
Sustain
290 episodes — Page 5 of 6

Episode 90: Logan Kilpatrick and the Julia community
Guest Logan Kilpatrick Panelists Eric Berry | Justin Dorfman Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! The podcast where we talk about sustaining open source for the long haul. We are very excited to have as our guest, Logan Kilpatrick, who is the Community Manager for the Julia Programming Language, a graduate student studying Software Engineering and Technology Law, and makes an exclusive announcement of another position he recently has taken on. Today, we are talking to Logan about the Julia Programming Language. We learn more about the role Major League Hacking played in the MLH Fellowship with Julia, why Logan is most interested in doing open source non-technical, his experience working at NASA, and the challenges he has with research papers. He also tells us about why the Julia community should not be using Slack, but maybe using Discord and Zulip in the future. Logan shares some parting advice about reaching out to people if there’s opportunities that are interesting to you. Find out more and download this episode now! [00:00:22] Logan gives us a brief introduction of who he is, what he does, and what this new position is he has recently taken on. [00:01:52] NumFocus is the topic and how this all came to be for Logan, and why Julia as a programming language is so unique and special. [00:05:48] Justin brings up ML Hacks and Logan explains more about this. [00:08:04] Logan fills us in on what his Julia day-to-day tasks that he works on and his non-technical tasks so he can influence the next non-technical open source contributor. [00:11:51] Find out if the Julia Programming Language is using any tools to monitor their community engagement. Justin talks about something he uses called Orbit, which is a framework for building high gravity communities. [00:16:00] Find out the experience Logan had working with NASA! [00:18:49] Logan has so much going on in his life and Justin wonders how he finds time to do anything. [00:20:10] We learn why Logan has a bunch of challenges with research papers. [00:22:47] Eric wonders if people are not sharing the code for reasons that they don’t want to give up intellectual property or that it’s not completely well-formed and they just want to own it, but still want to share it. Logan gives his perspective on this. [00:25:17] Logan explains the different places you can find the Julia community and why they should not be using Slack. Eric wonders what is out there that we can use that people would adopt, and Logan talks about Discord, Zulip, and Forum Community. [00:29:09] Logan covers one more thing, going back to the convo they had about open source contributions and non-technical contributions. He also brings up Jono Bacon’s book, People Powered. Quotes [00:04:46] “The estimate right now is something like a million developers or something like that, which is at a million users.” [00:05:53] “So, Major League Hacking is an incredible organization and they were sort of generous enough in the first iteration of the MLH Fellowship, which is just an opportunity for students to contribute to open source and get paid to do it by Major League Hacking and a bunch of peripheral organizations who support Major League Hacking.” [00:08:33] “I think my sort of general goal that has just come out recently for me is to make people understand that a non-technical contribution in open source is a viable way of contributing.” [00:08:58] “And the reason for that is I feel like there’s more opportunities to do those non-technical contributions and there’s more sort of missing pieces in the non-technical space.” [00:10:21] “Again, I think there’s so much non-technical work that if someone doesn’t step up and do it, it doesn’t get done.” [00:20:21] “One of which is a lot of times folks don’t release their code, which is sort of one of the missions of NumFocus and in a sense, “Open code equals better science.” [00:26:16] “To me, it’s 100% evident and perfectly clear that we should not be using Slack.” [00:26:23] “Slack is a tool that is built for corporations to communicate with one another... It is not a tool for open source projects to be using.” [00:28:46] “In my personal opinion, Discord and Zulip will probably be the two that are fighting each other in the future with respect to places that communities go and meet.” [00:29:22] “I think something that is perhaps might be obvious to some people, might not be obvious to some people, but really, non-technical contributions in my opinion are the pathway to making a code contribution.” [00:30:58] “I think my parting suggestion for people that I always try to instill whenever I have the opportunity to talk to people that I don’t know through the internet is take the opportunities to reach out to folks that you don’t know if there’s opportunities that are interesting to you.” Spotlight [00:31:55] Logan’s spotlight is the tool Julia’s visualization package Makie. [00:32:29] Eric’s spotlight is a suite of tools called Setapp. [00:33:03] Justin’s spotli

Episode 89: Leslie Hawthorn, OSPOs, Digital Sovereignty, and Cultivating Open Source Communities
Guest Leslie Hawthorn Panelists Allen "Gunner" Gunn | Eric Berry | Eriol Fox | Richard Littauer Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! The podcast where we talk about sustaining open source for the long haul. We have an excellent guest on today and she is here to talk about real stuff! Our guest is Leslie Hawthorn, who is the Manager for the Vertical Community Strategy in Red Hat’s Open Source Programs Office in the Office of the CTO. She has spent her career creating, cultivating, and enabling open source communities and we are so fortunate to have her with us today to speak her eloquent words of wisdom. We learn more about what Leslie does in her position, the Open Source Program Office and how she sees it growing and changing, and a deep conversation of European digital sovereignty and how it is both a threat and opportunity for open source and open standards. Also, Leslie keeps it real and shares awesome advice on what it takes to be the best kind of corporate open source program officer. Go ahead and download this episode now to learn much more! [00:02:37] We learn what Leslie she does in her position. [00:05:13] Richard is curious about what Leslie thinks about the OSPO concept in general and how does she see it growing and changing in the past five years. [00:07:43] Leslie talks about digital sovereignty and the movement towards open source program offices focusing on that. [00:13:13] Eriol brings up a design phrase “human-centered” and asks Leslie to talk more about examples she has seen where humans, users, and citizens have been centered at the creation of various open source software projects. Leslie mentions a really great panel discussion to check out with Claudia Barrosa and Pia Karter where they talked about Open Source and Open Standards, Supporting European Innovation. [00:18:21] Leslie tells us what made her move to Germany and how that’s reflected in the work she’s doing at Red Hat. [00:23:16] Richard wonders why Leslie feels that the OSPO at Red Hat is the place where you can affect the most change, how is she doing ecosystem level change in her current position, and where does she think it will lead her over the next few years. [00:27:42] Gunner is curious to know if Leslie has a taxonomy of how she thinks about different types of open source program offices and their motivations or contributions to open source communities, and any guiding principles that she thinks any accountable open source program office or officer might want to be following or guided by. [00:33:02] Find out where you can follow Leslie online. Quotes [00:02:49] “And when we think about traditional community management, quote on quote, there’s typically a community focused human who is looking at the universe from the perspective of, how does my singular community engage with other entities?” [00:07:45] “Those who are not familiar with this concept of digital sovereignty, just the really quick rundown is this idea that folks in Europe are, I would say for some good reasons and for some bad reasons, deeply concerned about making sure that there is control of IT infrastructure and data and everything associated with just having a technological life, which turns out is now true of every citizen.” [00:08:14] “And there is, I will say, especially given my past employer, there is legitimate concern for what does it mean if your IT infrastructure is outsourced to someone far, far away from you who is not necessarily beholden to the same laws or to the same values system of the place in which you reside.” [00:09:31] “Pia Karger, who is the head of the Open Source Program Office in Germany, you know, pointed out that one of the reasons why there was this change in the name of the office that she shares was because this notion of digital sovereignty and being, let’s create open source that is exclusively to be contributed to by Europeans, that is explicitly to be used by Europeans, was not in keeping with the value system that folks in her office wanted to enact nor with Germany in general.” [00:10:04] “So instead, you know, she pointed out digital sovereignty is not about excluding people from contribution or excluding people from participation, it’s about ensuring that that there is freedom of choice.” [00:10:22] “You don’t want to do any single sourcing of any particular vendor or any particular, you know, one place where you’re going to get all your technology if you’re any organization.” [00:11:10] “The ability to collaborate amongst one another and share best practices, and this moniker of the OSPO is this critical anchor because turns out, if you described your work using common language, it’s very easy for folks to connect to one another and be able to do that knowledge sharing and best practice and collaboration because they can actually find each other.” [00:11:43] “Yes, OSPO is a locus of collaboration, my friends.” [00:14:45] “And then not only did she take us through their entire evolution, but then po

Episode 88: Foundations Roundtable: From Maintain to Sustain
Guest Ewa Jodlowska, Rachel Lawson, Leah Silen, Ben Nickolls, Jory Burson, and Karen Sandler Panelists Duane O'Brien and Richard Littauer Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! The podcast where we talk about sustaining open source for the long haul. Today, we’re doing something a little different with this episode. We are giving you the audio recording of a round table that was recently hosted by Duane O’Brien and Richard Littauer, about the role of foundations in open source. Our panelists today are Ewa Jodlowska, Rachel Lawson, Leah Silen, Ben Nickolls, Jory Burson, and Karen Sandler. We’ll spend time talking about foundations and associations in general, the kinds of things they do, the kinds of legal structures that they may have, and how they differ from each other. They explain about the work they’ve done for their projects and some services that they offer. And then we’ll spend time talking about projects, when projects might think about reaching out to organizations, or when maintainers might think about bringing their projects to organizations. So, take a listen and enjoy! Go ahead and download this episode now! [00:00:40] Duane starts off with a quick overview of the conversations they’ll be talking about. [00:01:36] Everyone gives a brief introduction of themselves, who they’re representing, and what their organization does. [00:06:42] Duane asks the panelists for their responses to: What is a foundation, what isn’t a foundation, and what are some of the differences between the types of organizations that you have. [00:10:58] Speaking on behalf of the Python Software Foundation, Ewa talks about what kinds of things they do for projects and we learn from Leah what fiscal sponsorship means. [00:13:07] Duane asks if there is anyone for whom their organization and their view of fiscal sponsorship is significantly different from what the others have described. Jory, Ben, and Karen share some things. [00:17:34] Duane asks the panelists to discuss about the times that their organizations have helped solve another kind of problem or member projects or for projects that later became members. And, when have they been able to step in and intervene on behalf of the project? [00:27:45] Find out what kinds of things the panelists look for from projects that apply to be a part of your organization and when do they think they’re ready to come in. [00:31:56] For the maintainers of projects who are in charge of their project and are thinking it might be or wondering if it’s time to start reaching out to foundations, Duane asks the panelists for some key indicators that they might look for that it’s probably time to tag in some bigger help than they’ve had to date. [00:32:54] Richard brings up a question that was in the chat about mailing lists and why is mailing list important when considering whether you’re going to take on a project into your foundation. [00:34:45] A question that was sent to Richard personally and not in the chat was, why do we think there are so many women in this space? [00:36:20] The next chat question Richard asks was, can everyone agree that most open source software foundation’s purpose is not to support the public interest, but instead to support the interest of the members? [00:39:33] The panelists tell us what they are most excited about that might be coming up for them and what they want to plug on behalf of their organization. Links SustainOSS SustainOSS Twitter Ewa Jodlowska Twitter Python Software Foundation Python Software Foundation Campaign (donation page) Rachel Lawson Twitter Drupal Leah Silen Linkedin NumFOCUS Ben Nickolls Twitter Open Source Collective Jory Burson Twitter OpenJS Foundation Karen Sandler Twitter Software Freedom Conservancy Discover Drupal FundOSS JavaScriptLandia OpenJS Foundation YouTube NumFOCUS PyData Global 2021 PyData YouTube Cloud68.co Aspiration Tech Indeed Credits Produced by Richard Littauer Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at Peachtree Sound Special Guests: Benjamin Nickolls, Ewa Jodlowska, Jory Burson, Karen Sandler, Leah Silen, and Rachel Lawson.

Episode 87: Ewa Jodlowska, Jackie Augustine, and how the PSF managed PyCon during COVID
Guest Ewa Jodlowska Jackie Augustine Panelists Eric Berry | Justin Dorfman | Richard Littauer Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! The podcast where we talk about sustaining open source for the long haul. We are super excited to have two guests with us, Ewa Jodlowska, who is the Executive Director of the Python Software Foundation and has been with the PSF since 2012. We also have Jackie Augustine, who is the Director of Events at the Python Software Foundation and she joined the PSF in 2018 to assist in the planning of PyCon US. Today, we’re going to talk with Ewa and Jackie about how PyCon works, which is the largest annual gathering for the community using and developing open-source Python programming language. Since PyCon US 2021 had to go virtual this year, we learn what they’ve done different, using Hubilo as their event platform, sponsors feedback, how attendance was, the value of these conferences, and if they would ever go hybrid. Also, we learn about a successful virtual job fair that Jackie did this year for PSF and find out the one thing she’s most excited for the next PyCon. Download this episode to find out much from Ewa and Jackie! [00:03:23] Ewa fills us in how PyCon US is different from PyCon. Jackie tells us what they’ve done since last year and how they’ve adapted since COVID came through. [00:06:08] Jackie tells us why they went with Hubilo as their event platform, and how the sponsors feedback was for the virtual experience overall. [00:08:14] Justin asks how the attendance was for the virtual event. Also, he wonders if going forward if they see themselves doing a hybrid. [00:12:34] Richard is curious to know from Jackie and Ewa if an ecosystem level of analysis of what PSF does and what their conferences are, influenced their decisions at all and is there anything they’re doing to make it more sustainable ecologically. Also, Jackie tells us how international attendance was at their conference. [00:15:12] Ewa talks about the “value” of these conferences for the ecosystem as a whole and what would happen if we just never have them again. [00:17:03] Jackie tells us about the successful job fair she did this year which was a virtual set up. [00:18:52] Richard asks if they’ve looked into moving beyond the single annual convention format. [00:21:08] Eric could only imagine what Jackie must go through in the weeks prior to the conference and asks her to talk a bit about the experience on an emotional level that she goes through, and she tells us what she learned through this process that she didn’t expect. [00:24:17] Richard asks if there’s any way Jackie’s made or plans on making it easier for people who come to the conference to join in the decision-making process for a PSF, to join into working groups and feel like they’re a part of something bigger than just watching a talk, and how has that shaped how you’re planning future models. [00:25:51] What is Jackie most excited about in the future for the next PyCon? [00:26:01] You can find out from Ewa where to follow PSF, where you can sign up to go the conferences, and where you can follow Jackie online to connect with her. Quotes [00:08:52] “In the end, you know, we had our goals, we had our tiers of goals, and we hit what we thought we would hit, and we were successful in that.” [00:10:21] “I think the question that we’re asking ourselves is, do you actually take that component out in their ability for anybody to attend whether they feel comfortable traveling or not.” [00:11:29] “When you add something like a hybrid event, you’re really planning two events at the same time, so that really changes up how we’re able to do that with the resources that we have.” [00:13:02] “Some of the things that we’re doing or planning on doing is like the swag papers and all that is going away moving forward, so we’re taking the steps. We work with the convention centers as well and make sure that they are doing their part in the sustainability and things like that.” [00:13:51] “Yes, it’s been wonderful for the environment that we’ve all kind of had to reset and stay home, but I also think that’s going to have a little bit of an adverse effect because now everyone is going to be like, oh my gosh, I want to be together, you know, whenever that can happen.” [00:15:32] “And I feel like actually there are hundreds of people that attend PyCon that probably never go to a talk. All the value that’s there for them is to network with people, to talk about their projects with people, to have, you know, their projects be seen and tested, whatever the case might be.” [00:19:30] But then PyCon went to Cleveland, but that I think also helped reinforce a lot of the attendance when you looked at the numbers and how many people attended from Ohio was really incredible, right, so it kind of brought the larger scale portion of it.” [00:24:40] “We rely a lot of volunteer committees.” [00:25:51] “What are you most excited about in the future for the next PyCon? Seeing faces!

Episode 86: Kavita Kapoor and HFOSS: Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software
Guest Kavita Kapoor Panelists Eric Berry | Eriol Fox | Alyssa Wright | Richard Littauer Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! The podcast where we talk about sustaining open source for the long haul. Our special guest today is Kavita Kapoor, Founding Member and Strategy Director of the Federation of Humanitarian Technologists. Kavita tells us all about the Federation of Humanitarian Technologists, how things are going there since they started, and a project they started. We learn from Kavita why she thinks it’s important that children learn about technology, she gives incredible advice on how a tech person can get involved with the humanitarian efforts, and why it’s important to live your mission and visions. She also tells us her perspective and shares a personal story on the lack of gender diversity in tech jobs, as well as not enough LGBTQ plus spaces for the tech community especially in the UK. Kavita is amazing, so go ahead and download this episode to hear more! [00:03:11] Kavita tells us all about her herself, her involvement in the Shorinji Kempo martial art, and how she met Mike Nolan, who is the other Founding Member of the Federations of Humanitarian Technologists. [00:05:45] We learn all about the Federation of Humanitarian Technologists. [00:07:45] Kavita talks about how they hired their first Humanitarian Aid Director and how everything is going there. [00:09:55] Eric wonders where those lines cross in open source versus what Kavita is working with humanitarian efforts. [00:13:00] Eriol asks Kavita if open source software and the open source community offer more opportunities for these Non-governmental organizations and charities to build capacity around their technology. [00:15:24] Find out why Kavita thinks it’s important that children learn about technology, and whether open source can be part of that education and how early should it be. [00:19:13] Richard wonders why Kavita is so interested in the membership organizations such as OpenUK and the Federation of Humanitarian Technologists. [00:21:33] Eric tells Kavita she is a powerhouse and wonders how she has time to do the things that she’s doing and also wonders if she has any other passions. [00:22:30] From the technologist side, Kavita tells us how a tech person can get involved with the humanitarian efforts such as hers and do that in a sustainable way for them, emotionally as well as financially. [00:26:43] Eriol asks to hear Kavita’s perspective on things that she’s witnessed when people with tech skills do get engaged with these kinds of projects, but the barriers that she’s perceived and the ones that she’s tried to knock down so they can participate. She talks about gender diversity and not enough LQBTQ plus spaces for the technology community, especially in the UK. [00:31:54] Find out where you can follow Kavita online. Quotes [00:06:40] “And I think it’s what we all realized when we work for organizations of different scales is that it’s really difficult sometimes to scale up and have the infrastructure, especially when you’re working on projects that are all funded for the end goal, for the end impact.” [00:17:31] “So I went off and became COO of the Micro:bit Educational Foundation and we went around the world. We went to into sixty countries during my tenure. We went from a million devices in the UK that was given away free, four million devices around the world, and some of the kids that we worked with were incredible.” [00:19:59] “But actually, when I’ve been working for profit organizations, I’ve never felt that I could have the impact that I wanted to have or have the access to the power structures that I wanted to have so that we could actually do more good.” [00:20:25] “But the bottom line is always about where the money is.” [00:20:43] “You have to live your mission and visions.” [00:23:41] “I find it crazy at the moment that we’ve got so many people out of work who have tech skills and so many open tech positions and I’m trying to figure out what that gap is.” [00:24:44] “It is really where your starting point is, but you can always do something, and you can always negotiate with your teams at work to get some bandwidth.” Spotlight [00:32:24] Eric’s spotlight is a new program that just launched called FundOSS. [00:33:53] Eriol’s spotlight is a project called Chayn. [00:34:42] Alyssa’s spotlight is being thankful that her computer is working. [00:35:02] Richard*’s* **spotlight is the National LGTB Chamber of Commerce (NGLCC). [00:35:58] Kavita’s spotlight is Software Conservancy. Links SustainOSS Kavita Kapoor Website Kavita Kapoor Twitter Kavita Kapoor Linkedin OpenUK International Rescue Committee Shorinji Kempo Federation of Humanitarian Technologists The Federation of Humanitarian Technologists-GitHub BBC Micro Games Archive Micro:bit Project Implicit Harvard Project Implicit Test Lesbians Who Tech Pride Summit 2021 FundOSS Chayn National LGBTQ Chamber of Commerce Software Freedom Conservancy Sustain Podcast-Epi

Episode 85: Geoffrey Huntley and Sustaining OSS with Gitpod
Guest Geoffrey Huntley Panelists Eric Berry | Richard Littauer Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! The podcast where we talk about sustaining open source for the long haul. We are super excited to be going “down under” with our guest today, Geoff Huntley, who works at Gitpod as part of a team that focuses on community and he works with the engineering team. He is also a long-time open source developer advocate, and general coder dude from Australia. We learn from Geoff how he got started in coding, how he loves to teach people coming into the field, and the importance of turning up, sticking around, and helping out in this industry. He tells us all about Gitpod, what he does there, why more people are adopting it, what beer money does for maintainers, and how he’s using Gitpod to try to solve the problem of maintainers sustainability. Also, Geoff shares some awesome advice to help the sustainers out there, and his advice on how to use money, which you really need to hear! Download this episode now to find out much more from Geoff #vanlife! [00:01:45] Geoff tells us about the van he lives in and the project he maintains called ReactiveUI. [00:02:50] We learn how Geoff got started with coding and how he ended up willing to take over an open source project that takes a lot of maintenance. [00:06:00] Richard asks Geoff to talk about the amount of maintainers out there and any opinions he has about the engineering code versus the maintainer parable he just mentioned. [00:08:49] We learn more about Gitpod from Geoff. [00:10:49] Eric asks why people are adopting Gitpod, what makes that different between that and Codespaces, and Geoff tells us what the response has been so far. [00:14:40] Geoff talks about how he’s using Gitpod to try to solve this problem of maintainers sustainability, and how it goes back to Nadia Eghbal with her Roads and Bridges and the pivotal work she did with the Ford Foundation. [00:17:43] Eric wonders what Geoff thinks that beer money does for the maintainers, and when he was talking to the guys, what kind of response was he getting. [00:21:18] Geoff tells us how many people were involved in the distribution and if he was able to bring in more community members to help decide where those funds were allocated. [00:23:13] We find out the background of the team at Gitpod, and what Geoff does there. [00:25:12] Richard wonders how Geoff is structuring partnerships and how is he making it easier for developers to know about the whole suite of tools that are at their disposal to try and get not just beer money, but sticker money, backer money, and eventually, hopefully things like UBI coming out of code. [00:26:46] Geoff shares his knowledge to the sustainers out there and that can help others. [00:33:00] Eric and Richard share their thoughts on what the next five years is going to be. [00:39:24] Geoff leaves us with a final thought on, “How to use money?” We also find out where you can find him online. Quotes [00:03:27] “Well, it was for personal development and learning. I found at the company I didn’t really have a mentor as such, and I found in open source there is an unlimited supply of learning if you just turn up and say, “How can I help?” [00:04:12] “No other industry has that opportunity if you just do the one simple thing of just turning up, sticking around, and helping out.” [00:04:36] “So these are common problems in open source. We have a lot of focus on the code, but there’s so many different ways people can contribute to open source even if you still don’t understand the code base.” [00:07:22] “So, one thing to always remember is problems can be fixed, we’ll pull requests. Open source software is as is.” [00:16:03] “Now, one of the things we’ve found in that is it’s still too hard to give projects money.” [00:18:56] “People are very excited just to even know that you’re using their software and how it’s getting value.” [00:39:31] “I suppose I’d leave to everyone to think about when you do have money and beer money is coming in, consider maybe not paying your developers.” [00:40:12] “So, use your funds to bring yourself joy. Think about all the things you do as an open source maintainer and the things that don’t bring you joy, that’s what the funds should be used to do.” Spotlight [00:42:22] Eric’s spotlights are github1s and GitHub Web IDE. [00:43:31] Richard’s spotlight is the Vermont Commission on Native American Affairs. [00:44:30] Geoff’s spotlight is the open source project pre-commit. Links Geoffrey Huntley Twitter Geoffrey Huntley Linkedin Geoffrey Huntley Website Gitpod Iron Ring Open Source Maintainers on GitHub GitHub-open source Geoff Huntley’s personal monorepo-GitHub Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure by Nadia Eghbal (Ford Foundation) DevX Conf “DevX Conf wrap & distributing $10k of open-source funding” by Geoffrey Huntley and Christin Frohne Gitpod chat Geoff Huntley Gitpod chat “Gitpod Open-Source Sustainability Fund” by Ge

Episode 84: Jono Bacon on Building Sustainable Communities
Guest Jono Bacon Panelists Justin Dorfman | Richard Littauer Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! The podcast where we talk about sustaining open source for the long haul. Today, we have as our special guest, Jono Bacon, a self-employed Community and Collaboration Consultant, author, speaker, and Founder of Jono Bacon Consulting. Jono tells us about his interesting journey with his career, the diversity of his clients, a concern he has with chat channels, and why community is the most important thing in open source. He talks about developers and how to help them see their value and potential to achieve their goals. We learn more about some of the things Jono wrote, including his most recent book, People Powered: How Communities Can Supercharge Your Business, Brands, and Teams, _and how he got the _“star power” behind it. Also, he also shares an awesome story when he worked at XPRIZE, and something that made him realize how unique the open source world really is. Go ahead and download this episode to hear much more! [00:01:46] Jono tells us how he ended up doing what he does. [00:03:36] We find out the type of clients Jono has and how he gets them often through referrals. [00:06:34] Jono talks about how he feels about Discord, Discourse, Gitter, and the open source IRC replacements that are going on right now. [00:09:42] Richard asks Jono what he thinks the value is of having these side conversations, and how does that help community members have better engagement and build value for them. [00:13:28] Jono shares his opinion on one of the flaws with individuals in open source and why community is the most important thing. [00:16:46] Richard wonders how Jono balances the needs of emotionally connecting to everyone in your group and how he makes sure that developers know there is a balance to be met to have the community thrive. [00:20:30] We learn about some things Jono wrote and he tells us about his most recent book, _People Powered: How Communities Can Supercharge Your Business, Brands, and Teams. _Justin wonders how he got the “star power,” such as Jamie Hyneman and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, in his book. [00:28:01] We hear an awesome story when Jono worked at XPRIZE and how personalities of people made him realize how unique the open source world really is. [00:31:42] Richard asks Jono if there are any challenges, anything open source needs help with, and what is down the road for us. [00:36:44] Find out where you can follow Jono online and learn more about what he does. Quotes [00:07:25] “The second priority that I’ve got is by extension, that anybody who joins the community should get amazing value out of it.” [00:07:32] “As far as I concerned, if you join a community and you don’t get value out of it, that community hasn’t earned you.” [00:07:56] “One of the concerns I have with chat channels and chat services in general and I’d include Slack, Mattermost, Discord, Git, all of these, is that by definition, it’s a linear stream of consciousness. So Slack claims that they’ve got history and you can kind of unlock history for example if you pay for it. It just doesn’t work.” [00:08:41] “That’s why I think even Slack, don’s say this is for community building, it’s for building teams.” [00:10:00] “So, to me what brings people into communities is they’re there to solve a problem. They’re there to improve their future state, such as they’re using pieces of open source software, and they want to make better use of it and solve their problems or build their applications.” [00:10:16] “I think what people stay for in the community is an intrinsic sense of belonging and a sense that this is just a good place for me to be.” [00:13:26] “My take on this is I think one of the flaws of a lot of open source communities, not so much communities but more individuals, is that they always talk about the most important thing is code, is getting code that can be created and shared with a group of people.” [00:13:57] “But to me, I’m engineering for impact here, whether you’re building a little project to just make certain types of unit testing easier, or whether you’re building a replacement for a major piece of proprietary software.” [00:14:48] “ The reason why I’m so passionate about community is because if you take a hundred people inside of those hundred people, there are so many ideas and insights and experiences and skills, and so much time available. Then when we can get all of that out into the open, it makes us the best we can be as people.” [00:17:28] “But, I think most people, a much more kind of, I guess you could say practical than that, and they will do something if they can see the value, and it’s worth it, and they can achieve their broader outcomes.” [00:18:36] “You need to be inclusive, not just in terms of a rich demographic of people, which is always important, diversity of race and sexuality and all those wonderful things.” [00:18:48] “But just a diversity of ideas and letting people come in and take your li

Episode 83: Dominic Nguyen on Chromatic, Storybook.js, and building self-sustaining OSS projects
Guest Dominic Nguyen Panelists Eric Berry | Justin Dorfman | Richard Littauer Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! The podcast where we talk about sustaining open source for the long haul. We are very excited about our guest today, Dominic Nguyen, founder of Chromatic, the company behind Storybook.js. Storybook.js is an open source tool for building UI components and pages in isolation. On this episode, Dominic fills us in on Chromatic, how Storybook evolved, the story behind Meteor, which is the first full-stack JavaScript framework, and who their venture backers are. We also learn the difference between Declarative and Imperative UI, and Dominic tells us what it means for him to be an open source project. Download this episode now to find out much more! [00:01:21] Dominic tells us about Storybook and how it evolved. [00:06:26] We learn the difference between Declarative and Imperative UI. [00:08:22] Find out what other projects have come out of Meteor. [00:09:07] Richard wonders what the financial situation is for Storybook, how much money is needed, and where does it go. [00:11:00] Dominic announces Chromatic is hiring engineers to do open source development, and he tells us who his seed funders are that believe in his mission. [00:14:24] Dominic talks about open source companies launching these open source business models. [00:16:04] Eric wonders if there’s a direction with Storybook to work with or integrate with non-JavaScript based frameworks. [00:18:26] Richard wonders how Dominic is avoiding becoming a “kitchen sink” and making sure that he doesn’t just fill all the needs for everyone and then do it badly. Dominic explains why they exist as the guiding light. [00:21:43] Richard asks Dominic what it means for him to be an open source project and how does he mentally manage the divide between the Storybook community as a whole needing to be sustained. [00:25:04] Eric asks Richard why would the funds that are generated to develop and maintain this project, why should they be distributed outside of the team that’s the primary maintainers of it. Eric and Justin chime in and share their perspectives on this topic as well. [00:32:39] Find out where you follow Dominic online. Quotes [00:02:57] “Meteor was, for the audience who might not be familiar or who is just jumping into JavaScript now, was one of the first, or if not the first full-stack JavaScript framework.” [00:05:38] “If you look at the kind of long history of what components and why components exist, you can think about them as standardized parts.” [00:09:22] “The way we do it at Meteor is two ways: One, we have this idea of we’re a community led open source project. We have an open collective that donates, like folks in the community donate money and then it’s used effectively for marketing, marketing purposes, swag, doing stuff like CI, bills, like kind of incidentals.” [00:09:49] “Because when you think about it, it hasn’t been enough to really pay someone a salary without asking for donations all the time and I think that’s what’s happening in Babel right now.” [00:10:10] “So, what we do on the Chromatic is the company behind Meteor, we have maintainers, official maintainers whose full-time job is to push that project forward, build the features that people want and maintain that kind of core API, and that is in partnership with our community.” [00:14:37] “If you look at the long answer in the context of other open source companies that are coming out right now and are launching, it seems like this is the model that everyone has landed on that separates you from these older style like open source, I would say classic open source business models.” [00:15:02] “It seems like the modern kind of like open source business models, build an open source project, sell some type of service that compliments it.” [00:17:57] “So for instance, isomorphic was like the hot word five years ago.” [00:22:28] “We put money back into the open source project and in doing so the development experience is better for everyone and it’s that cycle that we’re trying to maintain and continue.” [00:27:34] “Yeah, for me, the issue is like people who contribute to it, they’re self-serving, it’s a self-serving action. They are contributing to it for their own benefit.” [00:28:11] “And when that is the case, I agree with you a hundred percent. When that’s not the case, when it’s a tool that’s being used by anybody, to me honestly, that is the beauty of open source.” [00:29:52] “So, the hard part about open source is maintaining it for a really long time.” [00:30:28] “Just staying afloat is like a full-time job.” [00:30:33] “And what we hope to offer the community from Chromatic, as like the maintainers, is a stable release cadence that keeps up with the rest of the ecosystem and includes some new, helpful, handy features.” Spotlight [00:33:26] Eric’s spotlight is s tutorial, “Dockerize your Rails app” by Nate Hopkins. [00:34:25] Justin’s spotlight is Wormhole by Feross. [

Episode 82: Steve Helvie and the Open Compute Project
Guest Steve Helvie Panelists Eric Berry | Justin Dorfman | Richard Littauer Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! The podcast where we talk about sustaining open source for the long haul. Our guest today is exceptional in many ways, so you don’t want to miss this episode! On this episode, we have Steve Helvie, VP of Channel Development for the Open Compute Project (OCP). He helps to educate organizations on the benefits of open hardware designs and the value of “community-driven” engineering for the data center. Today, Steve tells us how the Open Compute Project started, how he got involved, how it generates revenue, what open hardware is, and the challenges he sees with open hardware. We also learn why Europe is always at the forefront of regulations when it comes to sustainability and designs. Download this episode now to find out much more! [00:00:39] Eric, Richard, and Justin tell us about their backgrounds since Steve was curious. [00:03:26] Steve tells us his background, what he does at Open Compute Project, and explains more about open hardware. [00:06:41] Steve mentions there are 200 projects in the Open Compute Project and Richard wonders what the minimum entry is, what you need to be one of these projects, and how much money is needed to think about having open hardware in his company. [00:12:04] Justin asks for Steve’s insight on a supply chain attack when it comes to hardware and how does the OCP fix it. [00:14:56] Steve talks about sustainability with “save the earth and save money,” and how Europe is always at the forefront of regulations when it comes to sustainability and designs. [00:17:00] Steve had mentioned that he’s invested in helping people have hardware and run hardware better for their own companies, and Richard sees this to be at ends with Cloud Native, so he asks Steve to talk about how he sees that conflict. [00:18:13] Richard wonders if Steve is helping to improve Uber’s private cloud and partially the public cloud by allowing them to do work with OCP and with other managers, how has that not led towards a non-sustainable earth and how does he reckon with that conflict. [00:20:51] In talking about refreshing hardware, Justin tells us about a book he read called _Flash Boys. _He also tells us about how he talked to an ex-Googler when GCP was getting built, who told him that Google was importing thirty tons of hard drives every single day and asks Steve if this is a normal thing. [00:22:43] Richard wonders if a large amount of Steve’s clients are Crypto. [00:23:37] Eric brings up Steve’s background and wonders if he had an a-ha moment or was there a point in time where he thought this is bigger than just hardware. [00:26:00] Steve tells us besides memberships, how the OCP generates revenue. He talks about having to switch to virtual summits during COVID. The guys all chat about if they’ve seen memberships and activities increasing in the last year since going virtual. Steve shares a staggering number of virtual attendees at his recent event. [00:30:37] Richard wonders what challenges Steve sees for the entire field of open hardware. Steve mentions a great course he took on Open Source Technology Management that’s worth checking out provided by Brandeis University. [00:35:29] Find out where you can follow Steve online. Quotes [00:08:02] “There is such a huge fear that someone’s going to take my designs and copy them.” [00:08:28] “So, what big companies like, in any company really, is they like a dual sourcing strategy.” [00:08:40] “They like that one skew, give me consistency across the board that I can deploy in Asia, Europe, or America, but give me multiple suppliers that mitigates my supply chain risk.” [00:10:48] “The types of companies that are looking at Open Compute are companies that have an open source mindset, they have a Cloud Native mindset where software is going to define everything.” [00:11:26] “And that’s the point of when that happens in industries you start to see this customer poll. It’s happening now in Telcos. Fintech gets it, gaming gets it, traditional banking, traditional healthcare, insurance companies do not get it yet, but they will. It’s going to come.” [00:14:32] “So, there’s this second user economy or what we call circular economy that’s happening now within what Google, Microsoft, Facebook, all the Hyperscalers now have a second use plan because they need to for sustainability.” [00:15:03] “What’s happening in Europe is you have Europe is always at the forefront of regulations when it comes to sustainability and designs.” [00:15:21] “There are heat reuse out of data center initiatives. For example, the Netherlands, you cannot build a new data center in the Netherlands unless you have a heat reuse.” [00:19:11] “So, the only part that I can see that’s redeeming about this fact is that OCP designs use a lot less energy between 30-50% less energy than a normal standard server.” [00:19:53] “We have large enterprises that are taking the hardware coming

Episode 81: Mae Beale and Using Open Source for Good
Guest Mae Beale Panelists Eric Berry | Richard Littauer Show Notes TRIGGER WARNING: There is a mention of blood in this episode. Hello and welcome to Sustain! The podcast where we talk about sustaining open source for the long haul. Being surrounded by beautiful mountains is wonderful, but even more wonderful is our guest today, Mae Beale, who is the Engineering Manager for True Link Financial, Vision and Operations Strategist for Title Track Michigan, and the Founder and CEO of Beale Street Software. Today, you will find out about Mae’s involvement and the many hats that she wears working for True Link Financial, Title Track Michigan, and Ruby for Good. Also, we learn about some of the projects she’s built and others she’s involved in, which are Mutual Aid, Voices of Consent, and Terrastories. Mae shares some awesome stories and advice, so go ahead and download this episode now to hear much more! [00:01:20] Mae tells us about True Link Financial and Title Track Michigan. [00:04:47] Eric wonders if acknowledging or giving thanks for the land that I’m on is really common where Mae lives, and she explains the culture behind it. [00:07:21] Mae shares her thoughts with us on the topic of how people talk about laziness a lot in our industry. [00:11:38] We learn about the work that Mae is doing with Ruby for Good. [00:13:41] Mae tells us what kind of projects she has built through Ruby for Good, such as diaper and essential needs for diaper banks and an animal shelter. [00:15:18] Eric asks Mae to talk about if you want to get involved, what type of commitment is required, if it’s open for volunteers and to whatever extent they can contribute, the typical contributor that she sees in this program, and if you have to be a Rubyist to do this. [00:17:04] Richard brings up problems with open source such as how to choose the right project, how to fund this work long-term, how to avoid vendor lock-in for the non-profits and now have to use this code that was made for them. Mae shares her thoughts and also mentions a great project called the Terrastories Project. [00:20:32] Mae tells us her views on how to stop young person burnout. [00:22:26] We learn about two more projects Mae is involved in, Voices of consent and Mutual Aid. [00:27:22] Mae talks about how doing a better job of verbalizing could help with interpreting what’s happening, and she tells us a great analogy. [00:29:30] Mae tells us about Mutual Aid and how you can get involved. [00:31:38] Find out where you can follow Mae and see her work on the internet. Quotes [00:02:56] “And rights of the water itself. So, there’s a lot of different efforts similar to how companies became people. There is precedent for natural spaces to becoming people are entities that have their own rights. So, the protection is on behalf of the lake itself.” [00:06:34] “That’s generally my MO is I have a high sensitivity to the way in which the language that we use and the things that we focus our attention on shape who we are and how we are to each other.” [00:07:05] “But, acknowledging what is happening that makes one uncomfortable is something I try to be willing to share and willing to receive.” [00:08:34] “But, calling it lazy it is in my opinion, problematic and communicates things to other people, amongst ourselves and to other people, that don’t disclose our awareness of our privilege.” [00:10:00] "But, sometimes, part of language adjustments over time that we’re always trying to do is the difference between intent and impact.” [00:15:52] “So, there really is no average contributor we’ve had in the repos I’ve been involved in.” [00:21:39] “There’s people who like to be in community and so there’s a lot we get out of it that isn’t just coding.” [00:26:29] “And we operate as if relationships are Boolean states, and if we can shift that to being able to engage and build trust and build understanding then we can get somewhere.” [00:30:12] “Mutual Aid also includes a political arm of taking a political stance in that it’s not charity. There’s a phrase, “Solidarity - not charity.” Spotlight [00:33:11] Eric’s spotlight is Bridgetown. [00:34:14] Richard’s spotlight is EMA: The Erasmus Mundus Students and Alumni Association. [00:35:00] Mae’s spotlight is Ruby for Good. Links Mae Beale Twitter Mae Beale GitHub True Link Financial Ruby for Good Title Track Michigan Title Track Michigan-Understanding Racial Justice course A guide to indigenous land acknowledgement Ruby for Good Diaperbase-GitHub Terrastories Ruby for Good Terrastories-GitHub Voices of Consent Ruby for Good Voices of Consent-GitHub Ruby for Good-Mutual Aid Bridgetown EMA: The Erasmus Mundus Students and Alumni Association Ruby for Good-GitHub WeCamp Credits Produced by Richard Littauer Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at Peachtree Sound Special Guest: Mae Beale.

Episode 80: Emma Irwin and the FOSS Fund Program
Guest Emma Irwin Panelists Eric Berry | Justin Dorfman | Richard Littauer Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! We are so excited to have on this episode as our guest, Emma Irwin. She is a Senior Project Manager in the Open Source Program Office at Microsoft. Today, we learn what Emma does at Microsoft OSPO, how she runs the FOSS Fund Program inside Microsoft, and she tells us about an article she wrote on Mozilla last year about safety. We also dive into the recent news of Richard Stallman returning to the FSF board, and what Emma is excited about happening soon with work she’s trying to do to help with diversity, equity, and inclusion. Download this episode to find out much more! [00:01:32] Emma fills us in on what she does at Microsoft OSPO. [00:02:47] Richard wonders how Emma manages to make it not seem extractive to do open source and how she makes it inviting for people to come and volunteer their time to work on projects which are housed by Microsoft or Microsoft is involved in. [00:05:05] Emma tells us how she runs the FOSS Fund Program inside of Microsoft and the three goals of the FOSS Fund. She also tells us how many people are working in it and if it’s involved with other departments or business units, or if it’s completely separate. [00:09:26] Emma gives us her opinion of how you can best build communities that enable people to thrive in an open source environment. [00:11:36] Emma elaborates on the safety issue she brought up and tells us about an article she wrote on Mozilla last year. [00:13:32] We learn how many incidents Mozilla experienced a year. [00:14:32] Justin wonders of Emma sees any projects that get more hate than others. [00:15:56] Richard brings up the recent news of Richard Stallman returning to the Free Software Foundation after resigning in 2019, and Emma shares her thoughts about it. [00:19:57 ] Emma tells us what she’s most excited about in the next six months with work she’s trying to do to help DEI work. [00:21:56] Find out what Emma shares that she’s been learning recently as part of the FOSS Fund, which is a positive thing from Microsoft. [00:24:57] Find out where you can follow Emma on the internet. Quotes [00:01:47] “And then the place that we’re kind of at Microsoft is thinking about the culture that we’re building around open source as well, you know it’s the mechanics and the compliance piece, but it’s also the human piece.” [00:03:27] “But I really believe that, and my experience at Mozilla where I worked before this, was like bringing people together around specific topics, allowing people to learn a thing, but also collaborate and chat, come together around shared pain points or opportunities.” [00:07:48] “A good OSPO doesn’t live in any part of the organization, it traverses and works with organizations and teams across it.” [00:09:41] “I think, and I teach that you really have to be mindful of who it is that you want to engage as part of your open source project.” [00:11:53] “So that work was done kind of back in the topic are of recognizing that there is not a fluid line in open source between employee or paid staff and contributors.” [00:12:51] “So that blog post and work was all about creating an end to end program to ensure that both staff and volunteers felt safe, but also understood their role.” [00:14:08] “I’ll actually say that a lot of people mean well, a lot of people want, but they’re often unprepared.” [00:14:42] “I think some of the well-organized projects, the .net project at Microsoft. The group that runs that is extremely good at running community.” [00:17:26] “And that’s why open source is still less diverse than tech overall and Stahllman is like dinosaur in my opinion of that era.” [00:24:08] “Yeah, and there’s a risk working group with CHAOSS, that’s what they call the RISK WG, which is basically like, how do we think about our dependencies as a problem, how do we solve this?” Spotlight [00:26:21] Justin’s spotlight is Fiverr. [00:26:49] Eric’s spotlight is Gitpod. [00:27:25] Richard’s spotlight is Gist. [00:27:55] Emma’s spotlight is the Drupal Project. Links Emma Irwin Twitter Emma Irwin Linkedin Emma Irwin Medium Microsoft Open Source Microsoft’s Free and Open Source Software Fund (FOSS Fund)-GitHub Mozilla Community Participation Guidelines “Weaving Safety into the Fabric of Open Source Collaboration” By Emma Irwin Contributor Covenant “Richard M. Stallman returns to the Free Software Foundation Board of Directors,” article on ZDNet RMS Open Letter-GitHub CHAOSS Diversity and Inclusion Working Group-GitHub Fiverr Business Gitpod Gist Drupal Project Credits Produced by Richard Littauer Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at Peachtree Sound Special Guest: Emma Irwin.

Episode 79: Leah Silen on how NumFocus helps makes scientific code more sustainable
Guest Leah Silen Panelists Eric Berry | Justin Dorfman | Alyssa Wright | Richard Littauer Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! Today, our special guest is Leah Silen, who is the Executive Director of NumFOCUS. She has been the primary driver behind the organization and execution of its programs including fiscal sponsorship, the PyData event series, and DEI initiatives. We learn what NumFOCUS does, how it works in terms of scientific research, who provides the funding, and the diversity, equity, and inclusion support that NumFOCUS provides projects. Leah talks about the importance of Grant Management and Community Management needed to help projects in the future, and a “Sustain Exclusive” announcement is made by Leah on something NumFOCUS is in the early stages of building. Go ahead and download this episode now to find out what it is! [00:01:16] Leah explains what NumFOCUS does, how it works, and what scientific open source means. [00:03:22] Since NASA researchers use NumFOCUS for sponsored projects, Justin asks if there are any sponsored projects on Mars right now. [00:05:18] Leah tells us about NumFOCUS being a project foundational to scientific research. [00:05:54] We learn about Leah’s art background and becoming one of the founding members of NumFOCUS. [00:07:21] There are maintainers of forty-two projects and Leah explains who the typical maintainer is of the NumFOCUS ecosystem. [00:08:14] Find out what a typical week looks like for Leah at NumFOCUS. [00:10:37] Richard is curious how Leah sees the future of this sort of organization as we’re seeing more of them, and if she’s just going to keep growing until there’s hundreds of projects under her or will there be more or less. [00:13:12] We learn who provides funding at NumFOCUS since they have nine staff members. Justin wonders how NumFOCUS is diversifying their income and Leah makes an announcement about something NumFOCUS is building and it’s a “Sustain Exclusive!” [00:16:11] Justin asks if NumFOCUS ever joins forces with the PSF. [00:16:55] Leah mentioned the diversity, equity, and inclusion support that NumFOCUS provides projects, she describes how it’s important for project sustainability, and the conversations there have been. [00:19:59] Richard wonders about the process of taking on a new project. [00:23:25] Leah tells us how they deal with the maintenance of scientific projects. [00:25:24] We learn the moon-shot idea of NumFOCUS, besides just making sure all these projects run smoothly, and what the goal is. [00:26:42] Leah tells us what she’s most excited about in terms of providing better stuff to projects in the near future. [00:29:20] Community Manager and Developer Advocate is discussed. [00:31:20] Find out where you can follow Leah and NumFOCUS on the internet. Quotes [00:04:00] “Many of the leaders in that project work for a division of NASA that have been directly involved in Mars Roemer images and things like that, as well as Astro Pi, another one of the projects that’s widely used by the astronomy community.” [00:05:18] “We many times speak of NumFOCUS projects as being very foundational to scientific research.” [00:10:59] “We have to make sure that as the number of projects that we’re sponsoring are affiliated with NumFOCUS grows, that the organization is able to scale with that.” [00:12:20] “And there’s so many areas that we don’t address that we could address for our projects, you know just handling the legal aspect, grant management, helping them with we have a contributor diversification and research program.” [00:12:35] “So working on DEI initiatives that’s woven through everything we do and helping our projects with that.” [00:23:58] “But that’s one reason we really want to work and focus on diversifying the contributor base. Also, with contributors who are across different domains and in different areas.” [00:24:08] “So, if a project comes and applies to NumFOCUS and everyone is at one university, we don’t consider that open, so there has to be contributors spread out no more than two employed, whether that’s a university or whether that’s a for-profit entity.” [00:26:50] “So, I think projects, a lot of the things that NumFOCUS does can be related to Community Management but definitely when you’re talking about more of an internal project community.” [00:27:20] “I think that is probably one of the things that is most needed across projects is every project having a Community Manager to really look at their internal communities as well as interactions with their user base.” Spotlight [00:32:05] Alyssa’s spotlight is Community Managers. [00:32:44] Eric’s spotlight is Doom Emacs. [00:33:21] Justin’s spotlight is Lipgloss by Charm. [00:33:42] Richard’s spotlight is IDLE. [00:34:09] Leah’s spotlight is Sustain Diversity Working Group. Links NumFOCUS NumFOCUS Twitter [email protected] [email protected] “5 qualities of outstanding open source community managers” by Jason Blais Doom Emacs-GitHub Lipgloss-Charm Charm Twitter IDLE

Episode 78: Stormy Peters: Sustaining FLOSS at Microsoft's Open Source Programs Office
Guest Stormy Peters Panelists Eric Berry | Justin Dorfman | Richard Littauer Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! Our amazing guest today is Stormy Peters, Director of the Open Source Programs Office at Microsoft and long-time advocate of free and open source software. Stormy tells us how she started her journey into open source and how she got involved with the OSPO at Microsoft. We find out about the impact of Duane O’Brien’s FOSS Fund, what Stormy is doing at Microsoft to help other nonfinancial ways of supporting communities and building great open source ecosystems of communities, and about how they support Outreachy. Also, Stormy fills us in on where she thinks open source is going in the future, her team’s goals, and their focus on cultural change. Download this episode now to find out much more! [00:01:16] We find out how Stormy got into open source. [00:02:40] Stormy tells us how she got involved with the Open Source Program Office at Microsoft, if she ever found herself defending open source more so than today, and if she ever thought Microsoft would be in a position they are now of how much they’ve given back to open source. [00:04:14] Richard is curious how Stormy feels about sustain, how the process has been like for her, how has it been to see the change from just being a licensing issue to being a culture, and if she thinks most people are paid for open source. [00:08:45] Eric wonders what the overall mentality was for Stormy when she got to Microsoft regarding supporting open source and if it’s changed since she’s been there. [00:12:17] Eric asks Stormy if in five years our whole development environment is on Microsoft platform if we’re going to get locked in and is that going to cause the same type of negative frustration as he is with Apple right now. [00:13:40] Richard wonders if tools are owned by Microsoft how will that affect his development and how will affect the open source ecosystem if very large corporations become the main stakeholders in open source and direct the projects in their own ways, and Stormy replies and also explains how the people get paid. [00:16:10] Justin wonders how much impact Duane O’Brien’s program FOSS Fund has made in the way they operate and the rest of the bigger OSPO’s out there. We also learn what she’s doing at Microsoft to help other nonfinancial ways of supporting communities and building great open source ecosystems of communities. [00:18:53] Stormy fills us in on who makes up their team of employees at OSPO Microsoft and where you can go to see what they are doing. [00:20:12] Richard is curious where Stormy sees the role for OSPO’s for universities, governments, cities, and anything that’s not a large corporation. She also tells us about how they support Outreachy. [00:23:08] We learn from Stormy where she thinks open source is going in the future and why she thinks a Copyleft is dropped out of the parlance. [00:25:49] Stormy tells us how she sees Ethical Source progressing and if she sees it being a major player with people or as being a movement that will cause the same tensions that GPL used to cause. [00:27:24] Richard wonders if Microsoft has a mapping of what resources they have used of what code is in their system, what open source packages they depend on, and how they are actively working towards giving back to them as a whole down the stack. [00:29:12] Eric asks Stormy what is on the forefront of her team’s mind right now, and she fills us in on her team’s goals. [00:29:56] Find out where you can follow Stormy on the internet. Quotes [00:01:53] “And this was just about the time that Linux was getting popular and they had not one, but two desktops that were popular, GNOME and KDE, and I thought surely we can collaborate on this like they do.” [00:03:42] “I’d like to joke now that I think Microsoft’s first contribution to open source was being the common enemy.” [00:04:54] “I think it’s still evolving, and I think it always will evolve and so I think it’s important that all of us continue to think about it and figure out what the new models look like.” [00:05:32] “I think a much larger majority than before get paid to work on open source.” [00:06:33] “So, I know when I was at Mozilla we consciously thought about this with Firefox OS, having people full-time on it and even more than full-time, as they worked extra hours to try to get out the door, could you still welcome people that only had two or three hours a week to work on it.” [00:08:56] “So to go back to the question about my career that it looked like it changed with this last move, I don’t think it did. To me, this was the next step in the path.” [00:09:27] “Microsoft, I think, is ideally positioned to make the next big change in open source software.” [00:12:33] “So it’s my job, extended team’s job, to make sure that Microsoft does open source well, and part of us being successful in open source is making sure we have active communities around our projects that are broader than u

Episode 77: Jordan Harband: Being a Sustainable Maintainer of Hundreds of Projects
Guest Jordan Harband Panelists Eric Berry | Justin Dorfman | Alyssa Wright | Richard Littauer Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! We are all very excited to have as our guest today, Jordan Harband, referred to as “Mr. Perfect” by the panelists! He is a longtime open source enthusiast, maintainer, coder, works at Coinbase, a TC39 Delegate, and heavily involved with Node for years. Today, Jordan gives us his perspective of being a maintainer of repositories and code. We find out how he is so successful at being a maintainer of so many open source projects, how he deals with ethics, how to ethically license your stuff, and how he handles hundreds of repos which he helps maintain. Jordan tells us what he’s doing to help other people out and shares some tips to a path if you’re interested in becoming more experienced. Download this episode now to find out much more and to get some fresh inspiration! [00:01:39] Jordan tells us how he got started with Node. [00:03:42] Justin wonders how Jordan maintains all of his notifications that he has and how does he deal with it. Also, he tells us if sponsorship plays a part of him having that passion and not getting overwhelmed which is why he’s so successful. [00:09:23] Jordan explains how he is nowhere close enough in terms of revenue stream from sponsorships to be able to consider quitting a job and working full-time on open source. [00:11:34] Richard brings up a book called, Drive by Daniel Pink, and wonders how Jordan chooses which open source projects to invest in and how does he feel like they’re actually giving him value because you’re making something that’s meaningful to you. [00:14:06] Justin asks Jordan if IE6 will ever die. [00:16:32] Jordan explains how to deal with ethics and open source, and how to ethically license your stuff. Richard wonders what he thinks the ethical obligations are of the maintainer who has a package. [00:20:29] Richard wonders since Jordan has hundreds of repos which he helps maintain, and how he deals with deciding to take on more work. [00:21:35] We find out what Jordan’s involvement is with the Airbnb JavaScript Style Guide. [00:24:08] Jordan shares advice to somebody who is just starting out in open source looking to build in a sustainable way for themselves and for the code they’re making. [00:27:05] Eric asks Jordan if he ever considered setting up a counselling program for open source maintainers since he seems to have it all figured out. Also, Jordan shares when he had a challenging moment in his life. [00:32:33] Richard wonders if Jordan is doing anything to systematically change open source to make sure that other people also have the opportunities to work on open source if they want to, he shares what he is doing, and mentions one of the programs he’s involved with called Major League Hacking. [00:36:37] Find out where you can follow Jordan along with his “perfectness.” Quotes [00:04:05] “I try to treat those notifications in an asynchronous manner so that I’m not, like I don’t have any push notifications set up for those things, so it’s not bothering me when I’m doing something else, whether that’s doing coding or other work, or whether that’s spending time with family or friends.” [00:06:14] “None of the parts of my career have been specifically for my open source projects.” [00:07:01] “The rise of sponsorship models, Tidelift, Open Collective, GitHub sponsors, etc.., what that does to me is it’s a demonstration of interest and appreciation in a way that is more concrete than someone clicking a GitHub emoji, giving me kinda invisible internet points. It’s something concrete.” [00:08:02] “The ability of someone to contribute even a dollar, five dollars a month is a concrete gesture that for the majority of people is actually really significant.” [00:08:12] “There’s that whole concept of how, when a very wealthy person will donate a large amount of money to a charitable cause and then a number of people point out that in terms of the percentage of their net worth, it’s actually like you giving three dollars, and it’s still meaningful because it’s three hundred million dollars, but it’s much more significant I think when an individual gives sixty dollars a year, which is like my lowest tier on GitHub sponsors is five dollars, so if somebody is paying sixty dollars a year for most people that’s something, that’s significant.” [00:09:53] “It’s not life changing, as I said, in the sense of paying my bills or not, but it would be life changing in a sense that I would be able to consider, well, I love my job, but do I love my job more than I would love working full-time on open source.” [00:13:46] “So there is a trade-off there, but the upside is that ninety-eight of those packages need three minutes of maintenance every five years.” [00:14:30] “But I think there are a lot of engineers that are frustrated supporting old environments, old Node versions, or old browsers, and it sort of violates a sense of aesthetics to have to d

Episode 76: Tobie Langel on what people mean when they say "Open Source"
Guest Tobie Langel Panelists Richard Littauer Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! On today’s episode, we have an amazing guest back for a second time, Tobie Langel, who is an open source strategy consultant and Founder of UnlockOpen. He’s a really great resource for learning about the ins and outs of how open source works, with his common-sense approach to dealing with common issues that we have with open source licenses. One of the reasons he is here is to talk about a wonderful Tweet he sent out about “this” graph of what is and what is not open source. Download this episode now to learn much more as Tobie goes in depth about each quadrant of the graph. [00:02:02] Tobie explains what he meant by “this” that he refers to in the Tweet. [00:04:08] Tobie talks more about licenses and compliance in using open source in corporations. [00:07:06] Richard brings up Tobie’s Tweet about the grid with a Y and X axis and he describes what’s in each quadrant. [00:14:04] We learn what’s in the bottom right quadrant of the graph. [00:17:29] Richard shares his ideas on the early days of open source and Tobie expands on them. [00:24:02] Tobie talks about the role of OSI and how he imagines OSI looking at this going forward. [00:30:16] Richard explains what he thinks about when he thinks of OSI and how the graph is a really useful way of talking with people to figure out where they are. [00:32:24] Find out where you can follow Tobie on the internet. Quotes [00:04:50] “The other thing that corporations really care about are security of the software and the other aspect is community health. Why? And what’s interesting, that security itself has to do really closely to community health.” [00:19:06] “We say that copy left is a hack on copyright, but to some degree open source is a hack on copyright too. It’s a hack on being able to cross sort of corporate borders.” Spotlight [00:33:50] Richard’s spotlights are ICQ, AIM, IRC, and AOL. [00:34:37] Tobie’s spotlight is a book he read called, How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens. Links Tobie Langel Twitter Tobie Langel Linkedin Tobie Langel Graph UnlockOpen Sustain Discourse OSI ICQ New AIM (Software) IRC AOL Credits Produced by Richard Littauer Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at Peachtree Sound Special Guest: Tobie Langel.

Episode 75: Deb Nicholson on the OSI, the future of open source, and SeaGL
Guest Deb Nicholson Panelists Eric Berry | Justin Dorfman | Alyssa Wright | Richard Littauer Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! Today, we are incredibly privileged to have as our guest, Deb Nicholson, who is Interim General Manager and Interim Executive Director at the Open Source Initiative, as well as a founding organizer of the Seattle GNU/Linux Conference (SeaGL). Deb tells us how she founded SeaGL and what she did in legislature before open source. We learn about a blog post that Elastic wrote, how Deb feels about it, and how OSI is addressing it. Also, we learn how open source is looked at differently by the community and by lawyers, and a talk Deb did about all the different patent clauses in licenses. Find out what Deb is currently doing as the Interim General Manager at OSI and why being kind is so important to her. As well, if you haven’t seen the Seagulls video on YouTube, you have to watch it! Download this episode now to find out more! [00:02:23] Deb tells us the story of how she founded SeaGL, when the next conference will be, and how many people come to it. [00:05:39] Justin brings up a blog post that Elastic wrote recently and asks Deb what her feelings are about it and wonders how OSI is addressing it. Alyssa wonders if there was any direct conversation with somebody from Elastic. [00:09:20] Deb explains the two groups of people, the community and lawyers, and the differences between what they think open source means. [00:11:20] Eric asks Deb if Elastic deserves all the bad press and negative feelings. Deb also tells us what approach Elastic should have taken. [00:14:22] Alyssa asks Deb to speak more about lawyers sit in the community now and what lawyers and people with legal expertise can do to be a part of open source creation and sustainability. [00:16:40] Deb tells us what she did in legislature before open source. [00:17:40] Alyssa asks Deb how she found clarity around all these licenses, was she ever confused about how to navigate, and if she could help people understand and navigate through them. She mentions she did a talk about all the different patent clauses in licenses. [00:20:52] Deb explains how she ended up as the Interim General Manager at the OSI and what she’s currently doing there. [00:22:14] Find out why being kind so important to Deb. [00:25:13] Deb talks about the process of the Cryptographic Autonomous License. [00:26:54] Richard wonders Deb’s thoughts on setting best practices for open source in general, not just licensing, in particular other countries. [00:28:25] Find out where you can follow Deb on the Internet. Quotes [00:06:23] “Basically, we didn’t really think our business model through. We decided we were going to do one thing and then whoops, because we didn’t think it through, now we have to change.” [00:23:24] “It also means that when you go out and you talk to people about your mission you sound like a person that hasn’t had a conversation with someone about anything other than your work five years, because you kind of haven’t.” [00:24:35] “There might be other decisions I could affect, but like you end up sounding really out of touch and it’s not good for your organization and for promoting your mission if you never have perspective.” [00:24:44] “Unfortunately, Deb, you’re one of our guests, and this happens occasionally with our guests who are so eloquent that I can’t even imagine a question ‘cause you just wrapped everything up in such a nice bow that it’s like yes, that’s exactly the problem, that’s a really good point, I totally agree, we should all have more time off!” [00:25:05] “Take a vacation! Never forget! Even if it’s a staycation, because, you know, pandemic.” [00:25:36] “So we don’t draft licenses, that’s the thing we don’t do, but we do look at new licenses, and last year we approved the Cryptographic Autonomous License.” Spotlight [00:29:33] Alyssa’s spotlight is the launch of FundOSS. [00:30:38] Eric’s spotlight is Exercism. [00:31:43] Justin’s spotlights are “The Onion seagull beach interview,” and Katacoda-Interactive Learning and Training Platform we are using for Curiefense. [00:32:33] Richard’s spotlight is WaffleJS. [00:32:49] Deb’s spotlight is a project called Spritely. Links Deb Nicholson Twitter SeaGL.org Opensource.org Elastic- “Doubling Down on Open.” SEAGULLS (Stop it Now) – A Bad Lip Reading of The Empire Strikes Back-YouTube LibrePlanet 2021 Open Source Initiative-The SSPL is Not an Open Source License Social Linux Expo SCaLE19x-March 2022 Mill City Triatholon Podcast-SustainOSS-Episode 62 with Richard Fontana Podcast-SustainOSS -Episode 23 with Josh Simmons Podcast-SustainOSS-Episode 37 with Patrick Masson “Don’t Fear the Patent Clause,” with Deb Nicholson-YouTube Cryptographic Autonomy License-GItHub FundOSS.org Open Collective/Fund OSS Exercism.io The Onion-Seagull beach interview Katacoda Curiefense WaffleJS Spritely Project Credits Produced by Richard Littauer Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound Show notes

Episode 74: Jory Burson of OpenJS on building sustainable open source communities
Guest Jory Burson Panelists Justin Dorfman | Alyssa Wright | Richard Littauer Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! On this episode our special guest is Jory Burson, who is celebrating her birthday with us today! She is the Community Director of OpenJS Foundation, which is a non-profit foundation dedicated to serving the open source JavaScript ecosystem. Today, we will learn all about what Jory does as the Community Director at OpenJS, what the OpenJS Foundation is, why it was formed, and what it formed to do. Also, Jory tells us why she couldn’t imagine working on the web without MDN (Mozilla Developer Network) Web Docs and what the future holds for MDN. In addition, find out what Jory is most excited about going forward at OpenJS. Download this episode now to find out more! [00:01:20] Jory tells us about the OpenJS Foundation and what she means by “home.” [00:03:01] We learn why OpenJS was formed and what it formed to do. [00:06:25] Jory gives a brief history of how she got involved into these dynasties, also the kind of work she does at the Community Director at OpenJS. [00:10:37] Richard asks Jory what she is doing to make sure the projects have a longer life cycle and the work that they do is sustainable in the long term. [00:13:46] Jory tells us what her role is with MDN and she talks about how they restructured the organization. [00:17:27] Justin asks Jory about the future of MDN. [00:19:37] Jory talks about what they’re doing right now with working with MDN and other people to build out a shared roadmap of priorities to make MDN more useful and better than it is today. [00:22:40] Alyssa asks Jory what the balance is and most powerful partnership between these centralizing forces, these other entities, other projects, other contributors that are more distributed, and how do we relate with one another in powerful ways in order to sustain open source. [00:25:33] Jory tells us what’s she most excited about going forward at OpenJS. [00:27:19] Find out where you can follow Jory on the internet. Quotes [00:08:24] “It just blew my mind that there was that consensus of that population of people that’s that subgroup of people was going to make a choice that affected everybody.” [00:08:42] “And so at that point, from that point on, I just became very obsessed with understanding how those decisions got made and how people work together in a group to reach technical decisions and sort of how to make the human interoperability component of our technical interoperability discussions more effective.” [00:10:52] “So first, let me say out loud, that I am not convinced that the objective of any project should be to stick around as long as possible.” [00:11:49] “I think the objective is to help the project understand what is its scope, what is its end game, and how can it effectively move through different life cycles of startup phase, of growth phases, of the sustained phases, or maintenance phases.” [00:12:55] “But instead, because it was a part of the foundation, we were able to find and support new maintainers who could and did have the energy to drive that forward and how it’s really thriving.” [00:16:42] “And so, what we decided to do was find a solution and that’s what we did, we found I think a polyfill for MDN.” [00:20:24] “It’s interesting and kind of unfortunate that this process of moving the content off of the Wiki to GitHub has been a multi-year sort of project.” [00:24:51] “To understand JavaScript you have to understand the whole universe is maybe too much, so how can we and at what point is it appropriate to break those layers down so people can like not have to recreate the whole world.” Spotlight [00:28:28] Justin*’*s spotlight is Buffer.com [00:28:47] Alyssa’s spotlights are a shout-out to Jory’s birthday and the move to build things together to support the ecosystems. [00:30:36] Richard’s spotlight is the Boston JavaScript community of 2016, Jim Kang, Aria Stewart, Jory Burson, Boaz Sender, Gregor Martynus, Ashley Williams, and everyone else. [00:31:13] Jory’s spotlight is three people, Chris Mills at MDN, Dom at W3C, and Michal at jQuery. Links Jory Burson's Twitter Jory Burson's Website Jory Burson's Linkedin OpenJS Foundation MDN Web Docs JavaScriptLandia Standards Working Groups Buffer W3C Credits Produced by Richard Littauer Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at Peachtree Sound Special Guest: Jory Burson.

Episode 73: Anna Pojawis and Tyler Maran on using Bounties for Open Source Software
Guest Anna Pojawis and Tyler Maran Panelists Eric Berry | Justin Dorfman | Alyssa Wright | Richard Littauer Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! On today’s episode, we have two guests joining us, Tyler Maran and Anna Pojawis, the founders of Rysolv, a crowdfunding platform for open source development. They tell us all about Rysolv and what their motivation was behind starting this company. Find out what types of people respond to bug bounties and what sort of incentives are given to the developers to stick around. We find out if Tyler and Ana are working with companies to help with their program to get more money to build better bounties. Also, find out where to find projects that they are funding, where to find these bounties, and where they want this to go in the future. Download this episode to find out much more! [00:01:08] Tyler and Anna tell us all about Rysolv, how it works, and how they came up with the idea. [00:03:36] Eric wonders what their motivation was behind this company. Tyler shares with us when they began, to where there are now, and the challenges that they face, how they are generating more users, and how they’re advertising and marketing their product. [00:06:40] Tyler talks about what he’s learned around the types of people that respond to bug bounties. [00:08:18] Anna and Tyler explain what they do to incentivize the developers to stick around. [00:10:52] Richard wonders if they are doing anything interesting to look at how to onboard users collectively involving bounties in ways that make sure they stick around, and Justin wonders what their expectations are for the first year. [00:13:27] We learn what qualifies Tyler and Anna and motivates them to be able to run this type of business, and how they are going to solve the financial problems. Tyler makes a reference to a xkcd comic. [00:17:28] Alyssa wonders what an open source community looks like for these projects that are working with bounties and if the people will ever be not paid contributors to the work. Also, she wonders how money is playing within the sustainability of these open source communities. [00:21:08] Richard wonders if Tyler and Anna are working with companies to figure out how to get money shuffled into their program to build better bounties, and how they’re pitching this to people who may have the wallet steep enough to sustain long-term contributions or sustain people to have repeat issues. [00:23:48] In talking about a great moment of getting money into the hands of a developer, Anna tells us about one of the issues that recently got resolved and how they felt after. Tyler and Anna tell us what they each do at Rysolv and Anna tells us what her stack of choice is. [00:26:17] Tyler tells us where you could find projects that he’s funding and where to find these bounties. [00:28:03] Richard asks Tyler to share his hopes and dreams, where he wants this to go in the next six months, and if he wants a unicorn floating in a pool outside of his house.☺ Also, find out where you can get involved and where to follow Tyler, Anna, and Rysolv. Quotes [00:20:13] “We want to build upon the platform so that it can be more like long-term, more sustaining, and have some community building aspect about it.” [00:20:28] “As far as adding financial incentives, we think that open source work should not have to be volunteer work. People should get financial contributions for the amount of work that they put in to sustaining the modern internet.” [00:22:40] “So we’ve got what’s best for the company giving the money, and then you’ve got what’s best for the maintainer.” Spotlight [00:32:52] Justin’s spotlight is Git History Extension for VS Code. [00:33:15] Eric’s spotlight is daily dev, a Daily Chrome Extension. [00:33:57] Alyssa’s spotlight is virtual FOSDEM 2021. [00:34:55] Richard’s spotlight is a tool on npm called License. [00:35:36] Tyler’s spotlight is The Awesome Foundation. [00:36:47] Anna’s spotlight is Discourse. Links Tyler Maran Linkedin Tyler Maran Website Anna Pojawis Linkedin Rysolv Rysolv Twitter Rysolv-GitHub xkcd-A Webcomic of Romance, Sarcasm, Math, and Language Intex Mystic Unicorn Inflatable Spray Pool-Amazon Git History daily.dev FOSDEM 2021 License-npm The Awesome Foundation Discourse-GitHub Credits Produced by Richard Littauer Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at Peachtree Sound Special Guests: Anna Pojawis and Tyler Maran.

Episode 72: Eriol Fox on Open Source Design and Sustain
Guest Eriol Fox Panelists Eric Berry | Justin Dorfman | Alyssa Wright | Richard Littauer Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! Today, we welcome regular Sustainer Eriol Fox, the Head of Design at Open Food Network, who is working on a fully funded PhD at Newcastle University, and also one of the hosts of Sustained Open Source Design Podcast. What is a design, and how does design fit into open source? Eriol tells us their thoughts on programming and one important thing you need as a user experience designer. Find out some of Eriol’s favorite toolsets, what Open Food Network is, and all the other things Eriol thinks about as a community-first person. Download this episode now to find out much more! [00:01:26] Eriol tells us what they mean by a Design PR. They also explain what they mean by design, since there are a lot of opinions on what design is. [00:04:36] Alyssa asks Eriol what’s the best way to speak about design and what’s the best way to speak about it without offending anyone. [00:09:47] Eriol tells us their thoughts about programming and if it requires an additional level of talent that just might come natural to some people and not to others. [00:14:33] Having been involved for over ten years in seeing the evolution of technologies come about, Eric asks Eriol if they have any preferences, and if they see the direction of technology leading to a way where everything is going to become modularized components. [00:10:06] Justin wonders what Eriol uses day to day for their tool set and if they only use open source tools. They mention one of their favorites being Penpot. [00:24:46] Alyssa wonders how Eriol applies these design guidelines when they think about map design. They mention checking out a fantastic designer, Justin Scherer. [00:27:57] Eriol tells us all about Open Food Network where they currently work. [00:30:20] Eriol tells us what else they like to do besides what they do now. [00:34:36] Find out all the places you can find Eriol online. Quotes [00:03:07] “And I think it does it a disservice to really talk about it as just a UI uplift ‘cause that really plays into this false narrative that design is just about making things look better. But what it is also doing is improving the experience for these users of a backend system, which is deeply complex.” [00:11:00] “And also I remember I was so fond of one of the backend developers I worked with in my first job, but he routinely would ask me what I was coloring in that day, which is tricky to hear as a designer, especially when you want to engage with a wider community of developers and people that do cool stuff with tech.” [00:12:17] “I really do think, and I know that there are some designers especially that would disagree with me, but I do think that one of the things that you really need, one of the only things you really need as a user experience designer is a curiosity for solving human problems and thinking about why people do the things that they do.” [00:13:03] “So you can operationalize a lot of the empathy process as well, so it’s not something that’s innate skill.” [00:29:15] “I’ve had conversations recently, as recent as this week, with my team about how when lots of PR’s get pushed by contributors or paid members of staff, they actually might be solving Tech Debt, but they might actually be creating user experience debt (UX Debt), and this was a very new term for them.” [00:31:02] “To get a bit mushy for a second, it really gave me the same kind of feelings that I had when I was really involved in my local community development project. So that’s why it felt incredibly natural to be part of the open source community and maybe why it feels like I’ve been around for a long time.” [00:34:11] “Maybe one day we’ll see as many projects that are design related in Outreachy and Google Summer of Code, and maybe even at some point we’ll see a whole scheme which is just for designers in open source.” Spotlight [00:35:47] Eric’s spotlights are the Open Source Design website and his 3D printer. [00:37:08] Justin’s spotlight is a notifier for GitHub browser extension by Sindre Sorhus. [00:37:47] Alyssa’s spotlight is Open Collective Open Web Docs. [00:38:28] Eriol’s spotlight is a piece of open source software called Jamulus. [00:39:45] Richard’s spotlight is one of his best friends, Simon Vansintjan Links Eriol Does Design Eriol Fox Twitter Penpot Justin Scherer Twitter Open Food Network Sustain Open Source Design Podcast Sustain Open Source Design Podcast-Episode 1 FOSS Backstage Open Source 101 Eriol Fox- GitHub Human Rights Centered Design Open Source Design Notifier for GitHub browser extension by Sindre Sorhus Open Collective Open Web Docs Jamulus Credits Produced by Richard Littauer Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at Peachtree Sound Special Guest: Eriol Fox.

Episode 71: Hong Phuc Dang, founder of FOSSAsia, on how to build communities across boundaries
Guest Hong Phuc Dang Panelists Pia Mancini | Richard Littauer Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! Our guest today is Hong Phuc Dang, an awesome open source contributor and long-term member of Sustain. She is also the Founder of FOSSASIA and works with Zalando, a clothing manufacturer and store in Europe. We will learn all about what Hong Phuc does at Zalando. Also, she tells us more about what FOSSASIA is, how many people are in it, how many countries are represented, tensions to deal with, and so much more. And listen here to find out more information on the FOSSASIA Summit 2021, which is happening soon. Download this episode now to find out much more! [00:01:29] Hong Phuc tells us what she does at Zalando and how she works on open source with them. [00:02:52] We learn what FOSSASIA is. [00:03:55] Hong Phuc explains how she found the early reaction of the companies and the general kind of business ecosystem about false principles. [00:07:12] Pia asks Hong Phuc how internationalization compares with the type of projects she is seeing in Asia and how the relationship is. [00:10:01] Richard brings up FOSSASIA and how it has grown, and Hong Phuc tells us how she got from where she was to where she is now, also how many people are in FOSSASIA and how many countries are represented. [00:13:40] Richard asks Hong Phuc if there any tensions in FOSSASIA and if she has to deal with having people from different countries that may not always like each other, working together under the same umbrella. [00:16:07] Hong Phuc talks about the English spoken as the main communication, but how meetings are different in other countries. [00:16:56] Hong Phuc gives us her opinion on insights on India Stack and what they’re building there. [00:18:52] Richard is curious how FOSSASIA compares to Linux Foundation or Open Forum Europe and if Hong Phuc has any interest in setting policy for open source in governments in Asia or in large organizations. [00:20:53] We learn a little more about the FOSSASIA Summit 2021, when it is, what’s going to happen, and how many speakers. [00:22:30] Find out where you can follow Hong Phuc on the internet. Spotlight [00:23:12] Pia’s spotlight is a project called Pi Guard. [00:23:56] Richard’s spotlight is Open Source Café. [00:24:38] Hong’s spotlight is eventyay. Links Hong Phuc Dang Twitter Hong Phuc Dang Linkedin FOSSASIA FOSSASIA Twitter FOSSASIA Linkedin FOSSASIA Instagram FOSSASIA Summit 2021 Zalando Tech Twitter Pi Guard Open Source Cafe eventyay Credits Produced by Richard Littauer Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at Peachtree Sound Special Guest: Hong Phuc Dang.

Episode 70: Avi Press and Scarf
Guest Avi Press Panelists Justin Dorfman | Alyssa Wright | Richard Littauer Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! Our guest today is Avi Press, Founder and CEO of Scarf. We learn all about what Scarf is, why it’s called Scarf, and how it works. We also find out how Avi convinced investors to get on board with him and how Scarf is helping open source software developers use data effectively. Find out if there will be any cost for maintainers to join and about the newest product called Scarf Gateway. Download this episode now to find out more! [00:01:00] Avi tells us what Scarf is, what it entails, and how it works. [00:02:41] Avi tells us how the documentation insights work. [00:04:03] Alyssa wants to know why it is called Scarf and Avi tells us how he is dealing with privacy concerns. [00:07:30] Justin asks Avi how he convinced investors to get on board with him. Also, he tells us about the Head of Sales position they are looking for and what this position entails. [00:10:18] Avi talks about how the maintainers have been using the data to date. [00:11:55] Alyssa asks Avi if he can share the differences made to a certain project that he’s seen or if these are still working in a hypothetical space. [00:14:05] Justin saw on GitHub that Avi’s main project, Scarf, is Apache 2.0 and he noticed that is becoming the go-to license when there is a VC involved. He asks Avi if this was chosen before or after the investment. [00:16:23] Since Scarf provides data to open source software developers, Richard asks Avi how he is helping them use that data effectively. [00:18:25] Richard wonders if Avi is going to be batching their clients or is he marketing for them individually. [00:19:54] Richard asks Avi: how do you make that money sustainable to the point where you don’t need to keep going out and asking people, and how do you turn it into a business? [00:22:35] Avi talks about dual licensing. [00:24:44] Richard is curious if Scarf is doing a federated or a decentralized registry and Avi explains about the new product, Scarf Gateway. [00:26:51] Richard asks Avi if this will ever cost maintainers money to join and use his network. [00:28:02] Find out where you can learn more about Scarf and Avi. Spotlight [00:29:21] Justin’s spotlight is CII Best Practices Badge Program. [00:30:07] Alyssa’s spotlight is the Igalia’s Open Prioritization experiment. [00:31:17] Richard’s spotlight is Goal Zero. [00:32:08] Avi’s spotlight is the project Org-roam. Quotes [00:05:02] “And really our thesis here is that currently open source just means sharing code, but we’re trying to say the benefits of that openness can go much beyond the code and actually the data about how that code is used and how that code is interacted with.” [00:07:45] “I want people to be thinking more about how the companies that run open source infrastructure are funded. It’s really important to know, and we’re no exception. So, Scarf is a VC funded company.” [00:10:46] “That’s one really important way is to validate your project by showing real usage of the tool, of the code, etc.” [00:11:07] “By being able to allow maintainers to be proactive rather than reactive there’s just a whole slew of opportunities that are now unlocked for maintainers, instead of having to be reactive to everything.” [00:11:27] “And by being able to let maintainers be more proactive, we’ll have less burnt out maintainers because they’re not constantly feeling like they’re just drowning under the weight of the popularity of their software.” [00:14:38] “And that really, I think is a point that I’d like to underline as well, which is that if you have an open source project and there’s a lot of commercial use and there is a business opportunity there, a lot of developers, they’re not lawyers, they’re not enterprise salespeople, they’re not all the other things that are needed to build a business around an open source project, and that’s what we really want to provide to open source maintainers.” [00:21:42] “And unfortunately right now until Tidelift, if and when they really grow their business out, right now you have a lot of maintainers that are really just competing for that same pie, and the pie is not getting a lot bigger very quickly.” Links Avi Press Website Avi Press Twitter Avi Press Github Avi Press Linkedin Scarf Scarf Twitter Scarf Linkedin CII Best Practices Badge Program Open Collective/Open Prioritization Open Collective/focus-visible in WebKit Goal Zero Org-roam Credits Produced by Richard Littauer Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at Peachtree Sound Special Guest: Avi Press.

Episode 69: Humanitarian Open Source with Michael Nolan
Guest Michael Nolan Panelists Pia Mancini | Richard Littauer Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! The podcast where we talk about sustaining open source. On today’s episode, our special guest is Michael Nolan, Director at the Federation of Humanitarian Technologists and the Assistant Director at Open@RIT. We learn all about what the Federation of Human Technologists is and what they do, and find out what Mike is doing at Open@RIT. He also tells us about his current project on GitHub called Coalesce, that he’s working on in London. Also, did you know Mike has a podcast? Download this episode now to find out much more! [00:00:50] Mike tells us about the Federation of Humanitarian Technologists. [00:03:35] There’s a lot of non-governmental organization (NGOs) in the aid sector that need help, and Mike fills us in on what else is out there to do this sort of open source work to help them out. [00:08:12] Pia wonders how Mike is getting funding and if he’s planning on building a membership organization fee. [00:10:51] Pia poses a great question to Mike about why there isn’t a company that is doing this in a way that is profitable. Mike talks about the Digital Impact Alliance as a great example. [00:12:34] Mike is part of the Ethical Source Working Group at Sustain and he tells us about how this plays into what he’s doing. [00:14:43] Mike explains his GitHub project called Coalesce, a Volunteering Platform, and he also tells us why he is spending his time building it and the reasons they chose this project. He talks about South East Rivers Trust as one of the organizations they work with. [00:23:38] Find out where you can get involved in the Federation of Humanitarian Technologists. [00:24:45] Mike tells us about his new position at Open@RIT, what it is, and what he’s doing there. [00:31:25] Richard mentions Mike has a podcast called the Ethics in Open Source Podcast that you should check out. Spotlight [00:28:00] Pia’s spotlight is a productivity app called WorkFlowy. [00:28:44] Richard’s spotlight is a paper that came out called, “Crisis MT: Developing A Cookbook for MT in Crisis Situations.” [00:29:43] Mike’s spotlights are the Ethical Source Working Group and the Open Mind Project. Links Mike Nolan Twitter Mike Nolan Website [email protected] Federation of Humanitarian Technologists Federation of Humanitarian Technologists YouTube Open@RIT Open Technology Fund Digital Impact Alliance The Ethical Source Movement South East Rivers Trust Coalesce Impactful Open Source OpenMined WorkFlowy “Crisis MT: Developing A Cookbook for MT in Crisis Situations.” Open Mind Project Ethics in Open Source Podcast Credits Produced by Richard Littauer Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at Peachtree Sound Special Guest: Michael Nolan.

Episode 68: Introducing FundOSS.org: A new way of funding open source, by Gitcoin x Sustain
Panelists Pia Mancini | Alyssa Wright | Richard Littauer Guest Kevin Owocki Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! This is a special edition episode we are doing today. We have the most enthusiastic guest and returning champion Kevin Owocki with us to talk about quadratic/democratic funding, which is a completely new concept, and how we're using it in FundOSS. What is FundOSS? Well, we have a really exciting announcement to make today, so be sure to listen. We are discussing what the fund is and how it works. Also, we will talk about funding open source maintainers and doing it a new way with more money, some of which is coming out of Sustain. Download this episode now to find out what this excitement is all about! [00:01:25] Kevin starts off by explaining the project they are working on called FundOSS.org. We also learn how this is different from traditional matching that happens. [00:06:10] Pia tells us why they are doing this and the main benefits, and Kevin tells us about the crowdfunding campaign and how much money they raised over a two week period. [00:08:47] Kevin explains quadratic funding, a pilot they did, and Bitcoin grants. [00:10:47] Pia asks Kevin to talk a little bit about the funding of the commons and the radical markets framework to it. He mentions a paper written about quadratic funding. [00:14:38] Alyssa asks Kevin to talk about how collectives that are participating can make this a successful campaign for themselves and their budgeting, and the projects that may not be as visible what they can do. [00:16:20] Pia tells us about how Sustain put money towards this fund, how they got to that decision, and what enabled them to do this. [00:17:58] Kevin tells us all the other large sponsors of the work. [00:20:06] Richard wonders who is funding this since they are all here, and if there is an amount of that matching fund that goes towards the owners. Alyssa tells us this is a joint venture with Gitcoin integrating with open source collective. [00:23:00] Richard wonders if any of the money goes towards dependencies or is it only towards really cool project TM, and Alyssa explains. [0025:32] Kevin addresses Richard’s point about only the popular projects getting funded and that being a problem. [00:26:34] Richard tells us everywhere you can follow Kevin on the internet and Alyssa shares one final point about call to actions. Spotlight [00:28:57] Pia’s spotlight is Zanga.tech. [00:29:41] Kevin’s spotlight is Ethereum. [00:30:43] Alyssa’s spotlight is thanking a few people from FundOSS, Zach Herring, Sanchay Mittal, and Octavian Todirut. [00:31:24] Richard’s spotlight is the Low Resource Languages GitHub repo's links. Quotes [00:10:37] “So we’re really trying to adjust the behaviors in the ecosystem to move more towards working on the digital infrastructure that people care about as opposed to projects with private gain associated with them.” [00:11:11] “From what I understand is that public goods, which are goods that are non-excludable in non-rival risks. So, things like clean air, clean water, privacy, open source software is a public good, suffer from something called a free rider problem, which is basically like well this good is non-excludable and non-rivalrous, why should I support it, why should I give it my all? There’s no paywall for open source software.” [00:13:37] “I think it’s just as important that we have a broad sense of distribution of those projects that people don’t know about.” [00:22:51] “Trust the open street maps person to know all about geographies.” Links Kevin Owocki Twitter Kevin Owocki Website FundOSS.org Sustain Podcast-Episode 50-Gitcoin, Quadratic Funding, and how Crypto can sustain Open Source with guest Kevin Owocki Gitcoin A Flexible Design for Funding Public Goods- by Vitalik Buterin, Zoe Hitzig, E.Glen Weyl Open Collective Fund OSS Gitcoin- WTF is Quadratic Funding-video Zanga.tech Ethereum Zach Herring Twitter Low Resource Languages-GitHub Credits Produced by Richard Littauer Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at Peachtree Sound Special Guest: Kevin Owocki.

Episode 67: Ryan Sipes and Building Community at Thunderbird
Panelists Richard Littauer Guest Ryan Sipes Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! On the episode today, our special guest is Ryan Sipes, the Community and Business Development Manager for Thunderbird, as well as the Treasurer on Thunderbird’s governing body. We learn all about what Thunderbird is and an interesting story of how Ryan ended up there. We also find out when Thunderbird was spun out of Mozilla, the aftermath Ryan had to deal with assuring people it was not dead, and that there were people still working on it. Even though COVID hit this year, Thunderbird has been super successful in obtaining donations, and Ryan shares how they did this. Also, we learn how Ryan gives back for open source projects that Thunderbird uses and find out what Ryan is most excited about in the future for Thunderbird. Download this episode now to find out much more! [00:00:46] Ryan tells us an interesting story how he ended up at Thunderbird, how he applied for the position, and mentions Foss Jobs as a great resource. [00:03:58] Richard asks Ryan how large the contribution base is, how many people he has as active contributors, and if they are contributing on GitHub. [00:05:56] Ryan explains the governance model, where the council fits in, and how they’ve managed to grow during COVID. [00:08:26] We find out how many people use Thunderbird. [00:09:47] Ryan tells us about getting spun out from Mozilla, which happened before him, and living with the aftermath of that when he was there. [00:12:28] Richard asks Ryan how he would have done things differently if he was Mozilla’s leadership board. [00:13:46] We find out when Ryan was brought on as a Bus Dev, what did he initially start doing and what else did he did to help make sure the project had more money in time. [00:17:27] Richard asks if Ryan sees any differences in the kind of users who use Thunderbird and if he’s trying to cater to them in particular, as opposed to people who just use Gmail for their day to day purposes. [00:22:43] Richard wonders how Ryan asks for money so effectively and if he has any tips on how to get donations since he does it so well. [00:29:03] Ryan tells us how he gives back for his open source projects that Thunderbird uses. [00:31:06] Ryan talks about what he’s most excited about in the future for Thunderbird. [00:32:41] Find out where you can follow and find out more about Ryan and Thunderbird. Spotlight [00:33:42] Richard’s spotlight is mailing list by Martin Edwardes called the EAORC (Evolutionary Anthropology Online Research Cluster). [00:34:37] Ryan’s spotlights are two projects called EteSync and Etebase. Quotes [00:07:10] “When I was looking at the coronavirus, I was very worried because 99.9% of our funding comes from in-kind gifts, from donations.” [00:16:02] “One thing that really, I guess made us successful at the level we are, like this year we’re going to do $2.3 million in donations, and so, that’s reasonably good. But so much of that came from explicitly letting users, letting donors know that we need the support in order to produce a really high-quality piece of software.” [00:25:46] “I thought, well, maybe the thing is we just have to ask, and be very upfront about it, and it seemed like such a small thing but I told my team we have got to ask people as soon as they download, and it says your download has started, and then the ask, and we did that, and immediately donations went up substantially.” Links Ryan Sipes Website Ryan Sipes Twitter Thunderbird Twitter Thunderbird Foss Jobs EAORC (Evolutionary Anthropology Online Research Cluster) by Martin Edwardes EteSync Credits Produced by Richard Littauer Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at Peachtree Sound Special Guest: Ryan Sipes.

Episode 66: Eric Holscher of Read The Docs, Write The Docs, and Ethical Ads
Panelists Eric Berry | Justin Dorfman | Alyssa Wright | Richard Littauer Guest Eric Holscher Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! On today’s episode, our special guest is Eric Holscher, cofounder of Read the Docs and Write the Docs. As part of his work with Read the Docs, he created a privacy-focused ad network called EthicalAds. Eric will tell us all about Read the Docs, Write the Docs, how EthicalAds started, and why the Ads work. We also discuss challenges since EthicalAds launched, how things have worked with ethical advertising in our current economic recession, and what ad sales look like when it’s ethical. Download this episode now to find out more! [00:01:31] Eric tells us the history of how he co-founded Read the Docs, who funds the company, and he tells us about Write the Docs. [00:04:33] Eric fills us in on how he’s been doing meetups this year and how they’ve been going. He mentions using a tool called “Hopin” for the online events. [00:06:00] We learn how EthicalAds started. [00:08:21] Eric tells us what the reaction was when he introduced Ads on the platform. Also, he explains the rules that he’s applied and what ethical advertising is. [00:12:02] Eric explains what unethical advertising is and we hear his thoughts on if the Ads are scalable and long-term feasible to keep holding on to that early nineties style newspaper advertising. He also talks about Maciej Ceglowski from Pinboard and Doc Searls from Linux Journal. [00:17:26] Richard asks Eric if he has an opinion on how he deals with advertising itself being unethical. [00:19:49] Alyssa asks Eric if he thinks ethical advertising can be particularly useful for the sustainability of other open source work in projects. [00:21:41] Eric tells us the biggest challenges since launching EthicalAds six months ago. [00:23:49] With the economic recession in 2020, Alyssa wonders what the need was and what has this work looked like for EthicalAds in the current economics we’re living in. [00:26:29] Richard asks Eric if any maintainers have been able to support themselves through putting Ads on their docs. Eric mentions Material UI supporting people. [00:29:15] Eric tells what Ad sales looks like when it’s ethical. [00:31:32] Eric lets us know where you can find him on the internet and follow his journey with EthicalAds and Read the Docs. Spotlight [00:32:53] Eric Berry’s spotlight is the importance of simplifying your life. [00:34:02] Justin’s spotlight is his new Versa 3 watch. [00:34:22] Alyssa’s spotlight is a Twitter account called “Cats where they shouldn’t be.” [00:35:06] Richard’s spotlights are Read the Docs and Eric Holscher. [00:35:49] Eric Holscher’s spotlight is Pycon and the PSF 2020 Fundraiser. Quotes [00:06:28] “Trying to get open source maintainers to pay you money, that’s not who we want to charge money. They’re the ones doing all the work and not getting any money. Trying to charge them is just kind of a non-starter.” [00:25:05] “I do believe that a lot of good things are started in down turns because once the kind of market turns around then you’re positioned, you’ve already built the brand, you’re kind of ready to go and kind of ride that growth.” [00:26:34] “I mean there are definitely projects that are supporting multiple people with advertising, and Read the Docs is one.” [00:29:22] “I mean, very similar, except saying no a lot.” Links Eric Holscher- Website Eric Holscher Twitter Read the Docs Write the Docs EthicalAds Hopin Maciej Ceglowski Linux Journal-Doc Searls Material-UI “Simple Living Manifesto: 72 Ideas to Simplify Your Life” (Zen Habits) fitbit Versa 3 Cats Where They Shouldn’t Be-Twitter Read the Docs-GitHub Python Software Foundation (PSF) Pycon US 2021 Credits Produced by Richard Littauer Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at Peachtree Sound Special Guest: Eric Holscher.

Episode 65: CHAOSS and Sustain: A Joint Podcast
Panelists Pia Mancini Richard Littauer Guests Venia Logan Brian Proffitt Georg Link Show Notes 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. Spotlight [00:35:21] Georg’s spotlight is an open source project called the Toolkit for YNAB. [00:36:24] Venia’s spotlight is Scribus. [00:37:36] Pia’s spotlight is Open Prioritization by Igalia. [00:38:30] Brian’s spotlight is reMarkable 2. [00:40:28] Richard’s spotlight is the Audubon Christmas Bird Count. Links SustainOSS SustainOSS Discourse Sustain Working Groups CHAOSS CHAOSScast Podcast CHAOSS News CHAOSS Software CHAOSS D&I Badging Program CHAOSS-How to Participate FOSS Backstage Toolkit for YNAB-GitHub Scribus Open Prioritization by Igalia reMarkable 2 Audobon Christmas Bird Count Audobon Christmas Bird Count Map of Active Circles Birding in Vermont Credits Produced by Richard Littauer Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at Peachtree Sound Special Guests: Brian Proffitt, Georg Link, and Samantha Venia Logan.

Episode 64: Travis Oliphant and Russell Pekrul on NumPy, Anaconda, and giving back with FairOSS
Panelists Eric Berry | Justin Dorfman | Alyssa Wright | Richard Littauer Guest Travis Oliphant | Russell Pekrul Show Notes 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! [00:01:10] We find out what OpenTeams is and how it works. Travis also tells us when he wrote NumPy and SciPy and when he started OpenTeams. [00:07:18] Travis tells us about a non-profit he started with a bunch of people called NumFOCUS so there could be a home for the fiscal sponsor for open source projects. [00:09:24] Russell tells us what FairOSS is and how it works. [00:11:32] Alyssa asks Russell how does he first see the dependencies and then how does he assign that value? He mentions BackYourStack as a starting point. [00:13:00] Eric brings up one of the problems he’s found with trying to fund up open source is that it’s very difficult to solve the problem on more a grand scale. He wonders how Travis and Russell make the impact they want with the magnitude of problems they see. A key piece Travis brings up that they recognize is there’s a data gap and projects have to be participating. Alyssa wonders if projects are aware of their dependencies. [00:17:22] Richard asks about the dependency graph that they are making. He wonders how do you go down the stack and look all the way at the base and how do you judge the usefulness of what dependencies really matter for what code matters for the business proposition? Richard also wonders if anyone has done equity stuff for open source maintainers. [00:23:06] Alyssa is interested in learning more about how Travis and Russell are building the relationships with these companies and what we can do to help. [00:26:35] Alyssa asks Travis and Russell to talk about why this, why now, with this being a time of economic contraction, why is this important? Also, why have they been seeing traction during what can be difficult times for a lot of companies? [00:27:40] Eric asks if Travis can give an example of a project that he feels does that well, that doesn’t have to go through and do it twice, essentially. [00:29:48] Alyssa brings up investments around open source start-ups and how they start with a commitment towards open source and once the investment happens there’s a pivot. She wonders if Travis could talk about how this type of sustainability is shifting that model of these investments. Travis tells a story about speaking to the Founder of SaltStack and how their views matched. [00:34:03] We find out where you can learn more about FairOSS and follow them on this journey, invest, and join in. Spotlight [00:34:52] Justin’s spotlight is Curiefense, which extends Envoy proxy to protect all forms of web traffic. [00:35:15] Alyssa’s spotlight is Pixel8.earth. [00:36:06] Eric’s spotlight is OctoPrint. [00:36:53] Richard’s spotlight is Michael Oliphant’s work. [00:37:36] Russell’s spotlight is Conda. [00:38:20] Travis’s spotlight is Matplotlib. Quotes [00:03:25] “We were connecting and creating a social network long before the social networks started. That was the early days of social networks and it was addicting.” [00:04:14] “New libraries are starting to be written on numarray and we had SciPy written on numeric and there was this fork in this flegging scientific community in Python.” [00:21:18] “So that was a very exciting day. Actually, I remember I told my wife you know the problem I’ve been searching on for twenty years, I finally figured it out. I’ve been trying to figure out twenty years how to make this work, and I finally figured it out. I had to go start several companies and start a venture fund and get involved in finance and cap tables to really pull it off, but that got me excited. Now I also said, but we’re at the base of Mount Everest, like all we’ve got to do is climb to the top of this mountain and we’re there.” [00:22:44] “So you basically have a company and its value is spread to all the values of the projects. You have a bunch of those, have a thousand of those, that each add incrementally the value of a project. Invert the matrix and every project now has a linear dependency on companies that effectively you created an index fund out of every project.” [00:24:52] “The idea is if you can get open source contributors to recognize that they want to work only for companies that are participating people want to hire open source contributors. They’re some of the best people

Episode 63: Tobias Augspurger on ProtonTypes, LibreSelery, and Environmentally Sustainable Open Source
Panelists Eric Berry | Justin Dorfman | Richard Littauer Guest Tobias Augspurger Show Notes 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. Spotlight [00:32:17] Justin’s spotlight is a website called, WTFisQF.com. [00:33:00] Eric’s spotlight is books and jigsaw puzzles. [00:33:26] Richard’s spotlight is FarmBot. [00:33:44] Tobias’s spotlight is the Wind Turbine published by the International Energy Agency. Quotes [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.” Links Tobias Augspurger GitHub Protontypes-GitHub Protontypes LibreSelery-GitHub SustainOSS Discourse Continuous Donation Distribution to your Project Contributors-Tobias Augspurger WTF is QF FarmBot International Energy Agency Wind Turbine Credits Produced by Richard Littauer Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at Peachtree Sound Special Guest: Tobias Augspurger.

Episode 62: Richard Fontana on the Legal Side of Open Source
Panelists Alyssa Wright | Richard Littauer Guest Richard Fontana Show Notes 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. Spotlight [00:38:52] Alyssa’s spotlights are working on the Digital Infrastructure Grant and Quadratic Funding Expirations with Gitcoin. [00:40:17] Richard Littauer’s spotlight is Kevin Mitchell’s website. [00:40:42] Richard Fontana’s spotlight is Youtube-dl. Links Richard Fontana -Twitter [email protected] Red Hat “The GPL cooperation commitment and Red Hat projects”- Red Hat Blog by Richard Fontana The License Zero Manifesto- Kyle Mitchell “Is it time to revise the Open Source Definition?”-by Richard Fontana “Should API-restricting licenses qualify as open source?”-by Richard Fontana “Why CLAs aren’t good for open source”-by Richard Fontana Choose an open source license Digital Infrastructure Grant Gitcoin Quadratic Funding Kevin Mitchell’s website (Projects) Youtube-dl Credits Produced by Richard Littauer Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at Peachtree Sound Special Guest: Richard Fontana.

Episode 61: Melissa Logan on Marketing Open Source Effectively and Sustainably
Panelists Justin Dorfman | Richard Littauer Guest Melissa Logan Show Notes 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. Spotlight [00:35:22] Justin’s spotlight is FingerprintJS. [00:36:00] Richard’s spotlight is a website with election data that allows you to see what’s happening every minute in all of the battleground states. [00:36:41] Melissa’s spotlight is Scribus.net. Quotes [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 we

Episode 60: Erik Rasmussen on the hard work of maintaining, marketing, and funding open source libraries
Panelists Allen "Gunner" Gunn | Eric Berry | Justin Dorfman | Richard Littauer Guest Erik Rasmussen Show Notes 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. Spotlight [00:26:15] Eric’s spotlight is PgHero by Andrew Kane. [00:27:02] Justin’s spotlight is Dato, better menu bar clock with calendar and time zones for macOS. [00:27:43] Richard’s spotlight is Etymonline.com. [00:28:20] Erik’s spotlight is the GraphQL Code Generator. Quotes [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.” Links Erik Rasmussen Twitter Final Form Redux Form “Open Source Sustainability” blog post by Erik Rasmussen PgHero-GitHub Dato Etymonline GraphQL Code Generator Open Collective-SustainOSS Open Collective-Ford Foundation General Support Grant Credits Produced by Richard Littauer Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at Peachtree Sound Special Guest: Erik Rasmussen.

Episode 59: Jenn Schiffer on Satire, Coding, Why Teaching OSS Is Super Important
Panelists Eric Berry | Justin Dorfman | Richard Littauer Guest Jenn Schiffer Show Notes 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. Spotlight [00:32:50] Justin’s spotlight is make8bitart.com. [00:33:50] Eric’s spotlights are The Spaghetti Detective and Thingiverse. [00:36:05] Richard’s spotlight is Jim Kang and his website Smidgeo.com [00:36:54] Jenn’s spotlight is the jQuery Project. Quotes [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.” Links Jen Schiffer Linkedin Jen Schiffer Twitter Glitch Hoobastank2 on Twitch Hoobastank2 on Twitch Twitter Jenmoney.biz Livelaugh Blog Girls Who Code Make8bitart The Spaghetti Detective Thingiverse Eric Berry Twitter Smidgeo Smidgeo Twitter jQuery Credits Produced by Richard Littauer Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at Peachtree Sound Special Guest: Jenn Schiffer.

Episode 58: Joel Wasserman on Flossbank and Sustainably Giving Back to Dependencies
Panelists Eric Berry | Justin Dorfman | Richard Littauer Guest Joel Wasserman Show Notes 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. Spotlight [00:30:09] Eric’s spotlight is iPad game called EVE Echoes. [00:31:11] Justin’s spotlight is Handshake. [00:31:26] Richard’s spotlights are Ethical Ads and The Long Trail. [00:31:58] Joel’s spotlight is Coil. Quotes [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.” Links Flossbank Flossbank-GitHub Joel Wasserman Twitter EVE Echoes Handshake Ethical Ads-GitHub The Long Trail Coil Credits Produced by Richard Littauer Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at Peachtree Sound Ad Sales by Eric Berry Special Guest: Joel Wasserman.

Episode 57: Mikeal Rogers on Building Communities, the Early Days of Node.js, and How to Stay a Coder for Life
Panelists Allen "Gunner" Gunn | Justin Dorfman | Richard Littauer Guest Mikeal Rogers Show Notes 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. Spotlight [00:34:46] Justin’s spotlight is Into the Ether podcast. [00:35:06] Gunner’s spotlight is Save Internet Freedom. [00:35:33] Richard’s spotlight is a book called, Apprenticeship Patterns by Dave Hoover and Adewale Oshineye. [00:35:49] Mikeal’s spotlight is GitHub Actions. Quotes [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.” Links Protocol Labs IPLD (InterPlanetary Linked Data) Medium-Mikeal Rogers Mikeal Rogers-GitHub Mikeal Rogers Twitter “Request for Commits explored different perspectives in open source sustainability”-podcast with Nadia Eghbal and Mikeal Rogers Hope in Source podcast with Nadia Eghbal and Henry Zhu Apprenticeship Patterns: Guidance for the Aspiring Software Craftsman by Dave Hoover and Adewale Oshineye Into the Ether- A podcast by EthHub Save Internet Freedom GitHub Actions GitHub Actions (GitHub Docs) InfoWorld Tech Watch-“Why io.js decided to fork Node.js.” Credits Produced by Richard Littauer Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at Peachtree Sound Special Guest: Mikeal Rogers.

Episode 56: Dominic Tarr on Coding What You Want, Living On A Boat, and the Early Days of Node.js
Panelists Allen "Gunner" Gunn | Eric Berry | Justin Dorfman | Richard Littauer Guest Dominic Tarr Show Notes 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. Spotlight [00:25:16] Eric’s spotlight is called Mind Stream. [00:25:47] Justin’s spotlight is EthGasStatio.info. [00:26:15] Gunner’s spotlight is signal desktop. [00:26:48] Richard’s spotlights are Scuttlebutt and Patchwork. [00:27:11] Dominic’s spotlight is the Project Gemini. Quotes [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.” Links Dominic Tarr Twitter NPM Mindstream EthGasStation Signal Scuttlebutt Patchwork Project Gemini Credits Produced by Richard Littauer Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at Peachtree Sound Special Guest: Dominic Tarr.

Episode 55: André Staltz on Open Source Going to Zero and Developing Below The Poverty Line
Panelists Pia Mancini | Richard Littauer Guest André Staltz Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! Our special guest today is André Staltz, a self-employed JavaScript wizard from Helsinki, Finland. He’s done a lot of interesting open source work and has been really instrumental in how open source funds individual developers. He tells us about his consulting job and about the great blog post he wrote. We will talk about the cost of software going to zero and what this means. Also, André tells us what he hopes to see in the future for open source. Download this episode now to find out all this and much more! [00:01:01] André fills us in about what he does, how he got started as a developer, and what kind of work he’s currently doing. [00:02:22] André tells us how he came to write his fantastic blog post, “Software Below the Poverty Line” and he goes in depth to explain what it means by open source beneath the poverty line. [00:06:50] Richard wonders if André has done any work looking at how many people in open source actually make money consulting and don’t make money from selling their open source at all. [00:09:52] Pia asks André how you make the argument of more money going into this ecosystem if the cost is going to zero and he explains. [00:16:30] André touches on something very important that’s connected with time, which is attention, which he states is something you can monetize. [00:23:48] Richard wonders if the cost of software is going down so much just because the cost of production is going down so much. [00:30:35] André tells us what he wants out of his open source work and what he’s interested in. [00:35:06] Find out where you can locate André on the internet and look at cool stuff he does. Spotlight [00:32:33] Pia’s spotlight is Crowdin, an open source solution for localization management. [00:33:19] Richard’s spotlight is Moxie Marlinspike, who got him into sailing. [00:34:17] André’s pick is a library called Neon Bindings, which allows you to bridge between Rust and Node.JS. Links André Staltz Website “Software Below the Poverty Line”-Blog post Crowdin Moxie Marlinspike Website Neon Bindings Neon Bindings-GitHub Credits Produced by Richard Littauer Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at Peachtree Sound Special Guest: André Staltz.

Episode 54: Danese Cooper on the History of Open Source, InnerSource, and What's Next
Panelists Pia Mancini | Richard Littauer Guest Danese Cooper Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! On today’s episode, we have special guest, Danese Cooper, from her home in West Counties of Ireland. She currently works for NearForm, as VP of Special Initiatives. We will learn all about how the InnerSource Commons and Open Source are related. We find out about Danese’s last tech job at PayPal, where she started talking about InnerSource and why she moved to a remote part of Ireland with her new job. We find out about the concept of “trusted committer” and two companies that are practicing InnerSource. Also, find out why Danese said, “Open Source has won.” Download this episode now! [00:01:45] Danese gives us a bio about herself and fills us in on her job at NearForm and InnerSource Commons. [00:05:40] Richard is curious to know when Danese talked about InnerSource and Open Source being related, how do they both work together to actually sustain open source. [00:10:50] Danese talks about the “sustainability quotient” and how there are not enough practitioners of open source. [00:13:02] We hear the twenty-year old “fake stories” about why people are afraid when we talk about InnerSource and Danese tells us about the concept of “trusted committer” and what they do. [00:18:38] Danese tells us two stories about two companies that are practicing InnerSource that have been talked about publicly. [00:24:34] Pia asks Danese if she’s seen a lot of InnerSource or projects that were born in InnerSource and then they were released to the wild as successfully and she shares some stories. [00:31:49] Danese explains what she means when she said says, “Open source has won.” [00:34:54] Danese fills us in on what she’s doing now, what’s next, what’s exciting, and where to find her on the internet. Spotlight Richard’s spotlight is kalm.js.org. Danese’s spotlight is have a look at Mozilla and try to lend them some support and COVID Green App. Quotes [00:11:17] “I feel like this area of endeavor has been so generous to me, giving me a means to make a living and an interesting means to make a living for this last 35 years. I kind of owe a give back of something to make the campground better than I found it and I think that is InnerSource.” [00:11:35] “Getting those poor 85% out of the salt mines and helping companies modernize now, because in another ten years they won’t be able to hire people that don’t expect transparency. So, they are going to have to figure it out, but if they figure it out now for the right reasons, they have a better chance of being in a good position to accept those new workers when that’s all you can hire.” [00:32:23] “There would be no Google if there was not Linux, period, full stop. It would not exist because their cost of acquisition for that kernel and their ability to modify it to their needs meant that they could optimize better than AltaVista, which was the search engine of choice before there was Google.” Links Danese Cooper Twitter InnerSource Commons kalm Mozilla Ford Foundation-2020 Digital Infrastructure Research RFP COVID Green App-GitHub Credits Produced by Richard Littauer Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at Peachtree Sound Ad Sales by Eric Berry Special Guest: Danese Cooper.

Episode 53: What the Fork? Shurui Zou on Forking in Open Source
Sponsored by: Panelists Justin Dorfman | Richard Littauer Guest Shurui Zhou Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! On today’s episode, we have special guest, Shurui Zhou, who is going to be teaching soon at University of Toronto in the Fall, and she’s been working on Forks on GitHub. Our topic today is Social vs. Hard Forks. We will learn all about the difference between the Social and Hard forks, Shurui’s GitHub Bot she wrote, and her paper she wrote on “Identifying Features in Forks.” Also, Jenkins, previously known as Hudson, an open source continuous integration tool, is explained and why it is such a success story in terms of hard forks. Download this episode now! [00:01:31] Shurui tells us about her PhD Thesis which is on Forks. [00:02:51] Richard wonders what Shurui means when she said she tried to merge together different forks. She also tells us where she got her initial forks from that she was trying to merge and where the initial database was seeded from. [00:05:57] Richard wants to know without the domain knowledge of a maintainer does Shurui find it difficult to figure out what is going on. Also, has she seen any frustrations from maintainers? She wrote a GitHub Bot that she talks about. [00:10:42] Shurui tells us about a future work that was super interesting which is how we can identify the intention behind this work. She mentions the paper they published on 2018 on “Identifying Features in Forks” and talks about the difference in hard fork and social fork. [00:13:11] One thing that caught Justin’s attention is that 290 projects on GitHub are rejected to “redundant development” and Shurui explains what this means. [00:17:00] Richard wonders if Shurui has run across this phenomenon of someone being the only maintainer and being a selfish person wanting all the stars and is this a common thing. [00:19:04] Richard wants to know how Shurui is dealing with the political side of things. [00:20:04] Shurui talks about the project she was referring to which is a repository. Richard wonders how many hard forks she’s found where it’s just some company that wants to do something, versus a group of community members who are interested in building out a feature and having it go in a different direction. Also, how many times do you see a company decide we need to have this under our own wheelhouse and fork it and them develop independently without going back? She brings up the Hudson and Jenkins story. [00:26:22] Richard asks Shurui if she’s tried making forks. [00:29:00] Shurui tells us where we can find her on the internet and how can we learn more about her research. Spotlight [00:30:14] Justin’s spotlight is he’s rescuing a Golden Doodle puppy and go to YouTube for dog training videos. [00:30:45] Richard’s spotlight is the Library of Babel. [00:31:26] Shurui’s spotlights are two repositories on GitHub, Marlin and Smoothieware, and she wants to thank her collaborators and her PhD advisor. Quotes [00:08:16] “The maintainer will go through the code and with the description all together in the mail and to decide whether we want to merge it or not.” [00:10:55] “One of the future works I think that was super interesting is how we can identify the intention behind this work.” [00:11:19] “And we actually define these kinds of forks as social forks because people create forks and maybe their goal is to merge back.” [00:11:30] “We found out there are two types of forks and we define forks that create a fork and going to a different direction and never come back we defined this as a hard fork, and we define the GitHub style fork as a social fork.” [00:12:26] “We have seen some requests happening in one community and have been submitted three years later, exactly the same feature.” [00:12:46] “I know the title to this podcast. It is going to be social vs hard fork with Shurui.” [00:17:00] “But, if I were to hard fork it, I would lose all the watchers, all the stars, and I was signaled to every single one of those people that I’m kind of a selfish guy who wants stars.” [00:17:55] “They don’t want people to hard fork and to fragment the community and go to a different direction.” [00:19:22] “I’m not dealing with the political side, but what I’m trying to do is to just raise awareness of what’s happening with different forks.” [00:21:19] “Jenkins was a hard fork off of Hudson because that’s the people after Oracle… and they want to maintain or keep the Hudson project within their pocket.” [00:24:09] “One thing we’ve studied to compare the difference between the hard fork and social fork before and after GitHub, is maybe before GitHub people create a fork, they have already the intention of going to a different direction to fragment the community.” Links Shurui Zhou Twitter** ** Shurui Zhou- University of Toronto, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering “Identifying Features in Forks”-Shurui Zhou “Identifying Redundancies in Fork-based Development”-Shurui Zhou Dog Training 101: How to Train ANY DOG the Basi

Episode 52: Being Willing to be Open: Twenty Years of Coding at Red Hat, with Tom "Spot" Callaway
Sponsored by: Panelists Eric Berry | Richard Littauer Guest Tom Callaway Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! On today’s episode, we have special guest, Tom Callaway, currently working at AWS, but previously at Red Hat for almost twenty years, doing pretty much every job they had. We will find out all about Red Hat and all the positions Tom held there. We will also learn why Red Hat was the right people, the right place, at the right time, with the right seed funding to get it done. How did Red Hat figure out how to compete meaningfully and how did they deliver value above and beyond the bits? Tom has stories to tell and advice to share. Download this episode now to find out this and much more! [00:01:40] Tom tells us what he did before working for AWS and how he started at Red Hat. [00:03:58] Richard asks Tom what some of the main changes are that he has seen and how it’s affected things. [00:09:23] Eric wants to know from Tom at what point when he was working at Red Hat, did everybody start believing that maybe this is something, maybe this can survive, and this will become something huge. He tells us one of the big things that impacted Red Hat early on. [00:14:30] Richard wants to know how Red Hat pitched to developers that they want to get this and how did they pitch up to their managers. [00:16:53] Tom fills us in on the strategy that has been worked successfully for Red Hat. [00:19:12] Red Hat seemed to lead the charge in making open source a core part of the company and the culture. Tom tells us what it was like working with a company that had that type of focus giving back to the community. [00:24:35] Richard is curious to know if there was any time when things didn’t work well at Red Hat and competition got out of hand and being in the open, ended up screwing over something. [00:29:25] Richard asks Tom what he would say to developers who have something and then want to go out and make something out of it and does he think there’s models outside of sticking with large open source companies to sustainability live a middle-class life. Tom gives some awesome stories and advice here. [00:40:54] Tom tells us where we can find him on the internet. Spotlight [00:41:50] Eric’s spotlight is developers.redhat.com. [00:42:54] Richard’s spotlight is a small project called Vesper by Harold Mills. [00:44:20] Tom’s spotlight is OctoPrint. Quotes [00:05:24] “When I joined Red Hat there was no semblance of a reasonable business model at all. We made more money selling hats on our website than we did selling software.” [00:20:01] “One of the things that’s unique about Red Hat is the employment contracts are structured in a way such that they explicitly say Red Hat doesn’t own the open source work that you do. You own it. You can go out and do whatever you want.” [00:22:50] “And I was able to just by being curious and by being passionate, move into roles all the way up into the CTO’s office.” [00:31:39] “I think you have to be willing to have the freedom to be open.” [00:32:10] “If you write amazing software and you can never apply it in a real-world scenario, your company will die. If you cannot figure out how to compete meaningfully with the software, it does not matter how good it is, your company will die.” Links Tom Callaway Twitter AWS Raspberry Pi Hacks: Tips & Tools for Making Things with the Inexpensive Linux Computer by Ruth Suehle and Tom Callaway Red Hat Red Hat Developer Harold Mills/Vesper OctoPrint Credits Produced by Richard Littauer Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at Peachtree Sound Ad Sales by Eric Berry Special Guest: Tom "Spot" Calloway.

Episode 51: Working in Public: Nadia Eghbal and her new book about Making and Sustaining Open Source Software
Sponsored by: Panelists Allen "Gunner" Gunn | Eric Berry | Justin Dorfman | Richard Littauer Guest Nadia Eghbal Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! Today, we have special guest. Nadia Eghbal, a writer and researcher, works for Substack, and has a new book out which we will be talking about today! We discuss Nadia’s book, what it’s all about, why she wrote it, and why Eric refers to it as the “Open Source Bible.” She also talks about the report she did called, “Roads and Bridges,” published by the Ford Foundation. Find out why she has been called the “Open Source Archaeologist.” Download this episode now! [00:01:43] Nadia tells us all about her book, what it’s about, and why she wrote it. [00:02:56] Justin asks Nadia what her expectations were of writing her report, Roads and Bridges. [00:05:01] Eric mentions a talk Nadia gave a few years back, and she used a “lobster” reference throughout it, so he wonders what her motivation was behind going so deep into creating a legacy of documentation and knowledge that very few people in the world have. [00:09:16] Richard brings up Mike McQuaid’s sticker funds and Nadia brings up an example of this. [00:11:40] Eric talks about Nadia’s book which he refers to as the “Open Source Bible,” and Gunner adds his viewpoint as well. [00:13:24] Gunner asks Nadia if this book leads to actions and does she have any thoughts about what actions she would like it to lead to on the part of readers. [00:15:36] Gunner has an archaeology question for Nadia and is curious to know if she has reflected on the idea that when you’re not downloading, when you’re not installing the idea of a license or the idea of a piece of technology, being more community created, as a more abstract or removed concept. [00:17:52] Justin brings up a previous podcast guest, Matt Asay from AWS, talking about Amazon working hand in hand with Redis and all these other open source companies, and he asks Nadia what she thinks about this. [00:22:03] Richard is curious to know what to do with projects that don’t have a charismatic leader where it hasn’t focused on who they are, which may have really good documentation. Is there any hope for any of those projects or they doomed to just continually wither and run out of steam? Nadia gives us the run down. [00:27:28] Richard wants to know what Nadia is doing at Sub Stack that is so interesting to her and following the research that you’ve learned from this book, why there? She tells us why she wrote the book. [00:32:37] Justin mentions a book he read called, Hate Inc. by Matt Taibbi, who has a Sub Stack thing. This is a great read! ☺ [00:35:08] Richard wants to know how Nadia can help people who write low-level software projects, who don’t have the power or the means or they are shy. What can we do to help those people? [00:38:22] Nadia tells us where you can find her on the internet, where you can find her book, and work. Spotlight [00:39:02] Gunner’s spotlight is Gosh science. [00:37:27] Justin’s spotlight is Nadia’s book, Working in Public (real world version). [00:39:30] Eric’s spotlight is also Nadia’s book, Working in Public and a quote from the book. [00:41:32] Richard’s spotlight is the concept of Antilibraries. [00:42:25] Nadia’s spotlight is Brendon Schlagel’s anti-library. Quotes [00:11:39] “I think what we’re seeing happen in all of this is we’re working toward building a shared vocabulary of the universe of this ecosystem, where each project is going to have its own arcane vocabulary over time.” [00:17:49] “Depending on who you talk to, the term open source just means so many things to different people.” Links Nadia Eghbal Website Nadia Eghbal Twitter Nadia Eghbal Linux Conf AU 2017- Consider the Maintainer (YouTube) Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software by Nadia Eghbal Substack Gathering for Open Science Hardware (GOSH) Antilibraries Hate Inc: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another by Matt Taibbi Credits Produced by Richard Littauer Rebase.fm Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at Peachtree Sound Ad Sales by Eric Berry Special Guest: Nadia Eghbal.

Episode 50: Gitcoin, Quadratic Funding, and how Crypto can sustain Open Source
Sponsored by: Panelists Eric Berry | Justin Dorfman | Richard Littauer Guest Kevin Owocki Gitcoin Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! Today, we have special guest, Kevin Owocki, founder of Gitcoin. We find out what Gitcoin does and what’s changed with it in the past couple of years. Some other topics we discuss are Quadratic Funding (QF), a hot new thing called DeFi, Ethereum, Blockchain, and Downtown Stimulus in Boulder, CO. Download this episode now to find out this and much more! [00:01:27] Kevin tells us what Gitcoin does, what he’s doing there, and what’s changed in the past couple of years. [00:03:43] The hot new thing is “DeFi.” Kevin explains what this is. Richard wonders if there’s any way to make some sort of mutual funds out of all the different dollars, out of all the different major currencies that you can actually stabilize and cross them. [00:05:54] Richard wonders if the currencies have shifted in this stable currency market and has that affected DAI and Gitcoin in any way, and has Kevin seen less percentages going out because the current downturn in the global economy at all. [00:07:44] Eric brings us economic struggle and he wants to know Kevin’s perspective on blockchain and if they’ve stepped up. Does this whole process make people think that we need to have more control over the structure of our economy? [00:12:44] Kevin answers a question about maintainer’s views on providing quality or quantity on contributions. We also find out how much money has flown through Gitcoin’s platform. [00:15:39] Eric asks Kevin, since there is a lot of money pumping through Gitcoin’s platform and the intention is to sustain open source, is that focusing on blockchain projects now and does he see this type of technology or this idea moving into more of a global landscape with all sorts of projects? Downtown Stimulus in Boulder, CO is also mentioned. [00:19:52] Kevin explains what QF is. We also find out how QF can be gamed. [00:32:41] If you are a maintainer, and you want to get involved in Quadratic Funding, find out here how to get involved. [00:34:50] Kevin tells us how people can go about from nothing to doing stuff with Quadratic Funding, using Ethereum, using Gitcoin, or learning about DAI, if they don’t know anything right now. [00:36:12] Kevin tells us where we can find more about him online. Spotlight [00:37:34] Justin’s spotlight is inspired by Dave Gandy, Episode 41, a weight loss app called NOOM. [00:38:11] Eric’s spotlight is Kevin’s magnificent mane and the shampoo he uses. [00:39:10] Richard’s spotlight is Awesome Remote Job-a repo run by Lukasz Madon. [00:39:57] Kevin’s spotlight is Ethereum. Quotes [00:13:23] “One of the things she said was, even when contributors are coming to these repos is that they’re not providing quality contributions. And if they do, then they’re like drive by contributions and they don’t come back and they don’t promote to maintainers.” [00:23:37] “If you push the power out to the edges and you let your community decide what to find, not only does that push the decision out to the edges, the Ethereum Foundation gets to measure which projects their community cares about. The community co-funds the projects along with them and they can fund a thousand projects per quarter or ten thousand projects per quarter instead of just 10-20. [00:41:25] “And so, I’m really excited about what Ethereum is doing and I want an Ether-binge. You should check it out!” Links Kevin Owocki Website Kevin Owocki Twitter Kevin Owocki Gitcoin Gitcoin Funding Open Source With Gitcoin-Devchat.tvhttps://devchat.tv/sustain-our-software/sos-014-funding-open-source-with-gitcoin/ Downtown Stimulus Gitcoinco Quadratic Funding-GitHub DeFi Ethereum Awesome Remote Job-Lukasz Madon Sustain Podcast – Episode 41 Noom Credits Produced by Richard Littauer Rebase.fm Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at Peachtree Sound Special Guest: Kevin Owocki.

Episode 49: What OpenUK Does with Amanda Brock & Andrew Katz
Panelists Eric Berry | Justin Dorfman | Richard Littauer Guest Amanda Brock OpenUK Andrew Katz Orcro Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! Today, we have two special guests from the UK, Amanda Brock and Andrew Katz. Amanda is CEO of the UK body for “open” and OpenUK. Andrew is a lawyer working for a small boutique consulting firm that does open source things. We are discussing contact tracing apps and how they are going. We will find out how Amanda built her team when she was at Canonical. Then we will find out all about OpenUK and OpenUK KidsCamp, and the MINI-MU Glove, which is the coolest things ever! Andrew tells us about open hardware, Open-Silicon, open source licensing, and research he is doing. Download this episode now to learn more! [00:01:06] Alex and Amanda tell us how they know each other and what they are working on. [00:02:30] Since Alex and Amanda are both involved in contact tracing apps, which are coming out right now, they talk a bit about the British effort there and how it’s going. [00:06:38] Justin is curious and wants Amanda to tell us when working at Canonical, the day to day for a lawyer just coming into the organization that was shaking things up in the Linux world and just the open source world, what did she do and how did she build the team. She also talks about the Dell deal when Dell started putting Ubuntu on their laptops for context, which was the first thing she worked on. [00:10:54] Andrew turns the table and asks Amanda how it felt and how did you adapt to dealing with changes in negotiation dynamic changes. Richard asks how has that fueled your work with OpenUK and how do you feel that experience has allowed you to go forth and work there and what are your goals? [00:15:24] Amanda talks about what OpenUK does and she tells us more about OpenUK KidsCamp, which their goal is have it running by 2022. She talks about the “MINI-MU Glove.” What a cool thing! (kit linked below.) [00:22:41] Justin goes back to Canonical and wants to know what went wrong with Ubuntu phone. Andrew tells us how his experience has been working with open hardware. Andrew also lets us know of some other open hardware projects other than what he’s working on. He explains what Open-Silicon is. [00:30:17] Eric wants to know what challenges Andrew is seeing with open source licensing and does he feel there is a certain amount of pressure or necessity for you to push and determine these different licenses that should exist. Also, what’s the goal of the research he’s been doing. [00:35:41] Richard is amazed by the level of hardware hack that seems to go on in Britain, like RepRap, and he asks Andrew if he has any thoughts on why they are further along. [00:39:27] Amanda tells us where we could find them and where can we read about the work that’s going on and she tells us about her book. [00:45:40] Eric has one last question for Amanda and Alex and asks them why do they think that these countries are not wanting to open source their research and their findings in order to help us reach our goal of everybody can go back to school and work? They tell us their thoughts on this. Spotlight [00:42:18] Justin’s spotlight is Sia.tech by NebulousLabs, [00:42:43] Eric’s spotlight is our amazing editors for this podcast at Peachtree Sound. ☺ [00:44:01] Richard’s spotlight is strangeparts.com. [00:44:35] Andrew’s spotlight is CERN Open Hardware Licence. [00:45:07] Amanda’s has two spotlights: OpenRan and LibreOffice. Quotes [00:31:56] The most interesting part of the research has been talking to people, you know, who are well understood, who are very prominent in this area, and understanding their different viewpoints.” [00:37:20] “With Brexit, it made me sort of focus a bit more on what was happening.” Links Amanda Brock Twitter OpenUK Twitter OpenUK Linkedin OpenUK OpenUK GitHub Andrew Katz Twitter Andrew Katz Linkedin Canonical OpenUK Kids Camp MINI.MU Glove Kit RepRap Sia.tech Peachtree Sound Strange Parts CERN Open Hardware Licence OpenRAN LibreOffice article Open Tech Reponse Moorcrofts Corporate Law-“CERN Open Hardware Licence 2.0 Andrew Katz presents, ahead of the official release.” Free and Open Source Software: Policy, Law, and Practice (second edition to be released August 2020) Credits Produced by Justin Dorfman Rebase.fm Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at Peachtree Sound Special Guests: Amanda Brock and Andrew Katz.

Episode 48: Security and Cryptography with Nadim Kobeissi
Hello and welcome to Sustain! On today's episode, we have special guest, Nadim Kobeissi, who runs a small company in Paris called Symbolic Software. We are going to find out how Nadim got into doing security and cryptography and all about his new project called Verifpal. We will also learn more about PEPP-PT effort, RustTLS's code, Cure53, and we discuss the effectiveness of the Code of Conduct. Download this episode to find out all this and much more! [00:00:45] Nadim tells us what Symbolic Software does and how he got into doing security and cryptography. He also tells us he's working on another project called Verifpal. [00:06:28] On the topic of Verifpal, Nadim tells if he plans on building services around that with his consultancy or if it's strictly use it at your own discretion. [00:08:45] Richard asks Nadim to talk about what's been going on in the world of cryptographically analyzing contract tracing apps and how they deal with privacy and what his thoughts are. He explains the PEPP-PT effort. [00:19:47] Richard talks about contact apps being very useful for authoritarian regimes and privacy issues with Zoom. Nadim has a story about what they are doing in China with drones. [00:25:20] Justin wants to know what Nadim did for RustTLS, how did he get paid, and what is Cure53? [00:31:02] Nadim tells us his thoughts of the effectiveness of COC (Code of Conduct). [00:40:17] Nadim has a great story about being approached while walking on the street by a Green Peace guy and Red Cross. [00:42:32] Nadim talks about technology and it doesn't have to be tribal and maybe it could be political. [00:43:40] Nadim lets us know where we could find him on the internet. Spotlight: [00:44:17] Justin's spotlight Youper-a pocket AI therapist. [00:44:35] Eric's spotlight is the resume.io. [00:45:00] Richard's spotlight is Moxie Marlinspike's website, specifically his yacht stories. [00:45:58] Nadim's spotlight is a book called, Database Internals: A Deep Dive into How Distributed Data Systems Work by Alex Petrov. Panelists: Richard Littauer Justin Dorfman Eric Berry Guest: Nadim Kobeissi Quotes: [00:02:41] "What government told you…no, no, no, I was just poking fun at the fact that we had really severe security vulnerabilities and the Australian government at one point issued an advisory." [00:18:29] "It confirms a lot of my worst fears in a way that's very visceral and dramatized with a multimillion-dollar budget behind it." [00:18:48] "There's a saying at Google that in order to get promoted at Google you have to create a chat app." [00:19:58] "A friend of mine was saying it looks like China has been particularly good at dealing with their population and COVID, and I'm like yeah, it's been really good at dealing with it if you only qualify certain amounts of people as citizens." [00:29:00] "Personally, I don't think I could have written code this good myself." [00:31:32] "The code of conduct, I don't think there's anything bad about them." [00:33:55] "As a maintainer of my own open source project, I would love to have a code of conduct for contributors." [00:35:38] "Putting a code into your repo doesn't do anything by itself most of the time." [00:39:53] "One final thing I feel that is a bit problematic is that you find yourself in a position where by simply having any criticism at all, you already have to defend yourself as not being morally in a gray area or criticizing some sort of greater good." [00:42:48] "There's a lot of tribalism that's entering open source software." *Links: * Nadim Kobeissi-Website Cure53 Symbolic Software Verifpal DP3T-Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing Exposure Notification RustTLS Youper Resume.io Moxie Marlinspike Stories-Website Database Internals: A Deep Dive into How Distributed Data Systems Work by Alex Petrov Black Mirror-NetflixSpecial Guest: Nadim Kobeissi.

Episode 47: People and Relationships with Matt Asay
Hello and welcome to Sustain! On today's episode, we have special guest, Matt Asay, Cloud and open source executive with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Matt tells us how his office is different from the Open Source program office. We will learn all about his career and his HTML5 start-up Strobe that was acquired by Facebook. Also, Matt talks about some interesting things he's learned from interviewing project maintainers and it has to do with the importance of being nice, kind, and welcoming. Download this episode now for some great inspiration and advice. [00:00:58] Matt tells us the difference between the two offices and teams and also how he ended up in his role. [00:05:09] With the focus on what your customers are doing, Justin asks Matt how does how does he address the controversies like the MongoDB API and all that other stuff and what is he doing to combat that? [00:12:22] Here we will hear all about Matt's impressive career and his HTML5 start-up Strobe acquired by Facebook. [00:16:59] Matt tells us about interviewing project maintainers and things that have stood out during the interview process after talking to them. [00:25:00] Matt explains what the key to sustainability is and he goes into risk sustainability. [00:28:10] Richard gives some really good feedback on Matt's answer on how he solves problems and Matt says he is going to steal one of his answers. [00:32:39] Richard asks Matt what is he doing with his team, what do your partnerships look like with CouchDB and Confluent, and what are you doing to make sure that the work you have lasts beyond you? [00:37:48] Matt tells us where we can find out more about him on the internet. Spotlight: [00:39:30] Justin's spotlight is arweave.org. [00:39:56] Richard's spotlight is the IPFS stack. [00:40:30] Matt's spotlight is an interview he did with Hugh "Jim" Bailey at OBS (Open Broadcaster Software). Panelists: Richard Littauer Justin Dorfman Guest: Matt Asay Quotes: [00:06:00] "So I've always worked for those companies. It's always been an easy marketing sell for me to talk about that. But, with AWS it's different." [00:06:46] "The whole open source definition is around distributing software, but we're not distributing software anymore. It's being consumed as a service over the internet." [00:07:35] "I used to work at MongoDB. I love MongoDB. It's one of the best working experiences I've ever had." [00:10:42] "I have a lot of respect for people, these virtuoso engineers who develop great software. But I have just as much respect for those who can operationalize and make that software easy so that customers don't have to worry about how they're going do maintenance on my SQL, as an example." [00:16:16] "If you want to successful you've got to figure out how to work with people." [00:17:54] "You reflect the kind of community that you will encourage. And so, if you're a jerk, then you're going to struggle." [00:18:03] "This is their free time. They're volunteers. They don't have to show up and be abused by you." [00:20:17] "In general, life's too short to be dealing with mean people all the time." [00:20:32] "If you're rude to those volunteers they're going to go elsewhere, and in open source, those contributors are your most valuable asset." [00:25:00] "So I think one of the keys to sustainability has to be community." [00:27:44] "I think that's something we need to figure out because open source is only getting more and more significant with more and more dependencies on it." *Links: * Matt Asay Twitter The Newstack InfoWorld-Articles by Matt Asay TechRepublic AWS Arweave IPFS "How open source "selfishness" can lead to burnout" by Matt Asay with Hugh "Jim" Bailey. Credits Produced by Justin Dorfman Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at Peachtree Sound Special Guest: Matt Asay.

Episode 46: Commercial Open Source with Joseph Jacks
Panelists Eric Berry | Justin Dorfman | Richard Littauer Guest Joseph Jacks Founder and General Partner of OSS Capital Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! On today’s episode, we have special guest, Joseph Jacks, Founder of OSS Capital and also works on Open Core Summit, which is a conference he founded as well. Today we discuss with Joseph what he does at OSS Capital, the companies they invest in and how he helps commercial Open Source Companies. We will also find out about what he did at Open Core Summit last year and find out about when and where the next one will take place. Download this episode now to find out more! [00:01:10] Joseph tells us what he does at OSS Capital. He also tells us what he means by Commercial Open Source. [00:03:22] Richard and Joseph discuss GitHub and GitLab. [00:11:29] Justin brings up the business source license which is very controversial, and he wants to know Joseph’s involvement with it. [00:17:08] Joseph tells us about OSS.cash, the conference he did in 2013 with the spreadsheet data, and how the Open Core Summit went in September 2019, right before COVID hit. [00:22:49] Eric is fascinated by Joseph’s process and he says it seems like he’s trying to find that brief moment when a project starts to take off, but hasn’t really considered creating a corporation, creating a company to generate money around it. It seems like you’re looking for a unicorn before it grows its horn. Joseph elaborates on this. [00:26:48] Joseph talks about RISC-V since they are invested in that company. He also tells us other companies they are invested in. [00:30:36] Joseph explains how commercial offensive software companies are different. Also, he tells us how they help commercial Open Source Companies early on. [00:37:03] Where can you find Joseph on the Internet, URL’s, or Twitter? Find out here. Spotlight [00:37:44] Justin’s spotlight is EB.js. [00:38:23] Eric’s spotlight is since Code Fund shut down, he wants to extend his gratitude and say thank you to all the publishers, open source projects, bloggers, application builders, maintainers, and all of them that were within the network. [00:39:32] Richard’s spotlight is scuttlebutt.nz. [00:40:09] Joseph’s spotlight is the Kubernetes project. Quotes [00:04:14] “I tend to think of the companies as slightly different in terms of what they focus on and GitHub has sort of like a Facebook social network feel, you know, huge amounts of people collaborating on public Open Source repos.” [00:05:18] “And so even though the core, the Open Source core for GitHub is very small, it’s sort of super tiny core, and the crust around that Open Source core is really thick, like basically all of GitHub.com, all this proprietary technology they’ve added around it, I’ve still viewed it as commercial Open Source because that sort of existential definition is still true.” [00:16:03] “Another one is WSO2 in Sri Lanka. The WSO2 is a company in the middleware kind of category and the enterprise IT world. They sell products for connecting applications and doing messaging integration, integration middleware, SOA software, and business process management, lots of things of this nature.” [00:19:58] “The spreadsheet motivated starting OSS capital for sure, and also Open Core Summit. I guess the reason is because this thing’s kind of been maintained for going on seven years now I guess, and the growth of this spreadsheet’s been pretty substantial.” [00:23:15] “Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but it seems like you’re looking for a unicorn before it grows its horn.” Links Joseph Jacks Twitter OSSC Open Core Summit Twitter Open Core Summit COSS Index Scuttlebutt Kubernetes Credits Produced by Justin Dorfman Produced by Rebase Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at Peachtree Sound Special Guest: Joseph Jacks.

Episode 45: The Meaning of 'Tyranny of Openness' with Nathan Schneider
Sponsored by Linode Panelists Allen "Gunner" Gunn | Eric Berry | Justin Dorfman | Pia Mancini | Richard Littauer Guest Nathan Schneider University of Colorado Boulder Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! In this episode, we have special guest, Nathan Schneider, a Professor of Media Studies at CU Boulder. He also runs a new little outfit called Media Enterprise Design Lab. In today’s episode, Nathan will tell us what he does, how he got to where he is today, and he explains what he means by, The Tyranny of Openness.” We will also discuss Democratic Mediums, Platform Cooperativism, and CommunityRule. Download this episode now! [00:01:24] Nathan tells us what he does at University of Colorado, Boulder and social.coop. He’s also running Zoom right now on a Linux machine and he tells us how he got to where he is today. [00:05:03] Richard wants Nathan to describe what he means by “The Tyranny of Openness.” [00:07:33] Justin has been thinking about the Linux Kernel, Python (up until recently), Ruby, and cURL. They’re all run by BDFL and installed on billions of devices, so why is that working and in the future, how should projects at that scale work? [00:11:10] Pia asks Nathan in his wildest dreams, what would a structure like he was talking about look like and what tools should we be building? Gunner is curious and asks if the notion of governance design patterns is something that’s part of Nathan’s Meta governance? Nathan talks about an attempt he made to collect patterns, a little directory called, Democratic Mediums, which was a forerunner to some of this work. [00:17:54] Richard is curious to know what’s the split in coders like on a normal GitHub project, because there are people who would be classified as doers versus people who’d be classified as decision makers, and how does this work directly into governance? [00:21:27] Nathan talks about Platform Cooperativism as a critique of open source. [00:25:08] Nathan discusses about taking ownership, the big debates happening around Open Source right now and licensing issues. [00:29:21] Pia asks Nathan to talk about CommunityRule and his thoughts on it. [00:32:18] Nathan tells where you could find his work, where you can read his books, and how you can get involved. Spotlight [00:33:52] Justin’s spotlight is The Governance Ready Working Group. [00:34:10] Gunner’s spotlight is Gathering for Open Science Hardware. [00:34:29] Pia’s spotlight is SaveInternetFreedom.tech [00:35:11] Eric’s spotlight is Allinone.im. [00:35:27] Richard’s spotlight is Mathias Buus. [00:35:53] Nathan’s spotlights are The Ethical Source Movement and System76. Quotes [00:05:04] “You like the phrase of “The Tyranny of Openness.” [00:05:18] “I guess another annoying habit I have is that when I love something, I like to criticize it.” [00:09:13] “But there’s some sophistication there that a lot of our Open Source projects lack.” [00:09:43] “You know you’re an Admin or not. Admins can silence people, and you know, have incredible despotic control over voice.” [00:17:32] “It’s how engineers think. They want the engineered solution, but you know, politics is very good at resisting engineers.” [00:24:16] “Microsoft is stepping in and forking their code and you know, making money off of it. And they’re like, wait, what’s going on? This is not in line with our values, but it is in line with their licenses.” [00:25:59] “It’s sort of like a double-edged sword because you know with the Open Source licenses as they are defined now, they allow Amazon and Microsoft to do this.” Links Nathan Schneider CommunityRule Social.coop Media Enterprise Design Lab Democratic Mediums Xkcd-A Webcomic of Romance, Sarcasm, Math, and Language The Tyranny of Openness: What Happened to Peer Production? Governance Readiness Gathering for Open Science Hardware Save Internet Freedom Tech All-in-One Messenger Mathias Buus GitHub The Ethical Source Movement System76 Credits Produced by Justin Dorfman Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at Peachtree Sound Ad Sales by Eric Berry Special Guest: Nathan Schneider.

Episode 44: Crossing The Chasm with Tobie Langel
Sponsored by Linode Panelists Allen "Gunner" Gunn | Justin Dorfman | Pia Mancini | Richard Littauer Guest Tobie Langel Show Notes Welcome to Sustain! On today’s episode, we have special guest, Tobie Langel, the Founder of UnlockOpen, from Geneva, Switzerland. Tobie tells us all about UnlockOpen and what he does there. He tells us how he focuses on convincing companies that they need to contribute back to Open Source. Other topics we will talk about are DevOps culture, prototype JavaScript framework not being updated since 2015, which Tobie extensively explains what happened, as well as speaking about lessons to be learned and things we need to be aware of. There is so much great advice and stories shared on this episode. Download it now! [00:01:19] Tobie tells us about UnlockOpen and what he does. [00:02:30] Richard wants to know how do you get in the door as a consultant to try to talk to people about how they should use Open Source and how do you pitch that to people that don’t know what Open Source is? [00:08:04] Tobie discusses how he focuses on convincing companies that they need to contribute back to Open Source. Pia wonders if Tobie thinks we’re making progress towards cultural changes within the audience? [00:12:10] Allen asks Tobie if he’s advancing the notion of DevOps as a gateway drug for all of this open culture. Tobie mentions a book he’s reading called, Accelerate, that_ _talks about the benefits of DevOps culture to companies from a business perspective. [00:14:13] Justin wants to know where Tobie got his kind of background and he also wonders about project abandonment, and prototype JavaScript framework hasn’t been updated since 2015. So, what happened there and what lessons could be learned? [00:24:06] Tobie speaks about learning from history, about lessons to be learned, and things we have to be aware of. [00:26:06] Tobie mentions how he’s a huge fan of DHH and Basecamp and he gives some great advice that he’s learned on focusing on things that matter long term. Justin and Richard also have some positive advice and stories to share as well. [00:35:25] Richard makes an awesome statement here about being resilient. [00:36:20] Tobie tells us where we can find him to learn more about him. Spotlight [00:38:03] Justin’s spotlight is our first bonus podcast episode (#41) with Dave Gandy, and we discussed Font Awesome 6, the donut diet, commitments, and more. Check it out! ☺ [00:42:23] Allen’s spotlight is Open Tech Fund. [00:38:56] Richard’s spotlight is Aral Balkan, a cyborg rights activist. [00:39:17] Toby’s spotlight is a book by Nadia Eghbal called, Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software. Quotes “It boils down to bottom line and top line. To some degree it’s more than that, obviously, culture, brand, making people feel happy to work in a company. All of those are critical for a company.” [00:10:45] “And we are at the point where we need to cross the chasm. So maybe move that from being something that is essentially something adopted by a few really performant companies at the helm of this effort and move that across to become more mainstream. [00:16:47] “And so the funny thing is I essentially learned JavaScript by reading the source code because there was no documentation and I started contributing to the library by writing documentation for it.” [00:17:44] “It took a lot of time for Sam to realize that he was burning out and just couldn’t spend the time that was needed to give more authority to other people on the project.” [00:21:58] “There was a lot of energy, and people are ready to do a lot of things for the rocket ship because you also benefit personally quite a bit when you’re investing your time in a rocket ship.” [00:25:19] “This goes right to the heart of what we’re trying to talk about here. And so I think one of the things that I’m really picking up from what you’re saying is that it’s better to dedicate yourself towards an ideology of working well in the open, of working with other people, of trying to consistently not just stay ahead of the curve, but work in a way that what you do will matter later.” [00:34:20] “At the same time you could carry that comparison even further kind of ad absurdum, like everything’s the same, because we all need to eat and we all get tired and we all get sleepy and we all get hungry, we’re all kind of anxious and we have to work with other people and what wears kind of annoying and it’s pretty tough.” Links Tobie Langel Twitter UnlockOpen Sustain Podcast-Episode 41: The Donut Diet, Commitments. and More Awesomeness with Dave Gandy Open Technology Fund Aral Balkan Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software by Nadia Eghbal Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps:Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations by Nicole Forsgren, PhD Credits Produced by Justin Dorfman Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at Peachtree Sound Ad Sa

Episode 43: Investing in Open Infrastructure with Kaitlin Thaney
Sponsored by Linode Panelists Eric Berry | Justin Dorfman | Pia Mancini | Richard Littauer Guest Kaitlin Thaney Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! Today, we have Kaitlin Thaney, who is the Executive Director for Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI). Kaitlin will tell us all about IOI and what she’s doing there. She also explains the history of the Mozilla Science Lab and how her team came up with it. How has COVID impacted the organization, especially since her first day of the job was when New York City went into lockdown! Download this episode now to find out! [00:01:17] Kaitlin tells us what Invest in Open Infrastructure is and what she’s doing there. [00:04:17] Eric wants to know is this organization built to create essentially just the technology behind these infrastructures or is it primarily ways of sharing data? Kaitlin explains the end goal in simplistic terms. [00:09:50] With Kaitlin’s background and previous organization’s that she’s worked for (Wikimedia, Mozilla, and Creative Commons), Justin wants to know how those former employers shaped her for what she’s doing now as an Executive Director. [00:16:41] Kaitlin explains Mozilla Science Lab. She also has a call to action called “Get credit for your code!” She talks about this and how she and her team came up with it. [00:21:35] Richard asks Kaitlin to tell us what Elsevier is and how they represent what’s happening in academia now. Also, since she started this initiative before COVID happened, she tells us how she’s adapted, how she’s changed, and what’s happening moving forward. [00:28:21] Pia wants to know from Kaitlin what the broad impact COVID has had and what are her plans going forward, and how are folks thinking about this? [00:33:12] Richard gives a s/o to the Schmidt Foundation for funding Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI). [00:33:42] Kaitlin lets us know how you can get involved with her project if you are a software developer, work at a university, or a researcher. Also, how you can find her and where can you sign up. Spotlight [00:34:35] Richard’s spotlight is BibTeX. [00:35:02] Justin’s spotlight is Undraw.co. [00:35:28] Eric’s spotlight is Betterhelp.com and Therapistaid.com (both worth checking out) [00:37:55] Pia’s spotlight is Excalidraw. [00:38:43] Kaitlin’s spotlight is a portable Informed Consent Toolkit from Sage Bionetworks. Quotes [00:13:55] “You all know the deep roots that Open Source has, and software and the internet have in science. But beyond those initial stories, I think there’s an interesting kind of proof space that this sort of work allows for, because in terms of moving decisions forward, it’s not just talking about researchers. It also touches those in the education sector, universities, policy makers, for profit tech, and non-profit tech. All of these various elements that by their very nature, help bring and incubate different solutions that you can then apply to broader society.” Links Invest in Open Infrastructure Open Infrastructure in times of crisis: How IOI can help Kaitlin Thaney Twitter Kaitlin Thaney (IOI) Mozilla Science Lab-Get credit for your code! BibTeX unDraw.co Betterhelp.com TherapistAid.com Excalidraw.com Schmidt Family Foundation Credits Produced by Justin Dorfman Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at Peachtree Sound Ad Sales by Eric Berry Special Guest: Kaitlin Thaney.

Episode 42: Open Sourcing COVID-19 Data with Cindy Wang & Gil Yehuda
Sponsored By Linode Panelists Justin Dorfman | Eric Berry | Richard Littauer Guest Cindy Wang Sr. Director, Product Management, Yahoo Knowledge Graph Verizon Media Gil Yehuda Sr. Director of Open Source Verizon Media Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! In this episode, we have special guests, Gil Yehuda and Cindy Wang, who both work for Verizon Media, which is a combination of a bunch of companies, predominantly Yahoo and AOL. Gil is Senior Director, Open Source Program and Cindy is Sr. Director, Product Management, Yahoo Knowledge Graph. We learn more about Gil and Cindy’s positions with Yahoo, the Yahoo Knowledge Graph COVID-19 project, data sets, complications with data, and Vespa (open source big data serving engine). [00:02:26] Gil explains to us what coverage he has and what he’s responsible for in his OSPO (Open Source Program Office). He also tells us how many repos and orgs he’s managing. [00:05:29] Cindy tells us all about the Yahoo Knowledge Graph COVID-19 project. Justin questions data sets and its inconsistencies and Cindy explains. [00:12:30] Eric asks Cindy if this resource has been established as an authority and if she’s heard feedback or others pointing to this as the authoritative data source? [00:14:00] Gil explains to us two levels of complications with data that he’s observing. [00:18:30 ] In regard to financial incentivisation, Eric wonders what has been their experience, or have they had any feedback from people who are trying to massage the numbers in their favor? [00:21:22 ] Richard wants to know if there is any code open source and can people look at that? How can people get involved and what was that process like besides the data aspects? Also, Gil tells us if he has any pushbacks from making any of this stuff open. [00:29:01] Gil mentions Vespa.ai, an open source big data serving engine. Richard wonders if Gil has thought of long term plans for how he sustains this work and how it’s going forward and what teams will be on it, and will it just be open source in the sense of like a year? [00:31:57] Richard wonders if Gil and Cindy have plans to onboard people from the community who are interested in the data who are helping out so that they also become maintainers, so it’s not just a Yahoo only project internally. [00:33:08] Eric asks Gil to elaborate on a follow up question where he said he was using these tools internally. Cindy tells us all about the tools. Also, Eric wonders if there was any questions or concerns about licensing the open source and are people allowed to build commercial applications on top of this data? [00:40:24] Gil and Cindy tell us where people can get involved in this project, how can you follow along, and how can you follow them. Spotlight [00:42:20] Richard’s spotlight is Moment.js. [00:42:39] Eric’s spotlight is a project built by Jared White called Bridgetown, which is an updated version of Jekyll. [00:43:49] Justin’s spotlights are to thank Ashley Wolf for putting this whole thing together and a browser extension called Read Aloud, a text to speech voice reader. [00:44:31] Gil’s spotlight is a project called Denali. Quotes [00:04:51] "AOL had an OSPO and they didn’t have an OSPO and they kind of had an OSPO, but when we merged together we brought it together and we just continue to do what we do.” [00:05:04] “Before OSPO there was Open Source activity because as you know companies do Open Source even without OSPO’s. They just do Open Source better with OSPO’s.” [00:14:00] “There’s two levels of complications with data that I’m observing and there’s probably more, because there’s always more to everything.” [00:14:48] “But then there’s this other element which is, I don’t know, maybe it’s the political nature of data.” [00:16:23] “And I guess all of the paddling that goes on under the surface of the water to collect that data and to be as accurate as you can, but also to connect it to the source so that you could investigate it.” [00:20:36] “The training set has to be clean, so they actually spend 80% of their effort in cleaning the data.” [00:34:28] “So, for example, you look at some states now after opening, the numbers shot up. So, is it concerning from business planning perspective? Perhaps.” [00:37:23] “We have hundreds of millions of entities in this graph that represent billions of pieces of information that we use across the company for all types of things, like how the news stream is ordered.” Links Gil Yehuda Twitter Gil Yehuda LinkedIn Cindy Wang LinkedIn Yahoo-Covid-19 Data Yahoo Covid-19 Dashboard Yahoo Knowledge COVID-19 API Yahoo-GitHub Vespa-Github Yahoo! Developer Network (YDN) Yahoo! Developer Dash Open Podcast Read Aloud Bridgetown Denali OpenStreetMap Leaflet.js Credits Produced by Justin Dorfman at CodeFund Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at Peachtree Sound Ad Sales by Eric Berry at CodeFund Special Guests: Cindy Wang and Gil Yehuda.

Episode 41: The Donut Diet, Commitments, and More Awesomeness with Dave Gandy
Sponsored By: Panelists Justin Dorfman | Richard Littauer Guest Dave Gandy Font Awesome Show Notes Producer's note: When the show "ends," we are still recording while we all say goodbye. This time our goodbye turned into a great conversation with Dave after we finished recording Episode 33. With Font Awesome 6 coming out soon, we thought, why not celebrate by taking that extra tape and make an extension/bonus/part-2 episode? We hope you enjoy it! 🍩 Hello and welcome to Sustain! In this episode, we have Dave Gandy, from Font Awesome, talking about how he and his wife each lost 50lbs, how they did it, and about how important self-care is today. He will also tell you how he fit two donuts a day for a month into his diet, which he refers to as the “Donut Diet.” Download this episode now to find out how he did this and listen to the great advice he shares with us. [00:01:38] Dave talks about how he lost 50 lbs with working out and how “Stronger U” nutrition came into his life. [00:03:57] Dave explains his cheat days and he refers to it as “The Donut Diet,” eating 2 donuts a day for a month, and still kept the weight off. [00:05:51] Dave tells us about why the Stronger U membership is so good and worth the price to pay. [00:07:20] Richard talks about how he is trying to meditate every day and how you have to put in time to meditate to get better and Dave brings up prayer which is another form of meditation. [00:09:45] Richard brings up how all this applies to open source which is all about putting your money where your mouth is and making commitments. [00:10:58] Dave talks about the best way to self-care. Great advice here! [00:12:23] Dave talks about how there’s no such thing as failure, because you are growing and developing as person. He also talks about how to not worry about fear. Quotes [00:05:10] “I don’t think there is evil and good food. There’s not evil foods and there’s not hero foods, there’s just food and there’s the stuff that we like.” [00:06:04] “This isn’t a business where free trial can work. You’re not going to see it, unless YOU DO IT!” [00:06:44] “It’s not so much about extending the years of your life, it’s about taking the ones that you have and making them better!” [00:10:38] “The commitments we make to each other help make things stronger!” [00:11:16] “The way to the best self-care is other care. When you worry about others, you think about them and try to do that first, you end up in a weird way taking care of yourself.” [00:12:35] “If you’re doing it the way that you think is right to begin with, there is no such thing as failure.” Links Dave Gandy Twitter Font Awesome Stronger U Eggslut Credits Produced by Justin Dorfman at CodeFund Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at Peachtree Sound Ad Sales by Eric Berry at CodeFund Special Guest: Dave Gandy.