Evolution of Open Source
34 clips
How open source has changed over time
How has open source changed over time?
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
Community & Collaboration
Showing 34 clips
2:57
Discovering the Free Software Movement
From: Bart Decrem • Leading the Firefox Launch
Andy was like, I've seen the light. Software should be free, at least the operating system...Software that should be part of the commons in the way that the phone system is, is a utility.
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.
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.
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.
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.
3:01
The Creation of BusyBox
From: Bruce Perens • The Creation and Impact of BusyBox
Bruce Perens: The whole idea of BusyBox is it's all of the commands that you might need to install an operating system on a computer made smaller so that they all would fit on a floppy disk. Okay, that's how far back this goes. We had those three-and-a-half inch plastic floppy disks and the kernel fit on one and all of the runtime and BusyBox fit on the second one. And so, you would boot your system using these two floppy disks and then you would be able to put a CD in the CD drive and install the entire distribution from it.
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...
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.
1:51
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.
1:32
Why Open Source Matters
From: Heather Meeker • Open Source as a Transformative Force
Zack Ellis: When did you start to see open source as something transformative? Heather Meeker: I really saw it as transformative almost from the beginning. I did not realize and I'm not sure very many people would have realized at that time how huge it would get. But it was just so different from everything else that you learned as a technology lawyer. Like if you do a regular software license, you know, it has a particular form and some terms that you would expect. Open source is like bizarro world licensing. It's like exactly the opposite. It's like giving away rights and forcing people to give away rights instead of just like normal licensing.
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.
0:43
The Purpose of FOSSDA
From: Introduction to FOSSDA • Introduction to FOSSDA and Open Source
Heather Meeker: Welcome to the open source stories, digital archive, or FOSSDA. Open source has changed the world. And it's changed the world greatly for the better. It's a movement that's been going on for quite a while now, and it didn't start because of a government, or a company, or a politician. It started really from people who wanted to change the way people had access to software because software is so important to our lives now. Whether you know it or not, you are using open-source software right now, and you're probably using it every moment of your life.
0:38
Personal Journey into Open Source
From: Introduction to FOSSDA • Heather Meeker's Personal Journey into Technology
Heather Meeker: Now, it's only fair that I tell my own story and it's certainly not the most interesting story you're going to hear, but I was a computer programmer a long time ago back in the 1980s. It was so long ago, we called ourselves computer programmers instead of software engineers. I wrote code in compiled Basic. Now, for people who are in the tech industry, that is, you know, a very lightweight way of doing computer programming, but hey, you can't judge, because it actually worked really well for what we were doing at the time.
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...
0:44
A Shift: From Intended English Major to Computer Science
From: Joshua Gay • Finding a Career Path
I remember he saw the graphic arts award that I had won. And he suggested, but we recently just started a computer science program and we have almost nobody applying. So if you apply direct to major for computer science, your odds will be much higher.
5:46
Making an Impact on Education Through Open Source
From: Joshua Gay • Joining CK12 Foundation and Scaling Open Education
I ended up getting connected with Neeru Khosla. She had just started a project called the CK12 Foundation, a new company organization... her and her husband had been in Silicon Valley for quite a while then.
4:34
The Evolution and Legitimization of Open Source
From: Joshua Gay • Transition to IEEE and Standards Work
The biggest change is in the first 10, maybe almost 15 years that I was a part of it, I couldn't really go more than a week or two without having a conversation about questioning the legitimacy of it... To now, where I don't necessarily think people are on the whole more informed of what free and open source software is. But the legitimacy of it, that it's here, that it's established, is so strong...
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?
2:43
Developing the Fast File System
From: Kirk McKusick • Career Advice and Reflections
Elisabetta Mori: So what do you think were your major contributions to the project? Kirk McKusick: So I'm going to start slightly before that transition happened. And that was, well, sort of the first big contribution I made was the Pascal compiler. And although Pascal, although important at that time, faded away fairly quickly. The other major contribution I made was the fast file system...
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...
2:10
On Living the Life You Want
From: Kirk McKusick • Career Advice and Reflections
Elisabetta Mori:Is there anything you would do differently if you had your time again?
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.
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.
0:46
The Vision Behind VA Linux
From: Larry Augustin • Building VA Linux
Dell had been very inspirational to me. If you look at the start of Dell Computers with Michael Dell and his dorm room at, I think it was UT Austin, assembling PCs. I was doing the same, except I was doing it in the Unix world.
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.
1:03
Coining 'Open Source'
From: Larry Augustin • The Genesis of Open Source
We got Linus on the phone, and ultimately, the idea was we're going to brand this open source, because the openness of the source code was what was important. Bruce Perens, at the time, the head of the Debian project, had created a set of definitions for software that could be part of Debian. And we realized the world here needed to separate the notion of software in which the source code is available from free software, and we coined the term open source to do that. And we all agreed to promote and develop this, and that became the genesis for the term open source. And this was in 1998.
3:00
Experiences and Lessons at Apache Foundation
From: Lawrence (Larry) Rosen • Writing and Advocacy in Open Source
I became a member of Apache...had a different philosophy, a very open philosophy, a philosophy where software could be developed into derivative works...
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...
0:37
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.
3:53
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...
1:01
Joining Netscape and the Dawn of Open Source
From: Tristan Nitot • Challenges of Open Source Adoption
Tristan Nitot: I made it into Netscape, it was in '97 and it was a lot of work, but it was fun with smart people. In '98, then Netscape decides to open up the source code for Netscape Communicator.
2:00
The Creation of the Mozilla Foundation
From: Tristan Nitot • The Creation of the Mozilla Foundation
Netscape made - well, created - the Mozilla project and along with it came Bugzilla. Which was a complete game changer, even if it was not beautiful and not super easy to use, it was amazing.