About

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

How I got here

In the early 2000s I started Simbiosi.org with an idea: build a flat company, entirely based on Free and Open Source software. The concept got the attention of Richard Stallman, who pointed me to the Free Software Foundation Europe. I worked with the GNU Herds project for a while. Then the FSFE was fighting more urgent battles, and those plans went on pause.

In 2014 I picked up maintenance of Remmina, a GTK remote desktop client. What was supposed to be a contribution turned into 9 years of full-time-equivalent work on top of my day job. 150,000+ users, 8,000+ commits from 200+ contributors. I built CI/CD pipelines, managed releases, triaged bugs, reviewed PRs, dealt with the community. The total donations averaged about 1,000 CHF per year.

That experience taught me something no conference talk ever could: the people doing this work are invisible, and the companies building billion-dollar products on top of it have zero structural incentive to support them. It’s not that people don’t know. It’s that the system makes it easy to take and hard to give back.

What I do now

Full-time I work on AWS cloud governance and security at Kyndryl. I write about cloud architecture and I keep contributing to open source.

Simbiosi.org is back as what it was always meant to be: a place to make visible the people who maintain open source infrastructure and the gap between what they build and the support they get. Not a business. Not a consultancy. Not an audit. Advocacy for the people doing the work, backed by data.

The first case study is on the FreeBSD Foundation. More coming.

Where to find me