Natanael Copa
Natanael Copa is the founder of Alpine Linux and has been involved in open-source development since 2001. He works on k0s at Mirantis, with a focus on Linux, Kubernetes and small, maintainable systems. His interests include distribution engineering, musl libc, diskless systems and bringing Alpine Linux to new hardware architectures.
Session
Alpine Linux began as a small, diskless distribution for routers and security appliances. It was not designed for containers, cloud computing or smartphones, yet it eventually found its way into all three.
In this talk, Alpine’s founder looks back at five lessons from more than twenty years of building and maintaining the project: how real constraints can produce unexpected opportunities, why simplicity must include the contributor experience, how being different can pay off, why neglected work eventually becomes technical debt, and why a friendly community is part of a project’s technical quality and security.
This is not a complete history or a celebration of everything Alpine got right. It is a candid account of decisions that worked, mistakes that became apparent years later, and what it takes for an open-source project to survive beyond its original purpose.