Open Source @ Siemens 2023

This May, we hosted the 10^th installment of our Open Source @ Siemens event in Zug, Switzerland. Around 130 Open Source enthusiasts joined us at the venue and another 200 followed our livestream online.

The topics this year ranged from embedded to serverless, and from legal aspects of AI to community management in Open Source. We have now finished post-processing the presentations, and the videos are available online. 

Happy 10th anniversary!

To kick off the event, Roger Meier presented the evolution of Open Source events at Siemens over the last 10 years. Back in 2014, the Open Source event was organized by Siemens Building Technology and was internal only. Ten years later, the event has now been Siemens-affiliated and open to the public for a few iterations, with on-site speakers and a fully public video stream. This year and for the first time, all our speakers were present on-site! 

Roger also touched on some of the more recent developments, including the publishing of our Open Source Manifesto. 

Jan Kiszka, a Linux expert at Siemens, then spoke about vulnerability reports, how bug reports are sometimes really security relevant, and how to navigate the vulnerability reporting landscape for Open Source Software on different platforms. 

This was followed by Reto Lehmann, who joined us from Red Hat to talk serverless and event-driven applications and showed us a live demo on how to deploy them using the Open Source Knative solution.  

We wrapped up the morning sessions with an AI-flavored talk by Felix Mannewitz (Siemens) on the legal implications of GitHub Copilot and other Codex and ChatGPT-based solutions, which started an excited discussion with the crowd and remote viewers. 

The afternoon started with Olivier Brian from Puzzle ITC presenting a community model driven by Hitobito, a web platform designed to manage complex social hierarchies, allowing cultures as diverse as non-government agencies and political parties to manage their communities and collaborate. 

Max Dargatz from Red Hat followed with a fun, explain-like-I’m-five presentation on GitOps through an analogy with shopping groceries – featuring a toy fridge right on the stage. To put it to the test, Max deployed that very same “shopping list” to a real Kubernetes cluster in a live demo using Argo CD. 

Later, Antonio Di Stefano from EngFlow introduced Bazel and why we should care about this build system, the pain points it addresses, its remote build and caching capabilities, and how it compares to other generic build systems. 

Finally, Christoph Lumme (Siemens) and Sven Al Hamad (Webiny) spoke about code-driven communications and the next-generation, serverless Content Management System Webiny that enables that kind of agile approach to deploying content management. 

After the talks concluded for the day, our on-site speakers and guests gathered around the barbecue area outside – now an annual tradition at the event. Meanwhile, remote attendees had the chance to meet online by joining our virtual bar, which is also powered by Open Source, running on WorkAdventure. 

The second day started with Daniel Bovensiepen from Siemens and an insightful talk on semiconductors, explaining how they often represent the final frontier of Open Source, and why Open Source matters across the entire spectrum from software to hardware and manufacturing. 

Christoph Hartmann, CTO at Mondoo and co-creator at dev-sec.io, made us reflect on directions in reinventing Open Source security for DevOps and OT-Security in the modern world, shifting security measures from being seen as a roadblock in development to a more continuous approach. 

Thomas Graf from Siemens continued the morning talks and introduced us to the increasingly popular CycloneDX Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) format, and how it has been adopted as the current Siemens Standard BOM to help make sense of the software supply chain. Just before lunch, Walter Schweizer (Siemens) took us on a deep dive into the features of Secure Boot and how they can make our controllers more secure. 

After everyone enjoyed their pizza, Konstantinos Tsakalozos and Yalton Ruiz from Canonical started the afternoon sessions and presented MicroK8s, a production-grade, low-footprint Kubernetes for edge devices. 

Then, Juergen Seidel and Matthias Schulz from Siemens explained the origins of the Open Source SIMATIC AX Community and how to evolve from a “solution hero” to an Open Source community ambassador. Matthias Luescher from Schindler showed us a few tricks on how to automate and manage a diverse fleet of IoT devices using Git, Ansible and Mender to apply Infrastructure-as-Code best practices to embedded device management. 

Last but not least, Raimund Hook from GitLab invited us to hop on the Open Source bus for a journey with the GitLab Community. From ways to contribute to recognition via the Most Valuable Person (MVP) awards, he reminded us how and why we contribute to this vital piece of software. Message received loud and clear on our side: we have been using GitLab for our code.siemens.com coding platform for almost 10 years now and remain one of its larger contributors. 

We closed this 10-year anniversary of our Open Source @ Siemens Event with a public concert by The Birthday Girls. Founded in 2010, the band has played more than 200 live shows, ranging from smaller unplugged shows to larger festivals in Switzerland, Germany, Turkey, UK, Austria, and Spain. 

If you mix Kings of Leon with Coldplay and Imagine Dragons, then you’ll get The Birthday Girls.

The Zurich-based Indie-Rock-Pop band absolutely thrilled the audience on stage at Galvanik! Though there will not be any official recording of the concert, do check out their official Spotify page and see if you can catch them live. 

Thank you all for joining us! 

As we wrap up our activities around the event, we are already laying the groundwork for the next one, the 11th edition of our Open Source @ Siemens series, which is planned for May 2024. We are looking forward to seeing you there as well – stay tuned!