Open source is everywhere. From startups to multi-nationals to governments, open-source has become an integral part of software usage and development. However, open code is only one aspect; in most cases collaboration is the real goal. Many open-source communities thrive and proudly contribute to the greater good. But for newcomers, interacting with such communities can seem intimidating and they often hesitate to initiate that first step.

In this talk, Marc Khouzam will share some of his experiences over the last 12 years as an open-source maintainer and open-source project co-lead. He’ll try to dispel some of the myths surrounding open-source communities and help you take that first step. Having moved from the private to the public sector, he’ll also discuss what are the differences between the two with respect to open-source and the efforts taken to bring open-source to the City of Montreal. Join us and see that the “open” in “open-source” applies just as much to the community as it does to the code.

Marc Khouzam is Solutions Architect at City of Montreal. Besides focusing on continuous deployment towards Kubernetes, he is part of the City’s open-source committee and was heavily involved in putting in place the recent open-source policy of the City of Montreal.

Previously, while working at Ericsson, he spent 10 years as a maintainer of the open-source C/C++ Eclipse project and was co-lead of the project for the last 3 of those years. In the last decade, Marc has contributed to multiple other open-source projects such as GDB, Git, Helm, Kong and others.