This week on The Changelog we’re continuing our Maintainer Month series by taking to you back to the hallway track of The Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit North America 2023 in Vancouver, Canada. Today’s anthology episode features: Stormy Peters (VP of Communities at GitHub), Dr. Dawn Foster (Director of Open Source Community Strategy at VMware), and Angie Byron (Drupal Core Product Manager and Community Director at Aiven).

Special thanks to our friends at GitHub for sponsoring us to attend this conference as part of Maintainer Month.

Maintainer Week is finally here and we’re excited to make this an annual thing! If Maintainer Week is new to you, check out episode #442 with Josh Simmons and Kara Sowles.

Today we’re talking Brett Cannon. Brett is Dev Manager of the Python Extension for VS Code, Python Steering Council Member, and core team member for Python. He recently shared a blog post The social contract of open source, so we invited Brett to join us for Maintainer Week to discuss this topic in detail.

Thank a maintainer on us! We’re printing a limited run t-shirt that’s free for maintainers, and all you gotta do is thank them, today!

Today we welcome Mike Pennisi into our Maintainer Spotlight. This is a special flavor of The Changelog where we go deep into a maintainer’s story. Mike is the maintainer of JSHint which, since its creation in 2011, was encumbered by a license that made it very hard for legally-conscious teams to use the project. The license was the widely-used MIT Expat license, but it included one additional clause: “The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.” Because of this clause, many teams could not use JSHint.

Today’s episode with Mike covers the full gamut of JSHint’s journey and how non-free licensing can poison the well of free software.

Today we welcome Matt Klein into our Maintainer Spotlight. Matt is the creator of Envoy, born inside of Lyft. It’s an edge and service proxy designed for cloud-native applications. Envoy was unexpectedly popular, and completely changed the way Lyft considers what and how to open source. While Matt has had several opportunities to turn Envoy into a commercial open source company, he didn’t. In today’s conversation with Matt we learn why he choose a completely different path for the project.

Today we welcome Hisham Muhammad into our Maintainer Spotlight. Hisham is the creator of htop - a well known cross-platform interactive process viewer. This conversation with Hisham covers the gamut of being an open source software maintainer. To set the stage, a new version of htop was announced, but not by Hisham – it was a kind takeover of the project and needless to say Hisham was surprised, but ultimately relieved. Why? Well, that’s what this episode it all about…

Carbon is an open source web app that helps you create and share beautiful images of your source code. Whether you’ve used Carbon personally or not, odds are you’ve seen its dent on the universe of social code sharing. Mike Fix has been maintaining Carbon for a few years and he’s embraced the project as an opportunity to experiment and practice working in public.

On this Maintainer Spotlight episode, we chat with Mike about building Carbon, growing its community, sustainability models, and why he loves the world of open source.

Adam loves a good dark theme and supporting a fellow creator, and Hedy Li finished the episode we did with Nikita Prokopov covering FiraCode and reached out saying Zeno Rocha’s work on Dracula deserved the same credit. We agreed. So we linked up with Zeno about his passion for open source, how he’s changed his mind on making money with open source, his big release of Dracula Pro and the future of Dracula, and of course his new book – 14 Habits of Highly Productive Developers. Check for a link in the show notes for details on how to get your hands on Zeno’s book for free through our giveaway.

A listener request led us to Nikita Prokopov and FiraCode, and we’re sure glad they did. When we think of open source software, fonts aren’t usually high on the list of things that need maintaining. That’s not true when your font also supports hundreds of programming ligatures like FiraCode does. Nikita has his hands full!

Saul Pwanson is the creator and maintainer of VisiData, a terminal interface for exploring and arranging tabular data. On this Maintainer Spotlight episode, Saul joins Jerod for a wide-ranging discussion on crossword puzzles, biographs, and Saul’s open source gift to the world. Thanks to AJ for the suggestion!

We sit down with Tobias Koppers of webpack fame to talk about his life as a full-time maintainer of one of the most highly used (4 million+ dependent repos!) and influential tools in all of the web.

Things we ask Tobias include: how he got here, how he pays himself, has he ever gotten a raise, what his typical day is like, how he decides what to work on, if he pays attention to the competition, and if he’s ever suffered from burnout.

Caleb Porzio is the creator & maintainer of Livewire, AlpineJS, and more. His latest open source endeavor was announced as “sponsorware”, which means it lived in a private repo (only available to Caleb’s GitHub Sponsors) until he hit a set sponsorship threshold, at which point it was open sourced.

On this episode, we talk through this sponsorware experiment in-depth. We learn how he dreamt it up, how it went (spoiler: very well), and how he had to change his mindset on 2 things in order to make sustainability possible.

In this episode we’re shining our maintainer spotlight on Ovilia. Hailing from Shanghai, China, Ovilia is an up-and-coming developer who contributes to Apache ECharts, maintains Polyvia, which does very cool low-poly image and video processing, and has a sweet personal website, too.

This episode with Ovilia continues our maintainer spotlight series where we dig deep into the life of an open source software maintainer. We’re producing this series in partnership with Tidelift. Huge thanks to Tidelift for making this series possible.

In this episode we’re shining our maintainer spotlight on Valeri Karpov. Val has been the solo maintainer of Mongoose since 2014. This episode with Val continues our maintainer spotlight series where we dig deep into the life of an open source software maintainer. We’re producing this series in partnership with Tidelift. Huge thanks to Tidelift for making this series possible.

In this episode we’re shining our maintainer spotlight on Feross Aboukhadijeh. Feross is the creator and maintainer of 100’s of open source projects which have been downloaded 100’s of million of times each month — projects like StandardJS, BitMidi, and WebTorrent to name a few. This episode with Feross continues our maintainer spotlight series where we dig deep into the life of an open source software maintainer. We’re producing this series in partnership with Tidelift. Huge thanks to Tidelift for making this series possible.

In this episode we’re shinning our maintainer spotlight on Ned Batchelder. Ned is one of the lucky ones out there that gets to double-dip — his day job is working on open source at edX, working on the Open edX community team. Ned is also a “single maintainer” of coverage.py - a tool for measuring code coverage of Python programs. This episode with Ned kicks off the first of many in our maintainer spotlight series where we dig deep into the life of an open source software maintainer. We’re producing this series in partnership with Tidelift. Huge thanks to Tidelift for making this series possible.