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.

Heather Meeker: 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. And that's due to a very dedicated group of people who started, and who grew this movement over many years.

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?

Heather Meeker: And so I've asked lots of my friends, and colleagues, and people I don't even know to contribute their stories to this oral history, so that the generations who go

Heather Meeker: beyond and take open source forward into the 21st

Heather Meeker: century will understand, how such a movement could have come about.

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.

Heather Meeker: It was so long ago, we called ourselves computer programmers instead of software engineers. I wrote code in compiled Basic.

Heather Meeker: 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. But I was very interested in software as a result. And by the way, I got into software just by kind of talking my way into a job. It's not like you went to school to get a job in that back in those days. And eventually, when I went to law

Heather Meeker: school and then I graduated, I found that there was all this really interesting stuff going on in software licensing.

Heather Meeker: My clients started to ask me, "What about these open source licenses?"

Heather Meeker: And they were really something new. They were not like anything anyone had seen before. And for the most part, they weren't really written entirely by lawyers or much like normal software licenses. Most of the people I worked with at the time had the attitude of, well, you know, you can't use this stuff. We don't understand it. You don't know where it's been. It's kind of like when your mother says, "Don't put that in your mouth. You don't know where it's been." And but my clients kept asking me about it, and I thought that instead of the answer just being, "No", which was the answer most lawyers were giving it the time,

Heather Meeker: I had to say, "Yes, if..."

Heather Meeker: And so I started trying to figure out how to do that and there wasn't much out there. Not a lot of information out there. And so I actually started creating some of the information. And I found it was just an absolutely fascinating thing.

Heather Meeker: I mean, people get into the law for different reasons, but I think actually for a lot of lawyers, they get into it because being a lawyer is like solving all these really intricate puzzles. And by the way, that's very similar to what programming is like and I love both of those things.

Heather Meeker: So I started trying to unpack this puzzle and figure it out. And it's been so interesting and sustained me for decades now in my practice, and it's made my practice better than I could have ever expected. Just the pure interest value of, it is really what gets me out of bed and at my desk every morning,

Heather Meeker: So I have had a wonderful time focusing on open source software licensing over the years.

Heather Meeker: Well, I hope you enjoy listening to the stories in this archive,

Heather Meeker: and I hope it helps make you think about how people can change the world.

Heather Meeker: Thanks so much for listening.

Discover the Archive

Introduction to FOSSDA

Summary