Featured Speakers

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.

Margaret Heffernan is a renowned entrepreneur, CEO, professor, and author. Her books include Embracing Uncertainty, Wilful Blindness, and Beyond Measure.

She formerly led both UK and US companies including IPPA, Marlin Consulting, and iCast Corp.

Today, she mentors CEOs and senior executives in order to help them build resilient leadership strategies.

Margaret is an expert in business, leadership, and innovation and regularly contributes to both The Financial Times and The Huffington Post.

She is also among the highest watched TED speakers, with over 16 million views worldwide.

Furthermore, she is a Professor of Practice at the University of Bath and also Lead Faculty for Forward Institute’s Responsible Leadership Programme.

Daniel Stenberg is a Swedish Internet protocol expert and developer. He is most known for being the founder and lead developer of the curl project since almost thirty years; one of the world’s most widely used software components. He also participates in protocol development within the IETF and has authored books on curl, Open Source, HTTP/2, HTTP/3 and more. Daniel is president of the European Open Source Academy.

Stacey Kruczek is a Developer Relations leader and a founding Steering Committee member of the Developer Relations Foundation. With nearly a decade in DevRel, she has built and scaled technical communities from hands-on developers to senior technical executives. Stacey has led champion programs and developer-first marketing strategies that drive measurable business impact. She focuses on connecting technical audiences with business outcomes, ensuring the right support, insight, and engagement at every level. Passionate about the evolving role of DevRel, she advocates for its strategic value in modern organizations.

Ramón Roche is General Manager of the Dronecode Foundation, an open-source project under the Linux Foundation supporting drone and robotics development. He leads a global ecosystem behind technologies like PX4 and Pixhawk, and has over a decade of experience in open source. Ramón also organizes the PX4 Developer Summit, uniting hundreds of drone developers and innovators each year.

Kimberly McGuire is an independent roboticist and co-lead of the Aerial Robotics ROS interest group. She is a former robotics engineer and embedded software developer at Bitcraze and has done her PhD in Swarm Robotics at the Delft university of Technology. Kimberly is currently working on projects for simulation for robotics and is an independent contractor for various robotic companies.

An entertainer by nature and tech muse by trade, Daryl is a Seattle based developer advocate for Google’s Open Source Programs Office. Previously, he worked at Google on Cloud Information Experience, Cloud Podcasting team, as well as the Android messages team. Before that he worked at  Amazon on the Kindle for Android and Amazon Game studios teams. Daryl has been a tech professional since 2005 and he’s been performing improv since 2010 and finds those skills help his creative and learning processes for work. If you’ve gotten this far in the bio, make sure to ask him about his 4 years as a professional wrestler.

Madeleine is a senior executive with 30 years of experience in financial services technology across the Buy Side, Sell Side, and Exchanges.  She began her career at Accenture in the Financial Markets practice, executing large software implementations at multiple investment banks on Wall Street.  Madeleine then joined Goldman Sachs in 2000, where she led the development of the NYSE and Listed Trading Systems, working alongside 90 traders on multiple trading desks.  In 2006, Madeleine and her family relocated to Boston, where she joined Wellington Management Company in the Information Technology department.  Over 19 years of service at Wellington, she led technology-driven transformation throughout the investment process, trading, and operations.  As Partner and Chief Information Officer, Madeleine held multiple governance roles providing oversight across areas such as compensation, risk management, technology, and trade execution.  Madeleine currently serves as Chair of the Board for FINOS (Fintech Open Source Foundation) and the Treasurer of the Board for Boston City Singers.

Lingli obtained her Doctorate in Computer Application Technology from the Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences and joined China Mobile in 2009. She was a core member of the Novonet project which drives SDN/NFV strategy for China Mobile, and had been working on evaluation and introduction of data plane acceleration technology, running the Novonet Testing Lab for the SDN/NFV trial network for the company. She has been an active contributor and community leaders in various SDOs (ETSI, 3GPP and ITU-T) and open source communities (OPNFV, ONAP and LFN) to boost corresponding industrial collaboration. Currently, she is leading the network intelligent industry operation ecological construction team which drives the auto no mous network transformation with AI/ML enabled internal operation and external enrichment , as a director researcher at the artificial intelligence and intelligent operation center of China Mobile Research Institute.

Matthieu Lavergne is a Partner at Serena, where he leads pre-seed and seed investments in infrastructure software. He focuses on products designed for technical personas—developers, data teams, CTOs, and IT leaders—particularly in Open Source, DevOps, data infrastructure, and applied AI.

He is the lead author of the Commercial Open Source Software (COSS) Report, a widely referenced publication that analyzes the financial models and strategic dynamics of Open Source companies. His research informs founders, investors, and ecosystem platforms on how to build and scale COSS businesses.

I’m a Senior Developer Advocate in AI/ML at AWS. I previously worked as a Data/ML engineer and Developer Relations at Microsoft. I’m also a recurring speaker in the Underscore talk-show. I love engaging with developers about technologies, innovations and help them use our tools. My main focus are Artificial Intelligence and Cloud technologies but I also love astronomy, genetic engineering, outdoor activities and sharing a meal in good compagnie.

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.

Pallavi is an engineering leader driving the development of high-performance and scalable search and security technologies for the open-source OpenSearch Project. With deep expertise in performance, databases, analytics, distributed systems, and cloud services, she is passionate about advancing innovation in open source. Previously, Pallavi held key leadership roles at IBM, where she focused on database systems and played a pivotal role in the Spark Technology Center. She is a frequent speaker at technology conferences, sharing insights on the future of AI powered search, data, and open-source evolution. Pallavi holds both a Master’s and a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science.

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.

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.

Jim’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 new 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. His writing has appeared in Businessweek, Wired, and other top technology journals, 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.