The Linux Foundation Member Summit 2025

These informal sessions offer a collaborative space for open discussions—no slides, no recordings, just meaningful conversations with like-minded professionals.

These informal sessions offer a collaborative space for open discussions—no slides, no recordings, just meaningful conversations with like-minded professionals.

These informal sessions offer a collaborative space for open discussions—no slides, no recordings, just meaningful conversations with like-minded professionals.

These informal sessions offer a collaborative space for open discussions—no slides, no recordings, just meaningful conversations with like-minded professionals.

These informal sessions offer a collaborative space for open discussions—no slides, no recordings, just meaningful conversations with like-minded professionals.

These informal sessions offer a collaborative space for open discussions—no slides, no recordings, just meaningful conversations with like-minded professionals.

Open source software is at the heart of innovation, but its complexity often slows developer adoption, limiting impact. Developers need more than great technology—they need intuitive, hands-on experiences that empower them to truly engage.

Sean Lauer, VP of Marketing & Product, will share insights from The State of Developer Adoption 2025, a research report commissioned by Instruqt and conducted by Developer Marketing Alliance, exploring trends in developer enablement. Learn how leaders plan to turn complexity into opportunity—empowering developers, aligning goals, and fostering ecosystems that drive open source innovation.

Key takeaways for attendees:
• Strategic insights into overcoming adoption challenges and engaging developers with open source tools
• How to align open source project goals with organizational enablement strategies for long-term impact
• Emerging trends in developer engagement and the future of open source adoption

This session will examine the importance of developing a strategy for maintenance, growth and development for OSS projects and foundations, and discuss the challenges in doing so. It will consider how to plan strategy development, how to ensure it is inclusive of the community and relevant stakeholders, how to ensure that key organisational and external aspects are considered, and how to track progress meaningfully towards success.

AI is everywhere now whether we like it or not. People want to use it in the workplace, but there are concerns about using this technology. Arm has established an AI Office (AIO) to give employees guidance on how they can use AI in their working lives as the world’s understandings evolve over license and copyright questions. As we stand on the brink of this transformative change, we must ask ourselves: are we ready to embrace the future and unlock the full potential of AI in our professional lives?

Presented by: Dawn Foster, CHAOSS
Additional author/researcher: Matt Germonprez, University of Nebraska Omaha

Over the past few years, there has been an increase in hard forks that have been the result of corporate decisions made regarding OSS project structures. These so-called rug pulls from companies driving OSS projects can impact contribution and user dynamics, resulting in hard forks. This talk and our research is motivated by the growing trend of relicensing events and other structural changes to OSS projects that are resulting in hard forks originating from contributors and users of the original project.

We’ll explore the impact that these rug pulls have on the trajectories of the projects, individuals, and organizations involved through case studies of 3 relicensed projects and their resultant hard forks. We’ve found that hard forks resulting from relicensing events tend to have more organizational diversity than the original projects, especially when the forks are created under a foundation, rather than by a single company. The talk will dive into the data and implications to help the audience understand the consequences of relicensing both for the company driving the relicense and the risks of disruption to individuals and organizations contributing to and using the projects.

Unless your project explicitly becomes a Certification Numbering Authority (CNA), it is possible for almost anyone else to create a random CVE entry against your project. With the upcoming responsibility that projects have due to laws like the CRA in Europe, it is getting more and more important for all open source projects to handle the tracking of security bugs and identifiers themselves, instead of assuming others will do it for them.

cve.org now allows all open source projects to be their own CNA, so there is no excuse not to take ownership of this for your project. Groups like curl, the Linux Kernel, Kubernetes, and Python have all done this already, and OpenSSF has produced information explaining how you too can do it.

This talk will go into why you want to become a CNA, the steps involved, and tips learned from the Linux kernel CVE team in handling their 8 CVEs issued a day, alone with other information about other country's numbering authorities which will be coming online in the next few years.

The EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) has been adopted, and the new obligations for manufacturers and open source software stewards will come into effect in 2026 and 2027. This joint session between Linux Foundation Europe, LF Research, and the OpenSSF will describe how the Linux Foundation is seizing the opportunity for an improved state of the union in cybersecurity that the CRA offers, and is steering necessary adaptations for the benefit of our members, projects, and contributors.

Specifically, this session will describe CRA implementation progress, commencing with the Linux Foundation's stewards and manufacturers workshop in December 2024, new working groups at the OpenSSF, and research projects, to provide guidance and raise awareness within our ecosystem. It will end with an interactive panel discussion where questions about the impact of the CRA on our collaborative development efforts will be addressed.

Universities are important sources of talent and innovation for open source projects. Successful open source projects originating from academic researchers – including Ceph and Jupyter – highlight the benefits to be gained from university-based open source projects. However, much of the open source work occurring in academic settings are siloed, and potential innovations that could benefit industry and society at large are lost as funding cycles end and research stalls. This session aims to answer the question of how to create mutually beneficial relationships between academia and open source. It will include introductory discussion by experts to provide insights for improving collaborations between open source, industry and universities, and how organizations like the Linux Foundation can play a part. The discussion will ask participants to consider questions such as: how can universities improve training for the next generation of open source leaders; how can communities better on-board students and researchers looking to contribute to their projects; and how can industry partners and foundations/fiscal sponsors help the development of academic open source ecosystems?

The Cyber Resiliency Act was passed into EU law in 2024, and the clock is ticking. Manufacturers of products with digital elements must begin reporting in 2 years, with compliance enforceable in 3 years. This talk will share Dell’s initial compliance approach, which includes analyzation of requirements and intent into actionable items to drive product teams to compliance and roadmap development efforts. The presenters will share how Dell’s participation in OpenSSF accelerates our internal CRA compliance journey, as well as creates opportunities for Dell to collaborate with others in the industry to improve OSS security of the upstream OSS we all share.

Undertaking effective data governance in AI training has become a central issue among Open Source AI advocates due to the complex nature and diversification of shared data resources. To have effective governance requires navigating a matrix of rules and ethical principles to protect copyright, privacy and other data-related rights. Effective data governance must also consider the impact on fundamental rights, ensuring that equitable and inclusive standards are maintained within AI ecosystems and the oversight of such systems.

In this talk I will discuss the role of data governance and data sharing as they relate to Open Source AI development. Specific approaches and strategies will be shared that can be undertaken both by Open Source AI developers and by other stakeholders to increase the amount of data that is properly governed and available for use in Open Source AI development.

The U.S. is facing a critical talent shortage, with companies struggling to hire the best international professionals due to restrictive visa policies and the uncertainty of the H-1B lottery. Open Avenues Foundation has developed a groundbreaking solution that not only provides companies with an alternative pathway to hire top foreign talent but also invests in the future of the U.S. workforce.

Through its national Fellowship program model, Open Avenues partners with tech and scientific companies by obtaining a cap-exempt H-1B visa for the company’s key foreign national personnel who has no other option to work in the United States, without the requirement to win the H-1B lottery. Open Avenues then employes the highly skilled foreign professional for five-hours per week to train U.S. college students in the foreign national’s STEM profession. Once the foreign national has an approved part-time cap-exempt H-1B with Open Avenues, the law permits the tech or science company to immediately file its own concurrent cap-exempt H-1B for the same person, also without needing to win the H-1B lottery. This program provides international talent in the Fellowship to work for high-growth companies and contribute to the U.S. economy while concurrently preparing the next generation of American workers with the skills they need to compete globally.

Join Danielle Goldman and Jeff Goldman, Co-Founders of Open Avenues Foundation, as they share how this innovative approach is transforming both immigration and workforce development. Learn how business leaders can use this model to attract and retain global talent, strengthen their hiring pipeline, and stay competitive in today’s evolving economy.