/Open Source

Uncurled

- Daniel Stenberg tl;dr: "Everything I know and learned about running and maintaining OS projects for three decades. I have been actively involved in OS development since the early 1990s when I discovered the phenomenon of people writing source code they give away freely for others to use and modify under a certain license."

featured in #319

How To Pay Professional Maintainers

- Filippo Valsorda tl;dr: To successfully fund an OS project, a company needs to: (1) Pay the maintainers, not people external to the project. (2) Pay "real money" i.e. what they could make as senior engineers. (3) Pay for maintenance, not features or support. (4) Keep paying and assess performance at contract renewal time.

featured in #300

Support Open Source That You Use By Paying The Maintainers To Talk To Your Team

- Simon Willison tl;dr: "Reach out to the maintainers and offer them generous speaking fees for remote talks to your engineering team." Simon believes that companies are more likely to spend on a one-off paid speaking opportunities than pay a monthly donation. If the maintainer is not an experienced speaker, find a member of your team to act as a host and gather questions from your engineers in advance to run the session as a Q&A.

featured in #294

Lessons Learned From My 10 Year Open Source Project

- Steve Micallef tl;dr: (1) Writing open source software can be very rewarding in ways you can’t predict e.g gratitude from users, improvement as an engineer, etc... (2) Be in it for the long haul. "If you are consistently working on improving the project, it will get noticed and used over the flash-in-a-pan software that appears and eventually gets abandoned." (3) Ship it and ship regularly. And more. 

featured in #291

Open Source Maintainer Pulls The Plug On Npm Packages Colors And Faker, Now What?

- Liran Tal tl;dr: "The open source maintainer of the wildly popular npm package colors intentionally introduced an offending commit that adds an infinite loop to the source code. The infinite loop is triggered and executed immediately upon initialization of the package’s source code, and would result in a DoS."

featured in #281

"Open Source" Is Broken

- Christine Dodrill tl;dr: The recent vulnerability discovered in log4j2 is a "perfect microcosm of all of the major ecosystem problems with "Open Source." It is "a culture of taking from open source without giving anything back." This software is used by the largest of companies while the maintainer of log4j2 describes his work as "a spare time passion project," with a total of 3 people funding it prior to the vulnerability being discovered. Christine believes it's an obligation for companies to donate in return for using OS software.

featured in #276

The Coming Firmware Revolution (Video)

- Bryan Cantrill tl;dr: "Firmware is software that's just harder to get to." Bryan outlines major industry trends, the end of Moore's Law and introduces us to Wright's Law, which states that the more you manufacture something i.e. a CPU, the cheaper its cost, and the underlying impact this law will have on firmware. 

featured in #269

An Unbelievable Demo

- Brendan Gregg tl;dr: Brendan was a consultant at Sun Microsystems and author of multiple Dtrace applications. Sun Microsystems, the original publishers of DTrace, introduced him to an "expert who was on a world tour demonstrating Sun's new DTrace-based product." When Brendan saw the product, he realized it was his own work being presented back to him.

featured in #232

10 Years Of Open-Source Visualization

- Mike Bostock tl;dr: " A handful of observations" celebrating D3's anniversary (1)"Teaching is the most impactful aspect of tool building." (2) Supporting the tool is a great mechanism for feedback. (3) Bells and whistles are costly, and more.

featured in #226

Introducing Open Web Docs

- Robert Nyman tl;dr: "A collective project designed to support a community of technical writers around strategic creation and long-term maintenance of web platform technology documentation that is open and inclusive for all."

featured in #222