Open Source Software is Eating the World

Abstract

The venture capitalist Mark Andreessen, co-creator of the Mosaic browser, has famously said that "software is eating the world", referring to society's growing reliance on software in almost every business and product. While today's most widely used mobile apps and hosted applications are often proprietary, most of them are built with open source components and frequently run on open source platforms. Software developers rely heavily on open source languages and tools from product definition through continuous integration and deployment. These advances have made it possible to build and maintain innovative, complex, secure, and reliable software products more effectively than ever before.  This talk highlights the widespread use and acceptance of open source software in modern trusted systems.

Biography

Tony Wasserman is a professor of Software Management Practice in the Integrated Innovation Institute (III) and the executive director of the Center for Open Source Investigation at Carnegie Mellon University Silicon Valley (CMU-SV). From 2010-16, he served as a director of the Open Source Initiative (opensource.org).

Tony was previously founder and CEO of Interactive Development Environments (IDE), creator of the innovative multiuser Software through Pictures development platform, and one of the first 100 dot-coms. IDE included open source software in its commercial product (1984), making it the second company to do so. Previously, Wasserman was vice president of Bluestone Software (acquired by H-P), where he led a development team creating the award-winning Total-e-Mobile toolkit. Before and after these positions, he held executive positions for various startups, and continues to advise startups.

Early in his career, Tony was Professor of Medical Information Science at University of California, San Francisco, and a Lecturer in Computer Science at UC Berkeley.

Wasserman has been selected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a Life Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, and a Fellow of the International Federation of Information Processing (IFIP). He has published more than 60 technical papers, edited ten books, and is the recipient of several awards for his contributions. He was the first recipient of the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Service Award, received the 2012 Distinguished Educator Award from the IEEE Technical Council on Software Engineering, and the 2013 Influential Educator Award from ACM SIGSOFT. Wasserman earned his Ph.D. in Computer Sciences from the University of Wisconsin - Madison and his B.A. in Mathematics and Physics from UC Berkeley.

Tony has a longstanding interest in innovation and entrepreneurship, which is reflected in his classes, and as an advisor to numerous startups.