Kelsey Hightower joined Bryan and Adam to revisit a topic Bryan had spoken about a decade ago: corporate open source anti-patterns. Kelsey brought his typical sagacity to a complex and fraught topic.We've been hosting a live show weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour, and recording them all; here is the recording from August 28th, 2023.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Kelsey Hightower.Here is the (lightly edited) live chat from the show:

xxxxbubbler: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pm8P4oCIY3g here is Bryan's talk from 1 decade ago, for reference

rolipo.li: web3 is going great

rolipo.li: https://web3isgoinggreat.com/


ahl0003: Last time Kelsey joined us for predictions


blainehansen: "Governance orgies" happen when the governance mechanisms aren't well-designed ha. If they are well-designed then governance is good!

jbk: opsware maybe? or tivoli?

uptill3: hp openview was one as well

sevanj: "they've got us working for trinkets"

sevanj: this was mentioned on the bugzilla anouncement regarding funded staff being pulled from working on project in the last 3 years.

blainehansen: All open source problems are secretly public goods problems haha

carpetbomberz.com: Hashicorp DID do a "thing"

blacksmithforlife: Just like taxes fund roads, we should have a internet usage tax that then funds these open source projects that everyone finds value in. The person taxed should get to decide which open source project gets the money

kaliszad: The problem is, you can help other people, but first you have to sustain yourself. ?

aarondgoldman: Too boring to be evil

rolipo.li: too busy to be evil?

aarondgoldman: Angular never got budget even when Inbox used it and had millions of users

blainehansen: Most open source projects are probably not best led/governed by a for-profit company ha

aarondgoldman: HP had a huge repair service business when their hardware got much more reliable it almost killed the company

geekgonecrazy: Never actually considered using CNCF membership as a qualification for using a tool

ahl0003: it's the nintendo seal of quality!

geekgonecrazy: It’s an interesting thought now that I’ve heard it ? especially for any sort of core utility like this

saone: On the topic of patterns that seem to be working, Docker Desktop's license requiring subscriptions for larger organizations for use of their product and focusing on providing a really good developer experience seems to be a really good spot for them to be

goodjanet: The term freeloading comes up only when there's a "problem" (usually fiscal in a company/group), the rest of the time the exact same actions are fine or often encouraged

mrdanack: I disagree, there are freeloaders. Multi-billion companies like IBM and Oracle have benefited from the PHP project for multiple decades and really haven't contributed even a modest amount back.

geekgonecrazy: Anytime hitting CLA I always use that as clue to take hesitation and think about contributing. ?

quasarken: I love that bit about community Adam

blacksmithforlife: https://www.linux.com/news/us-government-opens-access-federal-source-code-codegov/


blainehansen: Sometimes a community of passionate contributors is more a burden than a gift. Every project is different, not every project can be supported by many well-paid engineers at vc-funded incentive-aligned companies. I don't think the BUSL is smart or good, but there's a funding/support problem here that legitimately needs to be solved, and the existing open source social contract hasn't solved it. https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2022/burden-open-source-maintainer


blacksmithforlife: Disclaimer: I'm a federal employee who tried to get more software open source while I was working at various agencies. For the most part it was soundly ignored and the agencies just claimed it was too hard and they didn't have enough funding to do it, which in my opinion is just false

blacksmithforlife: But, if you want it, just do a FOIA,