Open Source and Humanity, a Discussion with Mårten Mickos – InApps Technology 2022

Open Source and Humanity, a Discussion with Mårten Mickos

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Elon Musk and Tesla’s open-sourcing of its code is a symbol of a major next phase of transformation for how we perceive ourselves and society. It touches on the truth of open source software as an example that humans can show that really, they love to debate.

“I think society has to always look for resilience, and build resilience into society. Things that will survive no matter what happens, and will survive even if nobody’s watching, even if the boss is missing, even if there’s no decision maker. Open and distributed meritocracies have always provided the strongest resilience. When you say how do we build cars, and IoT, and software, in general, that can stand the test of time, the best thing is to make it open so that anybody can participate and that the participation is based on merit. Not based on ownership, not based on nationality, not based on politics, it’s based on the merits of the software. […] The more open software is, the more it can become the underpinning of something very large,” said Mickos.

When the debate actually results in something getting made, that’s a major human achievement and a testament to the role open source software now plays as more people like Elon Musk emerge and the deeper need becomes apparent to move beyond the individual and to a more collective knowledge about who we are and how software will be just based on our knowledge as much as books became the center of knowledge in the wake of the Gutenberg press. So I enjoyed my interview with Mårten Mickos, CEO of HackerOne, who touched on the topics of open source, Linus Torvalds and the role of legislative bodies to define the mandates for open source software as it more deeply becomes part of society and its own evolution.

In this Edition:

3:18: Mickos’s perspective on how open source software is intersecting with distributed architectures and physical computing.
5:02: Linux being the best example of open source precedence.
10:25: Exploring security and its role in building software.
15:31: When you get down to the granular level of the community itself, what is the dynamic there that is healthy?
19:13: What’s the realization people will be having when they process what Linus has expressed, and how is that a dynamic that is reflective about the Linux kernel itself?
23:49: What are some of the mandates that you’ve been observing lately?

Feature image via Pixabay.