Here are five of the news items that broke at the 2022 Linux Foundation Open Source Summit Europe, which convened +2,000 technologists in Dublin this September:
- Meta hands over PyTorch. Renewed focus on AI/ML from the open source community is underway
- The launch of Linux Foundation Europe
- Rust making Its way into the Linux Kernel
- The Linux Foundation’s effort to support multi purpose crypto wallets
- Potentially “vastly improved performance” via io_uring for submitting operations and collecting results without needing time-expensive Linux kernel calls
By sponsoring the summit, MLH observed first-hand how these innovations rely on the open source community receiving bright, fresh, diverse contributors of myriad backgrounds. Each of these stories touch on the work that Major League Hacking (MLH) has been doing for the past decade. Many attendees enthusiastically stormed the MLH booth explaining that they got their start in software engineering thanks to encouragement they received at MLH hackathons.
They are among the hundreds of thousands of emerging technologists from campuses across the world whom MLH teaches about open source as well as how to participate in and run hackathons.
Given MLH’s role in shepherding early open source talent, the Linux Foundation selected MLH’s Co-founder and CEO, Swift, to speak about the next generation of contributors. Due to overwhelming interest, Swift’s session about how to on-ramp developers into the ecosystem was standing-room-only. Attendees resonated with Swift’s message about the lack of capacity of the open source community as it is constituted today to address the issues that need to be dealt with to maintain the open source projects upon which we all rely.
Surprisingly, skeptics were won over by what Swift had to say. News of the involvement of corporations in open source is often viewed with suspicion. However, there was consensus that bringing new developers into open source merited the support of corporate sponsors with good will being expressed for the contributions of Meta, AWS, G-Research, and other visionary MLH Fellowship sponsoring partners. Fortune 1000 executives as well as new entrants to open source were equally interested in learning how to support the MLH Fellowship, which is a way for highly-deserving new developers to begin their careers by contributing to the open source ecosystem.
A number of talks focused on broadening and diversifying who contributes to open source, work that echoed the MLH Fellowship’s own program values and goals to bring diverse perspectives to important open source work, including those of underrepresented groups in tech.
Through the sponsorship of MLH Fellows, corporate OSPOs are making progress, not only on becoming more inclusive, but on maturing important OSS initiatives. The Linux Foundation’s Executive Director, Jim Zemlin, celebrated Meta’s transition of PyTorch to the Foundation. MLH Fellows contributed directly to PyTorch as part of Meta’s sponsorship of the MLH Fellowship. See an MLH Fellow doing a show-and-tell about it!
Open Source Summit Europe is an important way for the open source community to meet, to learn about each other, and begin to include new voices. MLHers had a ton of fun in Dublin and would like to thank all those who attended our session and happy hour! It was great hearing from our customers and seeing firsthand how they experience working with MLH. Join us at All Things Open in Raleigh, North Carolina. Speak about getting your company involved in all that MLH has to offer.