Panelists

Allen "Gunner" Gunn | Eric Berry | Justin Dorfman | Pia Mancini | Richard Littauer

Guest

Nathan Schneider
University of Colorado Boulder

Show Notes

Hello and welcome to Sustain! In this episode, we have special guest, Nathan Schneider, a Professor of Media Studies at CU Boulder. He also runs a new little outfit called Media Enterprise Design Lab. In today’s episode, Nathan will tell us what he does, how he got to where he is today, and he explains what he means by, The Tyranny of Openness.” We will also discuss Democratic Mediums, Platform Cooperativism, and CommunityRule. Download this episode now!

[00:01:24] Nathan tells us what he does at University of Colorado, Boulder and social.coop. He’s also running Zoom right now on a Linux machine and he tells us how he got to where he is today.

[00:05:03] Richard wants Nathan to describe what he means by “The Tyranny of Openness.”

[00:07:33] Justin has been thinking about the Linux Kernel, Python (up until recently), Ruby, and cURL. They’re all run by BDFL and installed on billions of devices, so why is that working and in the future, how should projects at that scale work?

[00:11:10] Pia asks Nathan in his wildest dreams, what would a structure like he was talking about look like and what tools should we be building? Gunner is curious and asks if the notion of governance design patterns is something that’s part of Nathan’s Meta governance? Nathan talks about an attempt he made to collect patterns, a little directory called, Democratic Mediums, which was a forerunner to some of this work.

[00:17:54] Richard is curious to know what’s the split in coders like on a normal GitHub project, because there are people who would be classified as doers versus people who’d be classified as decision makers, and how does this work directly into governance?

[00:21:27] Nathan talks about Platform Cooperativism as a critique of open source.

[00:25:08] Nathan discusses about taking ownership, the big debates happening around Open Source right now and licensing issues.

[00:29:21] Pia asks Nathan to talk about CommunityRule and his thoughts on it.

[00:32:18] Nathan tells where you could find his work, where you can read his books, and how you can get involved.

Spotlight

• [00:33:52] Justin’s spotlight is The Governance Ready Working Group.
• [00:34:10] Gunner’s spotlight is Gathering for Open Science Hardware.
• [00:34:29] Pia’s spotlight is SaveInternetFreedom.tech
• [00:35:11] Eric’s spotlight is Allinone.im.
• [00:35:27] Richard’s spotlight is Mathias Buus.
• [00:35:53] Nathan’s spotlights are The Ethical Source Movement and System76.

Quotes

[00:05:04] “You like the phrase of “The Tyranny of Openness.”

[00:05:18] “I guess another annoying habit I have is that when I love something, I like to criticize it.”

[00:09:13] “But there’s some sophistication there that a lot of our Open Source projects lack.”

[00:09:43] “You know you’re an Admin or not. Admins can silence people, and you know, have incredible despotic control over voice.”

[00:17:32] “It’s how engineers think. They want the engineered solution, but you know, politics is very good at resisting engineers.”

[00:24:16] “Microsoft is stepping in and forking their code and you know, making money off of it. And they’re like, wait, what’s going on? This is not in line with our values, but it is in line with their licenses.”

[00:25:59] “It’s sort of like a double-edged sword because you know with the Open Source licenses as they are defined now, they allow Amazon and Microsoft to do this.”

Links

Nathan Schneider

CommunityRule

Social.coop

Media Enterprise Design Lab

Democratic Mediums

Xkcd-A Webcomic of Romance, Sarcasm, Math, and Language

The Tyranny of Openness: What Happened to Peer Production?

Governance Readiness

Gathering for Open Science Hardware

Save Internet Freedom Tech

All-in-One Messenger

Mathias Buus GitHub

The Ethical Source Movement

System76

Credits

• Produced by Justin Dorfman
• Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound
• Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at Peachtree Sound
• Ad Sales by Eric Berry

Special Guest: Nathan Schneider.

Support Sustain

Panelists

Justin Dorfman | Eric Berry | Richard Littauer

Guest

Bogdan Vasilescu

Show Notes

Hello and welcome to Sustain! Today, we have Bogdan Vasilescu, who is an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, School of Computer Science. We start out by learning what Bogdan builds at the STRUDEL Lab. Then we discuss, “The GHTorrent project.” We also learn about the research that he and his group at CMU have been doing on open source sustainability. There are a few papers on topics related to sustainability that we will also discuss. One of his papers really inspired Justin, and after listening to this podcast you will probably agree that this is one of our best guests!

[00:02:18] Bogdan tells us more about what he builds at the STRUDEL Lab. He gives a shout-out to his students and collaborators who are doing all the work.

[00:03:50] Bogdan talks about one of his papers titled, “How To Not Get Rich.” He also explains The GHTorrent project which is like a mirror of GitHub.

[00:08:43] Justin asks Bogdan about a website he built and how 46% of packages show a badge. He asks how long did it take to get to that number? He describes the process and how they compute that number.

[00:11:31] Eric goes back to the scraping of GitHub’s readme’s and these npm module badges, and asks Bogdan what is he looking for with those and how does that translate to the topic of how not to get rich with open source?

[00:15:27] Eric asks Bogdan since he says that badges add almost validity and gives developers a sense of trust that this project appears to have an ecosystem around it, but how does that tie in with donations and how does it tie in with your report?

[00:18:14] Eric explains why he’s so interested in the donation side. He talks about corporations donating money out of their charity budget and unless they can donate with the 501C3 which allows it to be tax deductible, it’s a financial loss for them. He asks Bogdan’s takeaway on this and why are donations a terrible way to fund open source?

[00:22:38] Bogdan lets us know when the follow-up study of “How To Get Rich with Open Source” is coming out and what it contains.

[00:26:52] Eric wonders if Bogdan talked to GitHub about getting funds and he lets us know.

[00:28:50] Justin tells Bogdan how he was really inspired by his paper and how he is the best guest. Eric gives credit to his phenomenal students and thanks them for all this important work they are doing.

[00:30:00] Richard has a question about donations for Bogdan. He wants to know is there a light saying you should even bother with donation models and where is the good news? Bogdan answers.

[00:33:53] Eric wants to know who is doing donations the right way, what is the ideal scenario, and is there a right way to go about doing it?

[00:35:16] Richard mentions a couple of Bogdan’s other papers that deal with sustainability from another angle: “Why do People Give Up FLOSSing? A Study of Contributor Disengagement in Open Source,” and “Going Farther Together: The Impact of Social Capital on Sustained Participation in Open Source.” He wants to know what makes people stay in open projects and what makes people disengage?

Spotlight

• [00:41:16] Richard’s spotlight is Shields.io.
• [00:41:35] Eric’s spotlight is our sponsor Linode. The reason why the Sustain Podcast exists is because of Tyler Van Fossen and the Linode Company.
  
• [00:42:37] Justin’s spotlight is the Sustain Podcast newsletter he just launched. You can sign up at sustain.codefund.fm/newsletter.
• [00:42:57] Bogdan’s spotlight is a shout-out to the “Jekyll-Scholar” project.

Quotes

[00:14:02] “What we’re observing through this series of studies that we’ve done, and other people have done too, is that people’s behavior changes when you have this salience of information.”

[00:16:30] “On average, people submitting PR’s, they are more likely to add tests to their PR’s when the stuff is being displayed because then there’s some feedback loop that’s instant and very visible.”

[00:17:54] “That should be a part of the sustainability checklist. If you want to have a sustainable open source project, you probably need badges, you probably need a CI indicator. Those are core to making it so that project becomes adoptable with other developers.”

[00:24:08] “In the real world, organizations asking for charitable donations are very clear about what the goals of these campaigns are and we’re not seeing that in open source just yet.”

[00:29:51] “But really, thanks to Cassandra Overney and Jens Meinicke who were the students working on this paper, they’re the ones who deserve all the credit, not me, and my collaborator, Christian Kastner form CMU.”

[00:34:09] “I don’t think expecting donations to be the only way to sustain an open source project is the right approach.”

Links

Bogdan Vasilescu Twitter

Bogdan Vasilescu

Strudel Research

Strudel

The GHTorrent project

Strudel Publications

“Stress and Burnout in Open Source: Toward Finding, Understanding, and Mitigating Unhealthy Interactions.”

“Ecosystem-Level Determinants of Sustained Activity in Open-Source Projects: A Case Study of the PyPI Ecosystem.”

“How to Not Get Rich: An Empirical Study of Donations in Open Source.”

Shields.io

Sustain Podcast Newsletter

Linode

Jekyll-Scholar

Credits

• Produced by Justin Dorfman at CodeFund
• Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound
• Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at Peachtree Sound
• Ad Sales by Eric Berry at CodeFund

Special Guest: Bogdan Vasilescu.

Sponsored By:

• Linode: Whether you’re working on a personal project or managing your enterprise’s infrastructure, Linode has the pricing, support, and scale you need to take your project to the next level. Get started on Linode today. Promo Code: sustain2020
• Segment: Segment is a customer data platform that makes good data accessible for all teams.

Support Sustain

Panelists

Justin Dorfman | Richard Littauer

Guest

Dr. Carlos Maltzahn

Show Notes

Hello and welcome to Sustain! In this episode, we have a really interesting guest, Dr. Carlos Maltzahn, who’s a Professor at University of California at Santa Cruz. He teaches Computer Science and Engineering and specializes in storage systems. Carlos is going to teach us all about his project CROSS (Center for Research in Open Source Software). He will tell us how they get projects, how they get funded for projects, and he will explain the Ceph storage system to us as well as SkyhookDM. Interested in finding out how to enroll in CROSS? Go ahead and download this episode to find out!

[00:01:45] Carlos explains a project that is dear to his heart and he’s been directing for a while. called CROSS. He also walks us through how to get involved and what’s the life cycle look like for people.

[00:04:21] Carlos explains funding Open Source Autonomous Vehicles. He tells us how they get the projects and how they get the projects funded.

[00:09:25] Carlos explains about the funding part. He talks about “Ceph Storage System” that Sage Weil created as part of his PhD project. Great story here!

[00:19:33] Find out here the key advice CROSS got from Sage Weil about OpenStack.

[00:23:53] Richard asks Carlos since he’s so many successes thus far, have there been any other success stories he’s had? He shares some good news here.

[00:26:25] Carlos tells us about SkyhookDM, a programmable storage for databases.

[00:30:07] Richard mentions a great book he’s been reading that he highly suggests reading called, “Designing Data- Intensive Applications,” by Martin Kleppmann.

[00:30:33] If someone wants to enroll in CROSS, Carlos tells us four possibilities how to do this.

Spotlight

• [00:32:52] Richard spotlight is ROpenSci, an awesome project to help people get into the sciences and keep it open source and collaborate.
• [00:33:27] Justin’s spotlight is an article on ZDNet, “Mozilla starts funding open source coronavirus tech projects.” It’s a good read! ☺
• [00:34:06] Carlos’s spotlight is an incubator project at CROSS called “Popper,” by Ivo Jimenez.

Quotes

[00:04:56] “It turns out there’s a lot of interesting things going on in the university and the faculty are kind of discovering the usefulness of open-source software in their research.”

[00:06:22] “That is only possible with this open source concept, where you basically make it available, and that’s good for reproducibility of the science, but it’s also good too for learning, for bringing in the classroom all these things.”

[00:11:03] “We asked Sage whether it would be nice to give back a little bit to the university. And so, he gave me 2 million dollars to essentially build CROSS. It was the second largest gift ever given to the School of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz and it was a big deal.”

[00:19:42] “One of the key factors that made Ceph successful was that it fit into the ecosystem of OpenStack.”

Links

Dr. Carlos Maltzahn

CROSS at UC Santa Cruz

Ceph

SkyhookDM

“Designing Data-Intensive Applications” Martin Kleppmann

ROpenSci

“Mozilla starts funding open source coronavirus tech projects,” ZDNet

Falsifiable-Popper Project

Credits

• Produced by Justin Dorfman at CodeFund
• Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound
• Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at Peachtree Sound
• Ad Sales by Eric Berry at CodeFund

Special Guest: Dr. Carlos Maltzahn.

Support Sustain