Open Source @ Siemens 2026

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Agenda

May 19th

Time (CEST)	Description	Full Day
09:00 - 09:20	Welcome and latest news on Open Source @ Siemens In this introductory talk to welcome everyone at Open Source @ Siemens 2026, Roger shares the past year's highlights in open source at Siemens. Roger Meier (Siemens) Roger Meier established the Siemens internal coding platform code.siemens.com and further develops the internal developer ecosystem on top of doing operations together with his team. He is not only using Open Source Software, he's also an active contributor and maintainer on several Open Source projects for many years. Before joining Siemens he did electronic and software engineering in the area of audio-video systems, predictive maintenance, online shops, high availability systems and more. His primary focus at Siemens was on computer system engineering, kernel and user space, web, software and system architecture for multiple product lines. The GitLab journey started in 2013 within his department. Today he's more of a cloud native than an embedded developer.
09:25 - 09:45	10 Years of the CIP Project The Civil Infrastructure Platform project turns 10 this year. Siemens was one of its co-founders and is also one of its key contributors. This talk will look back where we came from, what was achieved, from an SLTS kernel over secure software update patterns to security certification, and how this is being used at Siemens Mobility and beyond. Pasquale Nieddu (Siemens) Pasquale Nieddu is a DevOps Engineer in the CoreShield Secure Operating Systems team at Siemens Mobility s.r.o. in Prague. He is passionate about trains, open source and Linux. As a member of the CIP Security Working Group he has been contributing to CIP for Siemens Mobility since February 2025. Jan Kiszka (Siemens) Jan Kiszka is Principal Key Expert for Open Source Embedded Systems at Siemens Foundational Technologies. He is involved in CIP since day 1, is representing Siemens in the Technical Steering committee and is chair of the CIP Kernel Working Group.
10:00 - 10:45	Sustainable Secrets Management with OpenBao Secrets sprawl and hardcoded credentials remain critical risks to modern cybersecurity. This session introduces OpenBao, the Linux Foundation- governed, community-driven fork of HashiCorp Vault. Learn how OpenBao provides an open, simple, and reliable way to eliminate plaintext secrets, manage long-lived identities, and secure your infrastructure. We'll explore the project's origins, the current development roadmap, and how the community is ensuring that robust secrets management remains truly open and sovereign. Michael Hofer (Adfinis) Michael "Hofi" is a Product Manager at Adfinis and a passionate advocate for open source, specifically Linux clients and secrets management. Alongside his team of OpenBao co-maintainers, he is on a mission to make sustainable secrets management accessible to everyone. He is honored to currently serve as the Chair of the OpenBao Technical Steering Committee (TSC).
11:00 - 11:45	Lucity - The PaaS you can leave Deploying software to a Platform as a Service (PaaS) has historically been a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you can deploy your code within minutes. On the other hand, you become seriously locked in to a proprietary platform. Lucity believes you can have your cake and eat it, too. You can get up and running within minutes while still keeping the exit door open. Lucity enables developers to connect their repository and deploy to Kubernetes without writing a Dockerfile or any YAML. Since it builds upon industry-standard tools, Lucity’s eject feature allows you to download the underlying Helm values, GitOps repository and build scripts whenever you choose to. This talk covers the motivation behind Lucity, its stateless architecture built on Kubernetes, ArgoCD, and Helm, and how ejectability works in practice. Christian Blättler (zeitlos) Christian Blättler is a cloud architect and the founder of zeitlos.software, the company behind the Lucity open-source project. Over the last seven years, he has worked as a software architect, helping to design and build various developer platforms and gaining a deep understanding of cloud-native technology.
11:45 - 13:00	Lunch break
13:00 - 13:45	Vibe Code Survival Guide for Open-Source Projects Vibe code is flooding open-source projects with an ever-growing volume of pull requests and ideas. Banning AI contributions isn't the answer, yet it is difficult to resist. How can open-source survive and keep progressing despite the pressure? This talk covers the project playbook we're building in CNCF Harbor and Harbor Satellite: defining a clear project direction so contributors, human or AI-assisted, know what's in scope before they contribute. Setting explicit acceptance criteria and guardrails. Using AI on the maintainer side to triage, review, and filter the growing volume of contributions. Deciding as a project where your boundaries are, what's core, what's an extension, and what's out of scope, so you stop drowning in well- intentioned feature PRs that slowly erode coherence. We share what works, what fails, and how we are rethinking open-source, contributions, community, and project positioning as a whole. Vadim Bauer (Container Registry) Vadim Bauer is a Container Silverback with over a decade of experience in running containers in production. As a maintainer of the CNCF project Harbor, he focuses on extending the boundaries of OCI artifact management, adoption, and developer experience. At 8gears, Vadim helps cloud providers, ISVs and enterprises adopt Harbor and use OCI capabilities.
14:00 - 14:45	Distributed Inference with llm-d and Kubernetes As large language models move from research to running in production on Kubernetes, teams face the challenge of scaling inference efficiently, portably, and cost-effectively. llm-d, a new multi-vendor open source project re-imagines large-scale inference as a cloud-native system, integrating vLLM, the Kubernetes Gateway API Inference Extension, and new strategies such as prefill-decode disaggregation and precise KV-cache awareness. This session introduces llm-d’s architecture and shows how it addresses key bottlenecks: GPU under-utilization, distributed KV-cache reuse, and complex request routing. Attendees will learn how they can achieve performant inference out of the box with llm-d, including features like prefill-decode disaggregation and distributed KV-cache reuse. Antonio Cardace (Red Hat) Antonio Cardace (@acardace), Principal Machine Learning Engineer at Red Hat, is a dedicated technologist with a deep background in Kubernetes, Virtualization, and embedded development. An active member of the open-source community, he currently contributes to the llm-d project and previously served as a maintainer for the KubeVirt project.
15:00 - 15:45	Open-Source Product Development with FreeCAD The established mechanical engineering industry is increasingly facing ever greater challenges. Costs are rising, dependence on other companies abroad is increasing, and qualified skilled workers are becoming more and more difficult to find. To counteract this development, I will demonstrate how the product development process in mechanical engineering can be implemented using open-source software. Among others, the software tools FreeCAD, PrePoMax, and LibreOffice are used. This significantly lowers the entry barrier for mechanical engineering startups as never before, while established SMEs can plan more independently and with greater long-term security. This is particularly essential in the current challenging economic environment. Aleksander Sadowski (ALSADO) Aleksander Sadowski is the founder of ALSADO, the world’s first company offering professional FreeCAD support in the industry. He is studying mechanical engineering at the Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences and has been actively involved in the FreeCAD community for many years. Aleksander is developing a workflow for product development in mechanical engineering, fully composed of open- source-software, including FreeCAD, LibreOffice, PrePoMax and OpenRadioss.
16:00 - 16:45	Lessons learned from maintaining parts of Ansible This talk is about maintaining the Ansible community.general collection, which was started in 2020 as the place where everything landed that no Red Hat team, partner, or group of community maintainers wanted to maintain. Felix will talk about the history of Ansible and how this collection was born and keeps alive, what maintaining this collection means or could mean, which challenges are arising from this, and what he learned from this. Felix Fontein (Plexim) Felix Fontein is a software engineer at Plexim GmbH, a company based in Zürich, Switzerland.
17:00 - 17:30	Kaniko: Rootless Container Builds in 2026 Google archived kaniko, but the community picked it up anyway, because the problem it solves hasn't gone away. Building container images without privileged access in kubernetes is still tricky. We'll look at how kaniko pulls it off, where it breaks, how it stacks up against its alternatives like BuildKit and Podman, and when to choose which one. Martin Zihlmann (SCANDIT) I'm Martin Zihlmann, DevOps Engineer at Scandit AG, and maintainer of https://github.com/osscontainertools/kaniko
17:30 - 19:00	Chat at the bar for on-site guests: The role of Open Source in the age of AI
19:00 - 22:00	BBQ for on-site guests

May 20th

Time (CEST)	Description	Full Day
09:00 - 09:20	Open Source Culture at Scale Building a sustainable and thriving open source culture within a large enterprise is both a technical and organizational challenge. In this talk, the code.siemens.com team goes over a decade of hands-on experience operating Siemens’ self-hosted GitLab platform and fostering an open source culture in-house. We will share our hard-earned practical lessons, Do’s and Don’ts drawn from real-world experience. Transparency in operations, trust-building, and enabling collaboration across diverse teams and decision-making processes that balance autonomy with alignment are central themes throughout our presentation. In addition, we will highlight how these principles extend into some of our key projects, including our sovereign AI platform, which is built entirely on open source components. We will showcase key enabling projects from our infrastructure stack and discuss how open source not only powers our technology but shapes our culture. Attendees will leave with a concrete set of practices, a deeper understanding of how to embed open‑source values into corporate DNA, and inspiration for scaling a transparent, community‑driven development model inside a large enterprise. Max Wittig (Siemens) Since the early days, I have been part of the code.siemens.com core team, serving more than 80k users with the GitLab experience. In addition to operating and further developing the ecosystem, I also coach colleagues across the company on topics such as Git, GitLab, CI/CD, Kubernetes, and containers. I am also a maintainer of several open-source projects, including the widely used python-gitlab library, which provides a pythonic interface for interacting with the GitLab API. Beyond that, I enjoy exploring emerging technologies and new open-source projects to stay ahead of the curve. Generally, an expert in Python, DevOps and all things involving Kubernetes. Ercan Uçan (Siemens) Dr. Ercan Uçan is a Senior Key Expert at Siemens, working as a member of the team behind code.siemens.com. Together with the team, he aims to provide a state-of-the-art developer experience to more than 80k users, again with the motto “for developers, from developers”. Ercan has a background in Computer Science. He completed his PhD at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich in the area of distributed systems and computer networks. He also worked at SCION, a research project on the next generation of Internet architecture. He finished his Master's studies at University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign in the area of peer-to-peer systems and gossip protocols. Besides spending time in the academia, he has also spent a significant amount of time working as a cloud developer at companies such as Swiftkey (Microsoft) and Siemens. Outside of engineering and technology, Ercan spends the rest of his time with music, as the guitarist of the Zurich-based rock band The Birthday Girls.
09:25 - 09:45	Building Sustainable Open Source Communities Open source only creates long term value when it evolves from isolated projects into sustainable ecosystems. In this talk, I will share practical lessons from building and growing open source communities across industries, including automotive, tooling, and compliance. We will explore how companies can move beyond simple code contributions and actively shape collaboration models, governance structures, and shared roadmaps. The session will cover concrete examples of how organizations can align internal teams, external partners, and open communities to accelerate innovation while maintaining trust and quality. Attendees will leave with actionable strategies for turning open source into a scalable, business relevant, and community driven ecosystem. Francisco Carneiro (Eclipse Foundation) Francisco Carneiro is an Ecosystem Development Manager at the Eclipse Foundation, working with global companies to build open and collaborative software ecosystems. He focuses on helping organizations turn open source into a strategic asset through community building, governance, and cross industry collaboration. With experience in technology, business development, and international partnerships, he bridges technical communities and enterprise stakeholders to enable sustainable open innovation.
10:00 - 10:45	Docling: The Open-Source Document AI Engine Join this session from the core Docling team to learn more about this emerging open-source AI project and go behind the scenes with insights into its journey. We will start by exploring what Docling is and how it can help address key unstructured data use cases — ranging from RAG and information extraction to broader document-related agentic workflows. Beyond current capabilities, we will also provide a sneak peek of exciting upcoming developments on our roadmap. Moreover, we will share key learnings from the Docling journey: the challenges and opportunities of open-sourcing, growing and nurturing an ecosystem, and evolving a research technology to a trusted industry standard — along with practical lessons relevant to anyone building sustainable open-source AI infrastructure. Panos Vagenas (IBM Research) Panos Vagenas is an Advisory Engineer at IBM Research, architecting innovative technologies at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence, Information Retrieval, and Data Management. He has been co-driving the Docling open-source project from its inception as a core developer and Technical Steering Committee member within the LF AI & Data Foundation. Panos holds an MSc in Computer Science from ETH Zurich and has received multiple awards including the NASA Group Achievement Award, the IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Award, the ACM SIGMOD Best Demonstration Award, and the ETH Zurich Excellence Scholarship.
11:00 - 11:45	Apache PLC4X - the IT/OT babelfisch About 10 years ago everyone in the OT world was talking about Industry 4.0 and what awesome things could be achieved by bringing together the IT and the OT world. As a senior IT consultant I saw what the IT side had to give, but also that we were lacking the means to universally communicate with this world. At that time OPC-UA was released and first devices appeared. At that time I started working on Apache PLC4X, as I was expecting it to take years for all equipment to support this new protocol. In this project we're generally trying to solve the same connectivity problem as OPC-UA - communicating with any piece of hardware using a shared API. However, PLC4X takes a completely different approach: We implement drivers for the native industrial protocols, which are then accessible via a shared API. With this we're able to also talk to the legacy equipment. In this talk I want to present this fascinating Open-Source project, show you what we've achieved and give an outlook to where it's headed. Christofer Dutz (Apache Software Foundation) Christofer Dutz is an Apache Member and long-time contributor to the Apache PLC4X, Apache IoTDB, Apache TsFile and many more projects, where he focuses on industrial communication, protocol integration and processing of TimeSeries Data. With a background in both software engineering and automation, he has worked extensively on bridging operational technology (OT) and modern IT systems. He is the founder of ToddySoft, a company dedicated to building secure, high-performance industrial protocol drivers and integrations for leading automation platforms. His work centers on making industrial data more accessible through open standards, open-source technologies, and robust commercial solutions.
11:45 - 13:00	Lunch break
13:00 - 13:45	Software Supercharges Stellarator Design Software supercharges stellarator design, even more so when it is open- source. At Proxima Fusion, we embrace the motto "Open Science, Closed Engineering". In 2024, we therefore open-sourced our core plasma simulation tool "VMEC++", which is a modern C++ re-write of the well- established Variational Moments Equilibrium Code by S. P. Hirshman et al, originally written in Fortran during the 1980s at ORNL. VMEC++ enables large-scale stellarator optimization at Proxima Fusion and allowed us to pose the "ConStellaration" challenge in 2025, which calls for novel applications of AI and ML to the intricacies of stellarator optimization for application in future stellarator-based fusion power plants. This talk will start with a brief summary of Proxima's roadmap towards commercial fusion power plants based on QI stellarator technology and where we stand as of today in this regard. I would then like to offer you the story of how VMEC++ started as a side project of my PhD thesis work and culminated into one of Proxima's core simulation tools, as well as shed light onto its application on large scale in the context of the ConStellaration challenge. Jonathan Schilling (Proxima Fusion) Jonathan Schilling has a background in plasma physics from his work on Wendelstein 7-X at the Max-Planck-Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) in Greifswald, Germany. In 2023, he co-founded Proxima Fusion as the first spin-out from IPP together with colleagues from MIT and Google-X. At Proxima Fusion, Jonathan fills the role of the Head of Labs in Munich and leads in-house hardware R'n'D, as well as contributes to the planning of Alpha, Proxima's net-energy- demonstrator stellarator.
14:00 - 14:45	Open Source Regulatory Compliance I report about our approach to regulatory compliance for open source dependencies, most notably the effects of the Cyber Resilience Act and what vendors have to do to keep selling products with digital elements in the EU. Dirk Riehle (FAU Erlangen) Dirk digs open source. In other news, he is the Professor for Open- Source Software at FAU Erlangen. Before joining academia, Dirk led the open source research group at SAP Labs LLC in Palo Alto, California.
15:00 - 15:45	Open Arms: Welcoming AI-Assisted Contributors The open source world is split: ban AI-assisted contributions, or let the review queue fill with code no one can fully stand behind. Neither answer holds. GitLab made a deliberate choice to keep the door open — and then had to live with what that meant in practice. This talk is that honest account. We'll look at what it took to design contribution pathways that actively enable AI assistance, what a global AI Hackathon with nearly 7,000 participants building DevSecOps agents revealed about the new shape of open source participation, and what actually changed for maintainers on the other side. The trade-offs are real. Review burden, code quality, community trust — none of it gets hand-waved away. For an audience running one of the world's largest self-hosted GitLab instances and building InnerSource culture at enterprise scale, this isn't theoretical. The same wave is coming to your project. The question is what position you want to take before it arrives. Raimund Hook (GitLab) Raimund Hook is a DevRel Engineer at GitLab, where he designs the systems, automation, and community programmes that support GitLab's open source contributor ecosystem. He spoke at Open Source @ Siemens 2025 on community onboarding and has spent the past year watching that work collide with the reality of AI-assisted contribution at scale.
16:00 - 16:25	Open Source Funding: How to get Started? As commercial companies we're benefitting and using a lot of open source software and dependencies. Contributing back to open source projects is a great way to support and enhance projects, but is not always the best or most efficient way. At SAP we were looking how to support open source projects and their maintainers additionally through financial contributions. While this sounds straight-forward, a lot of questions arise when you start to look into it: - How to select projects and maintainers to support? - What metrics and tools can support in finding suitable projects? - How to determine the right funding amount? - How to organize the process and budget internally? - How to scale it further in the future? In this talk, I share our experiences and learning from our recently established open source funding program in 2025 at SAP. What we explored, what we learned and leave you with some tips you can apply within your own organization to get started. Tobias Gabriel (SAP) Tobias is Senior Developer in SAP's Open Source Program Office. In his role he supports and advances SAP's open and inner source strategy. Additionally he is an advocate for making the life of developers easier.
16:30 - 16:55	Open Source This — Make No Mistakes It turns out that LLMs are useful not just for code generation, but also for reverse engineering. In this talk, I will show how LLMs can support the analysis of proprietary binaries, protocols, and system behavior to enable open source reimplementation. The focus is on reducing dependency on black boxes, increasing flexibility and rebuilding critical knowledge in the open. Daniel Bovensiepen (Siemens) Daniel is a researcher located in Beijing, where he works for Siemens on industrial communication systems.
17:00 - 18:00	Chat at the bar for on-site guests

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