Request For Commits

Brendan Eich, founder of Brave and creator of JavaScript, joined the show to talk about the history of the web, how it has been funded, and the backstory on the early browser wars and emerging monetization models. We also talked about why big problems are hard to solve for the Internet and the tradeoffs between centralization and distribution.

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Sponsors:

• Toptal – Scale your team and hire the top 3% of developers and designers at Toptal. Email Adam at [email protected] for a personal introduction to Toptal.

Featuring:

• Brendan Eich – Website, GitHub, X
• Nadia Eghbal – GitHub, X
• Mikeal Rogers – GitHub, X

Show Notes:

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Charlotte Spencer joined the show to talk about making open source more approachable, Your First PR, helping people make their first open source contribution, attracting new contributors, and what projects can do to bring in, retain, and communicate with new people.

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Sponsors:

• Linode – Our cloud server of choice! Get one of the fastest, most efficient SSD cloud servers for only $10/mo. We host everything we do on Linode servers. Use the code rfc20 to get 2 months free!

Featuring:

• Charlotte Spencer – Website, GitHub, X
• Nadia Eghbal – GitHub, X
• Mikeal Rogers – GitHub, X

Show Notes:

Charlotte Spencer is a software developer who’s done a lot of notable work around making open source more approachable and is a core member of the Hoodie project.

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Heather Meeker joined the show to talk about open source licensing, why open source licenses are historically significant, how much developers really need to know, and how much developers think they know. We also talk about mixing commercial and open source licenses, and how lawyers keep up with an ever-changing landscape.

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

• Toptal – Scale your team and hire the top 3% of developers and designers at Toptal. Email Adam at [email protected] for a personal introduction to Toptal.

Featuring:

• Heather Meeker – Website, X
• Nadia Eghbal – GitHub, X
• Mikeal Rogers – GitHub, X

Show Notes:

Heather has spent over twenty years on legal matters related to open source, and has published several books on open source software licensing.

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

David Cramer (CEO of Sentry) and Isaac Schlueter (CEO of npm) joined the show to talk about building businesses in open source, why they decided to turn their side projects into full-time work, how they experimented with finding steady sources of revenue, raising venture capital, working with investors and with community, and different company approaches to developing open source projects.

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

• Linode – Our cloud server of choice! Get one of the fastest, most efficient SSD cloud servers for only $10/mo. We host everything we do on Linode servers. Use the code rfc20 to get 2 months free!

Featuring:

• David Cramer – Website, GitHub, X
• Isaac Schlueter – Website, GitHub, X
• Nadia Eghbal – GitHub, X
• Mikeal Rogers – GitHub, X

Show Notes:

Sentry is a developer tool for detecting application errors, and npm is the default package manager for Node.js. Both started as open source projects, which David and Isaac have built into businesses.

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

On today’s show Nadia and Mikeal talk with Rod Vagg, Chief Node Officer at NodeSource, about liberal contribution agreements and the underlying mechanics of liberal contribution management, how to level up casual contributors, how projects transition into a liberal contribution mindset and whether there is a place for BDFLs in the future of project governance.

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

• Toptal – Scale your team and hire the top 3% of developers and designers at Toptal. Email Adam at [email protected] for a personal introduction to Toptal.

Featuring:

• Rod Vagg – Website, GitHub, X
• Nadia Eghbal – GitHub, X
• Mikeal Rogers – GitHub, X

Show Notes:

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

On today’s show Nadia and Mikeal talk with Max Ogden, creator of Dat, an open source, decentralized tool for distributing data sets. Max has also done a lot of work in the Node.js ecosystem, including helping start NodeSchool and publishing hundreds of modules to npm. He was also one of the first Code for America fellows.

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

• Toptal – Scale your team and hire the top 3% of developers and designers at Toptal. Email Adam at [email protected] for a personal introduction to Toptal.

Featuring:

• Max Ogden – Website, GitHub, X
• Nadia Eghbal – GitHub, X
• Mikeal Rogers – GitHub, X

Show Notes:

We talked about how he figured out grants were right for developing Dat, and how he managed to find his first funders. We also got into the mechanics of grant funding. Max shared what it’s like to work with grant funders, and how to build those early relationships if you’re looking for grants yourself.

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

On today’s show Nadia and Mikeal are joined by Eric Holscher to discuss non-code contributions, how they are regarded in open source culture, their value, and how to incentivize this type of work. They also talked about how Read the Docs grew a documentation community, contribution guides, and why this work matters.

Join the discussion

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Sponsors:

• Linode – Our cloud server of choice! This is what we built our new CMS on. Use the code rfc20 to get 2 months free!

Featuring:

• Eric Holscher – Website, GitHub, X
• Nadia Eghbal – GitHub, X
• Mikeal Rogers – GitHub, X

Show Notes:

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

On today’s show Nadia and Mikeal are joined by Jan Lehnardt to discuss the value of building communities to reduce burden on maintainers and create sustainable projects, how communities help grow a project, and contributor models.

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

• Toptal – Scale your team and hire the top 3% of developers and designers at Toptal. Email Adam at [email protected] for a personal introduction to Toptal.

Featuring:

• Jan Lehnardt – Website, GitHub, X
• Nadia Eghbal – GitHub, X
• Mikeal Rogers – GitHub, X

Show Notes:

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

On today’s show Nadia and Mikeal are joined by Andrew Nesbitt and Arfon Smith to talk about open source metrics, and how to interpret data around dependencies and usage. They talked about what we currently can, and can not measure in today’s open source ecosystem. They also talked about individual project metrics, how we can measure success, what maintainers should be paying attention to, and whether or not GitHub stars really matter.

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

• Linode – Our cloud server of choice! This is what we built our new CMS on. Use the code rfc20 to get 2 months free!

Featuring:

• Andrew Nesbitt – Website, GitHub, X
• Arfon Smith – Website, GitHub, X
• Nadia Eghbal – GitHub, X
• Mikeal Rogers – GitHub, X

Show Notes:

Andrew Nesbitt is the creator of Libraries.io, and Arfon Smith heads up open source data at GitHub. Andrew’s project, Libraries.io, helps people discover and track open source libraries, which was informed by his work on GitHub Explore. Arfon works to make GitHub data more accessible to the public. Previously, he worked on science initiatives at GitHub and elsewhere, including a popular citizen science platform called Zooniverse.

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Nadia Eghbal and Mikeal Rogers kick off Season 1 of Request For Commits with a two part conversation with Karl Fogel — a software developer who has been active in open source since its inception.

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

• Linode – Our cloud server of choice! This is what we built our new CMS on. Use the code rfc20 to get 2 months free!

Featuring:

• Karl Fogel – Website, GitHub, X
• Nadia Eghbal – GitHub, X
• Mikeal Rogers – GitHub, X

Show Notes:

Karl served on the board of the Open Source Initiative, which coined the term “open source”, and helped write Subversion, a popular version control system that predates Git. Karl also wrote a popular book on managing open source projects called Producing Open Source Software. He’s currently a partner at Open Tech Strategies, a firm that helps major organizations use open source to achieve their goals.

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!