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• Standardization of processes across projects, driven by increased scale and diversity |
• Comparison between BDFL (Benevolent Dictator For Life) models and democratic governance in large open source projects |
• Sustainability of projects with single decision-makers and lack of growth in contributor capacity |
• Importance of documentation and usability for attracting and retaining casual contributors |
• Counterexamples to the idea that open source projects on GitHub are overly complex and hard to contribute to |
• Discussion of FreeBSD as an alternative to Linux with a more accessible community |
• The importance of documentation, mentorship, and a culture of contribution in making a project easier to participate in |
• The role of GitHub in increasing contributions by providing a clear funnel for new contributors |
• Examples of projects that have successfully transitioned from proprietary to open source on GitHub |
• The benefits of open sourcing code, including increased contributions and community engagement |
• Changes in the landscape of open source contributions over the past ten years |
• Shift from Contributor License Agreements (CLAs) to Developer Certificate of Origin (DCOs) |
• Decrease in popularity of CLAs, especially those with asymmetrical rights |
• Increased use of DCOs as a simpler and more lightweight alternative |
• Complexity of governance policies in open source projects |
• Need for governance only when there are non-replicable resources at stake (e.g. developer attention) |
• Governance can be seen as a form of persuasion to convince developers to stay with the project |
• Projects often develop formal governance structures after a charismatic founder leaves |
• Governance models are used as a default when there's no clear leader, especially for organizational participants |
• Governance is "soft" in open source projects and not always necessary |
• Different governance models (BDFL vs. meritocracy) may have varying effects on project culture and contribution policies |
• The distinction between governance and contribution policies is important |
• Large projects are often governed by a single leader, while smaller projects may lack clear leadership structures |
• The browser is now the dominant platform for programming, with most companies developing web-based applications using JavaScript. |
• This has created a huge universe of JavaScript libraries and projects that are open to contributions from individual programmers. |
• Companies use open source releases as a strategic move to gain market advantage by releasing high-quality libraries first, which can then be used by competitors. |
• Large-scale multi-company projects, such as TensorFlow, rely heavily on corporate funding and have limited opportunities for individual contributors to make significant changes. |
• The middle ground of the open source ecosystem is thinning out, with fewer apps being developed in languages other than JavaScript. |
• Many existing projects are struggling to sustain themselves due to lack of resources or governance models that no longer work. |
• As the world moves towards more complex and distributed systems, older projects may need to adapt or risk becoming less relevant. |
• The concept of "tragedy of the commons" and its relevance to open source projects |
• How extensibility mechanisms (e.g. plugin systems, add-ons) allow for continued innovation even if the core project is mature and difficult to contribute to |
• The idea that as energy moves out to these satellite projects, the central project may struggle to maintain itself |
• Concerns about the sustainability of core projects when compared to smaller, more agile projects in their ecosystems |
• The possibility of a zero-sum game where developer resources are diverted from maintaining core projects to working on new ones |
• The difficulty of evaluating whether a project is getting sufficient resources and whether its governance policies are adequate |
• Sustainability of open-source projects and ecosystems |
• The issue with treating sustainability as an afterthought rather than addressing problems directly |
• Nonprofit sector funding models and volunteer-based vs paid work |
• Centralized vs decentralized project management and resource allocation |
• Long-term thinking and institutional support for open-source projects |
• Government engagement in open source and its potential to provide stability and long-term planning |
• Government and open source are incompatible due to risk-aversion among officials |
• Government projects have more exposure when using open source, increasing the risk of failure being publicized |
• The culture of government is not conducive to open source development, which values iteration and potential failure |
• A previous example (Solyndra) demonstrated how government investments can be unfairly scrutinized and criticized for failed ventures |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I'm Nadia Eghbal. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** And I'm Mikeal Rogers. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** On today's show, Mikeal and I continue with part two of conversation with Karl Fogel, author of Producing Open Source Software. Karl served on the board the Open Source Initiative, which coined the term 'open source' and helped write Subversion. He's currently a partner at Open Tech Strategies, helpin... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Our focus on today's episode with Karl was around shifts in open source communities and governance. We talked about the role of casual contributors in a world of rising open source activity, and have different projects handle this increasing demand. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** We also talked about cultural gaps between generations of open source and where it might all come together in the future. If you missed our first show with Karl, make sure you got back and listen to part one of this interview first. |
So Karl, there are more open source projects today that are an order of magnitude higher than they were even ten years ago when you wrote the first edition of your book. There are also more people that are learning to code than ever before. How is this difference in scale of projects and resources changed the open sour... |
**Karl Fogel:** Oh, what a big question. The part that I notice - and this is gonna sound very like curmudgeonly old man-ish, is that it's no longer possible to know everyone in open source. Of course, nobody ever knew everyone in open source, but you sort of at least knew their names or you were at most one degree of ... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** \[\\00:03:48.17\] I don't know if this is an apt comparison, but it reminds me a little bit of something that Rod had said in our episode about the role of contribution - when you have tons and tons of people coming in and a higher volume of contributions, then it's actually counter-intuitively harder... |
**Karl Fogel:** Well, when you say 'change things' you mean like change the technical procedures of the project, not change in a technical direction, like feature changes or design changes. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Right. It's almost like those structures become more codified, because you just have to deal with so much volume. |
**Karl Fogel:** Yeah. It's interesting, you made a contrast there between having a BDFL (benevolent dictator for life), the person who is the final arbiter of decisions when the group can't come to consensus in an open source project, versus having a lot of diverse contributors. I actually don't think there's any contr... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** That's an interesting comment. I do think that it's more common for BDFLs or de facto BDFL models, because they're never actually codified in projects like this, at this scale. But also, I keep thinking about the sustainability of those projects, and if one person is essentially responsible for all t... |
**Karl Fogel:** Well, that raises a really interesting question. One question I wonder about sometimes is "How do we know whether the Linux kernel is good or bad?" I mean, my box is running fine, I'm not worried about it crashing, but Linus has been so good at keeping the project unified that there hasn't really been a... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** And also, the Linux kernel is not GitHub, right? It's not dealing with a flood of casual contributions like those that would come from GitHub. |
**Karl Fogel:** I don't think the fact that it's not on GitHub is the reason it's not dealing with a flood of casual contributions; I don't think you can be a casual contributor to something as complex as the Linux kernel. There's just too much to learn. I'm involved in another project, the Emacs text editor; I'm not o... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I disagree with this in a couple ways, because I hear projects say that a lot, and usually that project has awful documentation and a shitty website. Those are things that are not very difficult for people to actually technically go and fix, but they're not being fixed because the barrier to trying t... |
**Karl Fogel:** Okay... I have a counterexample for you. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** ... and because you're not bringing in people to fix small doc changes or to fix the website, you're not even growing a culture that is thinking about barriers to entry, so of course you're gonna continue to develop conventions that are very hard to make it through. You're right that we don't have a ... |
**Karl Fogel:** Yeah, that's a really interesting point. It may be worthy of more study, because I haven't looked closely at that project. I mean, I do believe that its user base relative to Linux has been going down, unfortunately... Or unfortunately for them; I don't know if that's unfortunate in the global sense or ... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** So market share-wise yes, but market share-wise on servers everybody's losing to Linux no matter what, right? I think that their growth rate relative to themselves - their growth last year - is actually looking well. |
**Karl Fogel:** Well, I'm glad, because I think some degree of diversity is healthy. I don't want all of the free software operating system eggs to be in the Linux basket either, even though I'm a long-time Linux user myself. But just to give you a quick counter-example, although I think what you said surely is true of... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** It looks great, yeah. |
**Karl Fogel:** But the core of it is just hard, and it's just not about being on GitHub, it's just you have to understand how the C source code interacts with the Garbage Collection routines, what macros to use and how the redisplay engine works. You have to spend a lot of time studying it, and that's not gonna happen... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. I mean, it just doesn't map with my own experience. We've just had areas in NodeJS that we never thought that we would end up getting contributions to, outside of a core group of people that were spending all their time working on Node, because they were just too technically complex. And the mo... |
**Karl Fogel:** \[11:59\] Yes, I didn't mean to say that that doesn't happen. That happens, but I think that that leveling up is going to happen - do you think that being on GitHub or not would have made a difference in that leveling up? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I think that one, you have to have good processes in place and a culture of mentorship to level people up. But if you think about it like a funnel, GitHub is gonna increase the size of the funnel coming into that process, unquestionably. So I do think that it would increase the number of people comin... |
**Karl Fogel:** I can't argue that that's not true, I just don't know. And certainly there are other dysfunctionalities in the way the Emacs project is run, although they have been improving a lot lately. That sort of confound this experiment, so it's hard to know. But yeah, I think the idea of increasing the funnel ma... |
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