Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference North America 2026

Small and local governments face an outsized challenge: rising expectations from citizens paired with shrinking budgets, limited staff, and a complex technology landscape. Finding modern, secure, and sustainable solutions often feels impossible when proprietary systems are expensive, rigid, and dependent on vendors that may not fully understand public sector realities. Staffing constraints make it even harder—small teams are expected to maintain critical services, manage security, and deliver innovation.

This session explores how open source software can help governments break out of that cycle. We’ll examine how open source provides flexibility, transparency, and long-term sustainability, while reducing vendor lock-in and enabling collaboration across agencies. We’ll also address common concerns around support, security, and staffing, and discuss practical models for leveraging vendors and community expertise without sacrificing control.

Finally, we’ll tackle the fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) that often surrounds open source in government, separating myth from reality and showing how open source can empower small governments to deliver big outcomes for their citizens.

SBOMs tell you what's in your software. They don't tell you what you're allowed to do with it. License and attribution data is often missing or ambiguous -- a LICENSE file says MIT, but source files have Apache-2.0 headers. SBOM or not, you still don't know what to put in your notice file.

ClearlyDefined, an Open Source Initiative project, fills in that missing data. It runs automated license scans, then lets the community curate the results -- fixing misidentified licenses, adding missing attributions, and resolving conflicts between what a package claims and what its source files say.

In this session, I'll cover:

- Why SBOMs fall short on licensing: what's typically missing and where the gaps are worst
- How ClearlyDefined's harvest-curate pipeline works, with a walkthrough of tracing a component from ambiguous scan to curated definition
- How curations get contributed back upstream and why it matters for projects themselves, not just consumers

This talk is for anyone who's tried to build a license compliance workflow and found that the data isn't there yet.

Open sourcing a core product is easy to celebrate, but hard to initiate and sustain. This is a practical story about economic viability and how Harper open sourced our core product while protecting business health, funding continued engineering, and creating the conditions for durable community growth.
Geared towards founders, CTOs, investors, and developer relations and engineering managers, I share Harper’s intimate story of transforming our nearly decade-old, closed source code base into an actively growing open source community. I share what we learned from customer growth patterns, where adoption stalled, and how we recognized the potential of open source. From there, I dive deep into our execution strategy; separating the open source core from the commercial operations customers valued.
You’ll learn how licensing choices and clear boundaries between shapes trust, and how we approached the organizational and technical realities of moving a long-lived product into the open. If you're building or funding open source and need a sustainable model supporting profitability and momentum, this session offers a concrete path grounded in lived experiences.

Academic Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) are emerging across universities to support open source, but how can they identify contributors and know what support is needed?

The University of California launched its OSPO network in 2024, connecting six campuses (UC Santa Cruz, Berkeley, Davis, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and San Diego) to promote open source research, sustainability, and best practices. A major challenge is not only finding projects but understanding how they operate and engage contributors.

To address this, the UC OSPO Network is developing the Open Source Repository Browser (ORB), an interactive platform that maps activity, visualizes community health signals, tracks contributor patterns, and surfaces repository metadata. ORB enables OSPOs to guide targeted support, inform policy, and strengthen open source contributions across campuses.

The browser now visualizes data from 30+ universities, providing a multi institution view of project health, contributor patterns, and adoption of community standards. This talk will cover ORB’s design and implementation and share insights from multiple universities to inform OSPO strategies and engagement.