Sustain

Hello and welcome to Sustain! Today, our episode is a shared podcast between Sustain and CHAOSScast. Along with Richard and Pia, we have Georg Link, Venia Logan, and Brian Proffitt joining us from CHAOSScast. We had the idea to do this special episode because there’s a lot of work happening on sustaining software and understanding the health of our communities, and CHAOSS focuses on what open source development is, how it works, what communities are, and how you can find metrics to figure out how something is. So, we will learn about these metrics they use, the Diversity & Inclusion Badging Program, and the several areas that CHAOSS has to get involved in. Also, we learn about Sustain, how it started, what they do, and find out what Georg says works well for the Sustain community that brought him in. Also, find out where you can get involved in both the CHAOSS community and Sustain community. Download this episode now to find out more!

[00:03:24] Richard wants to know: If metrics lose some of the qualitative aspects of communities by focusing on quantitative metrics, how is this approach not stripping away the heart of open source?

[00:08:49] Pia wonders what are the most important qualitative metrics CHAOSS is evaluating. Georg tells us how they established the Diversity & Inclusion Badging Program (D&I Badging) at CHAOSS.

[00:14:16] Richard wonders if they’ve found a lot of uptake for the badges and if people have started using them.

[00:14:53] Georg tells us how people can get involved besides joining the working group. He explains three main areas that CHAOSS has to get involved.

[00:19:53] Pia tells us what Sustain is, how it started, and what they do.

[00:22:18] Venia talks about the concept of what a company, organization, or community is to people, and how they want to see something happen, so they ask for more structure. Pia tells us about Open Collective.

[00:26:24] Pia brings up doing the first Sustain and the first insights they wrote from the meeting about maintainers.

[00:28:44] Venia talks about her consultation services and how she works with other companies to produce community strategies. Georg tells us what he thinks works well for the Sustain community and what brought him in.

[00:31:29] Richard gives praises to Gunner and Pia for all the work they’ve done with Sustain, and Pia shares with us about having concerns the first time they did an event with a lot of people.

[00:33:32] Georg tells where you can get involved in the CHAOSS community and Richard tells us where you can get involved in the Sustain community.

[00:35:21] Georg’s spotlight is an open source project called the Toolkit for YNAB.

Special Guests: Brian Proffitt, Georg Link, and Samantha Venia Logan.

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Eric Berry | Justin Dorfman | Alyssa Wright | Richard Littauer

Travis Oliphant | Russell Pekrul

Hello and welcome to Sustain! Today, we have two guests from OpenTeams in Austin, Travis Oliphant and Russell Pekrul. Travis is the CEO and Russell is the Program Manager and the Founder and Director of FairOSS. We learn all about what OpenTeams and FairOSS are and how they work. Also, Travis tells us about the non-profit he started called NumFOCUS. Other topics discussed are dependencies and how their values are assigned, NumPy and SciPy, and building relationships with companies, which Russell mentions there is a bit of a “chicken and egg” problem here. There is some incredible advice and fascinating stories shared today so go ahead and download this episode now!

Special Guests: Russell Pekrul and Travis Oliphant.

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Eric Berry | Justin Dorfman | Richard Littauer

Tobias Augspurger

Hello and welcome to Sustain! Our special guest today is Tobias Augspurger, founder of Protontypes. Today, we learn all about Protontypes and LibreSelery. We will also talk about his sustainable awesome-list. We cover the robotics industry, and how open source has influenced it. We cover other sustainability projects, like FarmBot, which blend together community and open source. Tobias tells us other projects he’s interested in doing with ProntonTypes. Download this episode now to find out!

[00:00:55] Tobias tells us what Protontypes is. He also talks about sustainability for open source, and whether that means environmentally sustainable or sustainable for the maintainers.

[00:02:50] We learn all about LibreSelery, which launched this fall.

[00:10:26] Justin asks Tobias his thoughts on bringing more exposure to projects that are deep down in the stack that the others are standing above and how can you get those projects. Justin mentions checking out the Sustain discourse.

[00:13:56] Tobias tells us how his accelerator works. He talks about his sustainability awesome list.

[00:19:02] Richard asks Tobias if he’s had any students through Protontypes, or any projects come out of it . Tobias talks about the robotics industry as well. Richard mentions FarmBot, an open source DIY gardening tool.

[00:24:21] Richard wonders if Tobias has any interests from other projects that aren’t robotics, or in general if he’s using other sorts of projects in Protontypes.

[00:31:10] Find out here where can you learn more about Protontypes and LibreSelery.

[00:28:55] “I also think that people that work for something should get money if somebody is donating into such a project. You cannot really take donations and do not distribute it into contributors. So then stop taking donations if you don’t need them and give it to something else.”

Special Guest: Tobias Augspurger.

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Alyssa Wright | Richard Littauer

Richard Fontana

Hello and welcome to Sustain! Our special guest is Richard Fontana, who is a lawyer for Red Hat, where he focuses on legal matters relating to open source software, though his work has also involved a broader range of intellectual property and transactional issues arising out of all phases of the software development lifecycle. He has specialized in open source law for over 15 years, with over 10 of those years having been at Red Hat, and previously worked at Hewlett-Packard and the Software Freedom Law Center as well as several law firms. For several years he was a board director for the Open Source initiative and chaired its license review committee. We will discuss a blog post Richard recently wrote, Kyle Mitchell’s License Zero, API licenses, and if someone wants to become fluent in open source licenses where can they get information. Also, today, we have Alyssa Wright joining us as a new panelist!

[00:01:34] Richard tells us how he became a lawyer at Red Hat and what he does.

[00:05:53] Richard mentioned it’s quite uncommon that there are open source specific or lawyers with expertise in open source and he tells us why that is the case. Also, Alyssa asks him if he would advocate for more lawyers in the open source ecosystem, and what can we do as open source practitioners to make legal experts part of the conversation.

[00:11:16] Richard recently wrote in a blog post about looking to get the open source definitions improved or revamped.

[00:15:56] Richard tells his thoughts on Kyle Mitchell’s License Zero.

[00:19:42] We learn more about API licenses from Richard.

[00:23:40] Alyssa returns back to the article Richard wrote and she wants to know what inspired him to write it, to suggest a revision of the definition now and why is it relevant for what’s happening now in open source.

[00:29:04] Alyssa asks how someone can become fluent in open source licenses and Richard Littauer mentions choosealicense.com.

[00:31:49] Alyssa asks Richard if there’s anything reminiscent of open source software development that exists in the legal field.

[00:35:05] Richard tells us where we can find him and about his stuff on the internet. Also, what he is most excited about going on in the licensing world and the open source legal world.

Special Guest: Richard Fontana.

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Justin Dorfman | Richard Littauer

Melissa Logan

Hello and welcome to Sustain! Our special guest today is Melissa Logan, Founder of Constantia.io, a marketing consultancy that focuses on open source and enterprise tech companies. She pioneered the role of open source marketer that helped fuel the rise of open source software development. She also launched the Sexism Field Guide to help people identify and confront all forms of sexism. We will learn why Melissa created Constantia, her work at The Linux Foundation, Apache Cassandra, and Isilon. Also, Melissa talks about having the right personality to do marketing in a community and why she thinks about the community like a prism. Download this episode now to find out more!

[00:00:48] Melissa tells us all about Constantia and why she created it.

[00:02:30] Since Melissa has worked mainly with large OSPO’s, Richard wonders if she has had any experience working with smaller organizations or smaller repositories on GitHub type stuff. She also talks about what she did at the Linux Foundation and the projects they started, one specifically called OpenDaylight.

[00:06:38] When Melissa talks about open source there are two key ways that she describes it.

[00:07:43] We learn about Melissa working with the Apache Cassandra Community. Justin wonders if there was a company that did support contracts for Cassandra funding this or if this was a grassroots type of deal.

[00:11:03] We learn what Melissa did at Isilon.

[00:13:00] Richard wonders how Melissa gets marketing copy in front of people because mailing lists are important to getting into people’s inboxes.

[00:16:23] Richard asks Melissa if she has any insight on how to market somebody who runs a small react library and she gives some great advice.

[00:18:47] Melissa tells us how to pitch marketing to open source foundations as something they need to do because the return is so small. Richard wonders if she’s ever had to deal with people who are closed sourced and try to convince them to go open.

[00:26:55] Since the pandemic has changed a lot of things around marketing, Richard wonders what Melissa’s had to change with how she markets stuff to get in front of people’s eyes over the past six months.

[00:29:35] Melissa brings up the topic of disaggregated marketing and when you think about doing marketing in a community one of the most important things you need is the right personality. She also explains how she thinks of the community as a kind of prism.

[00:34:43] If you’re interested in seeing the awesome content that Melissa has put out, she tells us where we can find it online.

[00:08:01] “At Linux Foundation it was different because it was part of kind of the governance of the project.”

[00:11:03] “You were at Isilon. I remember reading about it way back in the day and it was acquired by EMC. What did you do there because that just really interests me?”

[00:17:15] “When you think about doing marketing in a community, there are a lot of people who work at different companies, they have different cultures, they have different reasons for participating. Maybe they’re not aware that you actually want to have a marketing effort.”

[00:17:32] “So I think what’s really important is to build some kind of architecture of participation for people in your community.”

[00:19:18] “What are those quote unquote KPI’s in an open source project? What do we look at? I think things like lines of code, stars, those are all, I think you should just set those aside. That really doesn’t tell you about the health of an open source project.”

[00:20:01] “So we really look at share of voice as one of the key metrics in an open source project and how we evaluate how things are doing.”

[00:21:35] “One of the key ways that we knew we were gaining traction was when we found out that AT&T had adopted OpenDaylight, and we found out because they had said something on a user list because of course they found some bug or issue with it, so of course that’s when they reach out and talk to us.”

[00:27:00] “So during the pandemic we’ve all been trying to figure out how not to overload people who are overloaded by so much content and information because everyone is doing everything digital all the time.”

[00:30:38] Then how do you level the playing field for projects that maybe don’t have a charismatic leader? And the way you can do that is to find someone who plays in this marketing role who does go and seek out all these other types of contributions and tries to shine a light on things that are happening, not just with individuals, but in all parts of your community.”

[00:31:40] “I remember in the early 2000’s, you had people in the embedded Linux community who were looking at ways to improve power consumption in satellites that were going into space so that was really important. You had needed a small footprint for everything. When they figured that out, they put it back upstream and that was then adopted by people in the supercomputing community.”

[00:34:26] “I think of marketing kind of like you’re a backstage manager for a play and you’re trying to make everything run really smoothly for all the other people on the stage and really shine a light on them literally and figuratively.”

Special Guest: Melissa Logan.

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Allen "Gunner" Gunn | Eric Berry | Justin Dorfman | Richard Littauer

Erik Rasmussen

Hello and welcome to Sustain! Our special guest today is Erik Rasmussen, who’s the creator of Redux Form and Final Form, two of the most popular form state management libraries in the React ecosystem, which we will learn more about. Erik talks about his blog post on, “Open Source Sustainability,” which he wrote out of frustration. He has such a passion and positive attitude for open source, but there are things that bother him as well, which he discusses. We learn that looking for contributions from larger organizations is an issue without the marketing aspect and maybe what can be done to help. Also, Eric Berry shares his vision of the future in open source which is pretty awesome! Download this episode now to find out more!

[00:01:06] Erik tells us what he does and how he got invited on this podcast. We also learn what Redux Form and Final Form do.

[00:05:13] Find out what Erik meant when he said it “balloons and it was too much,” but he also said he enjoys maintaining open source. He also talks about his blog post he wrote a couple of months ago and what bothers him about open source.

[00:08:52] Eric wonders if the sustainability of open source depends on people like Erik because of his positive attitude and have any large companies reached out to him to support him in any way.

[00:10:14] Justin asks if Erik if his library is on a dependency tree or people go NPM and install your library. Also, Justin wonders what Erik’s going to do to improve in getting the message out there that he’s looking for contributions from larger organizations.

[00:16:02] Eric is curious if money was never part of the equation and if Erik could never make a dime off of this, how would that change his outlook on open source and the projects that he puts out, and would he continue to maintain them.

[00:17:24] Eric tells us his vision of the future in open source. ☺

[00:20:25] Richard mentions in one of Erik’s blog posts he talks about how the donation model doesn’t work, but works partially for some people, and he also mentions an insurance model and Erik elaborates his envision.

[00:23:57] Richard asks if Erik has any hope and if he’s going to keep working on open source.

[00:25:20] Erik tells us where we can find him on the internet.

[00:04:10] “And then as a maintainer, this was really my first foray into open source, I made some rookie mistakes of trying to please everyone.”

[00:06:26] “I love open source and the fact that I can see that it is sort of rotten at its core bothers me, and what I mean by that is the incentives are misaligned from all sides.”

[00:22:51] “It’s a little bit how our medical system, especially in the U.S. is broken, that your doctor makes more money the sicker you are, and it should be the opposite. We should pay doctors to keep you well and if you get sick then the doctor has to do some work. Same thing with open source, people should be paying for there not to be bugs, and if there are bugs expect because of that contract that they will be immediately fixed.”

Special Guest: Erik Rasmussen.

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Eric Berry | Justin Dorfman | Richard Littauer

Jenn Schiffer

Hello and welcome to Sustain! Our special guest today is Jenn Schiffer, Director of Community at Glitch. Today, we will learn all about how cool Glitch really is and it’s free!

Also, they are one of the first platforms that let you view source of server-side code. Jenn tells us her internet humor variety show called “Hoobastank2 on Twitch, why she started her satire blog post on Medium when she entered the tech industry, how Glitch is used in the academic areas, and how licensing and sharing should be better communicated in schools. Download this episode to find out more! \

[00:01:05] Jenn tells us all about what Glitch is.

[00:02:11] Richard wonders if this is largely for art projects and is there any functional code that’s being used to run businesses on Glitch.

[00:04:45] Jenn talks about having live code on Glitch. We also learn about her internet humor variety show called “Hoobastank2 on Twitch.

[00:07:39] Jenn tells us about when she entered the tech industry, teaching computer science, working at NBA, rude blog comments about women in tech, writing satire blog posts on Medium, and “gotchas.”

[00:12:11] We find out about the archetype of the users of Glitch. Also, we learn about using Glitch in the academic area, Girls Who Code, and artists and entertainers bringing their exhibitions to Glitch virtually since they can’t run in person safely right now.

[00:18:21] Richard wonders if there are any difficulties in using Glitch, how is it hard to use Glitch, and what could be better for teaching open source in general. Jenn shares when she was first introduced to open source.

[00:24:50] Justin brings up a point about licensing in open source and not understanding the license and how it should be better communicated in schools in terms of sharing, and Jenn shares her view.

[00:31:43] Jenn lets us know where we can find her on the web.

[00:07:39] “So around the time Medium had started, 2013(ish), whatever, I just entered actually the tech industry, because I was in Academia, teaching computer science, and I was like, now I want to build computer science.”

[00:08:10] “The way that people try to prove that women in tech don’t belong there are with gotchas, like pointing things out that they think are wrong, or maybe they are wrong because we’re not allowed to be wrong.”

[00:16:34] “We’re seeing a lot of artists and entertainers that are realizing because of the pandemic and quarantine that they have to think of new, virtual ways to bring their art to the masses.”

[00:19:27] “I’ve had a lot of really interesting conversations with a lot of young developers who are in high school, with Discord exploding there are so many gamers that are learning to code because they’re building bots for Discord.”

Special Guest: Jenn Schiffer.

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Joel Wasserman

Hello and welcome to Sustain! Our special guest today is Joel Wasserman, an Engineer at Google and Founder of Flossbank. If you’ve never heard of Flossbank, this is the episode you want to listen to. We learn all about what it is, how the method works, what makes it different from other donation models out there, and how signing up and donating works. We also find out if Joel has advertisers lined up and what the current state of Flossbank is since they are still working on the system. Download this episode now to find out more!

[00:00:52] We start off by learning what Flossbank is, what sets it apart, and how the method works.

[00:04:03] Joel tells us how he got involved in Flossbank, how it started, and the process of how Flossbank works with signing up and donating.

[00:08:00] Eric wonders how the money gets distributed all the way down to every package and is it through open collective or does he have to reach out to everyone. Joel lets us know they are in the process of building their maintainer portal and he explains.

[00:10:36] Joel tells us how the funds get distributed. Justin wonders if this is a twenty percent time project and how Google and Amazon feel about this project that has to deal with money and his time. Eric also wonders what Joel’s long-term goal is and does he see this as his primary business eventually.

[00:13:11] Eric talks about creating a business and the kickbacks and negative feelings. He asks Joel to talk about what percentage he’s planning on taking and how he plans on using that money as it comes in.

[00:16:25] Richard wonders how Joel justifies Flossbank versus everything else and what’s his vision for making it stand out.

[00:18:29] Digging into the advertising side of things now, Joel shares how he’s finding advertisers and if he has any lined up.

[00:21:00] Richard wants to know what Joel is doing to support people who are not maintainers but who are major contributors to packages. We also find out the current state of Flossbank, even though they haven’t built the entire system yet.

[00:24:53] Joel mentioned earlier there is an enterprise version of Flossbank Enterprise and he explains what that is, how it works, and what the goal is. Joel shares a great story about a discussion he had with a company.

[00:27:58] Find out where you can get involved with Flossbank or reach out to Joel.

[00:06:10] “We found in the developer community that nobody likes anything pushed on them, and just in general, we think things should of course be opt in.”

[00:06:24] “We also build this on the belief that there are enough people in the ecosystem that actually want to give back. There’s just maybe not very easy ways to do it.”

[00:08:50] “We have realized that we are really solving the how to bring more money into the system part of the equation.”

[00:13:48] “André Staltz, who you recently had on the podcast, he stated in one of his blog posts, I don’t remember how long ago, talking about how open source is broken or something, said that if GitHub gave back even a fraction of what they were bought by Microsoft for then that would be 10X or a 100X fold what the open source ecosystem actually received in donations that year.”

[00:27:05] “Some of these people don’t see the return on investment on donating when their whole company is the return on investment. Your whole company is actually only possible because of open source. The fact that you have these employees is your return on investment, that is what open source produces.”

Special Guest: Joel Wasserman.

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Allen "Gunner" Gunn | Justin Dorfman | Richard Littauer

Mikeal Rogers

Hello and welcome to Sustain! Our special guest today is Mikeal Rogers, who works at Protocol Labs as IPLD Lead. We learn what Protocol Labs is, where they come from, and what Mikeal does there as the IPLD Lead (InterPlanetary Linked Data). We will find out what happened when io.js forked with Node.js, if there is a difference between the Project Manager and Developer Role, and Mikeal’s interests in design libraries, and building a community and ecosystem from scratch and how they interrelate. Download this episode now to learn more!

[00:01:25] Mikeal tells us what he does at Protocol Labs. We also learn who Protocol Labs is and where they come from.

[00:06:43] Mikeal talks about what he did in his previous jobs.

[00:09:48] Richard asks Mikeal what separates his path and his ideal goal from being someone who ends up just working on algorithms full time for Microsoft in the back office.

[00:14:15] Mikeal shares with us the io.js fork with Node.js. Justin wonders if there was a lot tension between the communities and Mikeal explains.

[00:19:40] Richard wonders if Mikeal thinks the Project Manager Role and the Developer Role are similar.

[00:24:18] Mikeal specializes in and worked on design libraries so they can grow entire ecosystems and communities and how to make the code itself actually enable and afford better sustainable practices, which he talks about here. He mentions the creation of the Buffer Interface.

[00:32:51] Mikeal tells us where we can learn more about him and things he’s done with community and sustainability stuff and where we can find him on the internet.

[00:08:10] “The whole industry is really pushing you towards do more, take on more responsibility, do a startup, take on executive roles, keep going. It’s just never enough to just write code or be a programmer.”

[00:08:24] “I had a real kind of identity crisis a little bit when I was leaving the Node Foundation, because I was like what am I going to do? And it actually took me a little while, like I had a short stint in some venture capital stuff.”

[00:22:30] “If you write code every day, you have a practice. Even if you’re just doing it for work, you have a practice, like you sit down, and you probably notice yourself taking a walk, or working on a problem in the shower or something. These are really subtle forms of meditation for you to take yourself in a different state and get all of the distractions away for a minute and just think about a problem.”

Special Guest: Mikeal Rogers.

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Allen "Gunner" Gunn | Eric Berry | Justin Dorfman | Richard Littauer

Dominic Tarr

Hello and welcome to Sustain! Our special guest today is Dominic Tarr, an open source sailor hacker person, calling from his boat in New Zealand. He’s been instrumental in the early JavaScript scene. Dominic tells us how he got into open source, coding, and how he got involved in JavaScript and Event Stream. We will also learn what Dominic is doing now and how does he envision open source going forward. How does Dominic fund his life living on a boat? Download this episode now to find out!

[00:01:35] Dominic tells us how he got into open source, how he got into coding, how he ended up where he is today, and how he got involved in JavaScript.

[00:06:45] Richard informs us that Dominic was in a group of influential people in Node JS who made a bunch of modules, one of them being Event Stream, which is Dominic’s. He also tells how many modules he’s written for NPM. Dominic also talks about how he initially dealt with the “fixing the bug” issues, since he was making these modules in his spare time and coding for fun.

[00:10:00] Justin wants to know how Dominic got 700 modules and how did he manage it for as long as he did.

[00:12:02] Richard wonders what Dominic is doing now and how does he envision open source or JavaScript going forward if it’s not fun to work on.

[00:14:07] Eric wants to know if Dominic has any reflections or thoughts around the shift in the overall view of NPM over the years.

[00:20:19] Richard wonders how Dominic’s funds his life because he lives on a boat.

[00:24:55] Where can you find Dominic on the internet? Find out here.

[00:11:13] “We had this one SquatConf where we just had our own conference, and we kind of timed it with some other, like more boring conference that would fly people in and then we would be like, okay, now we’re all in this place and let’s just have our own thing.”

[00:14:17] “So, for a long time, I guess before it became a corporation, I believe incorporated, before that it was very much open to everybody contribute and then it became a business, which obviously there’s good reason for it to become a business.”

[00:23:13] “I’m not a terribly big fan of schemes to pay open source developers, especially the ones that are like based on some kind of charity thing. Either they’re like straight forward charity things like Gratipay, then you never got very much money or you have strings attached or something.”

Special Guest: Dominic Tarr.

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