Charlotte Spencer joined the show to talk about making open source more approachable, Your First PR, helping people make their first open source contribution, attracting new contributors, and what projects can do to bring in, retain, and communicate with new people.
Heather Meeker joined the show to talk about open source licensing, why open source licenses are historically significant, how much developers really need to know, and how much developers think they know. We also talk about mixing commercial and open source licenses, and how lawyers keep up with an ever-changing landscape.
David Cramer (CEO of Sentry) and Isaac Schlueter (CEO of npm) joined the show to talk about building businesses in open source, why they decided to turn their side projects into full-time work, how they experimented with finding steady sources of revenue, raising venture capital, working with investors and with community, and different company approaches to developing open source projects.
On today’s show Nadia and Mikeal talk with Rod Vagg, Chief Node Officer at NodeSource, about liberal contribution agreements and the underlying mechanics of liberal contribution management, how to level up casual contributors, how projects transition into a liberal contribution mindset and whether there is a place for BDFLs in the future of project governance.
On today’s show Nadia and Mikeal talk with Max Ogden, creator of Dat, an open source, decentralized tool for distributing data sets. Max has also done a lot of work in the Node.js ecosystem, including helping start NodeSchool and publishing hundreds of modules to npm. He was also one of the first Code for America fellows.
On today’s show Nadia and Mikeal are joined by Eric Holscher to discuss non-code contributions, how they are regarded in open source culture, their value, and how to incentivize this type of work. They also talked about how Read the Docs grew a documentation community, contribution guides, and why this work matters.
On today’s show Nadia and Mikeal are joined by Jan Lehnardt to discuss the value of building communities to reduce burden on maintainers and create sustainable projects, how communities help grow a project, and contributor models.
On today’s show Nadia and Mikeal are joined by Andrew Nesbitt and Arfon Smith to talk about open source metrics, and how to interpret data around dependencies and usage. They talked about what we currently can, and can not measure in today’s open source ecosystem. They also talked about individual project metrics, how we can measure success, what maintainers should be paying attention to, and whether or not GitHub stars really matter.
Nadia Eghbal and Mikeal Rogers kick off Season 1 of Request For Commits with a two part conversation with Karl Fogel — a software developer who has been active in open source since its inception.
Nadia Eghbal and Mikeal Rogers kick off Season 1 of Request For Commits with a two part conversation with Karl Fogel — a software developer who has been active in open source since its inception.
Nadia Eghbal joined the show to discuss a HUGE topic that’s near and dear to our heart – funding open source! We discussed what it takes to fund open source software development, Nadia’s current investigative journalism efforts around funding open source (funded by the Ford Foundation), venture-backed open source projects, what it means for an open source project to be in good shape, some potential solutions to provide better long-term support for open source, and we tried to determine how much the open source of the world might be worth.
