Community devroom
Open Source is More Than Just a License
Why an exclusive focus on licensing is an impoverished view of what open source truly is
The Open Source Initiative's definition of "open source" focuses exclusively on a list of approved licenses: Only software using one of the approved licenses counts as open source. This narrow definition is concerned only with the shape of business contracts designed to de-risk corporate involvement in FLOSS. But we all know that what makes open source amazing is not the licensing, but the community. Open source is defined in practice by its community-driven, collaborative mode of software development. So it should be no surprise that the best open source projects have a laser focus on building thriving communities. Nor should it surprise us that many projects using OSI-approved licenses appear open source in name only. Ethics is the study of how to get along with others. This makes it the perfect tool for understanding how to build thriving, successful communities. In this talk, I argue that the Ethical Source Definition actually provides a more compelling definition of "open source" than the OSD. It better accords with community usage of the term, capturing what makes open source unique and successful.
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| Type | devroom |
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More sessions
| 2/7/21 |
Management is difficult even under the best of circumstances and managing globally-distributed teams is even more so. With the global COVID-19 pandemic and the restrictions it forced on all of us, management is nothing like the best of circumstances. With the pandemic, suddenly everyone is a remotee – even people who have no experience in working remotely, and no desire to work in such an environment. In this talk, I’ll explore how the lessons learned from navigating a globally-distributed ...
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| 2/7/21 |
During this talk, you'll learn about topics like cross-cultural collaboration, giving and receiving feedback, and active listening -- all things that are vital to the health of our open source communities.
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| 2/7/21 |
The open source is getting mature and there are a lot of established ways of behavior, expectations even, that both contributors and maintainers of a codebase have. Some of these expectations are explicit in contributing files, whereas others are implicit and more of a cultural behaviour we as a group have taken on over the years. Governments and civil servants come from a very different background and when they start developing publishing software in the open under a free licenses, these ...
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| 2/7/21 |
What do you do when the interest of your different constituencies are in conflict? Who do you favor and why? The 4 Freedoms and the OSD were designed for a small community of hobbyists. They offer little help when it comes to addressing the challenges open source faces today. Does open source need a W3C-inspired "priority of constituencies?" In this talk we’ll dig into the priority of constituencies, see how it could apply to open source, and get some interesting insights out of doing so.
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| 2/7/21 |
Even a large Open Source project is at risk to have a too internal focus. Listening to users does not come by itself. This presentation describes the logic behind the user engagement of the MariaDB Foundation, which has been complemented during 2020 by "MariaDB Server Fests", virtual events reaching nearly 20.000 users.
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| 2/7/21 |
It is impossible to bring every idea, every innovation, and every improvement you can think of to fruition. Doing a little less allows you to honor the finite amount of time each person can give to your cause or project or workplace. But how do you start cutting those todo's down to a manageable level?
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| 2/7/21 |
Open-source software is code that is designed to be publicly accessible. Open source has core principles that make it rely on collaboration between contributors and companies in order to achieve a common goal. To attain more collaborations, onboarding in most open source communities should be considered a priority. Oftentimes, beginners who are new to open source projects develop cold feet a short while after joining a community because they are not properly onboarded into the community. ...
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