April 25, 2024
How hard can it be: Open Source contributions # “Sharing is caring - if only more downstream users simply contributed to the open source software that they depend upon.” - a thought that has crossed my mind more than once in the past decades. Except - for your average software engineer in industry “contributing to open source” is anything but simple. In addition it’s anything but obvious why - on top of daily work - one should commit time to open source.
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August 29, 2018
FrOSCon 2018 # A more general summary: https://tech.europace.de/froscon-2018/ of the conference written in German. Below a more detailed summary of the keynote by Lorena Jaume-Palasi.
In her keynote “Blessed by the algorithm - the computer says no!” Lorena detailed the intersection of ethics and technology when it comes to automated decision making systems. As much as humans with a technical training shy away from questions related to ethics, humans trained in ethics often shy away from topics that involve a technical layer.
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March 8, 2018
An argument against proxies # Proxies? In companies getting started with an upstream first concept this is what people are called who act as the only interface between their employer and an open source project: All information from any project used internally flows through them. All bug reports and patches intended as upstream contribution also flows through them - hiding entire teams producing the actual contributions.
At Apache projects I learnt to dislike this setup of having proxies act in place of the real contributors.
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February 13, 2018
FOSDEM 2018 - recap # Too crowded, too many queues, too little space - but also lots of friendly people, Belgian waffles, ice cream, an ASF dinner with grey beards and new people, a busy ASF booth, bumping into friends every few steps, meeting humans you see only online for an entire year or more: For me, that’s the gist of this year’s FOSDEM.
Note: German version of the article including images appeared in my employer’s tech blog.
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January 23, 2018
FOSS Backstage - CfP open # It’s almost ten years ago that I attended my first ApacheCon EU in Amsterdam. I wasn’t entirely new to the topic of open source or free software. I attended several talks on Apache Lucene, Apache Solr, Hadoop, Tomcat, httpd (I still remember that the most impressive stories didn’t necessarily come from the project members, but from downstream users. They were the ones authorized to talk publicly about what could be done with the project - and often became committers themselves down the road.
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December 6, 2017
Trust and confidence # One of the main principles at Apache (as in The Apache Software Foundation) is “Community over Code” - having the goal to build projects that survive single community members loosing interest or time to contribute. In his book “Producing Open Source Software” Karl Fogel describes this model of development as Consensus-based Democracy (in contrast to benevolent dictatorship): “Consensus simply means an agreement that everyone is willing to live with.
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October 29, 2017
Open Source Summit - Day 3 # Open source summit Wednesday started with a keynote by members of the Banks family telling a packed room on how they approached raising a tech family. The first hurdle that Keila (the teenage daughter of the family) talked about was something I personally had never actually thought about: Communication tools like Slack that are in widespread use come with an age restriction excluding minors.
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October 25, 2017
Open source summit - Day 2 # Day two of Open Source summit for me started a bit slow for lack of sleep. The first talk I went to was on “Developer tools for Kubernetes” by Michelle Noorali and Matt Butcher. Essentially the two of them showed two projects (Draft and Brigade to help ease development apps for Kubernetes clusters. Draft here is the tool to use for developing long running, daemon like apps.
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October 23, 2017
Open Source Summit Prague 2017 - part 1 # Open Source Summit, formerly known as LinuxCon, this year took place in Prague. Drawing some 2000 attendees to the lovely Czech city, the conference focussed on all things Linux kernel, containers, community and governance. The first day started with three crowded keynotes: First one by Neha Narkhede on Keynotes Apache Kafka and the Rise of the Streaming Platform. Second one by Reuben Paul (11 years old) on how hacking today really is just childs play: The hack itself might seem like toying around (getting into the protocol of children's toys in order to make them do things without using the app that was intended to control them).
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May 26, 2017
Open development and inner source for fun and profit # Last in a row if interesting talks at Adobe Open Source Summit was on Open Development/ Inner Source and how it benefits internal projects given by Michael Marth. Note: He knows there’s subtle differences between inner source and open development, but mentioned to use the terms interchangeably in his talk. So what is inner source all about? Essentially: Use all the tools and processes that already work for open source projects, just internally.
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