hi everybody i’m henry badgery and welcome back to our fourth episode of open source for business brought to you
by open teams the open source services marketplace where users of open source software
can find vet and contract with service providers in this episode we talk with patrick
mason he’s a expert when it comes to developing and managing highly distributed organizations
of the topics which we will discuss in this episode include what is the open source initiative open
source licensing best practices biggest mistakes that companies make when
managing open source communities and the future of open source software
so are you ready let’s dive right in
[Applause] thank you henry hi my name is eunice shenzhou and i’m the vp
of partners at urban teams henry and i are super excited to welcome our guests
for this episode patrick mason the general manager and board director of open source initiative
also known as osi the open source initiative is a non-profit corporation
with global scope raising awareness and advocating for the benefits of open source software
they also focus on building community among groups that are part of the open source movement
patrick has over 20 years of experience in our senior leadership positions within higher education and
not-for-profit organizations from being the chief technology officer at the university of massachusetts
to working for the office of the president which i thought was very cool um so it seems like your professional
experience you’ve largely focused on development and management of highly distributed organizations and uh within this
capacity uh you then joined open source initiative uh to help professionalize the organization and
also to help build collaborative communities which is great we know that patrick is active on social
media on linkedin and at twitter you can find him at masonpj and that’s double s um
and another thing i wanted to bring up was the open source initiative is now calling for proposals
for their state of the source summit uh which will be held in mid-september and i’d also recommend that you check
out their new open source technology management micro courses
uh which are fantastic and they’ve been recently released they’re basically for professional development and training
around certain open source topics such as community building contributing to open source and
much more which is very exciting so now that the introduction’s out of the way uh let’s dive right in
so patrick thank you so much for joining us oh thank you so much for having me thank you for the invitation
i think i’m gonna have to capture your audio be uh your your introduction of our two initiatives
uh sounds fantastic we’ll have to use those uh to help promote the events of course you can use it as
well and i’m sure we will too um but i know that you have a lot of experience
within the educational tech community and prior to taking the position at open source initiative
you were a largely an advocate of open source which is which is great so could you actually take us back for a
second and tell us how you got here today uh sure well i actually created or
started my career um doing medical and scientific illustration and visualization so using
cgi or computer generated images to develop scientific visualizations
modeling simul visualizations and simulations and a lot
of that work obviously was computer based and i discovered open source through that process
um and while at ucla working in that capacity began to realize the value of
modifying the tools that we were using for the visualizations and simulations uh and open source software and at the
time it was free software the open source software movement had been uh the osi hadn’t been created yet and
the the label open source hadn’t been articulated yet or defined yet and uh really that experience the
ability to discover and modify tools uh to
make them do what i needed them to do and what the university needed them to do was really a powerful concept
that really allowed us to focus in on our research efforts so that’s where i i really made the
transition from someone who pissed uh pushed inc across the paper
to using digital technologies and computers and discovering open source in that way
then as my career sort of continued i we began to use other open source
technologies so i’d always found whether that was for online learning
or other administrative tools that there was always an open source option out there and slowly carried that
those ideas and uh those values with me as my career progressed into more senior
uh roles within institutions of higher education okay that’s awesome i’m actually really
curious to know what was it like when you made that first contribution what was the perspective of open source then not just for the
hackers but for companies um well it was much different
uh so this was in the mid 90s so early 90s mid 90s how long ago was that
yes when i began uh with open source it wasn’t the default that it is today
where the expectation is that there will be an open source tool and the communities uh i think we’re
more like uh sneaker networks and meaning that you wore your you know sneakers like shoes
you walked across the hallway or down the hall to find your colleagues and peers um we didn’t
have the whole infrastructure and community structure that was that is so common today that
allows for uh open source to propagate and and be shared so most of the contrib
contributions in the development work was very internal to the organization so in this case the
university that we were working in you worked with colleagues that were working in similar research you worked
with other institutions that might have faculty or researchers or staff that were also working and the projects were really
small projects dedicated to the unique set of tools that you needed of course
there are things like you know linux and and and things like you know those broader the lamp
stack was becoming uh popular at the time um as a alternative to sort of
traditional windows uh implementations but it wasn’t like it was today there was real challenges
around the fear uncertainty and doubt or fud of open source in fact i can remember standing up an ftp server
and installing fedora and the university network administrator sent me a nice email wondering what i
was doing with this rogue implementation of a of an ftp server and which sounds crazy
today but it was a much different environment where contributions and development work
was was highly specialized and localized to meet individual needs for specific
projects okay and when do you think the train when did you witness the transition from um sort of yes like you said the
fear uncertainty and doubt when did that start to change whereby um now we’re getting companies
contributing everywhere all around the world and it’s just becoming to become the norm
so yeah when did you see that change and what did that look like um i think well so i will say
again go back a little history so that was the free software movement um and then it wasn’t till 1998 uh you
know 15 maybe even almost 20 years later that the open source initiative and the
open source software movement took off so or was at least introduced so in 1998
that was probably one key point in time where free software advocates got
together and recognized the opportunities that
were available through netscape communicators releases open source software so a little history here
is um the the idea uh and the opportunities of
of mass collaboration made available through free software in the the new public
uh the general public license from gnu and the free software foundation created an
opportunity for folks to meet and get together and develop software and linux of course is
the best example of that and the idea was well how can we take the the
those benefits of of mass collaboration of the many eyeballs make all bugs
shallow sort of idea and and introduce that to business so there’s a
popular book at the time and probably might still be the cathedral the bazaar which talked
about the development process that linux community undertook
that allowed for somebody with an idea uh and to gain a global audience and
contributors and that book the the cathedral on the bazaar and the resulting discussions
that came out got into the hands of the netscape folks and netscape at the time was battling
microsoft explorer uh for for browser dominance and netscape decided that they would take
communicator and release that as um it wasn’t really called open source at the time but release it
under a license that allowed for uh distribution customization
use reuse essentially the software freedom of to use modify and and redistribute the
software and taking advantage of that opportunity a lot of folks from the free software
movement got together they met in palo alto and came up with the idea of open source that label was created by
christine peterson during a meeting uh related to the netscape communicator release
and from that meeting the osi was formed and also something called the open source definition so the open source
definition are at the time it was nine criteria but one more was added later and these
criteria were used to assess whether or not an open software license allowed for software
freedom again the ability to use modify and redistribute the software
and then using that open source definition it was uh licenses could be identified and
there were several the bsd and the gpl and so on other examples the mit were identified as licenses
that could be applied to software and then allowed for those benefits again of mass
collaboration around software projects so that was the sort of enabling
activity the creation of licenses that uh businesses projects foundations
could apply to their software um to create the network effect or to gain
the benefits of the network effect of mass collaboration so that was the enabling factor the
trigger that all this happened so the initial response was the fund of of well what happens if you have open
source software and everyone can see the code it must be insecure um who do you call if it’s
built by amateurs and and you know hackers in their basement uh how good can it be um if uh
you know these are all the sort of who do you call it two o’clock in the morning when you need support you know you need a professional
service level agreement to ensure that your core infrastructure is is stable and has um the support that
it’s needed so the first 10 years i’d say of the osi was really dedicated to
advocating for the use of open source software and highlighting its its viability as a
community no no really mass collaboration around projects is
a legitimate way to build software um and it’s quality yes this is this is you know comparatively
uh equal to and maybe better than um existing proprietary options and then
about 2004 i think is when we really started seeing uh especially with the
emergence of the web in the in the use of open source tools to enable uh startups and companies to
quickly uh without going through the procurement process and all the other sort of uh overhead
associated with developing infrastructure open source software really allowed for the quick and and and
easy way to build a company build services online so the development of
the web and the and more and more activities and services products available through
web technologies gave it that foothold that that then became what we see now so i think
2004 was another pivotal point and then finally
you know maybe now i don’t know when everyone sort of it became the default but when you see microsoft loves
linux now and you see google’s investment and facebook built on open source and all
these companies now i just think it’s become the default so that was a very long answer
no no that answer was amazing i think it’s probably one of the the most rich and insightful
answers that i’ve ever got when sort of asking the question what is the history how did it change what did it look like
and that was fantastic because i think just for the benefit of those listening but also to myself it’s that was a very unique answer that just
it makes so much sense uh it was almost as though it’s just that gray area that needed to be
uh defined for businesses to go okay we’re ready to step in and and help drive this movement um
so everyone anyone who’s basically been involved in open source they they would have heard of
the open source initiative and as you said uh you’re the they’re a steward of the open source
definition but for those uh listening what is open source initiative
and what role does it play amongst the the wider open source community uh so the osi is a non-profit
organization that was founded back in 1998 so that same meeting that led to the label open source and the and the
identity or the the definition being created that same meeting resulted in the
creation formation of the osi and our mission is to raise awareness
and adoption of open source software we’re primarily known for something
called the license review process uh as i mentioned uh the
definition and licenses that were originally created back in 1998 have been added to
through the license review process so what happens is any organization or person can submit a license to the to the osi
that license then goes through a process where it’s peer-reviewed publicly reviewed uh to
assess whether or not it conforms to the open source definition those 10 criteria that have to be
permitted or enabled through the license and then that license becomes osi
approved and we then say that you can call your software open
source software because it carries an osi approved license on it so that’s what we’re primarily known for
but enabled in order to do that we have several uh initiatives that help to raise
support of open source software its benefits um and those range from educational
activities so as you mentioned uh one of the latest ones is a professional development
and graduate program with brandeis university so that’s a formal educational initiative we also do things
we have a great program called floss desktops for kids which actually takes laptop and desktop
computers that would be normally cycled out of uh you know sort of thrown away
and give them to students to rebuild and they get to learn how the hardware works and they
rebuild the machines and they install all open source software on them and then they get to take the computers home
for keeps that’s one of the students said that once uh she said oh i can’t you mean i get to take this
home for keeps i don’t have to give it back so those are educational initiatives we also work with government
and companies to help them engage authentically with open source
software one of the big issues we’re seeing now is something called what we call fopen source or open washing
so fopensource is software that’s released with a non-osi approved license and the folks that
create that software call it open source but it doesn’t carry all of the benefits of open source software so
that’s open source like f-a-u-x folks get it and open watching is when companies
through marketing and promotional initiatives try to uh orient themselves within the
community as an open community but they’re really just using it as a way to to
sell their products or they’re not authentically engaged um so that’s a big area that we’re focused
on right now again that authenticity and engaging with the open source community we do conferences we have a
membership program for individuals and also for non-profit organizations so
our affiliate members include debian uh drupal wordpress you know a
lot of the platforms that people probably recognize and then other organizations with similar
missions and visions around software freedom and the internet so wikimedia and mozilla
are examples of those so those affiliate memberships help us to
by working with us they add uh credibility to the osi
mission they add a voice uh they extend our community uh toward our mission as well
so i guess that’s a pretty big picture of the osi in terms of what we do there’s more but you probably don’t have
enough minutes in the day to hear it all so patrick i know you were speaking a
lot about the different services that open source initiatives offer what
i really want to know is what is your pitch to companies you know
to encourage them to become a member um of the open source initiative or even to
go through your license review process can you tell us a little bit about what your pitch is to different
companies and you know why should any startup of um individual or even company
sign up for your membership and go through your licensing processes sure so i should probably clarify
the osi’s membership is available to individuals so i hope both of you will join or maybe
you already are members and shame on me for not knowing that so there’s an individual membership
program then there’s also an affiliate membership program affiliate members are non-profit
organizations educational institutions and user groups so again mozilla drupal wordpress python software
foundation those types of organizations and those are only members we have
corporate sponsors who are organizations that recognize the important role that the osi plays in
not only raising awareness and adoption of open source but that work around license review
as the steward of the open source definition our advocacy work um with government and
companies and other institutions and organizations so the
it’s a tough pitch because as a sponsor it’s really recognizing that role
and the companies that are current sponsors don’t get anything for their
contribution directly we’re a non-profit this is a straight contribution that they provide
they don’t get a seat on the board they don’t get to elect the board directors it’s really
their recognition that without the osi the open source software movement as we know it today would not exist
that there needs to be an independent third party uh whose mission is to protect
the promote and protect open source software so it’s if there’s a company that’s
interested in supporting the osi because they want to you know
get our membership contact list or have us tweet about them or
be part of their marketing campaign then that’s probably not an organization that that is going to understand the true
value and importance of our work and of course we recognize our
sponsors we thank them for their support we engage with them they’re not only
valuable to us for those direct contributions but they’re a huge resource for us to be
able to connect with other companies around policy and practice and principles of
open source it’s great to be able to tap a large company that
is has a great reputation for working in open source tap them on the shoulder and have them introduce us to maybe
folks that we need to talk to about an issue or if there is an issue within the open source community to get them to help us
raise attention and address the issue so we definitely try to work with them when we can but again our
activity is wholly independent of any outside uh corporate um influence or donations
or contributions that just doesn’t play a part so when i make the pitch to companies
about why they should support us it’s um really here are the activities that we do the
initiatives that we have to do on behalf of the open source community of which you are part of and if you think they’re important we
need your help to do it it’s it’s i guess you could sort of say it’s i mean this is probably i would never say this to a company
but it’s sort of like the tax that that they pay to ensure that the roads are open for
their cars to drive their delivery trucks to delight to drive on uh make sure that the fire
department shows up if their warehouse um is on fire that sort of thing so
uh and i we’ve had tremendous success with that i’m i’m humbled and
tremendously gratified by the outreach that we get from companies who will just contact us out of the blue
and shame on me for not having the you know uh the resources and time and
and and to have reached out and contacted these people first but often we’re contacted by organizations
that realize how heavily they’re invested in open source how much of their core infrastructure how much of their
products and services rely on open source and if we didn’t have clear
licensing and standards around licensing then a lot of the work that
they’re that they do and a lot of the tools that they rely on simply wouldn’t be available to them
and so it’s always gratifying to get those those contacts coming toward us to
support us well awesome thank you so much for
really giving a good overview of why osi exists and the importance it has to
different companies but since we are on the sexy topic the one that i hear a lot um
while uh talking with different people in the open source community or even users of open source
one thing that always comes up is licensing so
really what i want to know is what are some of the licensing best practices for
users of open source um and really all the all the things around licensing and licenses in open
source community so eunice you must be hanging out with a pretty dull crowd if
if licensing is the hot topic so it’s usually not uh it’s funny
um josh simmons who’s our president of the board currently has has this
phrase that i’m probably not going to say it exactly right but um he often says the osi does the
janitorial work of open source meaning that somebody’s got to come in here and you know make sure
things are you know clean and working properly and that sort of thing um so some of the best practices um
you know it’s it’s broad and one of the things that for some reason seems to be controversial currently
is the use of the open source label so we’re pretty adamant that only software
distributed with an osi approved license which doesn’t mean that 11 people in some room somewhere
approved this license it actually means that it went through a license review process with over 500 people who can participate
in reviewing that license so while it’s osi approved the osi is facilitating the license review process
and then based on the feedback of that community we’re approving or not approving or
sending it back for modification so that it truly is a consensus of the community on whether or not this is an
open source license and again whether or not it complies with the open source definition
so so there’s because open source the label is now so common um commonly used to describe
all sorts of things you know open source textbooks and open source uh hardware
and open source i even got an email once from somebody who wanted to create open source beer so i wanted to know if they could use
the open source label to describe beer exactly um so
that is sort of a an issue that’s that’s come up about well open source you know and the osi doesn’t
have a trademark on the two words open source that phrase that phrase actually even more history
goes back to open source intelligence which was a a technique used in world war ii to assess
the effectiveness of military activity during world war ii so could you derive any information that was freely
available by observing your enemy in the field so that open source label actually exists
before open source software but it has become a standard a term of art
that is recognized within technology and software industries as software that carries an osi approved
license so when you say open source software there’s a general understanding across
business and government and projects and developers that that’s sort of what it means so
helping first of all startups and developers and
new projects understand that often on github we’ll see people tout that their project oh they’ve
started a new open source project but it turns out they’ve created their own license or they’ve taken the mit
license and modified it for something and usually it’s right now there’s a lot of discussions around ethical licensing so
um what is the role and responsibility of projects uh to ensure that those
using the software align with social conventions and and ethical
issues that they’re concerned about so the actual osi or the open source definition doesn’t allow for
putting limits on use or users so those two things are in conflict the the
desire to ensure a healthy and safe community of contributors and users where you mandate
that you can’t use it for military use you can’t use it for uh illegal activities you you have you
can’t use it for things that might hurt the environment um unfortunately that in our fact we say
evil people can use open source software so there’s two criteria in the open
source definition that don’t allow for discrimination against users or fields of endeavor so anyone can use
it for anything and by allowing that it unfortunately allows people to
use it and probably things that most people wouldn’t like so that’s part of the discussions and
principles and practices that we often work with understanding what the open source label
means um there’s also you know we get a lot of questions about well what’s our what’s the best license what license should we
pick yeah and so we never get into that discussion uh licenses tend to be
constitutions of communities they they they serve as a foundation for
how the project that picks the license wants to operate how it wants to engage
with its contributors what its expectations are for the community of users
and contributors so that’ll be different and there’s no that’ll be different with every
community so there’s no right answer what’s important is that people pick a license that reflects how they
want to develop their software how they want to engage with the community and that they understand the
opportunities uh or barriers to different licenses uh through compliance with those
licenses the terms of those licenses so in that respect what we do is we try
to provide educational you know resources and that is without a
doubt the number one question we get from our everything from our social media accounts to our direct emails to
conferences and when i speak anywhere is questions about the nuances of licenses
which license is compatible with that license what’s the compliance issues associated with this license
which license should i pick what’s the best license those sorts of things and we don’t tell
anyone that we just try to help them make a decision that they’re most comfortable with yeah okay that makes that’s great and
what are some of the best practices for companies that want to make sure that they’re compliant that they’re not uh going against any of these licenses
what do you say like a first step is uh for a company that would like to do that well um
you know unfortunately it’s gonna depend a lot on the resources of that company but obviously uh you’ll want to engage with
a local qualified legal [Music]
representative or hire them if you can depending on the size of the company but
you really need to engage with a qualified attorney um whose experience
with open source software um you know there’s all sorts of issues whether you know you can be a
end user where you’re just downloading the software and what are the compliance issues with that and
and generally if you’re just using that computer on your the software on your computer or within your organization it’s really
there’s not a lot to to worry about you’re just using it as an end user well then it’s well what if i make a
modification to that software just because i make a modification on my uh software that i’m using on my laptop
or within my company um you know there’s no real requirements to share that or you know i can still
use that as um as just for my own use um
when you begin to uh contribute to a project not just to run it internally but you
want to send something and contribute it back to or create something and send it back to the community that is running the project you might run
into issues around contributor license agreements or how do you license your work so that
it’s compatible um with the existing license of the main project
so again you’ll want to reach out to someone who can give you legal advice on that
often the projects will have advice on how to best license your work if they
have a cla what’s what’s involved with that then there’s creating your own project
so a company might say oh we’ve had really successful we’ve been successful in running open source software locally
modifying it for local use uh contributing it back now the question is oh maybe we want to
start up our own project or maybe there’s a project that we’ve been working on that we’re forking and creating a new you know utility or tool or feature
that’s sort of an independent thing so then again what license do you want to pick how does that license uh
align with or comply with your existing ip other software that you might be including with this
so having a licensed compliance group is a very important
um one resource for a startup or a you know smaller company
or even a project would be to seek out organizations that help in this way that
can be through a foundation so if you have a project and you’re not sure about licensing or
you’re a small company or startup that that doesn’t have the resources to go hire a bunch of lawyers or even contract with
them you know think about reaching out and even joining a foundation so depending on the technology you’re using you might
want to join the apache foundation or the python software foundation or
software conservancy you know those organizations will have resources that
can help you and your project or your company uh best interact with and take advantage of open
source licenses okay that was great yeah because i think there’s definitely still a lot of work
to go uh because it’s just and even just open source is growing by the day and it’s growing so incredibly fast that
it’s difficult to keep up well with the best practices uh particularly when it comes to licensing
but i now like to shift the focus a little bit and focus on something that you said earlier that i found really interesting
um you said that you believe that uh proprietary sorry open source is better than proprietary
software so i said it could be it could be it could be so could you please explain why why is that the case
why do you believe that to be the case so first of all um as someone working in
open source software for 20 years i can guarantee you that i have created terrible open source software
there is plenty of bad open source software just because it’s open source just because it carries an osi approved
license doesn’t mean the software is good that’s a intellectual property and licensing issue not
a quality of code or features parity with other things that it’s completely different so um
there are like i said so there’s just because it’s open source doesn’t mean it’s better than it’s it’s com you know a similar
proprietary tool that’s out there um and i think that organizations should
use the same due diligence in identifying and implementing
open source software as they would proprietary software the real challenges and it’s getting
better but this used to be a challenge probably around you know 2005 2010
was as organizations like governments that have very strict procurement processes
and businesses that that have internal controls around contracting and software procurement um
how do you include open source software in that analysis right so if you put out an rfp or an rfi
request for information requests for proposals around software you’re probably not going to get
responses from open source projects because they don’t have pre-sales teams and sales teams that go
out and and answer rfps and and sales people that show up to you know talk about their
the proprietary or the open source software just like they would with proprietary software
so the process uh for including open source
software um as part of the decision making is is critical and then
you might have to edit this out because i don’t remember the i’ve lost track of the questions specifically
that’s right let me just write down the time quickly so the the question um why do you think
yeah the open source proprietary for better right so in this
in the case of procurement uh it’s it’s it’s just being equal we just want equal
footing we’re not saying it’s better because it’s open source or that because it’s proprietary it’s inherently worse we just want to be
ensured that organizations uh understand that that they can be equal and possibly better so that for their
benefit and the open source community they’re looking at all options so the other aspect would be and i do
think that the development methodology that’s enabled through uh massive
collaboration and you know the many eyeballs make all bug shallow
i think that is a better development methodology so incremental iterative development and
you’re seeing that in project management paradigms like agile development and devops and things like that where
it sort of recognized the small next best step and iterative development is sort of the
way to go and open source licensing enables that because you’re making all of the software source
available for people to modify on the fly they don’t you know it’s not locked down to just
the 100 people 50 people 10 people within the development
group of a company it’s being exposed to everyone you’re getting more input people coming
in and testing it against different sets of criteria and parameters against different tools and technologies
so you’re just getting more people who can tell you uh whether or not it’s there’s an issue and that’s only half of the benefit
me telling you there is a problem is great but you’re also exposing the project to allow more people to tell you
how to fix the problem so you could be working with a small group of people who are working in a
closed environment and they might find the problem but they don’t have the experience or expertise to perhaps
solve the problem so again by exposing this project through open source licenses that allows
anyone to use and modify the software you’re getting a much broader access to experts
and so the pace of development increases the quality of the software um increases and these are benefits that
are only possible through open source development so i wouldn’t say that open source
software is inherently better but i would say open source development is inherently better okay that was
that was great because i think um it’s it’s also the case like you were saying the fact that you’ve got community you have group
think you have thousands of people around the world working on one project it’s just very hard for a company to be
able to compete with that um and that’s what has i think made this software movement open source software
movement so so powerful and and swift in growth these days um but one thing i wanted to ask is is not
all open source communities obviously benefit from that but i know that you’ve had a lot of experience both building and fostering open source
communities and i also know that one of the core like like you mentioned one of the core services and activities of open source
initiative is to build and engage with open source communities so i wanted to ask with with your wealth
of experience in that domain what are the biggest mistakes that you’ve seen companies make
when both building and managing uh open source communities oh there’s a few um i think the two that
come to mind first are the sort of uh
sort of throw it or build it throw it over the wall it’s got an open source license on it
and the community with just because it’s so awesome we’ll just start start joining us and participating
because uh it’s such a great tool and don’t organizations want to be or don’t people and and projects want to
be uh affiliated with us in some way so this sort of idea that if you build it they will come sort of
thing um and we’re leveraging our name as big company x
uh and so of course everyone’s gonna want to help us um and then the other one is uh a big
company or government or you know someone some organization that’s that’s
benefited from a high profile or good reputation comes
in and thinks that they can sort of direct things oh we’re here now we’ll take care of it
and those two are probably the most common uh issues and there’s little
spin-offs of of things that happen related to those two but that idea that
that all you have to do is put an open source license on it and and everybody will want to come and
give you their free labor isn’t that awesome is one problem and then the other is
uh all right we’ll just show up and we’ll give you know a hundred thousand dollars to
the project and we’ll devote three developers and of course now we’ll decide the road map for
the project we’ll decide the you know direction of the project and the features and the governance and the decision making
will all be ours because we’re awesome and big brother steps in exactly so those are the two biggest
uh issues so helping organizations understand that why those aren’t appropriate uh um
and they don’t yield what you think they will uh that that’s from the big picture um for
smaller uh communities um and projects it’s it’s again about community
development and um actually it’s it’s
ensuring that they’re actually creating channels for people who want to participate to
participate in any way they want to participate so if i and i think most people know this
it’s just um maybe they don’t appreciate the time and energy and
dedication it takes right it’s more than putting up a mailing list and a slack
i would not you know slack’s great but it’s not open source but uh so rocket chat or some other open source version um but
it’s more than you know putting your stuff on github and and um you know and it’s more than just
technology related opportunities and coding related opportunities it’s it’s community
development and marketing and fundraising and it’s and it’s not just taking contributions
but converting and incentivizing and facilitating new leaders within the project you can’t
do it all maintainer burnout is a real thing where people feel committed
uh to their project and it’s this double-sided sort of story where it’s like i can’t do
it all it’s dr now they want me to do a conference or now i have to deal with licensing and now i have to i just you know i just
want to develop the software um well then you have to be willing to give that up and you have to be willing to establish
uh practices and expectations and maybe not policies but
sort of common awareness around the culture that you want to create within your project so that other people
can step in with their areas of interest and expertise to participate
to make the project because those folks want the projects to succeed as well and if you’re not giving them that opportunity
then you can’t do it all uh and your project will sort of be doomed through the sort of you know i know if
it’s a benevolent dictator it’s sort of a clueless hoarder
i don’t know if there’s a name for the the person who won’t give up control uh maybe that will we’ll call him a
clueless hoarder from now on that sounds very derogatory though that sounds neat that’s probably not nice
that’s awesome um yeah i definitely think this has some of the biggest mistake even with my little
experience in the open source community these are some of the big things that i’ve seen
over the last year and a half of me being part of this of the open source community
so i really want to talk about um the future and of open source and where
we think is heading um what are you the most excited about
with regards to the future of open source um i am two things
um and they’re on the different sp i don’t know if they’re on the it’s not fair to say they’re different spectrums
uh different ends of the spectrum but um i think that there’s a real appreciation and investment
by all organizations who understand the importance of open source in creating formal legitimate
uh you know they sometimes are called um ospos or open source uh programs offices um
uh so or but formalizing the role within their organizations
uh of the role to enable create distribute participate engage
with open source uh from a company-wide perspective it’s no longer uh one part of the organization um
you know it started off as the rogue developer who installed something on their desktop stuffed under their
their desk that nobody knew about uh then it got to uh well maybe there’s some part of the
data center that yeah they’re doing something over there it’s open source it seems to be working and now it’s to the point where no no
this is this is core to our our company core to our business core to
our government activities so we’re seeing all sorts of formalization around that so whether
it’s the eu and the work that they’re doing now around standards of open source whether
it’s companies that are creating ospos there’s a great project that the osi’s been involved with and some
exciting announcements will be coming out soon around introducing ospos to institutions of
higher education so education why aren’t uh universities
creating open source program offices when you think of all the intellectual property a lot of open source software comes out
of of universities colleges and universities and research activities
so why isn’t that something that’s more formalized within institutions of higher education same
with government we also have a public policy group that’s helping we have a director of public policy who’s working a lot with
the eu um and the european commission on uh
standardizing open source and and uh creating open source policy
uh so that is very exciting it’s like okay it’s not just now recognized it’s becoming part of uh the day-to-day
operations and expectations so that’s the one side the other thing i’m i’m but this is also
very scary it’s the absolute
incredible growth and engagement across all i don’t know if they’re
sectors or communities or populations or you know around the globe where we are
seeing highly motivated uh people working through self-discovery of
projects and i mean startups and things like that you know i’m old enough to remember the dot-com boom in the late
90s and things so it’s not like there hasn’t always been entrepreneurial activities but the tone the the at
the driver is different it’s so much more about community and collaboration yes it’s
great that we all make a buck or yes it’s great that we can start up a business but at the end of the day i’m
impressed by so many people that are coming to to us and i’m meeting through my work with the osi from around the world
that the reason i’m doing this is because of the community it creates and the ability to collaborate
with all these smart people around the world doing that have a shared interest
and it’s uh so motivational i i just leave every time i go to a comp
well i don’t go to many conferences anymore uh this year for obvious reasons but every time
i would go someplace or even today and whatever type of exchange that
you can have whether it’s through online activities or emails or discussion forums whatever it might be
that’s the thing that i’m just it just seems like there’s a this is gonna sound terrible a better
group of people getting more involved for better reasons
in open source i’m not really that interested in the vc folks who are looking for the next open
source super company yeah i i don’t really care about that
that’s not exciting that’s not interesting just applying old sort of business models and hacks
that are outdated and not really that helpful to to really only help a select few what i’m seeing now are
people who just have altruistic you know vision of a shared
co-creation of new opportunities that everyone of course is going to be
entitled to participate in it’s such a different attitude and it’s it’s fantastic it’s the most
motivational thing that i see that’s awesome that’s really awesome and
i think you have said it all but i really want to conclude with some uh really strong actionable items
uh what do you think are some best um action items that the people
listening today can take to drive change as individuals or within the organizations so that
it helps to us open source just becoming more friendly
you know so we don’t have to keep having conversations around open source any different challenges that we are facing as we grow
um within the open source industry i won’t even say community anymore
um well i guess that depends on you know the perspective of the person
so if you’re interested in joining a project
i i have a [Music] my son is a junior in college and
of course i’m beating him over the head about how awesome open source he’s a computer science major and beat
him over the head about open source um but he’s intimidated
um you know there’s the imposter syndrome and things like that which are totally real um and i think it it takes a lot of
courage especially if you don’t fit the stereotype of an open you know if you i
can see whether it’s in that stereotype might be that you’re you’re not an expert in coding or you
come from a culture or background that’s not like the rest of the group or there’s
all sorts of those barriers and it’s probably very easy to say just you know join anyway um
but i think you know there has to be a way to help people who might not fit the typical
vision or stereotypes associated with participation open source and so then that puts the responsibility
on the community so you know actionable items are creating communities that welcome all
participants because you never know where that next best idea is going to be
allow for leadership and activities to come from anywhere don’t
pick your favorites and create channels that really just only allow certain people to participate
you know so i think that’s at sort of the project level on both the the project side and the individual computer uh
contributor side um best practices uh from
you know larger organizations is um you know it’s gonna be a lot more work but definitely formalize uh open source and
your understanding and participation in open source communities
you know it can’t be run by that person over there who’s always done
it just because you know they have to be given organizational authority and you know
decision making authority to to to affect change so you know those are
those are sort of big picture items small things you can do right now you can join the osi as an individual member
so go to opensource.org join or members and you can join we have
student memberships complementary memberships regular memberships you can get your your project
to join as an affiliate member so you know that’s these are all selfish osi things by the way
but i think on going back again i’m still struck by the
difficulty it is for those who are motivated to
find ways to join and participate um you know nothing’s sadder
to me because you never know where the next great contribution is going to come from
if you don’t give somebody an opportunity to contribute so
the best thing that you can do for your project is create mechanisms that allow for
what at the end of the day is the core value of open source the mass collaboration
the network effect that’s enabled through open source and if you’re not fully exploiting that then you’re not
using open source to its maximum potential yeah wow that was a fantastic
way to end it and and thank you so much i’ve really really enjoyed this episode and it’s been great hearing all your
insights so thank you very much patrick well thank you so much for the invitation um it’s it’s always uh
great to talk to uh folks that are committed i know open teams is committed uh to uh increasing the use
and contributions of open source i mean these are exactly the type of organizations we want to support we want every
of course we want all software to be open source but we want all businesses that are that are working around open source to
be successful that is truly our mission to and uh seeing the work that opens teams is doing uh um
is great and if we can help in any way uh let us know because we definitely want you all to be
successful well thank you very much for that and it seems like our missions are almost directly aligned because our goal really is to help
people build their open source business um so to those of you listening uh thank you
very much for listening i hope you enjoyed this episode uh if you did like what you saw and you’re watching this on youtube
then please give the video a like and subscribe to be able to see some more content like this in the
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and let us know what you think so next episode we’ll be talking with wenjin chu the head of open source and
research at future way technologies so until then stay safe everyone
