Open source communities are the backbone of open source innovation and acceleration, and this Special Recognition for their contribution to Community Impact is dedicated to the communities that have made a demonstrable positive impact on the open source ecosystem or in advancing the interests of open source collaboration and innovation.
Roberto Di Cosmo holds degrees from Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Pisa. He was an associate professor at École Normale Supérieure (Paris) and, since 1999, a full professor at Université Paris Cité, where he led doctoral studies (2004–2009). He is president of the board of trustees and of the scientific advisory board of the IMDEA Software Institute, chair of the Software chapter of France’s National Committee for Open Science, and is currently on leave at Inria.
His research spans theoretical computing, functional, parallel and distributed programming, language semantics and type systems, and static analysis of large Free Software collections. He has published over 20 journal and 50 conference papers.
In 2008 he created and coordinated MANCOOSI, a €4.4M European project with 10 partners to improve package-based open-source systems. A long-time Free Software advocate since 1998 and author of Hijacking the World, he created Systematic’s Free Software thematic group in 2007, helping fund 50+ open-source R&D projects (~€200M). He directed IRILL (2010–2018). In 2015 he founded and now directs Software Heritage, a UNESCO-partnered initiative to archive all publicly available source code.