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**David Cramer:** Thank you! |
• Changes in open source since Karl Fogel's book was first published 10 years ago |
• Influence of Git and GitHub on development workflows and culture |
• Shift in perception of open source and whether it has "won" |
• Challenges remaining in the open source community |
• History of Producing Open Source Software, including its creation and reception |
• Karl Fogel's experience writing the book and his role as a partner at Open Tech Strategies |
• Evolution of roles within open source projects, such as community management |
• Intersection of technical and social skills in successful open source project leadership |
• The idea that open source projects are meritocracies with no structure or social hierarchy |
• The need for community management and people skills in open source projects |
• Addressing the "tyranny of structurelessness" and the dominance of certain personalities |
• The importance of compromise, communication, and managing competing interests in open source projects |
• Recognizing that programmers often lack soft skills and need guidance on community building and social dynamics |
• Discussing challenges such as creating a welcoming atmosphere, addressing toxicity, and finding incentives for healthy project development |
• Reflecting on whether any progress has been made in the past 10 years and what still needs to be addressed |
• Changes in open source projects from individual developers to corporations |
• Shift from Subversion to Git as a version control system and GitHub's rise as a platform |
• Need for updates to address new trends in open source development |
• Importance of acknowledging the shift to business-to-business open source projects |
• Governments' slow adoption of open source and need for education on its benefits |
• How GitHub has changed the landscape of open source, making it easier to contribute and manage projects |
• Shared namespace and unification of identity |
• Extension of Git language and tools for collaboration |
• Standardized contribution experience through pull requests |
• Friendliness and visual interface of GitHub |
• Ease of contribution and collaboration for new publishers |
• Empowerment of open source maintainers through streamlined process |
• Critique of previous tools (Trac, JIRA) as being more complex |
• GitHub's open source code can be used for bug tracking, but feature requests are often declined due to prioritizing simplicity for most users. |
• The term "open source" was coined in 1997 as a way to resolve terminology confusion and avoid ideological debates around free software. |
• The distinction between "free software" and "open source" is seen by some as a post-facto creation, with the two terms being used interchangeably. |
• Companies like GitLab can benefit from GitHub's publicly available decisions and innovations, allowing them to experiment with new approaches without alienating their own customers. |
• Open source has not "won" in the sense that proprietary software still dominates the market surface, but its volume is increasing as more users interact with open-source systems behind the scenes. |
• The distinction between infrastructure software and consumer-facing software |
• Open source's success on the infrastructure side but not necessarily on the principle of freedom |
• The importance of control over personal life and devices running proprietary software |
• Hacker/maker movements addressing vulnerabilities through modifications and customizations |
• Separation between production and consumption of software, with open source winning in production but not necessarily in consumption |
• Utilitarian arguments for open source, including privacy and security |
• The influence of writing useful code on the success of the free software movement |
• The importance of system porosity and allowing users to contribute to its development |
• The changing definition of software developers and the growing accessibility of coding |
• The impact of network effects on proprietary platforms and their tendency to control user behavior |
• The potential for future generations to demand more freedom and openness from digital systems |
• The cooptation of the term "open source" and its various meanings among different groups and individuals |
• Misuse of "open source" terminology and its implications |
• Definition of open source and its relationship to license and freedoms |
• Network effects and their impact on collaboration and community |
• Forking and its role in promoting open source dynamics |
• Trade-offs between user convenience and contributor autonomy |
• Role of user base size and motivation in facilitating forked projects |
• The tension between Google's control over the Android code base and manufacturers' need to fork it |
• Users of Android are often not the same as users of the Android code base (manufacturers) |
• Forking can lead to a disconnect between user needs and manufacturer needs, putting Google in a difficult position |
• Software becoming increasingly tied to hardware devices makes hacking and development more difficult for users |
• A dystopian future where few users have the resources or expertise to contribute to software development is possible |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I'm Nadia Eghbal. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** And I'm Mikeal Rogers. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** On today's show, Mikeal and I talked with Karl Fogel, author of Producing Open Source Software. Karl served on the board of the Open Source Initiative, which coined the term 'open source' and helped write Subversion. He's currently a partner at Open Tech Strategies, helping major organizations use ope... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Our focus on today's episode with Karl was about what has changed in open source since he first published his book ten years ago. We talked about the influence of Git and GitHub, and how they've changed both development workflows and our culture. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** We also talked about changes in the wider perception of open source, whether open source has truly won, and the challenges that still remain. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** So back in 2006 I started working at the Open Source Applications foundation on the Chandler Project, and I remember we had to kind of put together a governance policy and how do we manage an open source project, how do we do it openly, and basically your book kind of got slapped on everybody's desk.... |
**Karl Fogel:** Wow, that's really nice to hear, thank you. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** And it was... Especially at that time it was an amazing guide, and I know from talking with Jacob Kaplan-Moss that the Django project did something similar, as well. I'm very curious how you got to write that book and what preceded it. It's produced by O'Reilly, right? |
**Karl Fogel:** Yes. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I'm curious why O'Reilly wanted to do something... It's very deep and very nerdy, so... |
**Karl Fogel:** Yeah, actually I wanna take a quick second to give a shout out to O'Reilly because... I mean, that was never a book that was gonna be a bestseller, and they sort of knew that from the beginning, and they not only decided to produce it anyway, they gave me a very good editor, Andy Oram, who made a lot of... |
So the answer to your main question there I'm afraid is pure luck. I really think that in the early 2000s, 2005-2006 the time was ripe for some kind of long-form guide to the social and community management aspects of open source to come out, and my book just happened to come out. If someone else had written a long-for... |
So yeah, I just got really lucky with the timing. And the way that I was motivated to write it, that O'Reilly had contacted me about doing a Subversion book... I was coming off five or six years as a founding developer in the Subversion project and it had been my full-time job, and I'd gone from being mostly a programm... |
\[04:09\] So when it came time to write a Subversion book, I had already written a book, I knew folks at O'Reilly, and they said "Would you like to be one of the authors?" There were a couple other Subversion developers that I worked with who were also interested in writing, and we had all agreed that we would co-autho... |
Then as I started to write, I really let down my co-authors. I said, "Hey, folks, I'm really sorry. I don't wanna write another technical manual. I've already done that once. You folks go do it, it's gonna be great." And I wrote the introduction and they wrote a wonderful book that became one of O'Reilly's better selle... |
So I thought, "Well, what was it that I wanted to write if that wasn't the book?" and I realized the book I wanted to write was not about Subversion the software, it was about the running of a Subversion project, and about open source projects in general - Subversion wasn't the only one that I was involved in. So I wen... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Was that a popular view back then? Like, when you said that you wanted to write this non-technical, more management-focused book around open source, were people like "Why?" |
**Karl Fogel:** Let me cast back my memory... No, but then again, the people that I talked with - that's a very biased sample, right? Most people were encouraging, and if they were mystified as to why I wanted to write this, they hid it very well and were nothing but encouraging. Then it took a little bit longer to wri... |
I think there was, among people involved in open source. For example, the role of community manager was already a title you started to see people having. You started to see a phenomenon where the coordinating people, the people doing that community management and projects were no longer also the most technically sharp ... |
And that was true across a lot of open source projects. I could see that the people who were doing technical and community work together were not the Linus Torvalds model - and Linus Torvalds isn't by any means a typical example... The Linux kernel in general is not a typical example of how open source projects have ev... |
\[07:45\] I wasn't the only person sensing that. A lot of people seemed to already understand the topic of the book before I explained it to them. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** For that first book, I mean, you came up through the '90s open source scene and were clearly doing a lot of community work on the Subversion project - did you write it mostly just from your own experiences and memory, or did you go through a phase of research and reaching out to other projects? |
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