Introduction
Allison Randal is a computer scientist and open source strategist. She is a board member at the Open Source Initiative, board member at the OpenStack Foundation, board member at the Perl Foundation, and co-founder of the FLOSS Foundations group for open source leaders. At various points in the past she has served as a board member of the Python Software Foundation, chairman of the Parrot Foundation, chief architect of the Parrot virtual machine, Open Source Evangelist at O’Reilly Media, conference chair of OSCON, Technical Architect of Ubuntu, Open Source Advisor at Canonical, Distinguished Technologist and Open Source Strategist at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Distinguished Engineer at SUSE. She collaborates in the Debian and OpenStack projects, and is currently taking a mid-career research sabbatical at the University of Cambridge.
About the event
The early days of open source were all about creating an approachable on-ramp to software freedom. We focused strongly on the practical benefits of free software, and refined the message hoping to help the business sector better understand what we'd been saying since the early 1980s. We succeeded to such an extent that modern open source is characterized by active use, participation, and contribution from the largest Fortune 50 tech giants to the smallest Silicon Valley startups, and everything in between. Success at our first goal doesn't mean we're done, it only means we're due for the next phase of open source. The potential of what we might accomplish, using the resources of the entire tech industry, is both inspiring and daunting. This talk explores the past, present, and future of open source, and its impact on technology innovation in the industry today.