Opensource Manifesto from OpenUK and our reflections from AsFigo

Opensource initiatives will do whole lot better with solid government support worldwide and with elections just around the corner, UK's industry is poised to make that push to the new government.  We joined the OpenUK "Open Manifesto" launch at King's College London on 3-Jul-2024. Led by Amanda Brock, CEO at OpenUK this event boasted an impressive lineup of speakers and panel members and was well attended with diverse audience - from journalists to lawyers and of course many technical experts. Below is a quick reflection of what we found interesting and some pointers on our own work aligned in this direction.


The illustrious speakers including Liz Rice, Amanda Brock, et. al., reflected on OpenUK's popular submarine model to quantify UK based opensource contributions and laid out a path for more tech experts to follow the model of building a "live CV on GitHub". 


While the above is from 2023, the presenters did provide an update snapshot from 2024 highlighting some of the UK based GitHub commits to public repositories. As an interesting observation, Amanda mentioned that the maximum commits were made from a user based out of Scotland proving that location is not a barrier to opensource! 

We at AsFigo strongly believe in this model and have seen early success in building an opensource SystemVerilog testbench linter based on Pyslang, an opensource Python package - we made it available to the worldwide users via our github repo: PySlint (GitHub - AsFigo/pyslint: SystemVerilog Linter based on pyslang). We also presented this at recent StateOfOpenCon'24 organized by OpenUK earlier this year (link to the recoding: https://youtu.be/yOoH-MtrWTs?si=B-tnxHxCTXLQAP6e ). We were then able to leverage this work IEEE 1800.2 library to develop a custom lint for UVM BCL (Customizing UVMLint for IEEE 1800.2 Base Class Library (asfigo.blogspot.com). 

Matt Barker (Matt Barker) - Founder JetStack, VP Venafi and OpenUK Entrepreneur in Residence shared his wisdom on how to raise funding based on opensource efforts during his panel. 


This topic is particularly interesting for us at AsFigo as we evangelize opensource based chip design curriculum for universities across the UK (and beyond). Based on our founding team's multi-decade investment in this EdTech sector with deep focus on semiconductor design, we believe AsFigo can bring in valuable contributions to this space through OpenUK.

The anecdotes from recent training success in Nigeria and how this team was able to fuel it was inspiring indeed. 

Demystifying the "openness" of some of the popular AI platforms was truly the need of the hour. That was the main part of next set of speakers at this event. With Dr. Andreas Liesenfeld (Dr. Andreas) at the dais, the audience truly got a glimpse of his leading work on this topic (https://opening-up-chatgpt.github.io/). 

Prof. Neil Nawrence, The DeepMind professor of Machine Learning, at the University of Cambridge (linkedin.com/in/neil-lawrence-129a22127) captured the audience with his profound views on how technology leadership and achievements should be celebrated. "Forget the next app" - as a punch line indeed, Prof. Neil encouraged more DeepTech startups from the UK such as ARM, DeepMinds etc. 

The event concluded with book signing and networking evening. We sincerely appreciate the efforts by OpenUK and Amanda in particular in bringing such diverse set of stakeholders together and driving this OpenManifesto. We look forward to contributing to the digital skill gap and other related efforts in near future! 





 




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