Zephyr Project Meetup

FOSS & Safety – The case of Zephyr

Zephyr Project Meetup Hamburg

In recent years we have witnessed the steady rise of FOSS in practically speaking every software domain from cloud to desktop to embedded devices. That is, not necessarily all SW products today are FOSS but pretty much all are using FOSS as a dependency in the one or other way.

While the economic drivers for this development are easy to understand in some areas this is still posing challenges though. Take for instance safety-critical products such as medical devices. Here the device makers are required by law to provide objective evidence  – examined by external bodies – that their SW is properly functioning.

Now, in case a device maker wants to include  FOSS this can actually become quite challenging if the FOSS itself does not collect and make available such evidence for itself. After a quick introduction to the safety-critical software world this talk will shed some light on the Zephyr project’s current efforts to obtain such evidence. I’ll talk about the various activities- past, present and future – and how people can engage, participate and follow the safety work of the project.

About the speaker:
A physicist by training, Tobias Kästner has always been fascinated by the intersection of the physical with the digital world. His professional career started as a SW team lead in a medical device start-up and since then he has served a couple of roles for 15+ years in this industry. At inovex, he works as a solution architect and technical consultant for the IoT in general and medical devices in particular. He has been following the Zephyr project since its humble beginnings and has been using this technology in numerous projects since. Today he is also an active member of the project’s Safety Working Group.