Open Source Projects
32 clips
Projects and contributions
What open source projects have you been involved with?
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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
Challenges & Growth
Community & Collaboration
Evolution of Open Source
Showing 32 clips
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.
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.
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.
2:24
First Engagement with Free and Open Source Software
From: Cat Allman • Early Career and Entry into Free Software
Cat Allman: Fast forward a little bit and my first job with free and open source software was at Mount Zainu. Mount Zainu is Unix trademark backwards. Our logo was a little mountain range. I was a contractor, not an employee, but so I was working on coordinating the company's involvement with DECUS, which was the DEC User Group Conference. And found myself really kind of engaged with the political idea of software that had been created at a publicly funded institution as being free and available to the rest of us to use. Really the academic method of, you know, you come up with an idea and other people build on it and civilization rolls along...
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...
1:47
Introduction to the FreeBSD Foundation
From: Deb Goodkin • Finding Purpose in Open Source
Karen Herman: How did you first, um, you know, hear about the FreeBSD foundation and how did, how were you connected? Deb Goodkin: So, um, the FreeBSD foundation, I didn't know anything about. And, um, so, uh, my friend had contacted me and she said, so she was working at this, um, aerospace company here in Boulder. And, um, so I'm here in Boulder, Colorado. Um, and she said, I, there's a guy at my company. So she worked at an HR and she said, there's this guy in my company. He's running a nonprofit and he's looking for someone to run it. And I told him that I had a friend who is an engineer and looking for some work. And so anyway, so she connected us and that was the first time I had heard of FreeBSD and the FreeBSD foundation. And so, um, so the guy she was talking about was Justin Gibbs, who's the founder of the FreeBSD foundation. He's here in Boulder and he had started the foundation, I think it was about four or five years before that. And I bet he was working full time. And so it was growing to the point where he really couldn't run it. He, and he saw so much potential for growth that he wanted to find someone to run the company.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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...
1:20
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...
1:11
Fostering Open Source in Latin America through Education
From: Jon "Maddog" Hall • Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Maddog: ...40% of the students who qualify for a free university education [in Latin America] cannot accept it... Project Calwan teaches these young students how to set up their own business...
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...
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.
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...
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...
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.
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...
1:30
Discovering Open Source Through Personal Connections
From: Lawrence (Larry) Rosen • Transition to Law and Open Source
One of the friends that I met...worked for Xerox and, uh, developed Small talk...he said, you know, I'm, I'm working with this organization on the East Coast called the Open Source Initiative...
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...
0:39
Origins of Audacity
From: Roger Dannenberg • Origins of Audacity
Roger Dannenberg: Well, the project started basically from research needs that we have that we were working on actually on query by humming, which was getting computers to recognize tunes that people might sing or hum and search a database for them and part of that is just recognizing pitch and tunes and we were working on some algorithms to improve that. And of course algorithms fail and then when they fail, you want to see what happened and we were trying to visualize audio and the analyses that we did and figure out what was going wrong and we just felt like it would be really great to have a tool that could help us display audio data in different formats and deal with different audio files.
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.
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...
3:20
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...
3:53
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...
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.
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...