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Who I am

Antenore Gatta. Italian-Swiss. Father of five. Senior Lead Cloud Governance & Security Engineer at Kyndryl. Powerlifter. Hacker in the original sense.

30 years in IT. I started with GNU projects in the early 2000s, co-administered GNU Herds with the Free Software Foundation Europe, got Richard Stallman’s attention with an idea about building a company entirely on free software. Then life, kids, and paying rent took over.

What I do for a living

I design and manage enterprise-scale AWS environments at Kyndryl. Multi-account architecture, security frameworks, cost optimization. The kind of work where you build guardrails so 500 engineers don’t accidentally expose a database to the internet.

Core areas:

  • AWS Organizations, Control Tower, landing zones
  • Service Control Policies, IAM Identity Center
  • Cost management (CUR 2.0, QuickSight dashboards)
  • Infrastructure as Code (CloudFormation, Terraform)
  • Linux/UNIX systems, OpenShift, CI/CD

Certifications: AWS Solutions Architect Associate, AWS Cloud Practitioner, Red Hat OpenShift Administration (DO180/280, DO425).

What I do for free

From 2014 to 2023 I maintained Remmina, a GTK remote desktop client. 150,000+ users, 8,000+ commits from 200+ contributors. CI/CD pipelines, releases, bug triage, community management. Nine years, on top of a day job.

Total donations over that period: about 1,000 CHF per year. Roughly 110 CHF per month for what was basically a second full-time job.

That experience changed how I think about open source. At some point the frustration almost got to me: bug reports from companies deploying the software on hundreds of machines, zero contributions back. I was close to hating the whole ecosystem, which would have been the wrong conclusion. Instead I started studying what was actually going on: who gets funded and who doesn’t, the behavioral research behind it, the economics.

The short version: the system makes it easy to take and hard to give back. Mancur Olson called it the free rider problem in 1965. Darley and Latane called it the bystander effect. Nadia Eghbal applied both to open source in Roads and Bridges. The research is 60 years old. The open source community is still catching up.

So I relaunched simbiosi.org: data-driven advocacy for open source sustainability. Case studies with real financial analysis, policy work on the EU Cyber Resilience Act, and practical tools like donation page redesigns. Not a business: a community project.

Currently I volunteer on FreeBSD CRA compliance through the ORC Working Group’s Cyber Resilience SIG, reviewing the EC’s draft guidance. 16 years of compliance work at IBM and Kyndryl, years maintaining an open source project: this is where those two things finally meet.

Where to find me

Support my work

If you find my content or open source work useful, you can support me. Or better: pick an open source project you depend on and donate to them directly. That’s the whole point.