The Untold Stories of Open Source

There’s no need to bury the lead here. Soumith Chintala is the central figure in a major transition in the world of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. He works at Meta where he’s the manager of PyTorch, an open source machine learning framework that was recently transferred to the Linux Foundation. PyTorch enables ML engineers to deploy new AI models in minutes rather than weeks.

Soumith has been a community leader for the past decade, but he was a self-described introvert when he was growing up in Hyderabad. He is a researcher with over 52,000 citations and an h-index of 29 in Machine Learning, computer vision, and robotics, while focusing on high-risk research. From Marvel movies to memes, people such as Soumith are admired in modern culture. But this wasn’t the case in the 1990s when being a geek was still outside the norm.

With major software vulnerabilities popping up on what seems like a weekly basis and government regulation imminent when it comes to providing a software bill of materials for any application sold to the United States government, collaboration on open source security is no longer optional.

Large enterprises have come to realize that it's better to work together, to find common solutions rather than go it alone. Some financial service companies have been hesitant to embrace the inevitable move to open source. They perceive it to be more of a risk than a reward.

The promise of innovation through collaboration hasn't been enough to change that perception. Even proven ROI hasn't done the trick. So what's the answer how do we reach financial institutions that are holding out, how do we help them make the transition?

“I usually say that I’m a hybrid,” Ana Jiménez says. In this context what does that even mean, what is a hybrid? According to the Oxford Language Dictionary, a hybrid is “a word formed from elements taken from different languages, for example television ( tele- from Greek, vision from Latin).” If we use that as our definition, Ana Jiménez Santamaria has a good reason to call herself a hybrid; she can speak the language of the business world as well as that of the developer domain.

Ana holds a master’s degree in data science and a bachelor’s degree in marketing. Her journey to open source began at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Móstoles (MO’-stoeles), Spain on the southwest outskirts of Madrid. In 2017 she spent a year at the University of California, Riverside studying consumer behavior before returning home to Móstoles to get her Bachelor’s Degree in Marketing and Master’s Degree in Data Science.

When it comes to getting visibility for their work, most engineers working on open-source projects aren’t thinking about the science of human behavior or marketing. They want to address a problem, apply their knowledge to create the technology, and create something useful for themselves. Ana understands that because it was something she did at the beginning of her career.

Allan Friedman was one of the first, if not THE first person to talk with me about the need for a mandatory software bill of materials to be attached to all software back in 2017 when he was Director of Cybersecurity Initiatives for the US Department of National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).

In today’s show we’ll do a deep dive with Allan, tracing his path from doing economic research at Harvard in the early 2000s, to becoming the country’s most recognized advocate on SBOM legislation as the current Senior Advisor and Strategist for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency of the United States Government.