Savoir-faire Linux is proud to Sponsor LinuxCon North America. We could not miss this edition happening in our playground, as the conference is coming for the first time in Toronto! Is it the ‘Drake effect’, bringing the buzz to The 6ix, or the combination of our very entrepreneurial tech community and pro-innovation government… In any case, I’m pausing my blog series on FinTech to invite everyone to attend this conference. Next week, we’ll make an important announcement jointly with The Linux Foundation.
Savoir-faire Linux is a proud member of The Linux Foundation since 2011. We contribute to Linux, now hosted at The Linux Foundation, home to its creator Linus Torvalds and to its lead maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman. It seems logical for a company using the Linux® trademark(1). Our team has made some significant contributions to the Linux kernel, which is one of our specialities, and the reason why many customers are trusting us. Our contributions range from networking (bridge, switching) to hardware acceleration and embedded boards. We made it as top 40 contributor to Linux 4.4!
Today, Linux is used in industrial equipment, home equipment, aerospace, supercomputers (98% of the 500 fastest computers on earth), smartphones (e.g. Android), most of the global stock exchanges such as NYSE and NASDAQ, and the Internet (95% of the top one million domains, a majority of VMs running in the cloud)… At Savoir-faire Linux, we help our customers leverage all the benefits of Free/Libre Open Source Software such as Linux.
The Linux Foundation is not limited to Linux though, as it embraces all the software stack (see picture). Its mission is “to provide the knowledge acquisition, services, and infrastructure needed to develop professional open source software”. Web developers will recognize projects such as Node.js, Big Data scientists will recognize the R Consortium, Cloud Engineers will recognize Cloud Foundry, Embedded Systems engineers will recognize Yocto and Tizen, Networking Engineers will recognize OPNFV and OpenDaylight, Blockchain developers will recognize Hyperledger…
The mission of the Linux Foundation goes beyond Linux
The Linux Foundation plays an important role in the Free/Libre Open Source Software ecosystem, but also in the ICT industry at large. It offers a trusted neutral ground for industry giants to participate in collaborative projects that will define and redefine the key technical standards that will shape the future of Internet and our increasingly digital societies. On the success of their mission depends our ability, as consumers and developers, to use technologies from different vendors that must interoperate while guaranteeing our security and privacy. To put it simply, standards allow a person with an Android to call another person with an iPhone. Without open standards, the Internet and its services would be idiotically ghetto-ized and useless. As a result, the cost of our most basic digital services would be unbearable. Entrepreneurship and innovation would be impossible without access to massive amounts of capital. Our most fondamental privacy and human rights would be at risk.
The Linux Foundation also fills an important gap: the maintenance of our digital infrastructure. Free/Libre Open Source Software is so ubiquitous that most people don’t even realize, or care, that it’s there. It seems that today’s developers download and submit code without caring about licensing terms (a 2013 study found that 85% of projects on GitHub had not defined a license). This carelessness has a cost, as we discovered two years ago when Heartbleed threatened more than 17% of the world’s secured Web servers (including banking and government). The industry suddenly realized with horror that OpenSSL, the key software securing the vast majority of Web servers in the world, was supported by a single full-time person.
Nadia Eghbal exposed the state of our digital infrastructure in her recent report sponsored by The Ford Foundation. I also want to give a shout out to my friends at Software Heritage, a project from INRIA (France) aiming to collect and preserve “the source code of all software that is publicly available”. Services like this one and The Linux Foundation are critically important to protect our digital heritage (Free/Libre Open Source Software), as well as to guarantee our freedoms (in particular the freedom to fork a project from an earlier version of the code).
Savoir-faire Linux has done a lot of work with Ring, featured on an article from The Linux Foundation. Our team has developed an identity management tool on the blockchain, which we are testing right now (and aiming to release early 2017). We’re also redeveloping the Windows client to work natively on all Microsoft platforms. The beta version gained significant improvement, such as better video quality and better handling on cellular networks. You should come by to meet us and find out more!
Don’t miss the conference this year. We’ll have special celebrations for the 25th anniversary of Linux. Most importantly, 175+ sessions and activities will feed the hearts and minds of the 2,000 most saavy Free/Libre Open Source Software Developers in the world. The schedule is the who’s who of the IT industry: Red Hat (Jim Whitehurst will also appear on The Street at 7:30am before his keynote), Google, Facebook, IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, Huawei, VMWare, Citrix, Intel, Paypal, GitLab… and of course we’ll be there! Join us at LinuxCon!
Meet the Savoir-faire Linux team at booth #12 to @JoinTheRing and to hear about career opportunities with us. Or you can just drop by to chat about Product Engineering, Embedded Systems, DevOps, Infrastructure, Ring, and Linux of course. We are working towards a free world!
In case you still need to register, use the discount code from ICTC.
Notes
(1) The registered trademark Linux® is used pursuant to a sublicense from LMI, the exclusive licensee of Linus Torvalds, owner of the mark on a world-wide basis.
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