Heather Miller

Director of the Scala Center at EPFL, Professor at Northeastern University

Heather is a co-founder of and the Executive Director of the Scala Center at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland. She is also an Assistant Clinical Professor at Northeastern University in Boston. She obtained her PhD in October 2015 under Martin Odersky at EPFL, and is a longtime member of the Scala team, having worked on various aspects of Scala; from concurrency libraries to Scala dissemination and documentation.

The Dramatic Consequences of the Open Source Revolution: Unrecognized Challenges & Some Modest Attempts at Solutions in Scala

Open source has won. As little as 5 years ago, the decision faced by many companies building software was whether or not to go with a proprietary database/language/operating system/etc or to choose the open source one. In 2017 we give this shift little thought; nowadays we simply reach for the open source compiler/database/operating system without even considering the closed source, proprietary choices. This is great! Or is it? As we all happily jump on the open source bandwagon for project after project that we undertake, there are cracks beginning to form in some of the most important open source projects that we've all begun to depend on. Open source is in fact in peril in many ways. In this talk, I'll show you a view of open source that you may be completely unaware of, and I will show you some of the things we're trying in the Scala world to help combat some of the issues that have begun to arise in this shift towards open infrastructure.

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