FOSDEM 2021: Devroom for Safety and Open Source

FOSDEM is a two-day event organised by the FOSS community for FOSS the community. This event aims to gather like-minded professionals to learn, teach, and broaden their knowledge and network. The event is open to thousands of software developers of free and open source software and usually is held in Brussels; however, this year (2021), the fun will continue virtually.

The agenda for the Safety and Open Source devroom

At the Developer Room (devrooms), FOSS software developers can converse and showcase their projects, along with lightning talks, public presentations of the latest directions and more. This is a fun and exciting weekend for the developers and our employees since they are hosting their first devroom this year.

The FOSDEM Safety and Open Source devroom for Saturday 6th February is as follows:

• Shaun Mooney will be starting the day at 10:45 explaining “Why we should use Free and Open Source Software for safety applications”.

• Joffrey Huguet will be speaking at 11:00 on "Adding contracts to the GCC GNAT Ada standard libraries to strengthen analysis provided by formal verification tools”.

• Matthias Valvekens will give insight into "Document security and digital signatures in PDF" at 11:45.

• Claire Dross will be speaking on "Proving heap-manipulating programs with SPARK" "The SPARK open-source proof tool for Ada now supports verifying pointer-based algorithms thanks to an ownership policy inspired by Rust.

• Shaun Mooney will talk about “ELISA - Advancing Open Source Safety-Critical Systems” at 14:45.

Safety and Open Source is an increasingly important conversation for the open source community because software developed for safety applications typically employs traditional development practices that, although well-used, are increasingly outdated, and the code is often closed source. This is because safety standards are stringent, and safety applications must have rigorous quality assurance practices applied during development. Sadly, this means that using FOSS, which has not been developed to a safety standard from the start, is a real challenge.

Join the conversation about safety-critical software

After the talks, Codethink's devroom will hold a community discussion on "Safety and Open Source". The open forum will be an excellent opportunity to share opinions, debate different perspectives and talk about the latest developments for safety-critical software.

One of our Division Managers, Shaun Mooney, will be opening up this discussion and introducing the aims and goals of the devroom, the areas of focus and how participants will contribute to the discussion. Our director Paul Sherwood will then take over and guide the conversation into the state of safety-critical software in automotive and where that will be in 5 years' time.

Thes fun does not end in the devroom! An hour may not be enough to delve into everything STPA and FOSS so we will be continuing the discussion on gather.town where you will be able to virtually split off into groups and have conversations of interest with like-minded professionals.

This will be an exciting event not to be missed! Make sure you join us for free in this devroom to be part of the conversation >>

Also, join the conversation with us on our Twitter account @codethink and using the hashtag #safetyandopensource.

We will also have a Safety devroom chat where you can get involved >>

Keep up-to-date about Safety

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Related blog posts:

• Open source events for software engineers and project leaders >>
• Why support community-driven FOSS events >>