Industry Embraces Open Source-What This Means for Academia

August 17, 2015
Carlos Jensen, Judith Bishop, Phil Haack, Ross Gardler, and Rustan Leino | Microsoft Research, Micrososft, GitHub, Oregon State University

Open source is a powerful way of advancing software development and sharing data for experimentation. Microsoft has started putting research projects as well as key software such as .NET in open source repositories. Developers are jumping on to fix bugs and extend the systems. Academia has long wanted access to industrial projects, but now that it is a reality, what exactly can be done and by whom? There are many options, for example: instructors can use the software as illustration in their classes; software can be extended for research purposes; capstone projects can be based on OSS; and open data can be shared for analysis. The panel of experts will bring their experiences with using open source, from repositories, creation, and education.

Speaker Details

Judith Bishop is director of Computer Science at Microsoft Research. Her role is to create strong links between Microsoft’s research groups and universities globally, through encouraging projects, supporting conferences, and engaging directly in research. Her expertise spans programming languages, software engineering, and distributed systems with a strong practical bias. Her current projects are Orleans and Code Hunt, and she worked previously on TouchDevelop and Try F#. She received her PhD from the University of Southampton and was a professor in South Africa for many years, with visiting positions in the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Italy, and the United States. She was general co-chair of ICSE 2010 and co-chair of several Microsoft Research summits. She serves frequently on editorial, program, and award committees. She has written 16 books on programming, which have been translated into six languages. Judith received the ACM Distinguished Educator Award in 2014, the IFIP Silver Core and Outstanding Service Award in 2006, and South Africa’s Distinguished Woman Scientist of the Year in 2005.

Ross Gardler is a long-time open source guy. In the past he ran the publicly funded OSS Watch open source advisory service to the UK Higher and Further Education Sector and currently works for Microsoft Open Technologies with a focus on Linux. He is currently the President of the Apache Software Foundation.

Phil Haack (yes, it’s pronounced “hack”) works at GitHub as an engineering manager for the Desktop team. This team is responsible for GitHub for Mac, GitHub for Window, and the GitHub Extension for Visual Studio. He also led the team that created https://choosealicense.com/, an effort to demystify and simplify the choosing of an open source license. Prior to GitHub, he was a senior program manager at Microsoft responsible for shipping ASP.NET MVC and NuGet. These projects were released under open source licenses and helped served as examples to other teams for how to ship open source software. He regularly writes for his blog http://haacked.com/ and tweets random observations on Twitter as @haacked. He also speaks at conferences here and there, and has quit writing technical books forever several times now.

Carlos Jensen is an associate professor in the School of EECS at Oregon State University. He is the Director of the Center for Applies Systems and Software (CASS), which includes the OSU Open Source Lab, home to over 160 medium and large open source projects like the Linux Foundation, Apache Foundation, and Drupal. His research is in the intersection of usability and software engineering; he and his students study how open source developers to produce great software, where they fail to, and what tools and techniques we can develop to help more projects be successful.

“Rustan Leino is Principal Researcher in the Research in Software Engineering (RiSE) group at Microsoft Research, Redmond, and Visiting Professor in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London. He is known for his work on programming methods and program verification tools, and is a world leader in building automated program verification tools. These include the languages and tools Dafny, Chalice, Jennisys, Spec#, Boogie, Houdini, ESC/Java, and ESC/Modula-3.

Prior to Microsoft Research, Leino worked at DEC/Compaq SRC. He received his PhD from Caltech (1995), before which he designed and wrote object-oriented software as a technical lead in the Windows NT group at Microsoft. Leino collects thinking puzzles on a popular web page and hosts the Verification Corner channel on YouTube. In his spare time, he plays music and, recently having ended his tenure as cardio exercise class instructor, is trying to learn to dance. “