Security teams. He has been a key contributor to the OpenSSF since its inception, serving on the technical advisory board and leading technical initiatives that have advanced the security of the open source ecosystem. His leadership has led to the creation of industry-standard security frameworks and tools: SLSA, fortifying software supply chains; Sigstore, ensuring software integrity with robust signatures; Scorecards, providing critical security health metrics; and OSV-Schema, standardizing vulnerability information for enhanced precision and automation. Prior to this, he was a founding member of the Google Chrome Security team and built OSS-Fuzz, a massive-scale automated fuzzing infrastructure that secures Google and the broader open source ecosystem.

Abhishek is a valued voice in open source security, providing guidance to governments and organizations globally. He has contributed to shaping policies through his involvement in initiatives like the White House OSS security summits, NIST/NSF/OMB U.S. OSS Security workshop and serving on the NSF review panel. His thought leadership is evident in his contributions to numerous whitepapers, including the CISA JCDC guidance on securing open source software in OT environments.

Joined Huawei in 2011 and is now a senior expert in ICT operating systems. Since 2020, he has served as the Chairman of the openEuler Technical Committee and is responsible for the overall technical direction management of the openEuler Community.

Anna-Maria Behnsen works as a Linux Kernel Developer at Linutronix GmbH. At Linutronix, she started to work with the kernel as a member of the Real-Time Linux Team and is currently working at timer infrastructure related topics.

Derek Straka is a Director of Product Management at Wind River where he focuses on product strategy, product management, commercial partnerships, and industry solutions for Wind River’s Linux portfolio. He joined Wind River from McKinsey and Company where we most recently served as an Associate Partner and Senior Principal Engineer leading technology delivery and product strategy programs for Fortune 100 companies in healthcare. Before McKinsey, he served 12+ years in a variety of engineering leadership roles designing, building, and maintaining embedded Linux products in health care and defense. He is also passionate about open-source software serving as a Yocto maintainer for various meta layers including meta-python.

Carl Meadows is the Director of Product for Amazon OpenSearch Service and the OpenSearch Project

Dan is a member of the Linux core kernel architecture team at Intel. Generally interested in storage and memory technology enabling he has been involved in Linux kernel support for persistent, high bandwidth, and CXL (Compute Express Link) attached memory. Most recently he is involved in the effort to build device driver infrastructure for confidential computing (Trusted I/O). Dan has held a seat on the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board since 2016, and in 2022 he was elected as chair. He lives in Oregon with his wife and three children. When family and job commitments permit, he and his wife teach ballroom dance classes, a hobby they started in college.

I’m the tech lead for the kernel file system team at Meta, I focus on btrfs, Fuse, and other file system related topics.

Daniela Barbosa serves as General Manager, Blockchain and Identity, at the Linux Foundation and Executive Director of Hyperledger Foundation. She has 20+ years of enterprise technology experience, including four years as Hyperledger Foundation’s VP of Worldwide Alliances. Daniela started her career at Dow Jones working with global brands to architect and deliver enterprise systems and semantic web solutions. She also helped advance the Web 2.0 concepts of digital identity and data portability.

Ryan Waite leads open-source strategy for Microsoft as well as the Azure Open-Source Incubations team. He’s run engineering teams focused on high performance computing, big data analytics, fraud detection, and mobile computing at Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and Cray, the Supercomputing Company. A proponent of open-source software, Ryan is focused on how open-source collaboration enables all of us to do more together than we can alone.

Arpit Joshipura is an executive leader and open source software evangelist across carriers, cloud and enterprise IT – spanning networking, orchestrations, operating systems, security, AI, edge, hardware and silicon. He was recently voted among the Top 5 Movers and Shakers in the Telecom Industry. At the Linux Foundation, Arpit leads open source networking, orchestration & edge/IOT, including LF Networking projects (ONAP, OPNFV, ODL, FDIO, OvS, DPDK, OpenSwitch, Akraino/Edge/IOT, etc.) as well as major industry disruptions including VNFs to CNFs (Cloud Native Network functions), 5G, AI, etc.

Arpit brings 30 years of networking expertise and vision to The Linux Foundation, with both technical depth and business breadth. He has orchestrated and led major industry disruptions across enterprises, carriers, and cloud architectures, including IP, broadband, optical, mobile, routing, switching, L4-7, cloud, disaggregation, SDN/NFV, and open networking, and has been an early evangelist for open source. Arpit has served in CMO, VP, and Engineering roles within both startups and larger enterprises.

Gabriele is an open source technologist at heart. He spent over 15 years building developer ecosystems to deliver value through open source across Europe and the US. He thrives on driving innovation both contributing to open source communities and joining commercial open source ventures, whether it’s for an early stage tech startup, a Fortune 500 firm or a non profit foundation. He has recently won the Tech Leadership Award at FinTech Futures USA Banking Tech Awards.

As Executive Director Gabriele grew the Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS) from the ground up, with the vision of creating a trusted arena for the global financial services industry to innovate faster, leveraging open source as a model of collaboration. He then led FINOS to join the Linux Foundation umbrella to accelerate growth, ensure long term sustainability of efforts and reduce fragmentation in the Foundation’s ecosystem. In 2022, he took on a dual role as General Manager of the newly launched Linux Foundation Europe, which was created to foster regional open collaborations in the European continent and expand the global platform of the Linux Foundation.

Gabriele holds a Master in Computer Engineering, is a Committer for the Apache Software Foundation and advises open source startups. He’s a passionate soccer fan, reggae music connoisseur and special needs dad and advocate wannabe.

Nandini Ramani, Vice President at Amazon Web Services (AWS), leads the cloud operation services for millions of AWS customers that rely on these critical services for valuable insights into the performance, behavior, and health of their systems supporting the vital role in maintaining their reliability and quality in addition to the effectiveness of generative AI systems. This portfolio of services includes Amazon CloudWatch, which is used to monitor more than 11 quadrillion (or 11,000 trillion) metric observations, ingests more than exabytes of logs, and when combined with AWS EventBridge, triggers more than 32 trilllion events per month. CloudWatch also sends 400 billion OpenTelemetry metric updates per week. Both help customers remediate issues at unprecedented scale. Nandini has been breaking down the barriers that lead to pioneering product visions, design, development, and go-to-market strategies for global organizations like Twitter, Oracle, and industry transforming startups. An innovator with 17 patents, she has been recognized as one of the most powerful female engineers by Business Insider, and is listed in the Hall of Femme honoring female luminaries. Her combination of business acumen and deep technical knowledge makes her a sought after expert for her perspectives on industry shaping technologies. As a staunch advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion she is also been breaking down the barriers that keep women and under-represented populations from senior leadership positions sharing her insights as featured speaker at events such as Women Who Code, and WomenTech and is deeply commitment to helping support STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) education for girls.

Bryan Che is Chief Strategy Officer at Huawei. There, he leads Huawei’s vision and strategy across its overall businesses and portfolio, which spans mobile and consumer electronics, telecommunications, and cloud and AI.

Bryan has tremendous experience building new enterprise businesses and open source technologies. In the open source community, Bryan serves as a board director across various key organizations, including Eclipse Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), and Open 3D Foundation (O3DF). As an American expat employed in China who has traveled more than 3 million miles to over 40 countries, Bryan has worked extensively with many customers and partners around the world.

Bryan graduated with his Bachelors and Masters degrees in computer science from MIT.

Dr. Leemon Baird is the Co-founder and Chief Scientist at Hashgraph. The inventor of the organization’s namesake, the distributed hashgraph consensus algorithm, Leemon co-founded the Hedera network with Mance Harmon. He has two decades of technology and start-up experience, and served as Professor of Computer Science at the US Air Force Academy, as well as holding senior scientist roles in several labs. Leemon received his PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University and has multiple patents and publications in peer-reviewed journals. He has spoken at conferences in computer security, machine learning and mathematics.