Georg Greve

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.

MyKolab.com was originally announced for FOSDEM 2013 and saw great response from many people in the community. Planned as an enterprise platform for SMEs as well as collaboration platform for people who prefer to be customers, not products, its focus saw a dramatic shift when Edward Snowden released the PRISM revelations. Georg Greve will share the story on what's behind MyKolab, how it is part of the Free Software ecosystem by design, and how the team experienced the months of ever-new revelations that brought lawyers, journalists and many others into the platform.