The Linux Foundation Member Summit

Research has shown that diversity is not just a buzzword but a critical factor that significantly impacts the effectiveness and success of open-source communities. Building an inclusive environment requires more than recognizing the importance of diversity; it demands concrete actions, tangible outcomes, and a genuine commitment to creating a welcoming space for all contributors. This talk draws from an in-depth study of the GNOME Project's diversity and inclusion strategies, examining the opportunities and challenges in fostering inclusiveness. By exploring these experiences, the aim of this talk is to provide actionable recommendations for improving diversity efforts. While some open-source projects have implemented strategies to create a diverse and inclusive environment, they often struggle to achieve impactful outcomes. How can we move beyond setting diversity and inclusion strategies to achieve measurable results? Are policies and initiatives enough to foster true inclusiveness? In this talk, I will share recommended strategies to foster contributions from diverse groups.

Many open source communities struggle to achieve strong community participation from Asia despite the region representing 60% of the entire world population. Although there are numerous participants from India and China, the number is disproportionately low when compared with the US and Europe. An obvious reason could be time zones, however, as a Japanese woman who grew up and worked in Japan, and as a working mother, it seems probable this could also be explained by culture and other social barriers like language. Although we appreciate the benefit of diversity, it remains challenging to have an optimally balanced community. Do we compromise by having some people in each region to convince ourselves that we’ve achieved a target? Or do we look for ways to overcome the barriers enabling real benefit? Many DEI categories are grouped together which removes our ability to identify areas needing improvement. Asia consists of 40 countries with different culture, and Asians who grew up in the US have different views. Diversity is defined by a combination of multiple factors. Let’s look at our goals more closely and see what communities can actually do to bring real value.

Africa still is the forgotten continent, even if all the means are there to have African talent participating in the world wide Open Source movement. Governments are using proprietary software, implemented by expensive foreign consultants, because of the lack of local people that have received the proper education. The Living Open Source Foundation aims at changing that by empowering individuals through training in Open Source techniques and attitude. In this session you will learn how the Living Open Source Foundation has been offering education to talent in different African countries since 2019. On that journey, different problems were encountered and lessons were learned. Just bringing education is not enough, the educated talent needs to have access to jobs in local economies once educated and certified. That is why Living Open Source Foundation focusses on enabling local economies by using Open Source software. In this session you'll learn how we work, and how you can participate in bringing Open Source to Africa.

Many popular open source projects are owned and driven by corporations, and in today's difficult economic climate, those companies are under increasing pressure to protect their businesses or show stronger returns for investors.. One response to this pressure has been the relicensing of popular open source projects to more restrictive licenses. In some cases, this relicensing has resulted in a hard fork of the original project. Both the relicensing and the resulting fork create turmoil for the users of that project and the community of contributors, and this impact can have a ripple effect throughout the ecosystem. In this session, we’ll discuss the following topics using a data-driven approach: dynamics around relicensing that results in such hard forks; examples of several forks along with the impact on the communities; and thoughts about what this means for the future of open source. The audience will walk away with an appreciation of why relicensing results in hostile forks and how to think about this issue when selecting which open source projects to use.

It's been about 20 years since cloud computing in its modern form debuted. Open source has been around longer but that's also about the point when open source matured beyond being a cheaper Unix replacement to being the source of development and technology innovation that it has become. There are important lessons in those 20 years. Lessons about standardization. Lessons in flexibility. Lessons in cooperation. Lessons in developing ecosystems. Lessons in what not to do. Indeed, for all the success of Linux, the cloud has arguably been the great showcase for open source success over the past couple of decades. As a result, it's useful to think about the lessons there and how they apply to AI and other important areas of innovation going forward.

Synopsys reports that 95% of codebases contain open source, and of those codebases, 75% of the code is open source. Viability; as a metrics model in the CHAOSS community; provides tools to inform strategic business decisions about open source use and investment. We evaluate open source at milestones such as when initial decision to use/or not use, or at points in time where investment through contribution ensures ongoing security and sustainability. Viability metrics can identify key moments when open source projects require focus and investment. Viability also provides measures for tracking impact of this focus and investment, both for OSS and for internal goals tracking. With metrics, we can make decisions about when it’s the right time to contribute back to communities that have too little support, and when to subsidize the work that our critical projects depend on. Join Dr. Dawn Foster (CHAOSS), Matt Germonprez (University of Nebraska at Omaha/CHAOSS), Emma Irwin (Microsoft), and Gary White (Verizon), as they discuss the approach, complications, failures, and successes of measuring viability and de-risking applications.

Open Source options have had a difficult time gaining visibility and uptake by game developers, particularly when compared to commercial options. The talk will discuss the various tools and options available to game developers, challenges faced by open source in gaining adoption, and some ideas on how visibility and viability of options can be improved. It is important that open source tooling owners work together to raise visibility across the game development industry.