Linux Foundation Events are the meeting place of choice for open source maintainers, developers, architects, infrastructure managers and sysadmins, as well as technologists leading open source program offices, devrel teams and other critical leadership functions.

SAN FRANCISCO, June 30, 2021 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced that registration is open for many of its Fall 2021 events, for both in-person and virtual attendance. The Linux Foundation hosts the premier open source events around the world that empower technologists and other leaders to come together, share ideas, learn and collaborate to drive innovation.

In 2021, Linux Foundation Events will see over 90,000 open source community members from around the globe participate in-person and/or virtually.  Discussions will center around the latest open source trends, emerging technology developments and best practices surrounding 5G, IoT, cloud computing, open networking, security, embedded Linux, OS databases, AI, software architecture, edge computing, open source program office management, fintech, and much more. New events hosted by The Linux Foundation this year include OSPOCon and OSPOCon Europe. 

“We are ecstatic to return to in-person events, as we believe these face to face gatherings are so important to accelerating collaboration and progress,” said Angela Brown, SVP & GM, Events, The Linux Foundation. “Additionally, we will continue to offer a virtual component for our events as well, allowing anyone, anywhere to participate online. We look forward to welcoming everyone and hope you will join us.”

Registration is now open for the following Linux Foundation events.  Please visit each event’s website for information on early bird pricing, venues and more.

Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference
Sept 27 – 30, 2021
Seattle, Washington / Virtual
OSPOCon
Sept 27 – 29, 2021
Seattle, Washington / Virtual
Linux Security Summit
Sept 29 – Oct 1, 2021
Seattle, Washington / Virtual
Open Networking & Edge Summit + Kubernetes on Edge Day
Oct 11 – 12, 2021 
Los Angeles, California / Virtual
Open Source Strategy Forum
Oct 4 – 5, 2021 
London, United Kingdom
OSPOCon Europe
Oct 6, 2021
London, United Kingdom
Open Source Strategy Forum
Nov 9 – 10, 2021
New York City, New York

These events join KVM Forum, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America, Open Source Summit Japan + Automotive Linux Summit and many more that have already opened registration.  Please see a full list of Linux Foundation Events here. 

Discounts, Scholarships and Travel Funding
Members of The Linux Foundation receive a 20 percent discount off registration.  Members can contact events@linuxfoundation.org to request a member discount code. 

The Linux Foundation provides diversity and need-based registration scholarships for each event listed above.  For more information on eligibility and how to apply, please visit the event’s website, click the “Attend” tab and select the “Scholarships” option. 

The Linux Foundation’s Travel Fund is intended to enable open source developers and community members to attend events that they would otherwise be unable to attend due to a lack of funding. Please click here for more information.

Health and Safety
After careful consideration, we have decided that the safest course of action for returning to in-person events this fall is to take a “COVID-19 vaccine required” approach to participating in-person. To learn more, please read our blog post and visit the Health & Safety page, under the “Attend” tab on any of our event websites. 

Speak
Linux Foundation events are an excellent way to get to know the community and share your ideas and the exciting work that you are doing. We strongly encourage first-time speakers and members of underrepresented communities to submit. If you aren’t sure about your abstract or have any questions, please reach out to us and we will be more than happy to work with you on your proposal.

The call for speaking proposals for the following events is still open. Individuals are invited to speak in person or virtually. Please visit each event’s website (linked below) to view suggested topics, timelines and more.

Linux Security Summit (Deadline: July 11)

Open Source Strategy Summit London (Deadline: July 11)

Open Source Strategy Summit NYC (Deadline: July 11)

OSPOCon Europe (Deadline: July 18)

The Linux Foundation Member Summit (Deadline: August 1. In-person only)

Open Source Summit Japan + Automotive Linux Summit (Deadline: August 29. Virtual only)

Sponsor
LF event sponsorship packages offer speaking sessions & keynotes, lead generation programs, prominent branding opportunities and more; enabling you to make an important impact on the ecosystem, showcase your technologies and deliver your message. Click here to learn more about how you can share your thought leadership and support the entire global open source community. Email us for more information or to speak to our team.

Press
Members of the press who would like to attend and/or request a media pass should contact Kristin O’Connell at koconnell@linuxfoundation.org.

About the Linux Foundation
Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more. The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit linuxfoundation.org.

The Linux Foundation Events are where the world’s leading technologists meet, collaborate, learn and network in order to advance innovations that support the world’s largest shared technologies.

Visit our website and follow us on Twitter, Linkedin, and Facebook for all the latest event updates and announcements.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see its trademark usage page: www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. 

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Media Contact:
Kristin O’Connell
The Linux Foundation
koconnell@linuxfoundation.org

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Recipients will gain technical skills to start or advance their open source careers

SAN FRANCISCO — June 30, 2021 — The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, has announced the recipients of the 2021 Linux Foundation Training (LiFT) Scholarships. LiFT aims to increase diversity in open source technology by providing access to online and in-person training and certification exams for underserved demographics at no cost to the recipient. Since 2010, The Linux Foundation has awarded over 1,100 scholarships for millions of dollars worth of specialized, technical training to those who may not have the ability to afford this opportunity otherwise. 

This year, The Linux Foundation awarded scholarships to 500 of the over 1,250 applicants who vied to be selected in one of ten categories. 

This year’s selected pool of talent represents the potential for greatness in future participation in the open source community. Ages of recipients range from 13 to 68 with the average age being 30 years old. With the recipients also coming from 107 countries on six continents, the open source novices and seasoned tech professionals selected to receive this year’s scholarships serve as a reminder that interest in open source and technology generally crosses all demographics.

“We are excited to have our most diverse group of LiFT scholarship candidates ever,” said Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin. “When the COVID-19 pandemic struck last year, we decided to vastly increase the number of scholarships to 500 to be awarded in order to help some of those affected. With the effects of the pandemic lingering, we realized it was essential to award 500 again this year rather than return to historic levels. The level of talent and potential evident amongst this year’s winners is staggering, and we are happy to be able to contribute to their future success.” 

Highlighted scholarship recipients for 2021 in each category are: 

Blockchain Blockbusters

Saba Kifle, 34, USA

Saba is a UN Delegate for the UN Blockchain Commission for Sustainable Development and a part of the Women of Color in Blockchain Congressional Caucus. She is one of the few queer black woman working in the space and is very passionate about inspiring others in her community to get involved in blockchain. With this training, Saba – who speaks four languages – hopes to be better able to reach those who are more technically trained and may be interested in learning more about blockchain.

Santiago Figueroa-Lorenzo, 33, Spain

Santiago is a blockchain researcher at the University of Navarra who has run into difficulties performing efficient and immediate deployments of blockchain networks so that the proofs of concept to be performed are more immediate. He has accumulated experience working with technologies such as NodeJS, Web3JS, ReactJS, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Indy, and Hyperledger Besu. Santiago hopes that obtaining a Certified Hyperledger Fabric Administrator (CHFA) certification will reduce the learning curve, allowing him to focus on the research itself.

Cloud Captains

Badisa Mosesane, 29, Botswana

Badisa is a student at the University of Botswana where he studies computer science. He has been working with engineers developing automatic software deployments on High Performance Computing Linux clusters as an intern at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in the USA, where he developed a platform for visualizing cluster performance metrics, built a cloud-based user support cognitive chatbot, and supports advanced cyberinfrastructure operations of this major supercomputing center.

Andrija Sagic, 44, Serbia

Andrija is a cultural heritage digitization professional who heads the Digital Development Department for the Milutin Bojic Library, where he is trying to find a sustainable solution for the need for small cultural institutions to present their digital content, namely storage and web access. He hopes the training he receives from this scholarship will help him to achieve that goal.

Developer Do-Gooders

Danson Muia, 25, Kenya

Danson works to develop software tools that solve problems at a local level using open source solutions. One recent project he created is an online property management system for small landlords in Kenya. He has open sourced much of his code on GitHub, and hopes the knowledge he gains from this scholarship will enable him to create and share even better tools to benefit his community.

Pablo Velasquez, 32, Colombia

Pablo is a part of an organization in Medellin called Global Shapers, which strives to increase digital literacy and inclusion in the region. Projects he has worked on include an online system for arranging food donations and distribution to those in need, and setting up a local network to provide internet access to children. He plans to use the scholarship to study Node.js and use the open source technology to help even more people in his community.

Linux Kernel Gurus

Vandana Salve, 47, India

Vandana has years of experience working with the Linux kernel. From building Linux embedded systems for board support packages to developing device drivers and working on kernel security, she has contributed significantly to the community. She hopes to use this training to gain additional skills that will enable her to contribute even more to open source.

Alaa Emad Hossney, 31, Egypt

Alaa, who has a degree in embedded system engineering, participated in a Linux kernel mentorship in the spring of 2021, where she worked on fixing bugs in the kernel. She also was an Outreachy intern at Mozilla, where she worked on adding features on Firefox. She plans to use the knowledge she gains from this scholarship to pursue a career as a kernel developer, with a focus on embedded systems.

Networking Notables

Nathalia Nascimento, 28, Brazil

Nathalia has been working with Linux servers since 2009. After finishing university with a degree in computer engineering, she wanted to deepen her knowledge about computer networks but found the high level of vendor lock-in frustrating. She began learning about Software Defined Networking (SDN) and for the past five years has been working to implement it. Nathalia hopes to gain more knowledge about SDN and open networking generally from this training, in order to implement fully open source network infrastructures.

Ashish Kashinath, 30, USA

Ashish is a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he works on SDN solutions for safety-critical networks. His work focuses on predictability in terms of latency and bandwidth guarantees for such networks, and has developed SDN applications using open networking tools like OpenFlow and OpenvSwitch. Ashish is excited to use this scholarship to learn more about Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and apply that knowledge to his research.

Open Source Newbies

Zivile Silveira, 37, Brazil

Zivile studied economics in school and has been a homemaker in recent years, but wants to transition careers with the goal of becoming a data engineer. She is fairly new to Linux and software development generally, but enjoyed learning about the command line and various applications of Linux in The Linux Foundation’s free Introduction to Linux course. Zivile hopes the knowledge she gains studying system administration with this scholarship will help her advance toward her career goals.

Tan Shaella Suhendro, 25, Indonesia

Shaella studied interior design at university, but has since become interested in STEM. Interior design and architecture software tools are typically proprietary, so she wanted to learn more about open source alternatives. She has been independently studying open source tools and programming languages including C, Python and R. One of the things Shaella did to learn more about open source is complete The Linux Foundation’s free Introduction to Linux course, where she enjoyed learning about the command line and tricks to use Linux more efficiently. She sees the training provided by this scholarship as the next step in her journey to learning more about technology.

SysAdmin Super Stars

Juan Luis Porras Loria, 31, Italy

Juan Luis is pursuing a masters degree in geophysics at the University of Pisa, where he has installed geophysical processing software on Linux environments. Originally from Costa Rica, he worked as a research assistant at the seismological observatory where he helped maintain and secure Linux servers, and deployed virtual machines to perform specific tasks and ensure connections between end-users and the Linux servers. Juan Luis would like to use this training to become a system administrator who helps the geosciences field to implement more open source software.

Zafer Balkan, 33, Turkey
Zafer is a graduate of the Turkish Military Academy and currently serves with the NATO Deployable Corps while pursuing a cybersecurity degree at Tallinn University. He has also worked in developer, security and sysadmin roles for both the Turkish military and NATO. Zafer hopes to use the knowledge gained from this scholarship to encourage the use of more open source tools in defense to reduce vendor lock-in and improve security.

Teens-in-Training

Monil Vadodariya, 16, India

Monil is a straight-A student in high school who appreciates how important open source tools are for advancing new technologies like AI, machine learning, and blockchain. In his spare time he volunteers to teach younger kids about technology. Monil has participated in a number of hackathons, and helped develop software tools for his school including a proctored quiz system. 

Mateo León, 17, Chile

Mateo is a senior in high school who wants to study software engineering. He has taught himself about a number of technologies including programming languages like Java, Python, and C++, and developed his own cryptocurrency forked from Bitcoin. He has contributed to open source cryptocurrency projects by serving as an English-Spanish translator. Mateo hopes to use the knowledge gained from this scholarship to be a more effective developer.

Web Development Wiz

Olufemi Benjamin Anjorin, 21, Nigeria

Olufemi is a physics student at the University of Lagos who works part time as a software engineer. He uses open source technologies daily for projects such as building an open source interactive voice response system for crowdsourcing real time reports during natural disasters and other crises in Nigeria. Olufemi hopes this scholarship will build his technical skills to grow as a software engineer, and help him develop innovative software and systems solutions to solve problems within his community.

George Gognadze, 26, Georgia

George is pursuing a masters degree in computer science who is passionate about open source. He built the first web application in Georgia to report bullying, and has been involved in numerous local technology events. He hopes to be able to share the knowledge he gains from this scholarship with others in his community, and begin contributing back to the broader open source community.

Women in Open Source 

Fakhar un Nisa, 29, Pakistan

Fakhar is a trained veterinarian who is pursuing a PhD with a focus in cattle genomics. She is using Linux for analysis and interpretation of data around genotyping of different cattle breeds. Although she has little experience with Linux, Fakhar hopes that the training from this scholarship will make her more effective in her research, and believes strongly that the future of her field will be led by bioinformatics.

Dalal Mouani, 22, Morocco

Dalal, who speaks five languages, is currently pursuing a masters degree in data science. She eventually hopes to achieve a PhD in intelligent systems and to build intelligent applications. She has already built an OCR program for her university, and a web application for emotion detection. Dalal hopes this scholarship will give her skills she can use to improve her application development goals.

Additional Resources

The full list of 2021 LiFT Scholarship recipients can be viewed here

Photographs of 2021 LiFT Scholarship recipients can be downloaded here

About the Linux Foundation

Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more. The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see its trademark usage page: www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

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A Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) is a complete, formally structured list of components, libraries, and modules required to build (i.e., compile and link) a given piece of software and the supply chain relationships between them. These components can be open source or proprietary, free or paid, and widely available or restricted access. SBOMs that can be shared without friction between teams and companies are a core part of software management for critical industries and digital infrastructure in the coming decades.

SBOMs are especially critical for a national digital infrastructure used within government agencies and in critical industries that present national security risks if penetrated. SBOMs would improve understanding of those software components’ operational and cyber risks from their originating supply chain.

This SBOM readiness survey is the Linux Foundation’s first project addressing how to secure the software supply chain. The foundation of this project is a worldwide survey of IT professionals who understand their organization’s approach to software development, procurement, compliance, or security.  Organizations surveyed will include both software producers and consumers. An important driver for this survey is the recent Executive Order on Cybersecurity, which focuses on producing and consuming SBOMs.

The objectives of the survey are as follows:

How concerned are organizations about software security?How familiar are organizations with SBOMs?How ready are organizations to consume and produce SBOMs?What is your commitment to the timeline for addressing SBOMs?What benefits do you expect to derive from SBOMs?What concerns you about SBOMs?What capabilities are needed in SBOMs?What do organizations need to improve their SBOM operability?How important are SBOMS relative to other ways to secure the software supply chain?

Data from this survey will enable the development of a maturity model that will focus on how the increasing value provided by SBOMs as organizations build out their SBOM capabilities.

The survey is available in seven languages:

EnglishChineseJapaneseKoreanGermanFrenchRussian

To take the 2021 State of SBOM Readiness Survey, click the button for your desired language/region below:

BONUS

As a thank-you for your participation, you will receive a 20% registration discount to attend the Open Source Summit/Embedded Linux Conference event upon completion of the survey. Please note this discount is not transferable, and may not be combined with other offers.

PRIVACY

Personally identifiable information will not be published. Reviews are attributed to your role, company size, and industry. Responses will be subject to the Linux Foundation’s Privacy Policy, available at https://linuxfoundation.org/privacy. 

VISIBILITY

We will summarize the survey data and share the findings at the Open Source Summit/Embedded Linux Conference in September.

QUESTIONS

If you have questions regarding this survey, please email us at research@linuxfoundation.org. 

The post Linux Foundation Research Announces Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) Readiness Survey appeared first on Linux Foundation.

By Marco Fioretti

The WebAssembly binary format (Wasm) has been developed to allow software written in any language to “compile once, run everywhere”, inside web browsers or stand-alone virtual machines (runtimes) available for any platform, almost as fast as code directly compiled for those platforms. Wasm modules can interact with any host environment in which they run in a really portable way, thanks to the WebAssembly System Interface (WASI).

That is not enough, though. In order to be actually usable without surprises in as many scenarios as possible, Wasm executable files need at least two more things. One is the capability to interact directly not just with the operating system, but with any other program of the same kind. The way to do this with Wasm is called “module linking”, and will be the topic of the next article of this series. The other feature, that is a prerequisite for module linking to be useful, is the capability to exchange data structures of any kind, without misunderstandings or data loss.

What happens when Wasm modules exchange data?

Since it is only a compilation target, the WebAssembly format provides only low-level data types that aim to be as close to the underlying machine as possible. It is this choice that provides highly portable, high performing modules, while leaving programmers to write software in whatever language they want. The burden of mapping complex data structures in that language to native Wasm data types is left to software libraries, and to the compilers that use them.

The problem here is that in order to be efficient, the first generation of Wasm syntax and WASI do not natively support strings and other equally basic data types. Therefore, there is no intrinsic guarantee that, for example, a Wasm module compiled from Python sources and another from Rust ones will have exactly the same concept of “string” in every circumstance where string may be used.

The consequence is that, if Wasm modules compiled from different languages want to exchange more complex data structures, something important may be, so to speak, “lost in translation” every time some data goes from one module to another. Concretely, this prevents both direct embedding of Wasm modules into generic applications and direct calls from Wasm modules to external software.

In order to understand the nature of the problem, it is useful to look at how such data are passed around in first-generation Wasm and WASI modules.

The original way for WebAssembly to communicate with JavaScript and C programs is to simulate things like strings by manually managing chunks of memory.

For example, in the function path_open, a string is passed as a pair of integer numbers (i32) that represent the offset and, respectively, the length of that string in the linear memory reserved to a Wasm module. This would already be bad enough when, to mention just the simplest and most frequent cases, different character encodings or Garbage Collection (GC) are used. To make things worse, WASI modules that exchange strings would be forced to access each other’s memory, making this way of working far from optimal for both performance and security reasons.

Theoretically, Wasm modules that want to exchange data may also use traditional, JavaScript-compatible data passing mechanisms like WebIDL. This is the Interface Description Language used to describe all the components, including of course data types for any Web application programming interface (API).

In practice however, this would not solve anything. First because Web IDL functions can accept, that is pass back to the Wasm module that called them, higher level constructs than WebAssembly would understand. Second because using WebAssembly means exchanging data not directly but through ECMAScript Bindings, which have their own complexities and performance penalties. Summarizing, certain tricks work today, but not in all cases, and are by no means future-proof.

The solution: Interface and Reference Types

The real solution to all the problems mentioned above is to extend both the Wasm binary format and WASI in ways that:

directly support more complex data structures like strings or lists
allow Wasm modules to statically type-check the corresponding variables, and exchange them directly, but without having to share their internal linear memory.

There are two specifications that are being deployed just for this purpose. The main one is simply called Interface Types and its companion Reference Types.

Both Types rely on lower level features already added to the original Wasm core, namely “multi-value” and multi-memory support. The first extension allows Wasm functions to return an arbitrary number of values, instead of just one as before, and Wasm instruction sequences to handle an arbitrary number of stack values. The other lets a whole Wasm module, or single functions, use multiple memories at the same time, which is good for a whole lot of reasons besides exchanging variables.

Building on these features, Interface Types define strings and other “high-level” data structures, in ways that any unmodified Wasm runtime can use. Reference Types complete the picture, specifying how Wasm applications must actually exchange those data structures with external applications.

The specifications are not fully completed yet. Interface Types can exchange values, but not handles to resources and buffers, which would be required, for example, to “read a file and write directly into a buffer”.

Working together however, all the features described here already enable Wasm modules and WASI interfaces to handle and exchange most complex data structures efficiently, without corrupting them and regardless of what language they were used in, before compiling to Wasm.

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