Opening Talk: Open Source in the Agentic Era

AI is rapidly reshaping how software is created. Code generation, testing, documentation, and review are becoming more efficient, yet the challenges of understanding code, maintaining it over time, and sharing responsibility do not disappear. When code grows faster than human understanding, open-source communities may also accumulate a new form of cognitive debt.

In these opening remarks, Willem Jiang draws on his twenty-year journey in the Apache community. He will explore the opportunities and trust challenges facing open source in the agentic era and invite a new generation of developers to help build better ways for humans and AI to collaborate.

Speakers:

Willem Jiang: Independent Open Source and Agentic AI Consultant

Willem Jiang (Jiang Ning) is an independent open source and Agentic AI consultant and a maintainer of DeerFlow. He previously served as an Open Source Evangelist at ByteDance’s OSPO and as a member of the Board of Directors of the Apache Software Foundation. Willem has contributed to numerous Apache projects, including Apache Camel, CXF, ServiceMix, and ServiceComb. Before joining ByteDance, he spent six years at Huawei as an open source technical expert. Earlier in his career, he was a Principal Engineer at Red Hat, where he worked on Fuse ESB, and held engineering roles at FuseSource, IONA, and TravelSky.