Tom is a Principal Open Source Evangelist for AWS. He has been a part of the open source community since 1997, when he skipped his last day of junior high to go to Linux Expo. During college, he worked for a high-availability startup to cover tuition, and when they crashed along with the majority of the IT sector, he dropped out of college and went to work for Red Hat full-time. He worked for Red Hat for almost twenty years, in Support, Sales Engineering, Release Engineering, Engineering Management, University Outreach (CTO’s office), and Employment Brand. He’s an active contributor to Fedora and helped to write the Fedora Packaging and Legal Guidelines which are still in use today. He’s spoken at a number of conferences and events including SxSW, OSCON, Open Source Summit, and Red Hat Summit. He has one patent on a crazy idea that never got implemented in the real world, and is co-author of Raspberry Pi Hacks (2013, O’Reilly). When he’s not working, he finds enjoyment in 3D printing, pinball, games (board & video), geocaching, craft beer, B-movies, science fiction, trivia, traveling, and his wife and two boys. He lives in Cary, NC. Tom is also known as “spot” by many people in the open source universe, he’s gone by that nickname since the 1st grade, and he happily answers to it. Follow him on Twitter @spotfoss.
For more than 25 years, Open Source has fundamentally changed the way that software is used, developed, and distributed. Almost every company on the planet is using open source solutions today. Yet, Open Source faces a new set of challenges, including project sustainability, diversity & inclusion, corporate involvement, faux-pen licensing, and Generative AI. In this session, I'll discuss these challenges, and suggest some of the ideas I'm thinking about as possible solutions.
