Open Source Summit North America

Anurag Sinha

Anurag Sinha is a Senior Staff Software Engineer and Manager at Google, where he leads engineering for Commerce AI Native Integrations. He is currently focused on building and scaling the Universal Commerce Protocol (ucp.dev), an initiative aimed at transforming how commerce operates in an AI-first world.

Belle Guttman

Belle Guttman leads the Agentic AI Engineering teams at AWS responsible for the Strands Agents SDK, AgentCore Developer Experience, and agentic chat in Q Developer products. With a background in software engineering, she has spent her career solving complex technical problems with simple solutions for her customers.

Brendan Burns

Brendan Burns is a co-founder of the Kubernetes open source project and Technical Fellow & Corporate Vice President for Azure cloud-native open source and the Azure management platform including Azure Arc. He is also the author and co-author of several books on Kubernetes and distributed systems. Prior to Microsoft he worked on Google web search infrastructure and the Google cloud platform. He has a PhD in Robotics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a BA in Computer Science and Studio Art from Williams College.

Conference Sessions

May 18 at 2026, 9:45 AM | Ballroom A

Dirk Hohndel

Dirk is the Head of the Open Source Program Officer at Verizon. Prior to that, Dirk was VMware’s Chief Open Source Officer, where he lead the company’s Open Source Program Office, directing the efforts and strategy around use of and contribution to open-source projects and driving common values and processes across the company for VMware’s interaction with the open-source communities. Before joining VMware, Dirk spent almost 15 years as Intel’s Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist. Before that, among other roles, he worked as Chief Technology Officer of SuSE and Unix Architect of Deutsche Bank.

IBM Quantum

Jim Zemlin

Jim’s career spans three of the largest technology trends to rise over the last decade: mobile computing at cloud computing and open source software. Today, as executive director of The Linux Foundation, he uses this experience to accelerate innovation in technology through the use of open source and Linux.

Kate Stewart

Kate Stewart works with the safety at security and license compliance communities to advance the adoption of best practices into embedded open source projects. She has launched the ELISA and Zephyr Projects, as well as supporting other embedded projects. With more than 30 years of experience in the software industry, she has held a variety of roles in software development, architecture, and product management, primarily in the tooling and embedded ecosystem working with international teams.

Keynote: Sean Dague, Chief Services Architect, IBM Quantum

Linus Torvalds

Linus was born on December 28, 1969, in Helsinki, Finland. He enrolled at the University of Helsinki in 1988, graduating with a master’s degree in computer science. His M.Sc. thesis was titled “Linux: A Portable Operating System” and was the genesis for what would become the most important collaborative software project in history. In August 1991, Linus announced that he was developing the Linux kernel, proclaiming, “it won’t be big and professional.” Never in the history of technology has someone been so wrong. In spite of his humble proclamation, Linux has become the world’s most pervasive operating system. Today the Linux kernel forms the basis of the Linux operating system and powers billions of Android devices, powers ChromeOS, and has permeated almost every industry and form factor. Smartphones, TVs, appliances, cars, nuclear submarines, air traffic control, stock exchanges, and scientific research all run Linux. Linux also provides the underpinnings of the internet and the cloud computing industry. In 2005, citing a lack of free and open-source version control tools that met his needs for performance and scale, Linus famously created Git in only 10 days. Today Git is widely used in software development and for other version-control tasks such as configuration management and has become popular as an integral part of the DevOps culture. In 2000, Linus was listed by Time Magazine as Number 17 in the Time 100: Most Important People of the Century. Again, in 2004, Time Magazine named him one of the Most Influential People in the world. He was honored in 2008 with the Millennium Technology Prize by the Technology Academy Finland, “in recognition of his creation of a new open-source operating system for computers leading to the widely used Linux kernel.” He is also the recipient of the 2014 IEEE Computer Society Computer Pioneer Award. A true tech titan, he was admitted to the Computer History Museum Hall of Fellows, joining the ranks of the tech elite including Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, Tim Berners-Lee, Gordon Moore, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Steve Wozniak, and others. Torvalds remains the ultimate authority on what new code is incorporated into the standard Linux kernel.

Linux & Git

Rohit John Varghese

Rohit John Varghese is the director of systems engineering and product at Contoro Robotics, a company developing AI-driven logistics robots for shipping container unloading. He has been part of the founding team of two successful startups that together have raised over $25 million in funding. His work spans exoskeletons, human–robot interaction, teleoperation, and AI-enabled robotic systems, and he is always curious to explore any domain to its first principles.