Conference information/Schedule

Introductions

Carolyn Caizzi, UC Berkeley Library

  • Library is the original open source repository for information.
  • 20% about code, 80% about people, regulations, etc

Jarrod Millman, UC Berkeley

  • Berkeley has a history of open source (FreeBSD)
  • From Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS)
    • Interested in security
    • Involved in scientific python (numpy, scipy, etc)
  • Open source biggest challenges
    • Funding
    • Security
    • Burnout
  • Emphasis: community rather than code

Keynote Speaker: Open Software Entrepreneurship

David Charron, UC Berkeley Business School

  • NSF looking at open source projects from academia
  • Limited experience with running open source projects
  • POSE Program
  • (Example) FESTIM: Open source tool for fusion applications.
    • Published open source rather than patent
    • Blind to the people in the community
  • NSF interested in increasing access to research funding by NSF
  • People want to know how and have an implementation
  • Scientists are open sourcing projects with minimum effort
    • Put code online with no documentation or info who is using it
  • Now PESOSE, Pathways to Enable Secure Open Source Ecosystems
    • Added security
    • Similar language to business, but with less “product” connotations
  • (Example cont) FESTIM
    • 100 people interviewed, get to know customers
    • Learned why people choose their project
    • 2 bus problem: What happens if the two founders disappear?
    • Want to grow to many contributors
  • No open source project is alone in the marketplace
  • Natural Capital Alliance, Stanford
    • Ecosystem map: Platform, funder, users, contributors
      • There are always saboteurs who don’t want your project to succeed
    • Companies using software to make money, but never received kickbacks
    • Move from contributors to maintainers
    • BDFL: Benevolent dictator for life
      • Difficult to transition (funding, time, motivation)
  • Value proposition is not “free”
    • There are tangible benefits to open source
  • I-corps syllabus has good reference
  • Recommend 3 person team
    • Team Lead
    • Community Manager
    • Industry Mentor

Takeways:

  • NSF POSE gives necessary skills to manage and grow open source projects
  • Need pathway to sustainability
    • Community growth
    • Develop for the “customers”
  • Can really think of it as a business with different terminology

Panel

Experiences from the NSF POSE program

Stephanie Lieggi (UCSC):

  • Looped project into a larger project
  • Think of it as a successful application
  • Merging with Apache Arrow
    • Collaboration cleaned up code base
    • Managing transitioned from student maintained to industry

Sanjit Seshia (UC Berkeley):

  • Interested in verification
  • SCENIC project
    • Language where every variable is a random distribution
    • Paper
  • Holding 2 day bootcamps to get up to speed on the language
  • Have working groups to connect developers to users, also workshops

Andrew Kahng (UCSD):

  • Participated in the OpenROAD project
  • Open source limited paperwork/overhead
  • Cooperate partnership was beneficial in avoiding overhead

Keynote: The Role of Foundations in Advancing Open Collaboration and Innovation

Nithya Ruff, Chair of the Linux Foundation

  • AI began at universities, but absent from current discussions
  • Foundations gives universities opportunities for academia and industry
  • Allow for a neutral place for code and community can live
  • Examples for academia to foundation
    • Spark
    • RISC-V
      • Contrary to geopolitics involving semiconductors
    • Ray
    • Ceph
    • TUF
    • CHAOSS
      • Community health analytics open source software
  • Urgency
    • Federal Funding Pressure
    • Geopolitical tensions
  • Collaboration playbook
    • Industry
      • LXF Mentorship Program (mentorship.lfx.linuxfoundation.org)
      • Linux Kernel Mentorship
        • Submitting a patch to the linux kernel
      • Google Summer of Code
    • Academia
      • Published paper and contribute the artifact
      • Create a foundation project
      • Possible funding opportunities from eBPF

Takeaways:

  • AI is a large focus of the Linux foundation
  • Common for academic projects to transition to a foundation

Breakout: Open Source Tools for Scientific Research

Unmapped Cities: Scaling Pedestrian Infrastructure Mapping with Tile2Net

Maryam Hosseini, Assistant Professor, UC Berkeley

Assistant professor at city planning and development

  • Looking at data from cities for accessibility
  • Interested in pedestrian infrastructure
  • Third of US pop non-drivers, 95% of funding goes to automotive
  • Lack of data on pedestrian infrastructure
  • Use aerial imagery for pedestrian infrastructure

Jupyter Book: Next-generation Tools for Creating Computational Narratives

Chris Holdgraf, 2i2c, Jupyter foundation

  • Housed underneath linux foundaton
  • Multi-stakeholder community
  • Allow for rich markdown text to be generated into documentation pages
    • has references, figures, mathtex
  • MyST is the underlying parser

From Silos to Standards: Open Data Modeling with LinkML

Nomi Harris, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab

  • Lot of scientific data, but difficult to use
  • LinkML: Link Modeling Language
  • Provide framework for standardizing data formats

Reflections on Building a High-Performance Microarchitectural Simulation Framework

Heiner Litz, UCSC

  • 80% of Google’s energy spent on GP CPUs
  • Focusing on increasing instructions per cycle
  • Designed microarchitectural simulator
  • Typically written in C/C++ for simulations
  • Scarab
  • 100000 USD per year!
  • Testing involves running the arch on many different workloads
  • Majority of code is written by AI
  • Non-permissive license become absolute as code and be regenerated

Takeaways:

  • Two of the tools have definitions as code, looks like the way forward
  • LinkML has applications for representing data for Dirtviz
  • Attendee has a good comments
    • If a community exists around a platform, its unlikely people will switch

Panel: Making a CROSS play

  • Chinstrap Community: Has course for taking open source project commercial
  • Open source is like a car
    • Individual parts are the source code
    • Buying the car include warranty, support, onboarding
  • Making money from open source
    • Open Core
      • RedHat is a classic example
      • Open core: Core source is open source, setting enterprise features
    • Traditional
      • Create a business and open source parts
      • Value is the combination
    • Consultancy
      • Not likely to get investors
      • Offer professional services based on the project
  • UC Berkeley has OP3 policy where participating projects return 1%