My Open Source Experience Podcast

No matter how much you talk about something that you do or discovered, there will always be someone who hasn't heard your story yet. Conferences help with both information sharing, as well as to conect with like-minded people.In this segment of the My Open Source Experience podcast Wolfgang Gehring shares about his experience with presenting at events, creating online content and getting company approval and funding for all this.Learn more about:- Why it is important to attend and speak at events- Why encourage your employees to attend conferences, even without giving a talk- The concept of treating conferences as in-person trainings- A sustainable event strategy- Building a professional network, outside of your company- How beer can speed up software development- Why online conferences are just not the same

There are bad practices that no one should do when they get involved in opens source communities.In this segment of the My Open Source Experience podcast Greg Kroah-Hartman shares three examples from Linux history where people followed some bad patterns, which then somtimes resulted in raising the bar for everyone else.1. Merge and DisappearGreg shares an example where someone contributed a big change to the core parts of the kernel, and then became unreachable. It took the Linux community quite some time to unwind the changes and clean up the code. All open source communities are based on trust, when someone betrays that they make it harder for other to build trust as well. The community is more flexible with changes that are well isolated, like a filesystem or a driver, but you still can't betray peopl's trust with any of your actions during the contrubution process.2. Binary driversIt's a NO, you also don't want that, but also, you just can't. Some companies used to apply a trick, but they've been coming around as well.3. Never experiment on a community, especially without a consentGreg shares the interesting story when a university professor and some students went ahead and wrote a paper about submitting and landing patches in the Linux kernel that introduced vulnerabilities. It turned out that they weren't truthful in their paper, and also forgot to notify everyone about the experiment. While the university was banned for a while, this turned out to be a story with a happy ending with students now contributing to the kernel as part of their studies.Further advantage of open source SW development methods is that the change history is available online, the community can always go back and remove code if a controller becomes untrustworthy at any point in time after getting their changes merged.#opensource #community #collaboration #experience #podcast

Copyright is complex, and geographies get factored into that a little bit.In this segment of the My Open Source Experience podcast Rick Sanders talks about how copyright works on the global scale, including the Berne Convention and timelines.Leanr more about:- The Berne Convention- The government-driven nature of copyright- Copyright is government-driven but governments don't have much to do with copyright- The statue in copyright and in trademark, and the difference between the two- The concept of case law- Similarities between how departments in a law firm and large tech companies work together#opensource #community #collaboration #experience #podcast

Doing reviews is a task that is often percieved as a maintainer responsibility, or something that only the more established people in the community can do. This is a misconception, which deprives newcomers from the opportunity to learn, and makes it harder to grow the maintainer team.In this segment of the My Open Source Experience podcast Daniel Stenberg talks about his approach to - What maintainers need to do to support newcomers and hope for them to stick around- What percentage of Curl contirbutors are one-time contributors- Why doing reviews is a higher barrier- Communication practices that incentivize people to get involved, including doing reviews- When a change is submitted to change an area of the project, have you tried asking the people who worked on it before for their opinion on the patch?- As opposed to telling people to do reviews, try to ask for their opinion on incoming changes- Do tell people to go work out, ask them to come play a game with you#opensource #community #collaboration #experience #podcast

Working in a community where there are people who volunteer their free time gives people experience that can later on be beneficial in corporate environments as well.In this segment of the My Open Source Experience podcast Stormy Peters talks about her experience at the Mozilla Corporation, where she worked with a large community of many volunteers.Lear more about:- Why speed isn't always the most important- Investing time in your community and enabling people to join and participate always pays off later when the community starts to grow and become more sustainable- What is the maximum amount of time a volunteer would spend on trying to get involved in your project?- Offering mentorship to people is a strong incentive for people to contribute to projects#opensource #community #collaboration #experience #podcast

You need to make sure that you treat improvements in your project the right way. Some improvements are features as they bring new functionality. However, when the new functionality makes existing functionality available for people with disabilities, then it's not a feature that got implemented, it's a critical bug that got fixed.In this segment of the My Open Source Experience podcast Mike Gifford talks about the mindset shift in the Drupal community to start treating accessibility gaps as bugs and in cases as critical bugs.Learn more about:- GitHub's Readme newsletter- Marking something as a bug doesn't give it a priority automatically- You need like-minded people and leadership buy-in to move things forward in a focus area- Dark mode, a sad story- A fun feature, like adding motion on screens can make someone sick and should be easy to turn off- The potential in new tech to improve accessibility#opensource #community #collaboration #experience #podcast