About
In today’s episode, we talk with Nithya Ruff, the Chair of The Linux Foundation and the Head of Comcast’s Open Source Program Office. Nithya is an inspiring leader and was listed as one of the most influential women in open source by CIO Magazine.
Our conversation is very interesting and insightful for all businesses that use, contribute to or create open source software. Some of the topics we discuss include:
– What is an Open Source Program Office (or OSPO), how do you set one up, measure it’s ROI and ensure its success?
– Best practices for contributing to and using OSS
– Why an open source friendly approach attracts great talent
– Diversity and inclusion within the open source space
– And much more…
Transcript
hi everybody welcome back to the eighth episode of open source for business brought to you by open teams in this
episode of open source for business i talk with nithya ruff who is the chair of the
linux foundation and also the head of comcast’s open source program office nithya has been listed in the
past as one of the most influential women in open source by cio magazine i had a really really
interesting conversation with nithya and she provided some truly invaluable advice for any company that’s
using contributing to or even creating open source software some of the topics
that we did discuss and that we went deep in dove deep into were
largely centered around what an open source program office is why any company would want one how do
you go about setting one up and then how do you measure the success so the roi of having that open source program
office niffy goes on to explain why an open source friendly approach attracts great talent
and she’s very very passionate about diversity inclusion within the open source space so we talk
quite a bit about that too we discuss many other things and it’s a really fun and engaging conversation so
i look forward to all listening to it one thing i did want to share with all of you before we get into this is the link to
comcast’s github page i think you’ll really find some great stuff there you can see all of the amazing work they’ve
been doing and some there are some really awesome projects on there so just again this is the podcast
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 to show support for this podcast it would be great if you could leave a review on
apple podcasts letting us know what you think that really does go a long way so thank you for all your support so far
all right i think we’re ready so let’s dive right [Music]
[Applause] in thank you so much for joining us it’s
such a pleasure henry thank you for inviting me i know that you’ve published a lot of
articles i’ve seen your name all over social media when it comes to open source and you give a lot of talks around business and
community all around the world at conferences like the oss summit oz con all things open scale openstack
and the list literally goes on and while you didn’t start out necessarily
as a coder using open source software you began your career in open source when you’re working at
sgi in the 90s so you go a while back in open source so could you take us a bit back and give
us an idea of how you got here today absolutely henry and uh it’s it’s
stunning to me when i look back that it was the beginning days of open source
uh so i started in as you said in 1998 working at silicon graphics which was a
world-class server company who produced post-production
software for movies like indiana jones and jurassic park and
um we were in the midst of making a transition from proprietary operating systems to linux-based
uh servers we could see the writing on the wall that open source was here to stay and
that customers wanted open source based servers on x86 type of architecture
standards-based architecture customers got the cost effectiveness the innovation of
linux and so i was part of a strategy team learning all i could about how open
source communities worked and how silicon graphics could then work closely
with the community and then bridge to our customers and serve our customers using an open source
based product it’s a very different model and so uh it was so much fun
to be in the early days of open source um and and i think that began my journey
and i i would say the overarching story for me is i’m a connector i
connect communities of open source and companies so i help companies work more
effectively with open source and help open source communities work more effectively
with enterprises and companies that are adopting open source so broadly so if you will the next step was a
natural step i joined a startup called tripwire help them with their open source
strategy and open source their products uh which then led me to really
leading a whole product line an embedded linux product line at windriver systems
which was a part of intel i got to work with both open source communities like
yocto and other embedded open source communities and really sell customers on the
benefits of a commercial open source distribution that we were providing so you can see
was yet another aspect of commercial open source and then i was lucky enough to
work at sandisk western digital which is a storage company flash based
storage and on the surface one thinks uh you know what does storage have to do with open
source but there’s a tremendous amount of open source innovation that is happening inside
sandisk to make sure that software could optimize and effectively support storage
so i started the first open source program office for sandisk
and reported into the cto at sandisk and that was a tremendous you know
experience because i also got to start the women’s innovation network at sandisk which was our employee resource
group there for women in technology and so i could i could really take
both passions of representing diversity and also starting open innovation for a
company like sandisk which led me uh to my current um area which is comcast
and uh as you you also covered my open source work at the linux foundation
and uh it’s it’s just a fantastic place to be i’m doing the best work of my life and
enjoying it that is great to hear and you’ve obviously got such a
broad range of experience but something you really focused on too is the open source program offices which
which we’ll touch soon but before we get into that i really i wanted to know over the years and over the decades
would have been the most important changes or the the most impactful changes that you’ve witnessed uh in the open source space
um very very uh good question because it’s important to look back and look at our history
and where you’ve come from um the first phase i always define as the community phase it’s where
free and open source software was born um in mit you know with people like richard
stallman the free software foundation the beginning of the gnu
gpl license that kind of said the way business was done in
proprietary software is not good enough we need more collaboration
we need access to source code and we need to be uh have the freedom really to use it for
whatever we want so that was really the community phase i would say it was very organic a lot of people
were involved the second phase i would say is the foundations phase
so you have the beginning of foundations like the apache foundation the linux foundation this was started
because companies started using open source and they wanted a neutral place where they
could collaborate with each other and create new software together
you couldn’t really do it say from an ibm or a sun or a silicon graphics because
it would be biased or it would be driven by one company and this provided a neutral home
the other objective of these foundations was to protect and defend open source to propagate open
source to educate people on open source so the creation of foundations to me is
significant the third phase is the beginning of massive hyper scale and cloud
companies starting to build their infrastructure on open source so you see the beginnings of google
using open source facebook amazon and you can go on and on um all of these
companies were born post open source and so they and infrastructure was
rich in the open source arena and they started building on open source the fourth phase
frankly is enterprises like comcast capital one others starting to use open source
themselves and realizing that they could be empowered and they could become software
development houses they could be technology leaders and start innovating
on their own uh in the application space in the customer ui space where they serve customers so to
me that’s uh the long history and some of the major events that happened in open
source that was that was amazing it’s great just to see the change and i think it really is just the
businesses actually taking open source more seriously and that’s what’s changed to the extent that every business
knows they need to take open source seriously if they want to operate in a modern day corporate environment uh so going
forward what are some of the trends that you are seeing happening right now that enterprises should be aware of um
you hit it on the nail henry i think enterprises need to recognize all enterprises need to recognize that
they are now technology companies and digital companies especially during
covid it has accelerated companies need to be digital companies to serve
their customers digitally and through technology um what that means
is that they’re all consuming or using software of some sort and
even working you know creating software and it also means that 80 to 90 of the software they’re
consuming will include some form of open source so they need to get educated in open
source they need to understand how to engage with open source how to work with open source
they need to understand licenses etc and then the second major trend i would say for enterprises to pay attention to
is that open source is not just for working externally with open source
communities you can bring the power of collaboration inside the company and use it to
collaborate inside the company across divisions across product lines
thereby breaking down silos reusing software collaborating with teams across
the company even to create proprietary software and that movement has been called inner
source you know source okay as i was going out so that’s that’s the inner source movement that you were talking about okay
and you briefly touched on uh best practices or what companies should be doing when they’re contributing uh to open source
or engaging with communities but before we actually dive into more details around that i really wanted to focus in on what i see as your
expertise and uh that is open source program offices you’re now the head of comcast’s open
source program office and you started sundisc’s open source program office
so for those listening who are companies and they maybe have one representative or
even just a group of people who are interested in open source a lot of also those that don’t know
anything about it what is an open source program office and why would any upcoming company want one
and um that’s a great question because open source program office is a concept
that started just in the last 10 years so essentially i would say some of the
early companies where hp google i intel have had
major open source program offices and it often is large large companies that
start kind of this type of an office so what is it right um it is a center of excellence
for all things open source in a company it means that a company
assembles experts in open source in one place which becomes very efficient for all
engineering teams legal teams communication teams to work with not everybody needs to you know become
an expert in this it’s a concept that’s pretty familiar to very large and traditional companies
for example for many many years companies had standards bodies uh you know a group of people
inside the company who would interface with standards bodies and make sure that they brought back information
from the standards bodies and also contributed and influenced the standards body for the benefit of the company so
i call an ospo as having six c’s as in charlie
the first c i would say is communication communicating about open source inside and outside the
company the second c is consumption
so helping teams consume wisely and correctly the third c
is contributing back to open source so really guiding teams to contribute back and
also provide a process for approving contributions back to open source the
fourth c would be collaboration helping teams engage with open source communities with
foundations with other open source businesses and really harness the power
of collaboration the fifth c would be compliance extremely important one of the small
things we need to do when we use open source is comply with the licenses and understand the obligations that come
with the licenses and so we consult and help teams inside
comcast comply with the license the last c which is so all-encompassing is culture
so it’s really um creating a culture of open source being a good citizen in
open source it’s competency around open source it’s everything uh it’s really being a
friendly and a good citizen in open source uh let’s see what else can i say about
an ospo it really kind of includes a lot of different functions
we are developer advocates so we work with our developers and we advocate on their behalf with
communications with legal teams we champion open source engagement uh
and and one of the functions that more and more i’m doing is i’m an innovation strategist so i
consult with the business to see where open source makes sense whether they should open source something or
consume open source or collaborate with others so it’s it’s i i call it um a jack of all trades
or a jill of all trades and um the team that i have from an open source
perspective really brings together a multi-functional
outlook um and a huge community frame of mind i think yet always it always
comes back to community and one thing you touched on before that i’d like to sort of just deviate back to a little bit is the idea of compliance
uh primarily because last week we had a few weeks ago we we had a chat with paul chen who works at
synopsis on uh different auditing mainly works on auditing and he was saying there was a
client that after doing an audit report found i think it was over 150 000 open source projects uh dependencies
in their software which they were just flabbergasted by so uh do you have any advice
to those listening how do you make sure that you’re you’re being compliant do you need a
legal team do you need just one person who’s got that legal background you need a legal background at all
um so the com the uh open source program office itself we
are not legal experts we are not lawyers but we work extremely closely with our legal team
one of the best relationships we have is with our legal team and we have a fabulous legal team
at comcast people who really can think broadly not just about
risk mitigation but can think about the business needs for open source so i would say one of the first things
is get very friendly with your legal team and
also bring your legal team into open source events open source forums where they can understand um and also
work with their peers in open source legal uh to understand why and how to balance uh company needs
with open source licenses and open source needs so i would say that’s number one number
two is a lot of education so we have a mandatory course that every single
engineer and product manager needs to take in the company it’s just 15 20 minutes it teaches them
um the compliance principles and and our policy around compliance as a
company third you have to have a policy document a guidelines in the company
around open source uh how to consume it how to use it wisely we highly encourage our teams to
innovate using open source but we also want them to use it correctly so we provide guidelines and we provide
policy documents the fourth i would say from a compliance perspective
is build it into your pipeline into your workflow into your development pipeline so it’s
it’s a no-brainer right from the intake of open source to nightly
builds where you’re checking for open source and resolving conflicts or resolving license issues to creation of disclosure
notices and posting of disclosure notices automate that and make sure that it’s
well oiled and well done to me compliance is a respect for open source it’s a
respect for the community and we are very very
encouraging and supportive of our teams doing it well that’s great because it is such an
important issue there’s been so many famous legal cases where you’ve just you’ve realized the money at stake if you’re not
not taking compliance seriously so for those listening who are interested in what you’ve said
where can they begin to start an osp where where should a company begin
um so i’ll be shuffling some papers because i wanted to make sure you got the best
advice from us in how we have done uh open source um i would say
to begin i would say start with uh someone in your teams and not all
companies are very large and not all companies can afford to have a large team of experts doing it
so i would say start with someone in your development team who’s an open source enthusiast or an
open source expert there always is one because a lot of us really really enjoy working with the
open source community and love the philosophy of collaboration so start with that expert have that
expert uh go take a look at all of the uses of open source
in the company and how do an audit and kind of a an aggregation of all the open source
work that’s happening in the company and then go back and talk to legal and see
how legal’s been involved in open source in the company and then really compile um a
recommendation if you will to the head of engineering or cto and say this is what we’re doing in open
source i think we need to have a focus on this and we need to have someone who can you
know take this on either part time or full time to work on this developers often listen better to
developers so that’s why i always say it’s best to have it in engineering in the cto office and
that’s where i am i sit in the cto office in comcast
and in one of the largest engineering organizations within comcast and it’s and we think of our developers
as our customers so we are all about making them heroes and successful
in whatever they do so if you can go with that mindset do an aggregation of what’s happening
and start small i would also say attend an open source event whether it’s open source
summit sadly oscon has gone away but you can attend all things open
you can attend so many open source events out there pycon etc and you start then
also talking to other ospos other leaders and that helps you
kind of continue to evolve your open source practice inside your company the last thing i’ll say is the to do
group todo group is a huge source of information on how
to start your hospital and how to connect with other ospos in the industry and you can find them at todogroup.org
they’re a subgroup of the linux foundation the new group has i’ve had a look at a lot of the work they’ve done
and it’s fantastic it is just so detailed but also nothing is strays from achieving just a certain
result like that you will learn a lot if you do check that out so make sure that you do check that out so you’ve set up an open source program
office it’s running it’s working how do you measure success how do you go back and you say okay
there’s actually a positive roi on what we’re doing here and it’s so important to connect it to
the business success of the company and also to measure the roi and to communicate that roi um
sometimes it’s the line of sight between open source consumption and the business
impact on the company is a long line so it’s hard to say because i use this um the revenue has
grown so much or the cost is reduced so much etc so what we’ve been trying to do
is first we try to measure the efficacy of the open source program office itself
have we made a difference in the lives of our developers is it easier for them to consume open
source to contribute to open source uh to engage with open source communities
and we measure the sla or the time it takes for someone to submit a request
and and have it approved for example the second thing we do is we try to measure the
health of communities we are involved in because we have dependencies on certain
open source projects we want to make sure that they are healthy and that we are working with healthy
projects but also helping those projects be healthy uh through contributions of money
and etc and how do you measure the health what is a health community what do you look for
i think there are some well-known um metrics these days thanks to projects
like chaos c-h-o-a-s-s fantastic project
and it’s it’s things you know you could start with some very superficial things like the number of stars in the project
the number of forks the number of downloads the number of prs etc but i think it’s
also the diversity of the community that’s involved not just um you know diversity in terms
of the different kinds of people involved but also different companies that are involved or different communities that
are involved because you don’t want one company to dominate or one organization to dominate a project
because when they would draw then the project can it can also die it’s it’s how frequently
do they release do they have a readme document do they have a code of conduct
how easy is it to engage with the project from a communications
perspective how respectful are they of communications do they mentor new communicators or
contributors do they make it easy for people to contribute to the project to me all of those things also matter not just
the velocity of the you know the release of project innovation
we also measure uh such things as if we open source something uh how
successful is that project is it being well maintained um and we of course check the health of that
project as well um so i i kind of tune in very much to chaos
and make sure that we uh look at uh you know the different things that they’re advocating
um in terms of measurement of the company we do have opportunities to kind of show
business impact from the sense that instead of using a commercial software
if you’re using open source you can kind of say we’ve saved so many millions in license
cost right so there’s some amount of uh hard numbers you can show
but most of the time it is effectiveness numbers and health numbers that that one
can show that’s great and it’s so amazing just to hear and go through that list because i think
measuring roi i remember when talking to guy martin like it’s a difficult thing there are just so many different factors so
thank you for laying laying those items out i want to do something a little bit fun and so
kind of along the idea if you could go and you could sit down with a younger a younger younger self and uh
and and say before you set up a program office before or you’d ever manage one
what are some of the key learnings that you’d sit down and you’d say uh to yourself back then um
[Music] i would say um
what would i say to my younger self as i’m about to start an hospital as you’re about to start yeah based off the
biggest biggest things that you learned on your journey the biggest things i learned on my
journey is first of all know the business of your company what business is it in
uh what’s important to the company how do they measure their success uh what do their customers want because
that drives the role of open source and open source program office
in that company every ospo is different because it’s supporting a different objective a different mission
a different business case a different a product line and so it was it’s very important for us
to understand how you are helping the company succeed and what is the company’s business um so
for instance comcast is a very practical company very pragmatic company very customer driven very focused on
innovation and uh so it was important for me to understand the culture of the company
and the business of the company the second thing i would say is find
enthusiastic people and find supporters don’t first go to the detractors who
don’t believe in open source and try to convince them and argue till you’re blue in the face
go first to the supporters of open source and start building
momentum if you will the third thing i would say is if there are successes shout it from
the rooftop you know share it with others communicate it make heroes of the people
who are successful so that others then realize that they
want to be heroes too and they want to learn too and they want to kind of do this uh stuff too last but not the
least i would say is build a fantastic team around you
i am so lucky to have one of the best teams in the business
and um we started off as a team of women um all women team
and then we said no no we need diversity so we brought our horse uh man on the team
and uh we are a team who often did not come from an open source background but
we had the right booms we believed in collaboration we believed in customer
service we believed in innovation and i am privileged to work with this team and
i’m very lucky to work with this team so i would say those are some of the lessons work with you
know enthusiasts understand the business of your company oh one more thing
get a good champion or sponsor in your company and um this is
so so important someone at the top who believes in the importance of open source in your
company and to its innovation and i’m very very lucky to have two
of my best bosses ever matt zalesko who’s our cto and john
moore who’s my boss who’s the chief software architect they are incredibly pivotal
to supporting and continuing open source work at comcast
that’s great and yeah the champion is definitely necessary i’ve heard that quite a few times now so that is definitely a point that you need to
remember so we’d now like to shift gears a little bit and focus on best practices for managing corporate engagement with open
source software so what are some of the best practices that you’ve seen
that companies have done when contributing back to open source projects they’ve used or consumed yeah yeah i think um
you also said an important word henry which is contribute many companies will start and it’s so
easy to consume so the consumption is check we’ve done it compliance a little harder
and so but they have to do it so they’ll do that and then they’ll stop and it’s important
to give back so it’s important to contribute back why is it important to contribute back
and what do best in class companies do first they know their dependencies they
know what open source software they’re using and they know which is critical to their
success then they go off and they start
engaging with those communities they either sit in on the mailing lists they either
you know sponsor that project or they go attend at events they evangelize
their use of the project and then beyond that they start realizing that they’ve made some changes
to the project and that these changes really belong back in the project they don’t want to carry technical debt
they don’t want to fork the distribution and not benefit from the innovations of the project
they also realize that in order to use the latest security patches they need to be on the head of the the
the tree and not to uh fork and you know be on another side
so they do that and they realize that if projects are not sustained in
open source the goose that laid the golden egg will be dead and so sustaining open source
giving back open source is critical to all of us succeeding in open source all of us
consuming open source so if each of us says hey someone else is going to do it i’m not going to do it
then the commons will be gone so we do need to contribute back what do you see the how
do you foresee the path towards achieving sustainability within the open source industry what does that look like to you
and how do you think we can get there i think there are many many players towards sustainability
um there are players such as the foundations who
aggregate you know contributions and who give back to those communities um
the linux foundation itself for example hosts hundreds of projects and it provides a very professional
level governance and infrastructure and monies towards that project which comes
in from members and it gets back into the community and the philosophy of the linux foundation which
i love is that projects start out in a very organic fashion
but then it gets used by companies there’s a commercial ecosystem that builds around it
and which then uh contributes money back through profits that they make and in
the use of the product so you really need that flywheel to be successful and to work um you know very effectively
so i would say foundations are extremely important and then of course every consumer in the business
contributing back in any way possible not just code but in money in evangelization marketing
volunteering governance etc the third thing i would say is um we are
you know really facing um a lot of burnout of maintainers of contributors
you cannot expect just one or two contributors to be bearing the burden of carrying the
entire project our expectations of contributors and maintainers is high so we need to make sure that
we are grooming new contributors grooming new maintainers to come into the business
we are supporting uh maintainers through you know all taking on other uh help
in the project that’s needed whether it’s you know marketing help website or community
development etc so i would think you know sustaining the people in open source what the commons
um succeed is sustaining projects with everyone contributing and then really held through foundations uh
helping create kind of a professionalism in in projects would are three big things
there are lots of steps but i think these are three good ones definitely and i couldn’t agree more you
touched on the point of the open source contributors and maintainers and i know that a lot of maintainers and
contributors these days are employed by companies like amazon by comcast and they’re in very high demand there’s
no there’s no doubt about that so what what does an open source friendly approach
um sorry how does an open source friendly approach attract great talent uh because i i can imagine
that there’s a lot of developers that are working for comcast and they love the idea that comcast is an open source friendly company so why
why is that um yes having a great open source
program office as well as an open source program as a company and being a good citizen
in open source is very very important to attracting and retaining
good talent in the community and you’re exactly right many companies are you know lying with each other for
the same great talent and the reason an open source culture inside the company becomes
important is a lot of new developers and frankly a lot of mature developers
today want to work with open source they know that open source is everywhere
and they also like the philosophy of working with open source and the culture of open source
and the belief of giving back so they want that and they don’t want to
work for a company that does not support that or does not give them enough time to work with open source or
attend an open source conference or learn a new skill or to speak on behalf of the company
and its innovation in open source so i think um knowing that there are mature
practices in a company is a huge huge draw for many many of our
developers um and and it’s a great sense of pride uh it’s a great sense of um
i guess um happiness when you see your company represent itself in
open source communities and be respected for the work that they do so i think it’s it’s it’s important to
both recruiting and retention and development so for example on the development side
um the contribution to open source speaking at open source conferences
is a key part of our technical ladder in the company so if you want to go from being an
engineer to a principal engineer to a distinguished engineer to a fellow you need to have worked in open
source and contribute to open source which is huge in the old days it used to be that you would win patents
and you know getting patents is an important consideration and i’m not taking anything away from
that we highly encourage our teams to also file for patents because patents and
open source can coexist but we also encourage them to give back and work in open source
i think that’s definitely also just a path towards sustainability is having that encouragement from the company driving contributions
and driving that kind of behavior is is great to hear and i’ve definitely heard it it’s consistent across a lot of people that
i’ve talked to at the large companies so again i’d like to shift gears a little bit and and focus on what some of
the best practices are for managing community open source communities for projects that say comcast started or
projects that a company starts what are some best practices around that and that’s so important uh henry because
you don’t want to just release a project and then just disappear
um we’re not in the business of dumping and running uh we does that has that ever worked
before do companies it it works only if it is such a valuable piece of code that someone
adopts it and then someone kind of you know takes it over and starts uh maintaining it right but then with
millions and millions of projects these days how does it even get heard right how do
people even know so right in the in the contribution process when someone comes to us and
says i want to release this project we immediately ask do you have time to
maintain this project once it’s released have you and your manager allocated time for you to take care of
that project if you haven’t we will discourage you from releasing this project
so that’s important we also ask the question of is there an existing project that does
similar things should this be contributed to that project or become a part of that ecosystem
instead of you know starting yet another project right um and so those two really big questions
we ask and then once we approve the release of the project my team gets involved and they
help the developer um successfully set up the project on
github set up a readme we have a real checklist of things we feel is good hygiene
readme code of conduct cla contributor guide uh a logo a sticker
i found a lot of open source developers they they aren’t the best designers at logos but they always seem
to love the doer themselves and then the logo hangs around for years even though it’s got tens of millions of users that got a
funky little logo that is just hand drawn exactly exactly
and my team is very creative they kind of help with trademarking logos all of that good
stuff and they also coach them on community building you know how you need to be
transparent in your communications how you need to share your roadmap how you need to attract developers how
you need to nurture your developers by thanking them for their contribution not
biting their head off because they didn’t do it right and by encouraging you know
speaking at conferences about your project so we help with a lot of the community
building efforts and we encourage these teams to do it i’m so so proud of
some of our projects traffic control which is now at the apache foundation
uh trickster which is um a prometheus dashboard acceleration project
and it’s being considered uh for more contribution to the cncf foundation for example cooper
healthy which is a kubernetes cluster management uh software vinyl dns
which is dns as a service so it’s things that we do at scale we are at
we are an at scale company we support millions and millions of customers so we it’s really tested in our own
work and in our own production so when we put it out there we try to make sure
that it’s supported correctly i i’ve got to be honest with you sometimes
um maintainers change leave companies etc and so my team works very hard to kind
of track down projects that are not very active and go back and talk to maintainers and make
sure that they either assign it to somebody so it’s it’s kind of a life cycle process for us
we help in the beginning and then we constantly monitor to make sure these projects are successful
and you touched on a lot of the open source projects that comcast manages why do you manage those open
source projects why did you make them open source in the first place were they internal tools which you used
and you thought the rest of the ecosystem could benefit from them what was the reasoning behind really i guess having these open source
projects and that’s a great question um when teams come to us we ask them
why they’re open sourcing it because we want them to think about the reason and sometimes the reason is
i find this extremely useful as a tool or a library inside the company and we think there are many other
companies which could benefit from this so many other people who could benefit from this so you’re absolutely right it’s
something that people feel so passionately that is going to be useful to the world
they want to make sure that they are contributing something back from a goodness perspective the second
reason teams will say is they want to demonstrate the innovation the quality of work we do
because that attracts more developers into the company when they see the kind of work
we do as a company uh you know in proprietary days nobody knew what you
did and couldn’t even see your code but now with open source they can actually see your code
they said dang they do good work and i want to you know be a part of that the third reason could be that you want
to create a standard in a certain area because um there is such a fragmentation
of different ways to solve a problem you want to create one way or a consistent way or a default
standard in that area then you know there are various other reasons a building ecosystem
it makes it easier for you to help others consume your software and work towards a common api um
and so for all of those reasons and others we we often approve it we approve
almost 95 percent of the requests that come in front of us wow very rarely do we say no to
and this is our legal team incredibly supporting us working with us
and making sure that you know we give the developers the best guidelines for
being successful in the open source yeah i i know when i was talking with gil yehuda he was saying that whenever the
engineers heard something was going to be open source they all kind of freaked out and they all thought oh no we we better make this good we
better add good comments we better make sure that the flow is right and it’s structured right and i was sort of thinking why don’t you
just open source everything so you just give them this pressure or shouldn’t technical engineers be doing that the entire time but i thought
that was a a very funny comment observation on his behalf but something else which i know you’re very very passionate about
and something which you’ve really really been driving at as the chair and also on the board for
the linux foundation for a while now is the idea of different diversity and inclusion
and we all know this is a very important issue across all industries today but in particular in the open source
space it is something which we haven’t necessarily it’s never really
going to be solved but i think it’s something that we really needed to work towards so i was wondering if you could talk a bit about
how companies can work towards being more diverse and more inclusive uh whether it’s on their developer teams
or within the open source projects they manage or just in general yes indeed
it’s a huge huge passion for me a huge part of what i do um you know when you have a role
uh either as a chair or you know heading your function inside the company
you have a platform and a privilege that you can use to voice um the need for change and the
need for policy and the need for a different way of doing things and
frankly the reason open source has not been very diverse in fact it’s
the diversity in open source is much much poorer than technology in general is because
open source was a bunch of enthusiasts and they kind of just really focused on
innovating and moving the code forward they never really thought about what they need to
do from a culture and community perspective right so we are working very very hard and the
linux foundation does a fantastic job of everything from scholarships
to mentorships to inviting public speakers on the topic
and also showcasing all the diverse people in open source because
you cannot be what you don’t see so if you see someone on stage who looks like you you see someone who’s a leader in this
space who looks like you that inspires you that tells you that that it’s possible that’s a path that
can be possible for you and so i’m very lucky to
be part of an organization that really is driving it but to your question what
else can companies do what else can we do to improve diversity and and it’s for various reasons right
it’s damn good for the business it is um really a world that we’re building a
digital world that needs to reduce bias remove bias from the build it also creates incredible
innovation it creates opportunity and equity for people so there’s so many many good reasons why
diversity is important for me and for the world at large
i would say companies can also make sure that the projects that they are involved in are diverse are healthy have a conduct
they can bring they can walk away from projects and say i am not going to
support you financially or otherwise if you do not have a diversity policy or mentorship
and i know it’s hard for small projects to kind of invest in all that but they can bring advice and counsel to that project i
would say do mentorship projects support mentorship projects like outreachy like google summer of code
like linux foundation diversity projects and mentorship projects
not recognize just code but recognize all diverse forms of contribution
henry you make a contribution in the form of marketing and evangelization i make contribution in the form of
marketing and governance and so on and so forth so we need to recognize that open source needs
all forms of contribution i would say pay for scholarships for travel for
people to go attend events do talks do articles do you know
the biggest one of the biggest things is walk away from conferences that do not seem to have a
diverse set of speakers do not sit on open source uh panels that
are all male panels or have no diversity so there’s lots and lots of different
ways you can be an activist you can be an active ally if you will of diversity in open source
i i couldn’t agree more and just on the point of recognizing all contribution is
something that we’ve been very very passionate about at open teams and it was actually probably the first i guess aspect of our
business that we focused on so if you go to openteams.com today you can create a profile and you can build out your
profile with your skills your experience you can add an open source project you created or you can go to an open source
project that you’ve contributed to and you can add your contribution not just code but any contribution
and i think that’s really really important is that there hasn’t really been a way for people to be recognized because it’s
i might be getting this number wrong but i do remember hearing that over 70 uh of all the work isn’t code only 30
of all the open source work done for open source projects in the open source industry is is is code so i thought that was really
interesting but as we get towards the end i thought this is something i always like to ask every guest what are you most excited
about with regards to the future of open source i think the future is extremely bright i
think it is here to stay it is everywhere one of the things that excites me is a
broader adoption of open source in government in the energy industry in healthcare
there’s been tremendous innovation during the covet days during this pandemic of groups coming
together to create projects that collect data or that help with
contact tracing etc so we were involved for example in a project with the code for philly group in
philadelphia which was working on how to track
data for hospitals and so that hospitals can do a better job of planning staffing and ppe etc
so i love the broad adoption of open source the second is i think we are becoming
more and more diverse and inclusive and there is a vocabulary and a recognition
of being diverse and inclusive which i love the third uh trend i’m a huge fan of is
open source inside the company or inner source and for all of us to use those same
principles especially in a time like now henry where all of us are working remotely
and open source has cracked the code on working across the the world
in an asynchronous way across companies across people breaking down silos and this a
principles can easily be applied inside companies so those would be the three things i would be
very excited about that’s great and it is such an exciting future and i think we’re
just at the beginning of what is a revolution in the software industry and just the world
at large so it’s so so excited to be a part of that and you have been one of the leaders of that so i do thank
you so much for joining us today and for all of the work you’ve put in to helping open source thrive because
that’s really what we want to do at open teams that’s our that’s our mission is to help open thoughts or sort help open source thrive and i know
that’s something you’ve been passionate about for a long time so thanks for joining us and thank you for your time
my pleasure henry thank you for such a thoughtful interview i got a chance to share
uh some of my passions and my excitement and uh it couldn’t have gone better thank you
and i love chatting with you so thanks and everyone who’s listening uh if you liked what you listened to or watched
today then please go to our youtube channel and like and subscribe and leave a comment letting us know what you think
and also one thing that really really will help out is if you leave a review on apple podcasts or whatever medium
or platform you’re listening to this on so i just want to thank you all for listening thank you nithya everyone stay
safe and until next time goodbye
[Music] you
