Challenges & Growth
24 clips
Overcoming obstacles in open source
What have been challenges you or the open source community have faced?
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Introduction to FOSSDA
Cat Allman
Eric Allman
Kirk McKusick
Karen Sandler
Joshua Gay
Tony Wasserman
Jon "Maddog" Hall
Lawrence (Larry) Rosen
Tristan Nitot
Deb Goodkin
Heather Meeker
Bruce Perens
Larry Augustin
Roger Dannenberg
Bart Decrem
Early Exposure
Personal Mission & Values
Education & Mentorship
Open Source Projects
Community & Collaboration
Evolution of Open Source
Showing 24 clips
0:23
Concerns and Hopes for the Future of the Internet
From: Bart Decrem • Leaving Disney and Founding The Hobby
We believe that technology has a lot of risks...but we also have faith, you know, that technology can solve problems. And if we stay in the driver's seat, we can use this technology to solve important problems.
0:52
Challenges in Open Source Success
From: Bruce Perens • Open Source Success and Challenges
Bruce Perens: We did not achieve all of our goals. Actually, I would have liked it if people did appreciate the need for software freedom, which is something that is becoming more meaningful today, especially in the context of privacy and people seeing the large web companies, as sort of privacy eating giants, don't really have your best interest in mind. And open source, though very successful, I think, has evolved a extremely capable open source, exploitation industry. So, I'm not quite so happy about that, I actually am working on solutions.
4:04
Managing Volunteer Contributions
From: Bruce Perens • Community Collaboration and its Challenges
Bruce Perens: Um, I think that the software collaboration was very successful. A lot of the organizational efforts were not. For example, during this time, I drove the creation of software in the public interest, non-profit that's still very active in supporting open source projects, and there was vast distrust among the Debian developers of software in the public interest.
4:21
Concerns and Challenges for the Future of Open Source
From: Cat Allman • Sponsorship, Challenges, and Sustainability
Cat Allman: Challenges going forward to the FLOSS ecosystem. Something that I'm really concerned about, And I'm conflicted about it is, FLOSS is one of those 20 plus year overnight successes. It's been around a long time, but it's only now that people, businesses are appreciating how essential it is. At the same time, they still want the code for free. I mean, lots of businesses like Google are understanding the importance of working with projects so that they are sustainable, they have the economic and other resources that they need to continue. But what I worry about is the psychological aspects...
1:34
Challenges in Open Source Development
From: Deb Goodkin • Overcoming Obstacles in Open Source Work
Karen Herman: What is your biggest challenge? Deb Goodkin: Um, I would say the biggest challenge that, well, a couple of things, uh, one is for the project, one's for us. So one would be getting the money that to do this work, to fund the work. Cause we, there's, there's so many things we know we can help with and we just don't have the resources to do it. And, uh, we have these conversations all the time, like, oh, if we had someone who could step in to do this, that would be so beneficial. And, but we can't, can't do it cause we don't have the funding.
4:03
Being a Woman in a Male-Dominated Field
From: Deb Goodkin • Gender and Technology
Karen Herman: Have you had any challenges in your career, um, being a woman in sort of a man dominated field? Deb Goodkin: Um, well, yeah, I have, um, I mean, even, you know, starting out in college, um, there weren't that many women in, who are studying any, any of those disciplines, uh, computer science, engineering, computer engineering, and math. Cause those were, I think the areas that I touched on. Um, but I also found that because it was such a hard discipline that we really worked together to understand things that we had. Um, I mean, maybe you didn't have Google back then, but yeah, we had our own working group that spent a lot of time together. And so sometimes, so there might be six of us and really just teaching each other concepts, if someone doesn't understand it.
18:11
The Creation of DeliverMail
From: Eric Allman • DeliverMail: A Practical Hack
Eric Allman:...it turns out we already had a- another very slow, also terminal-based network called Birknet, which was a project done by a guy named Eric Schmidt... I said, Birknet is software, ARPANET is software, and I know how to write software. I'll bet I can find some way to glue these things together... And that was a quick hack called DeliverMail. And I won't say it worked well, but it did work and so I basically wrote Deliver Mail to get people to stop bothering me.
4:40
Points of Pride
From: Eric Allman • What He's Most Proud Of
Eric Allman:...coming out of the closet because it made my life a lot better and frankly the lives of other people around me a lot better... I lost some friends. You know, when I came out of the closet, I didn't just like open the door, I used dynamite to blow it open... And it gave me a path to being an easier to get along with person.
0:38
Navigating Uncharted Legal Territory
From: Heather Meeker • Early Experiences in Open Source Law
Heather Meeker: That scares lawyers a lot. Like when they don't have rules, they get freaked out. They like rules. So the experience was like walking out on a wire, you know. And by the way, there were some people at the time and probably still some some people, some lawyers who just would not deal with it at all because it was too weird and too new. And they felt that it was risky to give advice about it. But but my clients had questions. You know, I couldn't just say, oh, no, I don't know the answer to that. Like, you have to figure it out.
2:36
Challenges Faced in Open Source and Linux's Evolution
From: Jon "Maddog" Hall • Consulting for Governments and the United Nations
Maddog: ...What happened was this company called Sun Microsystems decided that they were going to bring out a system that that was specifically for UNIX at a much lower price...
0:37
Challenges and Community Building in Open Source
From: Joshua Gay • Grad School and the Commons Development Foundation
I decided to create something called MagnaWiki, a way to do annotations and revisioning of legislative texts... I was regularly calling legislative aides and things and getting their input and they were excited...
2:19
Call for Engagement and Support in Software Freedom
From: Karen Sandler • Final Reflections and Call to Action
Karen Sandler: I would say that if you are able, you should donate to these causes that you care about...
1:08
Bootstrapping and Persistence in Entrepreneurship
From: Larry Augustin • Entrepreneurial Lessons and Growth
This is just an amazing way of bootstrapping. And to me, I always look for today, I love the entrepreneurial part of the world and people launching and building things. We got people to send us checks for the computers they wanted, because we were selling a physical device. And to me, these things were hugely expensive. I mean, somewhere between $1,000 and $3,000. And I couldn't afford to buy the parts to send someone. People sent us a check ahead of time. We would cash the check, go buy the parts, have an assembly party in the living room of my apartment and ship them out. And that was what the business was initially.
0:37
The Cathedral and the Bazaar Impact
From: Larry Augustin • Business Challenges in Open Source
If you look at the concept of I am selling you something that's free, it's kind of an odd concept. It takes people a moment to get their heads around this concept.
1:54
Learning by Doing
From: Larry Augustin • Entrepreneurial Lessons and Growth
I always encourage learning. You know, as I look back now, I realize how naive I was at every stage, but that's how we learn. So I'm not big on the would have, should have, could have done it differently. I think everyone has to go through the learning phases, and there's a ton of things that I got wrong all the time. But I listened a lot, and I hope I learned from those. This is a little of my philosophy when I advise entrepreneurs and companies - I give them advice, but I also think they have to learn themselves. People make mistakes, that's part of the learning process. It's one of the things I think is great about the Silicon Valley culture - it's a culture in which people learn from making mistakes, and you can make a mistake, and get better, and learn, and come back, and that's okay.
4:00
First Programming Job and Shift to RCA
From: Lawrence (Larry) Rosen • Graduate Studies and Early Career
The first program I remember working on was kind of weird. It was, um, it was a program to try to determine what people's sign was in their, uh, when they were born and what kinds of influences the planets were having on them...
1:49
Interaction with Richard Stallman and Free Software Foundation
From: Lawrence (Larry) Rosen • Interactions with Richard Stallman and OSI
Karen Herman: Can you talk a little bit about Richard Stallman or your relationship with him? Larry Rosen: I met him through ISI. He was not on the OSI board, but he was, of course, a very powerful figure in the open source community.
0:16
Decision to Go Open Source
From: Roger Dannenberg • Decision to Go Open Source
Roger Dannenberg: Yeah, a lot of from Dominic Mazzoni who was a grad student at the time and Dominic did did more of the work than anyone else. It was mainly the two of us and I was contributing some kind of low-level audio drivers that I had built and and worked on some symbolic display as opposed to audio waveform display, but Dominic really put together the basic waveform display and interaction. And, it was it was Dominic that suggested in the very beginning that if if we are going to build something to display data , it really wouldn't be much additional work to cut copy paste and right, you know, and write it back out to disk.
0:20
The Success of Audacity and Community Effort
From: Roger Dannenberg • The Success of Audacity and Community Effort
Roger Dannenberg: So another problem is when you do have people that are contributing and very generous, you, well, at least with Audacity, there was a team of people that developed. So it was kind of like an inside, you know, it's as if you've got the inside group that has kind of all the power and all, you know, carries all the decisions and you have the outside group, which you also hope is there, you know, making contributions, but you know, the governance of very loose volunteer organization is really difficult because I think if it is completely open and everybody has an equal vote, then it's very easy to get distracted.
0:37
Open Source Financing and Sustainability
From: Roger Dannenberg • Open Source Financing and Sustainability
Roger Dannenberg: Yeah, I would I guess I would say that. I mean one thing that came out of that, you know, that I learned from this project, that might not be obvious to people thinking about open source is that there are a lot of possibilities for generating income and one of those is, you know, some of some of the Audacity developers, did some consulting on the side. So they would, for example, adapt Audacity for to be packaged with a product or are bundled with a crime or they would, you know, work with researchers and get some money to add some feature for them or something like that.
3:37
Introduction to Open Source Through AI Research
From: Tony Wasserman • Introduction and Early Academic Pursuits
Tony Wasserman: ...And my original thought was that I would go for a master's degree, but they made me an RA and encouraged me to stay. So eventually I got a doctorate in, of all things, artificial intelligence... Rolls of teletype paper that printed 10 uppercase characters per second and clattered as it did it...
3:53
Creating Software Through Pictures and Early Open Source Contributions
From: Tony Wasserman • Founding an Early Software Company
Tony Wasserman: ...we were distributing open source software in 1980... And the product was called Software Through Pictures. Ah, okay. So we were one of the first products to include open source software. I think we were second. I think Sun Microsystems was first...
3:29
Reflecting on Challenges and the Future of Open Source
From: Tony Wasserman • Closing Thoughts and Reflections
Bryan Berhenshausen: What do you see as the biggest challenges for open source as an idea, or for open source as a movement, or even as a set of practices in the future? Tony Wasserman: Well, there are a lot of issues, of course... But the first part of it is that proprietary software isn't going away...
6:58
Launching Firefox and Challenging the Web
From: Tristan Nitot • Building Mozilla Europe and Firefox's Growth
Tristan Nitot:...Firefox was making progress...it started to be the response to that. It was delivering, really...People got excited. It became viral...And so I stayed there, making sure that we would launch Firefox in Europe, probably even though I was kind of starving financially...