Safety Certification and Open Source - Can They Work Together?

The last 20 years have seen a tremendous surge of new technologies and capabilities emerge from open source software. These open source building blocks have become increasingly attractive as the base for innovative new products. Safety critical applications are now using them as well, but we lack infrastructure to assess when this software is safe to use, that can keep up with the rate of change of open source development. This talk will look at some of the challenges and approaches to building trust and confidence in open source used in safety critical software coming to new products. The approaches taken by 3 open source projects (Linux, Xen, Zephyr) will be discussed and contrasted.