Digital Catapult invites tech industry professionals to attend hybrid event on future of open source and cybersecurity

Co-Founder of Open Source Initiative, Bruce Perens, and cybersecurity journalist, Geoff White, among speakers attending

Digital Catapult has today announced its upcoming hybrid event, ‘Is the future for secure computer systems open source?’; held on the 29^th of June 2022 from 5-8pm BST at 101 Euston Road, London. As a continuation of the UKRI’s Digital Security by Design (DSbD) Roadshow series, this latest event invites software and hardware engineers, tech team leads and CTOs to learn about the future of the industry from leaders in open source.

Hosted by renowned cybersecurity journalist and author, Geoff White, the event will begin with a keynote address by Bruce Perens, co-founder of the open source initiative, before proceeding to a panel discussion and audience Q&A. Perens will be joined by Amanda Brock – CEO of OpenUK, the UK body for Open Technology, and other research and industry leaders to be announced.

The event will feature presentations jam-packed with industry insights and future-gazing predictions. Speakers will explore how tech companies are already embracing open source; the current as well as future state of open source; and the case for creating a legal imperative for manufacturers to make the code of critical systems publicly available.

Further details on the speakers are as follows:

• Geoff White – Author, speaker, investigative journalist and podcast creator, White is among the UK’s leading technology specialists, working for the BBC, Channel 4 News, The Sunday Times and many more. In a career spanning 20 years, he has covered election hacking, the dark web, the personal data trade and the emergence of cybercrime as one of the primal threats to modern society.

• Bruce Perens – Author of the Open Source Definition, the legal framework universally used for open source licensing, Perens is one of the key founders of the open source movement in software. From Pixar to HP and the UN, Bruce has been working at the intersections of open source, engineering, software, design and law for more than four decades.

• Amanda Brock – Brock is CEO of OpenUK, the UK body for Open Technology, and has previously been the Chair of the Open Source and Intellectual Property (IP) Advisory Group of the United Nations Technology Innovation Labs and was General Counsel of Canonical, one of the world’s biggest open source companies and the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu.