Community & Collaboration
36 clips
Building and nurturing open source communities
What can you tell me about how people have come together as a community?
Filter clips by:
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
Challenges & Growth
Open Source Projects
Evolution of Open Source
Showing 36 clips
0:39
From Pirate Radio to Tech Entrepreneurship
From: Bart Decrem • Moving to the United States and Discovering Silicon Valley
I started volunteering there and I made a little magazine, you know, compiling their Billboard chart...And so that's sort of a through line in my, in my career. It's like an aesthetic and cultural and philosophical political preference, you know.
0:10
Joining and Contributing to the Mozilla Foundation
From: Bart Decrem • Leading the Firefox Launch
Mitchell connected with Mitch and they were talking about, can we create a gnome fund, a mozilla Foundation? Uh, and I think the two of them put their heads together. And out of that came the Mozilla Foundation.
1:54
Reflections on the Open Source Community
From: Bart Decrem • Leaving Disney and Founding The Hobby
It's diverse community and people are there for different reasons...overindexes on folks with those drives building a better world and chasing our curiosity and sharing it with folks.
1:22
From Free Software to Open Source
From: Bruce Perens • The Genesis of Open Source Involvement
Heather Meeker: How'd you decide to get involved in/create this movement of open source? Bruce Perens: Well, obviously, I'm standing on the shoulders of giants because the work of Richard Stallman preceeded mine, and the basic concepts of open source are those created by Richard for free software. What we did with open source was create a marketing program for the free software concept which would reach different people. So, Richard's approach was very well suited for programmers, but it depended on the apriori understanding of the usefulness of software freedom. And our approach was more based on just having a big collection of software that you could build, whether it was a business or any project that you wanted to, you could build these upon, you could share the development of the software and my feeling personally was that the philosophy would come later for a lot of the people who participated.
2:26
Building the Debian Community
From: Bruce Perens • Debian Project Leadership and Community Building
Bruce Perens: I joined, I guess, there must have been 50 people on the whole project at the time, and eventually became the Debian project leader. Ian went on to other things and took the project and did something that no one knew was possible at that time, which was that Ian had made all of the core of the project, everything that it needed to boot and run and install packages, had been produced by Ian. And I took it and obviously didn't have the time to work on all of these packages and fanned them out to 50 people who I only knew from email correspondence on the net. I was a Debian project leader, I had never actually met another Debian developer, and fanned it out. And these 50 people who also did not physically know each other combined to create a working, running, operating system. And obviously, the software was very modular and that certainly helped us get away with that but also the fact that open source let us all sort of look over each other's shoulders and help each other was very useful as well.
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.
3:08
Launching Sendmail Inc. and the Dot-Com Bubble
From: Cat Allman • Foundations of FOSS Engagement
Cat Allman: So my brother around that time, that would be 1997, had a former colleague who they were talking together about doing something with Sendmail in terms of starting a business around it. My brother wouldn't hire me because nepotism, he's a very principled guy, so I started harassing his business partner to give me a job as they were putting this idea of a company together. And he finally gave up and hired me. So I was employee number five at Sendmail Inc...
3:56
Journey to Google and Advocating for Open Source
From: Cat Allman • Google Summer of Code and Global Outreach
Cat Allman: So they eventually broke down and hired me. And yeah, it was very exciting to try working at a big company. I have to say my first day was spent in a windowless room in a group for an orientation with all these extraordinarily perky videos. And I went home in tears because I thought oh my god I've made a terrible mistake. But unlike most people at least at the time who applied to Google I went into it knowing who I was going to work for and what I was going to work on. I didn't go to work at Google, I went to work on free and open source software at Google...
2:35
Learning Software Development at IBM
From: Deb Goodkin • Professional Formation at IBM
Karen Herman: What did you, what was the thing that you learned the most about at IBM? Deb Goodkin: At IBM, it gave me a really good foundation on how to develop code. And so you didn't really have like a hacking mentality then, like you have now. And, and, and that's fine, too. It's just that you really had to think through, what are you trying to do? And then how are you going to do that? And then, And then, as like a junior level engineer, I would actually, so I'd have to come up with my plan or my design. And then you actually had a design that you hand wrote. So it wasn't a programming language yet. And, and so we actually refer to it as pseudocode. And then you would actually meet with others, your colleagues, and, and people would review your design. And so you wouldn't actually implement it until it got approved. So, so it was a great way to learn because if someone saw like a hole in that, or even a, you know, a better way to do something, you would learn from that. And so taking that time to think through, you know, what, really, what are you trying to achieve? And then how can you get there? I, that was a good skill to have, and philosophy to have. Also working with others to learn how to collaborate with others. I mean, you learn that in school, but, but now, you know, you have a real product. And, and the way IBM worked back then, too, is sometimes you had competing teams. And so they had the money to fund, like, similar teams, you didn't always know it. And, and so whoever came out with better product, you know, basically won. You didn't look at it like that, basically, they would cancel your product, project, and you'd move on to something else. So, because things were so new, back then, too. So you didn't, there was so much possibility for innovation. And so I think that philosophy, that IBM was able to do that, was great. I also learned a lot from my manager, who happened to be a female, and her background was electrical engineering, too. And she was such a good role model for me, as well as a lot of the other people there. So, so it was a great experience starting out.
2:54
Relationship Between FreeBSD Foundation and FreeBSD Project
From: Deb Goodkin • Understanding the Foundation's Role
Karen Herman: Talk about, so, so the, the FreeBSD foundation and then there's the FreeBSD, how, how does that work, um, in terms of, you know, how you work together or, or don't? Deb Goodkin: Yeah, we're two totally different organizations. And so the FreeBSD project is, uh, made up of volunteers and, uh, from around the world and it's not a legal entity. And we have the FreeBSD foundation and, uh, which is a legal entity. It's, uh, um, here in the US we, it's, um, based, uh, when the IRS, um, uh, not certification, but, um, a definition, um, is this that we're a 501 C three. And so there's different types of nonprofits here. And so we're for the public good. And so our whole purpose is to support the project. So if FreeBSD went away, then we would most likely go away because we wouldn't have a purpose anymore.
3:00
The Global Open Source Community
From: Deb Goodkin • International Open Source Collaboration
Karen Herman: Talk about the international aspect of it as well. Deb Goodkin: The, yeah, it's, it's a US focus because like the foundation, we're a US corporation, but, and I don't know, I can't remember what the breakout is of number of like US contributors to outside the US, but you have people from all over the world and, and, um, you know, we have lots of people in Europe and, uh, people in, uh, Ukraine, uh, Asia, uh, South America who are contributing to the project. And, um, and so you have, so you have different cultures, uh, and, and it's interesting. Um, you know, it's, it's interesting. Um, I think it's really important for us to figure out how to work well together.
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.
1:55
Sendmail Inc. and Open Source Philosophy
From: Eric Allman • Running and Growing Sendmail Inc.
Eric Allman:...We made the front page of the New York Times when we announced the company... Sendmail had a reputation for being difficult to configure so our first thing was we'll make it easy to configure and using a graphic user interface... I really love it when people use the stuff I've written. And the easiest way to do that is to give it away.
1:51
USENIX Presidency and Community Impact
From: Eric Allman • Long-Term Involvement with Usenix
Eric Allman: So, so I started just attending USENIX. The first USENIX I went to was in San Francisco... And it was an amazingly wonderful conference. It's like you know I'm with my people here This is great and so I started going to more conferences and eventually I ended up on the board of directors... And I am this President for two years and I'm gratified that many people have told me that I was actually a good President.
1:56
Evolution of Open Source in Business
From: Heather Meeker • Impact of Open Source on Business and Collaboration
Heather Meeker: so open source is used by everybody now. Like almost everyone in the technology industry now actually contributes to it. I mean, it's everywhere. We're using it right this minute to do this interview. It's in your phone. It's everywhere, right? And if you go back, I guess, 25 years, the notion that that private companies would do collaborate was not an idea. I mean, it wasn't a thing that it wasn't a thing. Right. And and today you have all these like big organizations and companies collaborating on things and giving stuff away. And that just wasn't done. I would say open source changed the entire face of technology because it it changed a paradigm for how people interact. You know, they were just strictly competitors and now they're collaborators. And even there are there are only like maybe two, three companies that are known for not doing it now. Right. If you go back 25 years, like no one was doing it. They were terrified about what these licenses meant and everything. So it's completely been absorbed in business. And that, you know, if you believe in markets, which I do because I studied economics and all that stuff, that wouldn't happen unless it worked. Right. It actually works as a paradigm. Like it produced a lot of really great stuff. And over that time, people became convinced of that and they overcame their fear about these licensing paradigms they didn't understand. So they got over the fear and then it really changed their behavior. So to me, it's changed everything about the way the technology industry operates.
0:47
Capturing Open Source Stories
From: Introduction to FOSSDA • Capturing Personal Stories of Open Source Pioneers
Heather Meeker: Because this is such an important change in our world, and because it happened in the way it did. I thought it was important to capture the personal stories of people involved in this movement. What made them so dedicated? What made them understand that this was so important?
1:20
The Journey Towards Open Source Advocacy
From: Jon "Maddog" Hall • Caninos Loucos: Open Hardware in Brazil
Maddog: ...So this is how I got interested in Linux. And I could see because by this time I'd been in the computer industry a long time. And I could see the rate at which Linux was growing...
1:40
Empowering Education through FOSS Initiatives
From: Jon "Maddog" Hall • Memories of Grace Hopper and Maurice Wilkes
Maddog: ...Malaysia, the Malaysian government was creating a five year program to use open source software. And Malaysia is particularly interesting because... 70% of the IT workforce were women...
1:20
Linux Professional Institute and Inclusivity Efforts
From: Jon "Maddog" Hall • Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Maddog: ...as an example, one of the things we did recently was a diversity and inclusion policy for for our organization because we have two hundred fifteen thousand certified people in one hundred eighty countries around the world...
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...
3:36
Working with Software Freedom Conservancy
From: Karen Sandler • Outreachy and Transition to Software Freedom Conservancy
Karen Sandler: Software Freedom Conservancy is my absolute dream job...
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...
3:21
Contributions to BSD and the Evolution of Open Source
From: Kirk McKusick • BSD License vs. GPL
Elisabetta Mori: So you moved to Berkeley... And then, you know, you had first – you were sharing your room with Bill Joy when you were, like, a graduate student. And how did you get involved in the Berkeley Software Distribution Project?
1:55
The Inception of Sendmail by Eric Allman
From: Kirk McKusick • Career Advice and Reflections
Kirk McKusick: So to the story, um, so Eric wrote this thing, it was originally called deliver mail. Uh, and by being essentially able to forward mail back and forth between the internet and the local Berkeley network, he no longer had people, no longer needed to have accounts on that machine...
0:39
Appreciating Free Software at Stanford
From: Larry Augustin • Early Open Source Experience
As a research team at Stanford, we had access to essentially anything we wanted to access to commercially. We could get that. But the software that we used was easier to work with, was better, was available for free. And that's where I really learned that a community of people working together with the goal of producing great software was often producing things that were better than what was available commercially.
0:44
Stanford, Yahoo, Sequoia, and VA Linux's First Venture Funding
From: Larry Augustin • Early Business Development
As I was doing this, two of my friends from Stanford had raised venture funding. Two gentlemen by the name of Jerry Yang and David Filo. You may recall those names as their little company they had started was Yahoo. Dave and Jerry were both PhD students in EDA, Electronic Design Automation, at Stanford. They had started this little directory of the web on a machine under their desk in their office at Stanford.
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.
1:49
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.
2:30
Reflecting on the Success of Open Source
From: Lawrence (Larry) Rosen • Reflections on Open Source and Legacy
I think open source has been an enormous, enormous success...I want to accept some credit for having made good friends, for having not made as many enemies as I've made friends...
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.
3:20
Exposure to UNIX and Introduction to Open Source Philosophy
From: Tony Wasserman • Early Encounters with Open Source Concepts
Tony Wasserman: ...But then when UNIX came in the 1970s, I was on the faculty at UC San Francisco, and then I was also a lecturer at Berkeley... And Berkeley received a grant that involved enhancing AT&T UNIX. So Berkeley got the source code to AT&T UNIX and they made a bunch of changes, virtual memory being the one that is perhaps the most significant...
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...