This week we’re joined by Steve O’Grady, Principal Analyst & Co-founder at RedMonk. The topic today is the definition of open source, the constant pressure on the true definition of the term, and the seemingly small but vocal minority that aim to protect that definition. In Steve’s post Why Open Source Matters, he says “open source is at a crossroads” and there are some seeking to break the definition of open source to one that is more permissive to their desires, and they are closer than ever to achieving that goal. Today’s conversation goes deep on this subject.

This week we’re talking about the launch of OpenTF and what it’s going to take to successfully fork HashiCorp’s Terraform. We’re joined by Josh Padnick to discuss what exactly happened, how HashiCorp’s license change changes things, who has been impacted by this change, and ultimately what they are doing about it.

This week we’re talking to Andreas Kling about SerenityOS and Ladybird. Andreas started SerenityOS as a means of therapy. It’s self-described as a love letter to “‘90s user interfaces with a custom Unix-like core.” Andreas previously worked at Nokia and later at Apple on the WebKit team, so he had an itch to do something along the lines of a browser, and that’s where Ladybird came from. We get into the details of compilers, OSs, browsers, web specifications, and the love of making software.

This week we’re talking with Jonathan Carter who’s on his fourth term as Debian Project Lead (DPL) and we’re talking about 30 years of Debian!

Ok Homelabbers, it’s time to unite! Join Adam and his new friend Techno Tim for 1.5 hours of homelab goodness. From networking and WiFi, virtualizing Ubuntu running Docker containers, to Home Assistant and automation, building a Kubernetes cluster, to gutting a perfectly good machine just to build exactly what you need to run the ultimate Plex server — that’s what homelab is about. Let’s do this.

Red Hat’s decision to lock down RHEL sources behind a subscription paywall was met with much ire and opened opportunity for Oracle to get a smack in and SUSE to announce a fork with $10 million behind it.

Few RHEL community members have been as publicly irate as Jeff Geerling, so we invited him on the show to discuss.

This week we’re talking about type checking with Jake Zimmerman. Jake is one of the leads at Stripe working on Sorbet — an open source project that does Type checking in Ruby and runs over Stripe’s entire Ruby codebase. As of May of 2022 Stripe’s codebase was over 15 million lines of code spread across 150,000 files. If you think you have a bigger Ruby codebase, Jake is down to go byte-for-byte to see who wins. Jake shares tons of wisdom and more importantly he shares why he thinks types will win in the end.

This week we’re joined by Adam Jacob and we’re talking about his mission at System Initiative to rebuild DevOps. They are out of stealth mode and ready to show off their transformative new power tool that reimagines what’s possible from DevOps. It’s an intelligent automation platform that allows DevOps teams to build detailed interactive simulations of their infrastructure and use them to rapidly update their production environments.

This is our last week of hallway track coverage at The Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit North America 2023 in Vancouver, Canada. Today’s anthology episode features: Jeffrey Sica (Developer Experience & Programs @ CNCF), Eddie Zaneski (Kubernetes SIG CLI), Yaron Schneider (Co-creator of Dapr and Founder and CTO at Diagrid).

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

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.

This week on The Changelog we’re taking you to the hallway track of The Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit North America 2023 in Vancouver, Canada. Today’s anthology episode features: Beyang Liu (Co-founder and CTO at Sourcegraph), Denny Lee (Developer Advocate at Databricks), and Stella Biderman (Executive Director and Head of Research at EleutherAI).

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

This week we’re celebrating Maintainer Month along with our friends at GitHub. Open source runs the world, but who runs open source? Maintainers. Open source maintainers are behind the software we use everyday, but they don’t always have the community or support they need. That’s why we’re celebrating open source maintainers during the month of May. Today’s conversation features Alyssa Wright (Bloomberg), Chad Whitacre (Sentry), and Duane O’Brien (Creator of the FOSS Contributor Fund and framework). We get into all the details, the why, the hows, and the struggles involved for companies to support open source.

This week we’re talking about LLMs with Simon Willison. We can not avoid this topic. Last time it was Stable Diffusion breaking the internet. This time it’s LLMs breaking the internet. Large Language Models, ChatGPT, Bard, Claude, Bing, GitHub Copilot X, Cody…we cover it all.

After years of working for Google on the Go Team, Filippo Valsorda quit last year to experiment with more sustainable paths for open source maintainers. Good news, it worked! Filippo is now a full-time open source maintainer and he joins Jerod on this episode to tell everyone exactly how he’s making the equivalent to his total compensation package at Google in open source.

Alex Ellis:

Yesterday, Docker sent an email to any Docker Hub user who had created an “organisation”, telling them their account will be deleted including all images, if they do not upgrade to a paid team plan. The email contained a link to a tersely written PDF (since, silently edited) which was missing many important details which caused significant anxiety and additional work for open source maintainers.

He goes on to explain the problem in great details. Btw, Alex is no Docker hater. He has a long history of using and supporting the tech. He goes on to say:

Open Source has a funding problem, and Docker was born in Open Source. We the community were their king makers, and now that they’re turning over significant revenue, they are only too ready to forget their roots.

This decision seems myopic. There are other image hosting options, one of them even shares (inspired?) half of DockerHub’s name… Oh, and here’s our open invitation to the folks at Docker to come on the pod.

This week Evan Prodromou is back to take us deeper into the Fediverse. As many of us reconsider our relationship with Twitter, Mastodon has been by-and-large the target of migration. They helped to popularize the idea of a federated universe of community-owned, decentralized, social networks. And, at the heart of it all is ActivityPub. ActivityPub is a decentralized social networking protocol published by the W3C. It is co-authored by Evan as well as; Christine Lemmer-Webber, Jessica Tallon, Erin Shepherd, and Amy Guy. Today, Evan shares the details behind this protocol and where the Fediverse might be heading.

An open-source knowledge-based community software. You can use it quickly to build Q&A community for your products, customers, teams, and more.

It looks like a lot of work has been put into this, with more cool stuff coming (integrations, gamification).

Filippo Valsorda:

Last May I left my job on the Go team at Google to experiment with more sustainable paths for open-source maintainers. I held on to my various maintainer hats (Go cryptography, transparency tooling, age, mkcert, yubikey-agent…), iterated on the model since September, and I’m happy to report that I am now a full-time independent open-source maintainer.

People like Filippo are still (unfortunately) the exception, not the rule. BUT! I’ll celebrate every time an open source maintainer makes it to the promised land, hopefully paving the way for others to follow after.

I’m sharing details about my progress to hopefully popularize the model, and eventually help other maintainers adopt it, although I’m not quite ready to recommend anyone else drop everything to try this just yet.

This week we’re talking about by Postgres with Craig Kerstiens, Chief Product Officer at Crunchy Data, and a well known ambassador for Postgres. Just Postgres. That’s what this week’s show is about.

Tyler Cipriani read “‘Did you miss my comments or what?’ Understanding Toxicity in Open Source Discussions,” and learned about entitlement:

The term is new (to me), but the paper renders a familiar scene, “The author is usually visibly upset about not being able to use the tool, often complaining about wasted time.”

The situation is all-too-common and exhausting. And when it happens over-and-over, maintainers give up.

It made me wonder: why have I never seen “entitlement” in a code of conduct?

Good question…

Thomas Depierre, writing about the concept of the Software Supply Chain in the context of open source development:

We are not suppliers. All the people writing and maintaining these projects, we are not suppliers. We do not have a business relationship with all these organisations. We are volunteers, writing code and putting it online under these Licences. And yes, we put it online for people to use them. But we do not get anything from it.

He goes on to discuss how, importantly, licenses such as the MIT point this out (in all caps):

If you use this, I owe you nothing. At all. We have no relationship. I put this up online on the condition that if you use it, all the risks are on you… So all your Software Supply Chain ideas? You are not buying from a supplier, you are a raccoon digging through dumpsters for free code. So I would advise you to put these rules in the same dumpster. And remember. I am not a supplier.

That raccoon line reminds me of a now-ancient meme you might still enjoy…

Welcome to 2023 — we’re kicking off the year talking to Justin Searls about the state of web development and why he just might write a “You Might Not Need React” post. He’s been so productive using Turbo and Stimulus (and tailwind) in Rails 7 that we had to talk about the state of Rails development today and a bunch of other fun topics around building for the web in 2023.

To wrap up the year we’re talking about what’s breaking the internet, again. Yes, we’re talking about ChatGPT and we’re joined by our good friend Shawn “swyx” Wang. Between his writings on L-Space Diaries and his AI notes repo on GitHub, we had a lot to cover around the world of AI and what might be coming in 2023.

Also, we have one more show coming out before the end of the year — our 5th annual “State of the log” episode where Adam and Jerod look back at the year and talk through their favorite episodes of the year and feature voices from the community. So, stay tuned for that next week.

Tony Parker writing on Swift’s blog:

When Swift began life as an open source project, we wanted to open not just the language itself, but the ecosystem around it. Foundation has been instrumental in the success of decades of software and has been an integral part of the Swift developer experience from the beginning, and we knew it had to be included in the open source offering.

Historically, Apple’s open source efforts have varied in just how open they are when it comes to community. On that topic, this is an uplifting bit of prose:

Open source projects are at their best when the community of users can participate and become a community of developers. A new, open contribution process will be available to enable all developers to contribute new API to Foundation.

This new Foundation project is slated to launch on GitHub in 2023.

This week we’re joined by Christina Warren, Senior Developer Advocate at GitHub, and a true tech and pop culture connoisseur. From her days at Mashable covering the intersections of entertainment and technology, to Gizmodo, to Microsoft, and now her current role at GitHub we talk with Christina about her journey from journalist to developer, and the latest happenings coming out of GitHub Universe.

BTW, we’re planning to get Christina on Backstage in the new year to talk about Plex, MakeMKV, and all things that go into hosting your own media server. Drop a commment on this episode with a +1 if you want to see that happen.