There are bad practices that no one should do when they get involved in opens source communities.

In this segment of the My Open Source Experience podcast Greg Kroah-Hartman shares three examples from Linux history where people followed some bad patterns, which then somtimes resulted in raising the bar for everyone else.

1. Merge and Disappear

Greg shares an example where someone contributed a big change to the core parts of the kernel, and then became unreachable. It took the Linux community quite some time to unwind the changes and clean up the code. All open source communities are based on trust, when someone betrays that they make it harder for other to build trust as well. The community is more flexible with changes that are well isolated, like a filesystem or a driver, but you still can't betray peopl's trust with any of your actions during the contrubution process.

2. Binary drivers

It's a NO, you also don't want that, but also, you just can't. Some companies used to apply a trick, but they've been coming around as well.

3. Never experiment on a community, especially without a consent

Greg shares the interesting story when a university professor and some students went ahead and wrote a paper about submitting and landing patches in the Linux kernel that introduced vulnerabilities. It turned out that they weren't truthful in their paper, and also forgot to notify everyone about the experiment. While the university was banned for a while, this turned out to be a story with a happy ending with students now contributing to the kernel as part of their studies.

Further advantage of open source SW development methods is that the change history is available online, the community can always go back and remove code if a controller becomes untrustworthy at any point in time after getting their changes merged.

#opensource #community #collaboration #experience #podcast

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Copyright is complex, and geographies get factored into that a little bit.

In this segment of the My Open Source Experience podcast Rick Sanders talks about how copyright works on the global scale, including the Berne Convention and timelines.

Leanr more about:

- The Berne Convention

- The government-driven nature of copyright

- Copyright is government-driven but governments don't have much to do with copyright

- The statue in copyright and in trademark, and the difference between the two

- The concept of case law

- Similarities between how departments in a law firm and large tech companies work together

#opensource #community #collaboration #experience #podcast

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Doing reviews is a task that is often percieved as a maintainer responsibility, or something that only the more established people in the community can do. This is a misconception, which deprives newcomers from the opportunity to learn, and makes it harder to grow the maintainer team.

In this segment of the My Open Source Experience podcast Daniel Stenberg talks about his approach to 

- What maintainers need to do to support newcomers and hope for them to stick around

- What percentage of Curl contirbutors are one-time contributors

- Why doing reviews is a higher barrier

- Communication practices that incentivize people to get involved, including doing reviews

- When a change is submitted to change an area of the project, have you tried asking the people who worked on it before for their opinion on the patch?

- As opposed to telling people to do reviews, try to ask for their opinion on incoming changes

- Do tell people to go work out, ask them to come play a game with you

#opensource #community #collaboration #experience #podcast

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Working in a community where there are people who volunteer their free time gives people experience that can later on be beneficial in corporate environments as well.

In this segment of the My Open Source Experience podcast Stormy Peters talks about her experience at the Mozilla Corporation, where she worked with a large community of many volunteers.

Lear more about:

- Why speed isn't always the most important

- Investing time in your community and enabling people to join and participate always pays off later when the community starts to grow and become more sustainable

- What is the maximum amount of time a volunteer would spend on trying to get involved in your project?

- Offering mentorship to people is a strong incentive for people to contribute to projects

#opensource #community #collaboration #experience #podcast

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You need to make sure that you treat improvements in your project the right way. Some improvements are features as they bring new functionality. However, when the new functionality makes existing functionality available for people with disabilities, then it's not a feature that got implemented, it's a critical bug that got fixed.

In this segment of the My Open Source Experience podcast Mike Gifford talks about the mindset shift in the Drupal community to start treating accessibility gaps as bugs and in cases as critical bugs.

Learn more about:

- GitHub's Readme newsletter

- Marking something as a bug doesn't give it a priority automatically

- You need like-minded people and leadership buy-in to move things forward in a focus area

- Dark mode, a sad story

- A fun feature, like adding motion on screens can make someone sick and should be easy to turn off

- The potential in new tech to improve accessibility

#opensource #community #collaboration #experience #podcast

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Open source engagement is a journey, and it doesn't start with contributing large amounts of code, even if you're a large company.

In this segment of the My Open Source Experience podcast Ashan Senevirathne talks about Swisscom's approach to explore and leverage projects from the CNCF ecosystem to build and operate their networks.

Learn more about:

- OSS projects that are easy to adopt in the telecom ecosystem

- OSS projects that are addressing needs that are specific to the telecom segment, such as Nephio

- How the telecom industry matured and started to flourish in how they are engaging with open source projects like openStack and Kubernetes

- How standards bodies fit in between telecom operators, vendors and the open source ecosystem

- The need for standards bodies to evolve faster

#opensource #community #collaboration #experience #podcast

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Both in personal and in professional life, it can happen that people discredit you and undermine you behind your back. There are multiple ways to handle this situation without letting the other person to make a damage to you.

In this segment of the My Open Source Experience podcast Shuah Khan shares an experience from her corporate career when someone was discrediting her behind her back.

Lear more about:

- How to handle when someone talks behind your back

- While talking about people behind their backs is never the way to go, there might still be constructive feedback in what they are saying

- How to distance yourself from what is happening and avoid it to get to you

- You don't have to be reactive to handle the situation

- When leaving the company is the right thing to do

#opensource #community #collaboration #experience #podcast

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Industry segments, like automotive, often rely on specialized hardware and software stacks. As that is very expensive to keep up, most segments have a shift towards COTS HW and that is an opportunity to look into open source as well.

In this segment of the My Open Source Experience podcast Philipp Ahmann talks about his experience with this generation change, that also involved using Linux. This shift opened up more opportunities than what you would expect, and allowed Philipp to work at any location without confidentiality or IP breaches.

Learn more about:

- Open source gives flexibility to both individuals and companies

- Experiencing different cultures through communities

- Software, especially open source, often gets used in ways that the original creators did not think of

#opensource #community #collaboration #experience #podcast

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The open source ecosystem has many layers, components and actors and all these need to work together in harmony to keep the ecosystem thriving. The Season 3 finale episode reflects on some of these peices and explores how companies can improve their practices internally, while also touches on communication practices and building your skills in open source communities.

Learn more from:

- Ashan Senevirathne on building skills and resumes through open source

- Daniel Stenberg on how to encourage collaboration through communication

- Mike Gifford on how to create a focus area in an OSS project

- Stormy Peters on open source challenges

- Wolfgang Gehring on why your company needs an OSPO

#opensource #community #collaboration #experience #podcast

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Accessibility sometimes comes with a stigma, since it becomes a discussion topic when someone has a disability that prevents them to do something that they would like to, like accessing an admin interface because they're blind.

In this episode of the My Open Source Experience podcast Mike Gifford talks about how he put accessibility on the map in the Drupal community, and through that for the internet.

Learn more about Mike's journey here: 

Learn more about:

- Joining a global community

- Moving faster in your business with OSS

- What is accessibility

- Types of disabilities

- Accessibility focus area in Drupal

- How to increase accessibility in your web resources

#opensource #community #collaboration #experience #podcast

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