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.

Sophia Yang is the Head of Developer Relations at Mistral AI, where she leads developer education, developer ecosystem partnerships, and community engagement. She is passionate about the AI community and the open-source community, and she is committed to empower community growth and learning.

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.

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

David is a kernel engineer at Meta, working primarly on the CPU scheduler and BPF. He, along with coworkers at Meta, maintain the sched_ext pluggable scheduling framework. In his free time David likes to stargaze, brew (and drink) beer, and optimize gaming on Linux.

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.

Jim Zemlin’s career spans three of the largest technology trends to rise over the last decade: mobile computing, cloud computing, and open source software. Today, as executive director of The Linux Foundation, he uses this experience to accelerate innovation in technology through the use of open source and Linux.

At The Linux Foundation, Jim works with the world’s largest technology companies, including IBM, Intel, Google, Samsung, Qualcomm, and others to help define the future of computing on the server, in the cloud, and on a variety of mobile computing devices. His work at the vendor-neutral Linux Foundation gives him a unique and aggregate perspective on the global technology industry.

Jim has been recognized for his insights on the changing economics of the technology industry, and he is a regular keynote speaker at industry events. He advises a variety of startups, including Splashtop, and sits on the boards of the Global Economic Symposium, Open Source For America, and Chinese Open Source Promotion Union.