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. ...
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. ...
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. ...
Note to self - slides for staying sane when maintaining a popular open source project # For further reference - Simon MacDonald has a great collection of good advise on how to stay sane when running and maintaining a popular open source project. Link here: http://s.apache.org/sanity Some things he mentioned: Include a README. It should tell people what the project is about but also what the project is not about. ...
Async decision making # This is the second in a series of posts on inner source/open source. Bertrand Delacretaz gave an interesting talk on how to avoid meetings by introducing an async way of making decisions. He started off with a little anecdote related to Paul Graham’s maker’s vs. manager’s schedule: Bertrand’s father was a carpenter. He was working in the same house that his family was living in, so joining the family for lunch was common for him. ...
Notebook - OSS office at Adobe # tl;dr: This post summarises what I learnt at the Adobe Open Source Summit last week about which aspects to think of when running an open source office. It’s mainly a mental note for myself, hopefully others will find it useful as well. Longer version: This is another post in a series of articles on “random stuff I leant in Basel last week”. When I was invited to Adobe’s open source summit I had no idea what to expect from it. ...