We regret the lack of fruitful collaborations between free software communities and programming research in academia (other sorts of academic research, such as systems research and compilers research, are better served). Programming errors, obviously, are one of the main common source of security flaws in software, and most programming research focuses on reducing them. Academia and free software have long tradition of working together, yet Microsoft, Google and Facebook take more advantage of programming research than most free software communities!

Both sides (free software hackers and academia) have efforts to do to improve this collaboration; this talk will focus on convincing free software communities that this is a real problem that they should pay attention to, and give illustrative examples of exciting projects that do the right thing in this area. Improving this situation can have very strong benefits on the quality of the free software that we collectively build, share and use.

Speaker

Gabriel Scherer (INRIA, France)

Bio

Gabriel Scherer is a programmer and a researcher in programming languages at INRIA (a French national public research institution), working at INRIA Saclay. He is a FLOSS enthusiast, and an active maintainer of the OCaml programming language implementation., specialized in reviewing other people’s pull requests.