text stringlengths 0 2.08k |
|---|
**Karl Fogel:** That's a really good question. Yeah, I researched other projects. I did rely a lot of my own experiences, which were somewhat broad; I had worked on a lot of projects by that point. But I was worried that I would be biased, and particularly towards backend systems projects, because I was a C programmer,... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Interesting. You mentioned that people were starting to come around and you were starting to see community manager as a title, but I do feel like the book addressed something and reset people's expectations about how open source projects run. It did bring a lot of this community stuff and not everyth... |
**Karl Fogel:** I think I get the question you're asking, and it's a good one. I've never really thought of the book as addressing a sort of as yet unacknowledged need, but I guess in a way it was. The observation I had at the time in Subversion, and then as I started to talk to people in other projects I realized it w... |
What I saw on Subversion was that managing a bunch of people who were not all under one management hierarchy, like they were coming from different companies, and some of them were true volunteers in the sense that there was no way in which they were being paid for their time, or only very indirectly, but a lot of them ... |
\[12:17\] There were all sorts of stuff that had to be done that was not necessarily visible from just watching the public mailing list. So the book was basically - I realize I'm giving a long answer, you should feel free to edit this down, by the way... Now I'm trying to be a little less verbose... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** No, this is perfect. |
**Karl Fogel:** Okay, I'm glad. \[laughs\] I guess the thing the book was meant to address was you get a lot of programmers who land in open source somehow, they find themselves running projects or occupying positions of influence, and both because no one has ever said it, and because it's not visible from the public a... |
That's what I was thinking when I was writing the book, and I never really articulated that until you asked the question, but I'm pretty sure that's more or less what I was thinking. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I mean, we're still struggling with that today. \[laughs\] We're talking in the past tense because the book came out ten years ago, but I'm still struggling to get people to recognize that today... |
**Karl Fogel:** Well, let's go right to the controversial stuff. The Linux kernel project is famous for kind of having a toxic atmosphere, right? And Linus has basically said that he equates the thing that most of us call toxicity with meritocracy. In other words, the kinds of people who write the kinds of code that he... |
Maybe that's actually true, but I just don't think the Linux kernel project has run the experiment of trying to... Forking the project and running a nice version, where everyone is welcomed warmly and not insulted personally by a charismatic leader, in which they can see whether that theory is actually true. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Right. I was actually not even thinking about projects that are more than ten years old, but even projects that start today struggle with this. Just acknowledging that soft skills matter and that somebody needs to pick up this community work. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I think it's interesting that you said that you wrote the book in 2005, around this time when you felt like people were starting to notice and care about the need for skills beyond coding, but I feel like that's almost what people would say about right now too, so I wonder if anything's even changed i... |
**Karl Fogel:** Well, just imagine how much worse things would be if we hadn't all been through that. \[laughter\] |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah. |
**Karl Fogel:** You never have an alternate universe in which to run experiment, unfortunately. But I think it will always be true, because the startup costs in open source are so low - although that's changing a little bit, and we can talk about that later - so that the people who start projects, they'll just land in ... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** \[16:17\] And if it's a useful project and people are like "Well, I'm gonna use it"... Or even if it's not useful, but it's just kind of a legacy being used, it's like, what incentive is there really? I think it's still very hard to tie together, and in some cases you can tie together the health of a ... |
**Karl Fogel:** Yeah... I can only make anecdotal studies there. One example is the LibreOffice project - it has really gone through a great deal of trouble to be welcoming to developers and to make their initial development process easier. Building a project is now way, way easier than it used to be; they've just real... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** You mentioned that you've released it under Creative Commons license, and I saw that you've actually kind of kept it a little bit up to date and you've kind of pushed small changes to it over time, but in 2013 you decided to actually do a full new edition of the book. What precipitated the need for a... |
**Karl Fogel:** A few things. One, the adjustments that I had been doing in the years from 2006 roughly to 2013, they weren't that trivial. I mean, there were a lot of small scale changes that went in. I think most sections of the book got touched, some of them pretty heavily, but I was never thinking of it as a full r... |
So one obvious thing was the revamping of all the examples to use Git instead of Subversion and to talk about GitHub. And also in general, the project hosting situation had changed. I'm sorry, I just don't consider SourceForge a thing anymore. \[laughter\] So many ads, too much visual noise, not compelling enough funct... |
So the recommendations about how to host projects really needed to change to be oriented more around the Git-based universe and to at least acknowledge and recommend GitHub, while acknowledging that it itself is not open source... Although I hope that they see a grand strategic vision whereby opening up their actual pl... |
\[19:53\] The other thing that changed kind of in a big way was what I think of as the slow rise of business-to-business open source, which is... The old cliché was "Open source always starts when some individual programmer needs to scratch an itch"; she needs to analyze her log files better, so she writes a log analyz... |
And I thought that the rise of that kind kind of project needed to be covered better, and that that was a trend that if the book could explain it better to other managers in tech or tech-related companies, that perhaps it would encourage some of them to join that trend. |
And sorry, I'm realizing that there's one more component to the answer - the other thing that changed was that I expected governments to be doing more open source by 2013 than they were, and I had at that point been very active in trying to help some government agencies launch technical products as open source, because... |
So there were some new trends that I wanted to cover and there were some new goals that I had for the book, and they just required ground-up reorganization and revamp. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Wow, that's great. We're gonna take a short break and when we come back Karl's gonna get into how GitHub has changed the open source landscape. |
**Break:** \[22:46\] |
**Mikeal Rogers:** We're back with Karl Fogel. Karl, in your mind, what have Git and GitHub changed about open source today? What are the biggest shifts that happened from the Subversion Apache days to now? |
**Karl Fogel:** \[23:44\] Well, so I might have to ask you for help answering this, because I wonder if I was so comfortable with old tools that maybe I was blind to something that was difficult about them. I didn't feel like GitHub changed the culture tremendously except in the sense that Twitter changed the culture o... |
If you have an open source project and you don't have the project name somewhere on GitHub, someone else is sure to take it for their fork, right? So you've gotta get that real estate even if you're not hosting there. |
But I think the way GitHub wants to think about it is that they made it a lot easier for people to track sources, to make lightweight quick, so-called 'drive-by contributions' and to maintain what used to be called vendor branches, that is to say permanent non-hostile forks; internal, or sort of feature forks that are ... |
So I think their goal was to make all that stuff easier, and also to make gazillions of dollars, which I'm happy to see they're doing. And I think that it is part of GitHub's self-identity - for the executive and upper management team, it's part of their self-identity to think of themselves as supporting open source, t... |
The moves that they made to give technical support and kind of a little nudge to projects to get real open source licenses in their repositories was a really helpful thing. Nowadays most active open source projects on GitHub do have a license file, and that's partly because GitHub made a push to help that happen, and t... |
So has it changed the culture of open source? That's the thing, I'm not really sure it was all that hard to contribute to an open source project before GitHub. Maybe that's because my specialty was working on one of the tools that is the main part of the contribution workflow, with the version control tools; I worked o... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, there's a couple things you are glancing over. Just a couple. And I suffer from the same problem, where you'll jump through hoops without realizing that they're hoops, because you're just used to doing this kind of stuff... But the Twitter analogy works really well; so yes, there's a shared nam... |
**Karl Fogel:** \[27:59\] That's a really good point, yeah. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Source control is certainly part of the contribution experience, but if GitHub was just Git, it wouldn't be the hub... It wouldn't be GitHub, right? There's an extension of the language and the tools around collaboration that they also unified. In Subversion I can create a diff, but how I send that d... |
**Karl Fogel:** That's true, and that's a really good point. I mean, it was never hard to find out. Usually you mail the diff to the mailing list and people review it there, right? But you had to find out the address, you had to go read the project's contribution documentation, and maybe that didn't exist or was not ea... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I mean that workflow itself may not be more discoverable than sending a diff to a mailing list, but once you do it, it's the same everywhere. I think that's the bigger shift. |
**Karl Fogel:** No, in fact I think it's less discoverable, in the sense that the actual... I mean, I've trained a lot of people in using Git; I go to a wonderful organization... In fact, I'm gonna do a shout out for them, ChiHackNight.org, the Chicago Hack Night, on Tuesday nights here. There are a lot of newcomers th... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I think there's also something to be said for the friendliness of GitHub, even just visually, right? Twitter is again maybe a great analogy for that... It's just prettier. People feel more comfortable on a more consumer-facing website than navigating around the corners of the internet. |
**Karl Fogel:** Yeah, and that's one thing that Subversion never had - a default visual web browser interface. There were several of them and your project had to pick, so the one you picked might be different from what some other project picked. With GitHub it's like... There are a lot of people who think of Git as Git... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. I think also - and this is one that is really easy to glance over if you have any experience, but because we're in this new, publish-first mindset, newer people will publish stuff and put it up there, and they'll actually get contributions. And it actually takes a much broader skillset to take ... |
**Karl Fogel:** Yeah, it really is. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** ... and all of these other features, right? So if you're somebody that doesn't know Git very well and you just got your project up, getting a contribution and then having to pull it down locally and look the diff, it's actually like a whole big extension of that collaboration toolchain, and they make... |
**Karl Fogel:** \[32:00\] Yeah, you're right. I've never thought about that, but the process of becoming an open source maintainer is a lot easier on GitHub, and it's so satisfying when you click that Merge Pull Request button and it just goes in. All you did was you clicked the green button and you've accepted a contr... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I think we're also skipping over this entire generation of tools like Trac and JIRA, that in a lot of ways were much harder to use than sending a diff to a mailing list. \[laughs\] |
**Karl Fogel:** Well yeah, I don't know, because I got so used to them. I don't think that they were a discrete generation; I think that they were a continuum of tools that as soon as the web came around, people started making bug trackers that... The original bug trackers were worked by email submission. You would com... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** It's like MySpace and Facebook, or any sort of second adopter. |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.