Open Source Summit North America

Brian Chambers is responsible for technology strategy at Chick-fil-A in Atlanta, GA. He is responsible for Chick-fil-A’s strategy and execution in rolling out Kubernetes clusters to the Edge in each of its 2,000+ restaurants to enable Internet of Things (IOT) and other applications. Brian has spoken at several QConNY conferences and at DevNexus, which is an Atlanta-based technology conference.

Michael Henry is a distinguished technology leader with extensive experience bridging Department of Defense requirements through the adaptation and implementation of free and open source solutions (FOSS). As the Chief of Information Technology for the Secretariat of the Air Force, Studies and Analysis, he provides strategic vision and technical leadership that shapes the future of Air Force information systems.

As the Crossfunctional Integration Lead of the Applications Category for the Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System, Michael has been instrumental in developing next-generation command and control capabilities through open source integration. His leadership has enabled seamless data flow across previously siloed systems, significantly enhancing the military’s ability to execute Joint All-Domain Command and Control operations.

Michael is the co-founder and creator of YodaBox, which has evolved to become the edge cloud node of record which is now known as EdgeOps at Platform One, the Air Force’s DevSecOps Platform. This groundbreaking technology has revolutionized edge computing capabilities for the Department of Defense, enabling secure deployment of mission-critical applications in highly contested environments.

A lifelong hacker and maker at heart, Michael brings his passion for innovation to everything he does. Outside his professional role, he pursues ambitious technical projects including making furniture, building robots, building race cars, and constructing experimental aircraft—applying the same creative problem-solving approach that has defined his government service. He actively experiments with various radio technologies and satellite communications, pushing the boundaries of connectivity in diverse environments all through automation.

His impact on national infrastructure extends beyond defense systems. In 2013, he developed the groundbreaking arrival-departure window for the Federal Aviation Administration, which mitigated midair collisions in terminal areas at major airports throughout the United States National Airspace System (NAS). These critical safety measures have been codified as regulation in the air traffic control procedures 7110.65 and continue to protect millions of travelers daily in the world’s busiest airports.

Throughout his career, Michael has championed the adoption of Linux-based systems across critical defense infrastructure, successfully developing statements of work that balance security requirements with the benefits of open source collaboration. As a strong believer in all things automation through open source, he advocates that government should be the largest contributor to open source technologies—not just a consumer. His expertise in navigating complex procurement regulations has enabled numerous defense projects to leverage community-driven innovation while maintaining the highest standards of security and compliance.

At the Open Source Summit North America 2025, Michael will share insights on creating effective edge clouds that align with both defense and commercial retail operations alike. By adopting open source principles, the government and open source communities can work together to enhance national security capabilities to build a stronger and more resilient future.

Positioned in the Office of the CTO at Block (formerly Square), Manik Surtani is the Open Source lead and is responsible for Block’s open source strategy and culture, and Block’s Open Source Programs Office (OSPO). 

His long tenure at Block has seen him wear many hats, including VP of Platform Engineering for CashApp (one of Block’s business units), leading strategic initiatives such as monolith decomposition, and as a staff IC responsible for highly fault tolerant distributed payments infrastructure. Prior to Block, Manik was a staff IC at Red Hat, was the creator and lead engineer of Infinispan.org (which is today a multi-billion dollar product line for Red Hat). He was also an early engineer on JBoss (an open source Java EE application server) which later got acquired by Red Hat. 

He has a background in distributed and fault tolerant systems, data grids, networking and load balancing, and performance tuning of JVMs, and is a strong proponent of open source development methodologies, ethos, and collaborative processes. He has been involved in open source since his first forays into computing, ever since compiling Slackware Linux in the early 1990s, with contributions to Linux, MySQL, PHP, OpenJDK, and many popular Java libraries you probably still use today. 

In addition to leading open source, Manik spends a lot of time thinking about the intersection between AI and open source, and how open source can create the right balance between transparency, safety, and velocity for the explosive growth of AI, particularly with Goose, Block’s new open source agent framework.

Phil is the Head of Ericsson Software Technology (EST), where he leads a passionate group of engineers developing open source software across a wide range of projects including Linux, OpenStack, Kubernetes, and ONAP among many others. 

Prior to Ericsson, Phil was the V.P. of Operations for the Networking Projects at the Linux Foundation including ORAN, ONAP, OpenDaylight, and Anuket.  In that role, Phil led a team of technical staff who oversaw community software development based on DevOps and open source best practices.  Prior to the Linux Foundation, Phil spent 12 years with Hewlett Packard working on Linux and Open Source starting in 2001.  There, Phil formed and led HP’s Open Source Program Office responsible for open source strategy, tools, processes, and investments as HP transitioned from Unix to Linux in the Enterprise Server market.

Jessica Forrester is a Distinguished Engineer and the Chief Architect for AI Catalyst Engineering, focusing on adoption of new technologies into the Red Hat AI product portfolio. She was an early contributor to Red Hat OpenShift, Kubernetes, and its related communities. She has led many cross-functional engineering teams at Red Hat across AI, hybrid cloud services, and Kubernetes / OpenShift Container Platform.

Ion Stoica is a Professor in the EECS Department and holds the Xu Bao Chancellor Chair at the University of California at Berkeley, the Director of Sky Computing Lab, and the Executive Chairman of Databricks and Anyscale. He is currently doing research on AI systems and cloud computing, and his work includes numerous open-source projects such as SkyPilot, vLLM, ChatBot Arena , Ray and Apache Spark. He is a Member of National Academy of Engineering, an Honorary Member of the Romanian Academy and an ACM Fellow. He also co-founded three companies, Anyscale (2019), Databricks (2013) and Conviva (2006)

Josh Aas founded Internet Security Research Group (ISRG), the non-profit entity behind the Let’s Encrypt certificate authority, in 2013. He has been ISRG’s Executive Director and chair of the corporate board since it was created. He worked on Gecko and Firefox as part of Mozilla’s platform engineering group for many years, and then worked for Mozilla as a senior strategist. Follow him on Twitter at @0xjosh.

Daniel Borkmann co-created eBPF and is a kernel developer at Isovalent working on eBPF, the Linux kernel and Cilium. He is a long-term Linux kernel core contributor in the eBPF and networking subsystem for over a decade and co-maintains eBPF and XDP.

In his spare time, he loves to ski, mountain bike, travel and generally enjoying the outdoors.

Christopher Robinson (aka CRob) is the Chief Security Architect for the Open Source Security Foundation. With over 25 years of Enterprise-class engineering, architectural, operational and leadership experience, CRob has worked at several Fortune 500 companies with experience in the Financial, Medical, Legal, and Manufacturing verticals, and spent 6 years helping lead the Red Hat Product Security team as their Program Architect.

Eddie Knight is a Software and Cloud Engineer with a background in banking technology. When he isn’t playing with his 2-year-old son, he combines his passion and job duties by working to improve the security of open source software.

Eddie helps lead CNCF’s Security Technical Advisory Group, the FINOS Technical Oversight Committee, the OpenSSF Security Baseline, and the FINOS Common Cloud Controls project.

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.