conferences | speakers | series

Let's talk about hardware: The POWER of open.

home

Let's talk about hardware: The POWER of open.
FOSDEM 2017

Clouds are spreading and software is eating the world. But software depends on hardware. If that hardware is not trustworthy, open and secure, the software's trustworthiness, openness and security is for naught. The Free Software community has been forced to live with this conundrum for lack of good alternatives. Too pervasive and omnipresent was the Intel defined x86 architecture, throttling innovation, while sequestering security and control from its users.

Most of the discussion in our community centred around damage control and preventing being locked out from the platform for good. We focused our efforts on protecting our ability to use our own software. Positively shaping the future, driving the direction, and solving the problem of trustworthy hardware for good and at scale seemed impossible.

But, the thing is, without (almost) anybody noticing, all of the above has changed.

Georg Greve, CEO of Kolab Systems, will talk about the journey Kolab took to discover OpenPOWER, what we found in the OpenPOWER Foundation, and what it all means for Free Software.

In this session you will learn how far we have come in our quest to run a data centre for High Performance Computing on a complete open hardware and software platform, a platform that, at the same time, far outperforms Intel. We will also cover the TALOS secure work station and what it brings to our community.

Speakers: Georg Greve