Be Clear About How Things Work (How Open Source Can Work with Companies)

This post is one of a series of posts about what open source software projects can do (if they wish to) to make it easier for companies to participate in their projects.

When a company wants to get involved in an open source software, often they need some help understanding how things work. Sometimes it’s the developer who wants to contribute that has questions. Sometimes it’s their management who wants to understand what type of commitment they are making and what they can expect.

An open source software project can make it easier for a corporate contributor to participate by being clear about:

  • What the release process and schedule looks like.
  • How long it takes for a PR to be reviewed and how to best position it for acceptance.
  • Who makes decisions and how.
  • What roles people in the project play and how they get to those roles.
  • Where and how to ask questions.
  • Who is working on the project and what their motivations are. (Is this software to make apps run faster on watches or is it to make apps run on car computers?)
  • How to find out and stay informed of security issues.

As an open source software maintainer, the more you can help organizations understand how you work and how to work effectively with you, the more likely they are to engage.

What open source governance models are available?

If you are looking for an open source governance model, there are two resources to explore.

  1. Red Hat has published the Project and Community Governance Guidebook on GitHub. It covers things from roles of the participants, to how projects evolve (and governance should evolve with them), to policies and procedures.
  2. The FOSS Governance Collection just launched with a collection of governance docs on Zotero. It is a great place to go see real, live documents used by existing open source software projects. (If you work on an open source software project, or just notice that one is missing, please upload the governance docs!)

Don’t forget, a project’s governance needs to evolve as the project evolves.

How Open Source Communities Work

Several happenings over the weekend are case studies in how open source software communities work.

The Dev Behind a Hugely Popular GNOME Extension Just Quit

While the news is about a developer quitting because it’s not “fun”. I think the message – or messages – are deeper than that.

  1. Isn’t it awesome that are free software is developed by people that love doing it? Back when I started the OpenLogic Expert Community, I contacted many maintainers and offered to pay them to fix issues that our customers had. Some of them turned me down because they loved working on open source software and thought payment would change that. (That inspired my Would You Do It Again for Free? talk.) Some of them turned down payment because this was a hobby and if they got payment their family might view it and the time they spend on it differently. They took free tech goodies instead!
  2. Wouldn’t it be great if when what you are working on no longer made sense, you could move on to something better suited for you at the moment? Working on something you love, because you love it, gives you the freedom to say it’s no longer your favorite thing to work on and to move on. You do still have responsibilities but in this case, it sounds like there was good backup.
  3. Feedback. I do hope that the GNOME community takes this feedback as an opportunity to explore how things are going. They should survey other users and figure out if this is an individual problem or a systemic problem and how they might prevent it from happening in the future.

Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth makes peace with Ubuntu Linux community

It is a positive sign that the GNOME project – or this part of it – had a clear and positive succession plan.

Again I think the title doesn’t capture the importance here.

Governance is very important to every open source software project. It’s important when you set it governance to determine how councils, boards and advisory boards are going to work. Who is going to be on them? What criteria determines who is on them? What are they supposed to discuss? What do they get to decide or control? How do their decisions get implemented?

And projects evolve. You need to continue to examine the governance structure and make sure it’s still working. Sometimes advisory groups are created to raise money or to make marketing decisions. And later they start making technical decisions. What does that mean? Should the group evolve? Or is a different part of the project experiencing difficulties that this group is trying to fill in for?

While I don’t know specifically what happened with the Ubuntu Community Council, it is normal for projects to have governing structures that change and evolve over time. As they set it back up, it will be important to figure out who is on it, how people get added and removed, what their charter is and how their decisions will be implemented.

Finding SciFi in Barcelona

This is the fantasy and science fiction section of the only used English bookstore in the late 80s in Barcelona. I was so excited when my dad found it. It was run by a woman from the Netherlands. She would buy any scifi books I had for half the price she could sell them for. She’d also buy back the ones I bought and read. My dad pitched in the other half. (They were not cheap. I seem to remember the used price was about the new price in the US.)

Every summer my uncle Larry Nelson would give me a box of scifi books in South Dakota that would eventually make their way to this shop in Spain. On a trip to London Dad and I found a used book store that just sold scifi and I came back with a suitcase full!

It was a long walk from our house in Barcelona to this store with no good public transport connections.

(There was also a store that sold new – very expensive – English books near our apartment. On each visit, my dad talked to the owner long enough that I would manage to read an entire book over several visits. I don’t think that was his intent. )

Open Source Hallway Track: May 13, 2020

Do you miss the hallway track at conferences? All those impromptu conversations with other people that care about open source software? So do we. Come join us in a virtual hallway track!

Topic:
Foundations vs self-host
https://twitter.com/storming/status/1260249576746782720

Notes & Coordination:

Join Microsoft Teams Meeting
+1 323-849-4874   United States, Los Angeles (Toll) Conference ID: 675 807 995#
Local numbers

https://etherpad.bke.ro/p/OSSHallwayTrack-2020-05-13

Meeting time:

Wednesday, May 13, 2020, 16:00 UTC

LocationLocal TimeTime ZoneUTC Offset
San Francisco (USA – California)Wednesday, May 13, 2020 at 9:00:00 amPDTUTC-7 hours
Denver (USA – Colorado)Wednesday, May 13, 2020 at 10:00:00 amMDTUTC-6 hours
New York (USA – New York)Wednesday, May 13, 2020 at 12:00:00 noonEDTUTC-4 hours
London (United Kingdom – England)Wednesday, May 13, 2020 at 5:00:00 pmBSTUTC+1 hour
Paris (France – ÃŽle-de-France)Wednesday, May 13, 2020 at 6:00:00 pmCESTUTC+2 hours
Tokyo (Japan)Thursday, May 14, 2020 at 1:00:00 amJSTUTC+9 hours
Corresponding UTC (GMT)Wednesday, May 13, 2020 at 16:00:00  

Open Source Hallway Track: May 6, 2020

Do you miss the hallway track at conferences? All those impromptu conversations with other people that care about open source software? So do we. Come join us in a virtual hallway track!

Topic:
May 6: Open Standards and Open Source

Location:
https://meet.jit.si/OpenSourceHallwayTrack

Wednesday, May 6, 2020, 16:00 UTC

LocationLocal TimeTime ZoneUTC Offset
San Francisco (USA – California)Wednesday, May 6, 2020 at 9:00:00 amPDTUTC-7 hours
Denver (USA – Colorado)Wednesday, May 6, 2020 at 10:00:00 amMDTUTC-6 hours
New York (USA – New York)Wednesday, May 6, 2020 at 12:00:00 noonEDTUTC-4 hours
London (United Kingdom – England)Wednesday, May 6, 2020 at 5:00:00 pmBSTUTC+1 hour
Paris (France – ÃŽle-de-France)Wednesday, May 6, 2020 at 6:00:00 pmCESTUTC+2 hours
Tokyo (Japan)Thursday, May 6, 2020 at 1:00:00 amJSTUTC+9 hours
Corresponding UTC (GMT)Wednesday,May 6, 2020 at 16:00:00 

Open Source Hallway Track: April 29, 2020

Do you miss the hallway track at conferences? All those impromptu conversations with other people that care about open source software? So do we. Come join us in a virtual hallway track!

Topic:
April 29: Giving Good Feedback
May 6: Standards and Open Source

Location:
https://meet.jit.si/OpenSourceHallwayTrack

Notes & Coordination:

https://etherpad.bke.ro/p/OSSHallwayTrack-2020-04-29

Meeting time:

Wednesday, April 29, 2020, 16:00 UTC

LocationLocal TimeTime ZoneUTC Offset
San Francisco (USA – California)Wednesday, April 29, 2020 at 9:00:00 amPDTUTC-7 hours
Denver (USA – Colorado)Wednesday, April 29, 2020 at 10:00:00 amMDTUTC-6 hours
New York (USA – New York)Wednesday, April 29, 2020 at 12:00:00 noonEDTUTC-4 hours
London (United Kingdom – England)Wednesday, April 29, 2020 at 5:00:00 pmBSTUTC+1 hour
Paris (France – ÃŽle-de-France)Wednesday, April 29, 2020 at 6:00:00 pmCESTUTC+2 hours
Tokyo (Japan)Thursday, April 30, 2020 at 1:00:00 amJSTUTC+9 hours
Corresponding UTC (GMT)Wednesday, April 29, 2020 at 16:00:00 

Designing a gaming computer and looking for feedback!

My son has been designing a gaming computer. Working entirely online, he’s researched what parts it needs, how to make tradeoffs in functionality versus costs, and where to buy those parts.

He’s looking for feedback now. Will this set of parts make a functional gaming computer? He’s going for low cost ($650) but still functional. Are there other parts he should consider? I should add that besides professional gaming, he is also an online gambler and will be using the computer for gambling on online slots. He will be moving to Italy in the summer and looking for the best online slots and casinos in Italy to play at, and found a number of good sources, but all the games on these casinos are very RAM and CPU heavy making his current laptop slow. According to Stranieri.com, online casino game players should budget for at least 8 GB of RAM, but I wonder if any readers can recommend a good CPU for his online gaming and gambling.

Thanks in advance for any feedback.

Join us for the first ever virtual hallway track!

Do you miss the hallway track at conferences? All those impromptu conversations with other people that care about open source software? Me too! So we are setting aside some time to have a virtual hallway track.

Topic:
Growing leaders in open source (Or wherever the conversation goes! It’s the hallway track!)

Location:
https://meet.jit.si/OpenSourceHallwayTrack

Meeting time:

Wednesday, April 22, 2020, 15:30 UTC

LocationLocal TimeTime ZoneUTC Offset
San Francisco (USA – California)Wednesday, April 22, 2020 at 8:30:00 amPDTUTC-7 hours
Denver (USA – Colorado)Wednesday, April 22, 2020 at 9:30:00 amMDTUTC-6 hours
New York (USA – New York)Wednesday, April 22, 2020 at 11:30:00 amEDTUTC-4 hours
London (United Kingdom – England)Wednesday, April 22, 2020 at 4:30:00 pmBSTUTC+1 hour
Paris (France – ÃŽle-de-France)Wednesday, April 22, 2020 at 5:30:00 pmCESTUTC+2 hours
Tokyo (Japan)Thursday, April 23, 2020 at 12:30:00 amJSTUTC+9 hours
Corresponding UTC (GMT)Wednesday, April 22, 2020 at 15:30:00 

If the meeting is too big for a single conversation (kind of like when everyone pours out of a lecture at a conference), we’ll break up into smaller groups.

A fun space opera series!

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Wayfarers Book 1) (Kindle Edition)
by Chambers, Becky (Author)

Price: $14.99
1 used & new available from $14.99

I’ve been looking for a fun space opera series and I found one in the Wayfarer series by Becky Chambers. It’s a fun series that combines space travel, human societies in space and other planets and alien species. What I love most about science fiction is how the people and societies adapt to technologies and the new discoveries in the universe.

In the first book, A Long Way to Small, Lonely Planet, a group of friends live and work on a space ship. The characters were instantly likeable – if you work in tech you’ve probably met a few of them. I nicknamed a few of them after people I know.