Software “ate the world,” and now open source is “eating software”—rapidly becoming the dominant channel through which the most innovative software is being built, and a critical component of most elements of modern society. Recent advances in generative AI products such as ChatGPT and Midjourney have broken through to broad popular awareness, making open source relevant to essentially everyone. Despite its rising popularity and increasing criticality, open source is still struggling with a funding and sustainability crisis, in large part because it is often challenging for business, government, and academia to interface effectively with open source projects and communities.
Travis Oliphant has been on a twenty-plus year journey to identify systems and business models that permit open source creation and participation to represent a sustainable career path. Along the way, he’s drawn on his experiences both building open source (NumPy, SciPy, Numba, and others) and building organizations and companies with an open source focus (NumFOCUS, Anaconda, Quansight, and most recently OpenTeams and its sister companies).
Listen in as Travis talks about the lessons he and his teams have learned about approaches that work more or less well, shares his vision for a healthy, mutually-beneficial relationship between open source and business, and describes his vision and plans for OpenTeams including the key role of the Open Source Architect, or OSA, Community.
Lex Fridman interview: https://lexfridman.com/travis-oliphant/
Travis’s LinkedIn blog on OSS governance: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/who-governs-open-source-project-you-depend-travis-oliphant/
Travis @ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/teoliphant/
Travis @ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/teoliphant
August 31, 2023
