Former Microsoft employees Lennart Pöttering, Christian Brauner, and Chris Kühl have recently unveiled the creation of a new company called Amutable. Based in Germany, the company is focused on ensuring the cryptographically verifiable integrity of Linux systems. More details about their mission will be revealed at the upcoming FOSDEM conference. It has been mentioned that Amutable’s technologies revolve around verified booting of Linux, maintaining the integrity of the build process, and upholding a trustworthy state during operation.
Chris Kühl, who previously founded Kinvolk (a company acquired by Microsoft), has been appointed as the CEO of Amutable. Kinvolk was known for developing the distribution kit Flatcar Container Linux and open cloud-native solutions for Kubernetes. Christian Brauner, a notable figure in the Linux community as the maintainer of the VFS subsystem and leader of projects like LXC and Incus, has taken on the role of technical director. Lennart Poettering, known for projects like Avahi, PulseAudio, and systemd, is now the Chief Engineer at Amutable.
The team at Amutable includes seven engineers with backgrounds in open projects like systemd, the Linux kernel, Kubernetes, runc, LXC, Incuss, and containerd. They also bring experience in building traditional distributions such as Debian, Fedora/CentOS, SUSE, Ubuntu, as well as atomically updated systems like Flatcar Container Linux and Ubuntu Core.