03-04, 10:00–10:45 (Europe/Berlin), Stage Auditorium
When growth is mandatory, open-source goes freemium, and Palantir is a success story, it might be time to start fighting our business models
“In cybersecurity, sharing is caring. Sharing threat intelligence, tools, and knowledge is the best way to collectively improve our security posture. But our business models conflict with this sharing. Through the sands of time, countless non-commercial and open-source initiatives either went “freemium” or were absorbed into multinationals and disappeared completely.
It all goes wrong when open-source projects get involved with Venture Capital. It makes some hackers wealthy, but where does this leave the hacker community and the world? Are acquisitions and IPOs collectively achieving our goals of making the world more cybersecure? Or is this all one large distraction? We need to conduct an uncomfortable but necessary discussion within FOSS communities about this.”
Dr. Melanie Rieback is CEO/Co-founder of Radically Open Security (the world's first not-for-profit computer security company), and "Post Growth" startup incubator Nonprofit Ventures. She is also a former Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the Free University of Amsterdam. She was named "Most Innovative IT Leader of the Netherlands" by CIO Magazine (TIM Award) in 2017, and one of the "9 Most Innovative Women in the European Union" (EU Women Innovators Prize) in 2019. She is also one of the 400 most successful women in the Netherlands by Viva Magazine (Viva400) in 2010 and 2017, and one of the fifty most inspiring women in tech (Inspiring Fifty Netherlands) in 2016, 2017, and 2019. Her company, Radically Open Security was named the 50th Most Innovative SME by the Dutch Chamber of Commerce (MKB Innovatie Top 100) in 2016.