Keynote: Project, Process, Product(ion) - Dirk Hohndel, VP, Chief Open Source Officer, VMware
Channel: The Linux Foundation
Date: 28/02/2017

Keynote: Project, Process, Product(ion) - Dirk Hohndel, VP, Chief Open Source Officer, VMware

We are more than 25 years into a revolution. It feels almost strained to still call it that. Open source is the new normal. It is a key part of how technology companies work today. But with all the excitement about the 40+ million projects on GitHub and all the focus on Linux and OpenStack and some of the other cornerstone projects, one question that at times seems to get too little attention is the one about the process that gets a project into production. Few people still think that open source software simply is something “free” (as in dollars) that they can run their production workloads on. But what does that actually mean? So, you have this open source project, it does exactly (or almost exactly) what you need for your production environment, what happens now? Or you run an open source project and want take it to the point where it is production-ready.

About Dirk Hohndel
Dirk is VMware’s Chief Open Source Officer, leading the company’s open source efforts and strategy 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, guiding Intel’s engagements in open source. 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 Linux and open source since the early 1990s. He was one of the early Linux kernel developers and has contributed to several dozen open source projects over the years. Dirk holds a Diploma in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Würzburg, Germany. He lives in Portland, OR.