Open Source Leadership Summit 2017

Open Source collaboration is a team sport, comprised of different players with a diverse set of backgrounds. While the end goal is often the same, there can be competing options and routes to achieving those goals. So how do open source projects encourage collaboration, navigate conflicts, focus on the greater good, and instill the trust necessary to work as a team? OPNFV director Heather Kirksey will sit down with OpenStack executive Director Jonathan Bryce and former OPNFV TSC Chair Chris Price to highlight key examples and lessons learned from managing two of the most unique open source projects in market today: OPNFV and OpenStack. OPNFV focuses its work upstream by leveraging existing code from a variety of leading open source projects across compute, storage, and networking in order to build a common NFV reference platform for the industry. In this fireside chat, Jonathan Bryce and Chris Price will explore OpenStack’s approach to working upstream with OPNFV and vice versa, as well as among their own communities to maintain the sportsmanship necessary to advance the industry. 

In the developer community, nobody cares where their collaborators are physically located. It's a completely different story for legal practitioners and others who look at the licenses, patents and treaties that dictate what's feasible, what's expensive and what's impossible -- or even illegal. Globally, lawmakers, treaty drafters and standards setting organizations entities are seeking to harmonize, standardize and codify the legal structures that govern our interactions. Many of these efforts may be well-intentioned but ultimately hostile to the production and adoption of free and open source software. With a global understanding of current policy trends, the worldwide community of free and software projects and companies will be ready to impactfully address and respond to proposed policy decisions.

A large company employing thousands of software developers worldwide faces many challenges to consistently manage its use and release of open source software. The underlying compliance requirements of open source software licenses, however, are the same for every organization, regardless of size. This talk will detail some of our experiences with developing and refining practices that address open source compliance issues and are designed to be transparent, repeatable, and scalable. We will describe the evolution of a number of such processes, from inception to present day to planned future enhancements. An essential element is the operation of a board of experts conducting mandatory reviews of a variety of issues pertaining to the release of software containing open source-licensed components. The lessons learned can be applicable to any entity dealing with open source software.

There are best practices to understand when building products from open source software, but there are a number of anti-patterns that crop up along the way. Product teams (from engineering to marketing) need to understand these patterns and practices to participate best in open source project communities and deliver products and services to their customers at the same time. These patterns hold regardless of whether the vendor created and owns the project or participates in projects outside their control.

Developer communities are social entities and they behave in many ways according to what we know of Anthropology. There is a large body of research in that area that may be applicable to online communities of developers. Another classic area of knowledge is philosophy of science which investigates the underpinnings of knowledge as well as the processes that led us to advances in science. Developer communities are frequently in a mode of discovery that is also not unlike the classic scientific endeavors.

This talk tries to build the bridge between anthropology, philosophy of science and attempts to come to an understanding of how our developer communities function and why they are effective. This may lead to insights that help us improve how these communities work and avoid dysfunctional behavior that sometimes creeps in.