Neutral Governance Through Open Source Projects, Kate Stewart,

An interview with Kate Stewart, the Senior Director of Strategic Programs at Linux Foundation, talking about an exciting new Linux Project, Zephyr, and the value of Open Source projects.

Of course, first thing first. What is Zephyr Project all about?

The Zephyr™ Project is a scalable real-time operating system (RTOS) supporting multiple hardware architectures, optimized for resource constrained devices, and built with safety and security.

Exactly what are you looking to solve?

There’s a lot of embedded applications, especially in IoT, where Linux is just too big to fit in the available resources.  Linux doesn’t really fit in less than 2M these days.  However, there are a lot of IoT devices, (like sensors) that still need to have secure connections and be able to be used in safety critical applications.  We want to move the professional software development practices that have made Linux so successful into this resource constrained space.  Today, that space is pretty fragmented, with a lot of projects not quite having critical mass or being under a single company’s control.

Neutral Governance Through Open Source Projects, Kate Stewart

What your objectives behind the project?

Create a true open source project, with neutral governance, that is able to tackle the hard problems of using open source on the IoT endpoints and resource constrained embedded applications.   There are many resource constrained devices that need to be able to run safety-critical application in a secure manner, and handle security updates.  By working with a community of developers that care about these goals, we can collaborate to share the effort and build software we can all trust.  If we can’t trust the data coming from endpoints then all the cool new edge, cloud and machine learning technologies have the potential to be garbage-in, garbage-out.

Who are your target audience?

We’re aiming to be the go-to solution for IoT and resource constrained software developers, and hopefully encourage them to contribute back upstream.   There are also emerging open source hardware ecosystems, like RISC-V and OpenPower, where Zephyr is a great open source reference implementation to compliment the emerging open source hardware.  There are many embedded market segments that have applications that need this base for an open source software solution, like wearables, medical devices, industrial, automotive, etc.

The readers would also like to learn about you, can you give a brief presentation of yourself?

I sold my first software program in 1985 (was in university at the time, before the terms free software and open source were around) and have been developing and managing software projects ever since then.   I’ve worked in Canada, Australia, and the US,  and have managed software teams in North America, Europe, Australia, China and India when I worked for a silicon manufacturer doing software enablement for new chips,  which is where the benefits of working with open source software became obvious. Because of open source, I’ve also the pleasure to work with great software developers worldwide and have enjoyed being a mentor to junior software developers on all the continents, except Antarctica, as well.

My involvement with the Linux community started in the mid 2000’s when we needed to figure out how to upstream code and have been involved in one way or another ever since then.  Recently, I was chair for the 2019 Linux Plumbers Conference, and am the chair the OpenIoT track here at OSS-EU and participate on the ELCE committee.

As one of the founders of the SPDX project, I’ve been collaborating with folks at the Linux Foundation since 2010 and have stayed involved with the SPDX community through many job changes, and still am active with that project on the technical committee.  Since joining the Linux Foundation 4 years ago to work on strategic programs, have launched the Real-Time Linux, Zephyr, CHAOSS, and ELISA projects, and help with Yocto, FOSSology, and others.

What are your plans for the future?

Working with the Zephyr’s Functional Safety and Security teams, to incorporate the best practices to make the LTS a sound foundation for developing applications that can be trusted as secure endpoints for talking to the edge and cloud applications.   There are no good examples of open source projects being certified for use in functional safety applications, and I’m working with Zephyr, Xen and ELISA project teams to figure out ways to tackle this goal.

One of my other focus areas these days is on increasing the automation of software bill of materials (SBOM) information and transparency in the supply chain, so we can detect vulnerabilities automatically and address them effectively.   This has the nice benefit of making it easier to automate compliance to the open source licenses as well.    is also essential as we work toward increasing the transparency of the province and pedigree of software to be used in safety-critical applications.

What will you be talking about at this event? 

There are several open source projects starting to look at how to get ready to be used in Safety-Critical infrastructure, I’ll be talking about Zephyr and ELISA during the conference and keynoting on Zephyr at the OpenPower conference on Friday.   Thursday will see me participating in 4 of the add-on events, Zephyr Hands-on, Open Source Software for Safety-Critical Systems, Automating Compliance with SPDX, and Real-Time Summit. All Zephyr sessions can be found here: https://www.zephyrproject.org/event/embedded-linux-conference-europe/

More information about the Zephyr Mini-Summit and hands-on workshop can be found here: https://www.zephyrproject.org/event/zephyr-mini-summit-zephyr-lts-1-14-an-open-source-rtos-you-can-get-on-board-with/

What excites you the most about this event?

Being able to brainstorm with the great developers that show up to this event, to figure out the next steps towards solutions for the strategic programs we’re working on.

Which influencers and websites do you follow to keep up to date with the latest developments?

LWN.net – favorite source of well written technical news, hands down.

Linux.com  – business related open source news

Opensource.com – wider open source community perspective

Finally, how can people find out more about what you are working on?

When something particularly interesting catches my eye, I tweet about it from @_kate_stewart

About Kate:

Kate Stewart is a Senior Director of Strategic Programs, responsible for Embedded and Open Compliance programs. Since joining The Linux Foundation, she has launched Real-Time Linux, Zephyr Project, CHAOSS, and ELISA.

About Open Source Summit:

OSS is the leading conference for developers, architects and other technologists – as well as open source community and industry leaders – to collaborate, share information, learn about the latest technologies and gain a competitive advantage by using innovative open solutions.

For more info about the Summit: https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/events/open-source-summit-europe-2019/

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