Building and Maintaining the Open Source Software Community

Key Takeaways

hello and welcome to the newest episode of the new stack makers podcast this week we are recording and live-streaming direct from the cube con cloud native con show floor in barcelona and today we're talking about open source communities how they've changed over the years and what's the current state of open source communities and we have three excellent guests we have Bridget Graham holt from Microsoft we also have folks from Oracle Karthik that's good all right excellent and and Caslon fields also a Solutions Architect from Oracle jump right into the main question open source as always thrive my community it grew up through a lot of different forces at play these days world so would you guys characterize the current state of open source communities how healthy are they I think that you're looking at it I mean Microsoft and Oracle together at last seriously folks like I feel like the that metaphorical rising tide that lifts all boats like that is so true in the open source world and we build much better software collaborating and playing together in this space than we do being like everyone's kind of entrenched in their enterprise silos certainly true kind of what open source is all about with so many companies these days adopting open source it's becoming so mainstream even in enterprise companies it's great to see how all the companies end up working together to create these awesome projects together yeah I think so Bob colons gonna talk about this in this keynote tomorrow but one thing we've started to I don't know if pivot is the right word but you know kind of merge towards is this idea of openness and you know it's not about looking at code bases that are you know that are siloed away or that are hidden away from comfort like by companies which are enterprise-e but it's kind of all in github today so you can kind of go and you know look at code bases and they're just open-source code bases and I think that's been one of the huge steps which is different from like when I started in industry 15 years ago where you know you'd find Java code and you know the Java code base online but you wouldn't really find anything other than that that was open source and you know today you look at take you coop con for example you just have all these projects that you can just go look up the source code for and I think makes it such a good point that just putting some source code out there isn't enough to be community because we've all tried to use that project that seemed great but the docs didn't make any sense and maybe that the install scripts didn't work and the forum's were empty and like the you know the the issues were going on remarked upon and you're thinking huh do I want to use this even as a personal project well maybe if I want to play with it but then back to the question of enterprise if you're an enterprise end user I really you're you're gonna have a lot of pushback in your organization if you want to use a project that doesn't have an active community yeah definitely true so it's not just about but your community has to thrive well I think we had a great keynote this morning if you missed that probably check out the recording of it Lucas and Nikita gave great stories about how they got involved with the open source community and why they stayed in the open source community and I think a lot of what makes a community thrive is having people want to help each other it's not just about the technology it's about people working together to do something so like Lucas said in his keynote he came for the technology because he wanted to run kubernetes on arm and had trouble doing that but he ended up staying because he found so many cool people that he enjoyed working with and talking to so I think in Nikita also made a point about that there's a lot of contributions across all these projects and so you may or may not be writing that one fundamental component of the stack sure maybe maybe you are and that's great but you probably also are going to want someone in the project who is encouraging new members or someone in the project who is telling the story of the project so that other people get excited about it because you're not gonna really thrive or get a lot of adoption especially in say an enterprise that would very much like to see your due diligence around security and they would very much like to see your documentation it's like all of those components are really important to making sure adoption is feasible right I'm hearing it's also like people over software so you know you we value our interactions with you know others both Nikita and Lucas or you know newer to industry and one of the one of the coolest things that I got out of the session was that you know they talked about mentorship and the idea that you know you're starting new in industry coming in you're working in open source but you also have folks that can kind of help you you know take to take those steps to you know become a better developer and you know become you know a contributor to open source and I think that's I think that's great one thing that I've noticed form you know from my experiences in Austin specifically it's you know Cuban Eddie's is more of a community based around you know we have the conferences like cube con we also have like you know meetups and stuff like that but it's more virtual but when you're trying to build physical community it's very similar because you you know you value those interactions so you go to like a DevOps is Austin or is Minneapolis because you want to talk to you know your friends and they're like I classify them not as developers but like friends of mine that I go to to you know hang out and understand what they're doing with you know their roles and you know different things that they're doing in industry as well so it's more about like you value your relationships and I think that's that's really key too because a lot of people are probably going to watch this and be excited and also having FOMO because they weren't in Barcelona which Barcelona is wonderful and I recommend visiting it if you get a chance but even in every single local community you probably have a meet-up perhaps dormant that you could propose a talk at as someone who runs a local meetup and I suspect you're in the same boat spoiler alert they need to talk every month and they don't want it to be themselves every month and they don't want it to be them and the other organizers on a panel every month like getting out there and sharing your experiences is part of participating in this wider community yeah and a lot of times Caslon you probably have these experiences in Seattle as well but like we it's not just technology that you want to talk about you also like you use cases are important like how you go about solving different problems because folks are really interested in like wanting to understand whether you know they're doing the right thing or or whether the road that they're walking on is not necessarily like an unpaved road they want to see similar examples so you helped build like a culture of openness in your and that reminds me also something that Bridgette said earlier about the diversity of people that it takes to run these communities it takes all sorts of different skills all sorts of different backgrounds and like I was in the contributor summit yesterday and we were talking about how it takes so many people to run kubernetes it takes people who are writing a code people who are p.m. in the releases making sure that everything goes smoothly people who are writing Docs helping make marketing materials like videos and blogs and things like that so it takes all sorts of different skill sets and backgrounds to be able to make these projects work and it's not just about being able to do code you can have use cases code sorts of different things that meetups people care about all of it and it's actually it's one of the things that we've noticed too both in meetups and in devops days I know we just ran into each other at I've outstayed Seattle and you've been running devastates often for a long time and like these are much smaller than coop con you know several hundred person local events but most of the people attend they watch sessions and they get some ideas and then they go to open space attendee directed breakout sessions to talk to each other and that's kind of the equivalent of a hallway track but formalized and I think anytime you're having a local event to meet up any kind of conference encourage what at bird's of feather sessions what you know lean coffee whatever you want to call it encouraging people to share and their experiences and talk with each other and just find out who is maybe a little bit further down the road that they are about to try and find out what does the pavement look like and is that bridge actually okay that was a joke that was my first DevOps days and I thought that part was absolutely amazing [Music] Oracle is open-source how it plays out within a large company within a large software vendor maybe we should start what is the value that an org or Microsoft size company brings to the end-user the enterprise user for open source I mean I think we all have opinions on that but I guess I will say in a general context if you're a large enterprise and I'm going to look right at the camera and say if you work at a large enterprise and you benefit from open source you should be employing and paying some contributors to open source because if you think about it that's how you keep your interest represented and how you keep the open source projects on track so I think we're 20 years into opens and I think we've pretty much figured out that it's great for business and it also is really important for businesses that rely on it to also support it mm-hmm yeah and and you mentioned you know having contributors from outside the company also contributed back to you whatever opens first project that they're using that's really important because you know we at Oracle or we at Microsoft might have like a certain view on you know how something should look like that we kind of the whole point of open source is actually building like the best possible platform of best possible product out there and different perspectives is really helpful from that point of view and so totally totally agree with your perspective on you know actually having folks that are using open source also contributing back but doing it on company time versus you know doing it you know outside impersonal projects are great but I don't think that the corporate world needs a whole bunch of handouts from people's spare time like definitely true and all that also reminds me of like I've been doing some customer visits in the Seattle area and the marketing people and the sales people who work with these customers oftentimes the customers are kind of suspicious of like Oracle is really doing open source it's not a real thing why would you do that and they everyone is learning together that open source is really really good for everyone we know that our customers want to use it we want to use it we want to enable our customers to do what's best for them so we want to support these open source projects not just for us but because it's good for our customers too and I think it's important for us to realize - and to be honest about the fact that we work at giant capitalist enterprises we absolutely are not doing open source as a charitable donation it is very good for business to have the credibility and to have you know your or in or your skin in the game or however you want to put it in terms of your actually participating you're not just consuming and we actually see this in an user companies I mean we all have write and user companies we work with where there are contributors from the end-user company who are on those because they have a vested interest in making sure that they go well like that's great and there's also I'm gonna put a plug in for an open-source project that I'm involved with um helm we actually have one of the great independent contributors independent consultant Josh Zielinski actually works on the home project extensively and is in the Chicago Chicago Milwaukee Michael megalopolis megalopolis mega city one I don't know which one he lives in but he's gonna be coming up from there to Minneapolis to give a talk about helm at our local meetup and it's like I mean obviously like this is the kind of cross-pollination of ideas from your local community to your open source contributor communities to the corporate supported stuff I think we need to just keep doing yeah and we see we see similar stuff were like we have a project oil project held on which is a Microsoft since framework and so you know the basic all the basics of the project are open source and one of the most interesting things that we are seeing is when people actually start using it and you know start needle filing bugs and talking about different ideas for for that specific project we get a whole bunch of things that code you know this should actually be on the roadmap or this should actually you know we should change the product product or project direction you know in specific ways for how people actually use it versus you know how we hypothesize for how people might want to use it instead you probably see yeah yeah the road map discussions are always an interesting hybrid of you know vested interests and very important voices and there's always going to be a complex discussion of exactly how things get prioritized but if you have good insights into how your your community like I mean that's that's the kind of thing like the home project I mentioned which is a CN CF project now and is a package manager for kubernetes the home 3 release that is going to be is an alpha now is very different in that it no longer has the server side component tiller was in the project you know introduced in helm two and they're actually taking it out and I think this is one one of those things where you listen to the community and you find out that oh the role based access control model and kubernetes has matured and changed over time we don't actually need this and it's adding unnecessary complexity I think one of the hardest things in any kind of large sprawling community project is editing like adding things is fine right but taking things out is a lot of work and hard but again listening to the feedback of the open source community is why the home project put in the effort to actually edit out a piece of unnecessary complexity and there was a huge cheer and I think it's a little more complex than that right like a component that serves a purpose sure it's great then when it's not serving the purpose so well anymore and instead it's adding unnecessary weight and complexity then you sometimes in many like I suppose a corporate endeavors you might just sit there saying I don't like this but we're stuck with it and I think it's really nice that in the open-source community they were able to say you know what we're not stuck with it and we can put the extra work into simplifying the model for all the end users yeah and I find it really interesting how all this kind of goes with a lot of the things I've been reading lately about the advocacy role that has become so popular in recent years which is all about interacting with the community from within the company and then bringing those insights from the community back into the company it's a role itself that kind of does that and then that itself is part of open source because you're all working together and collaborating from your different perspectives and I feel like advocacy is kind of like the human version of that now I had never thought about that before but I think that's pretty cool I mean I think there's there's an entire ecosystem there for sure every you know maintainer and you know everyone who runs a cig everyone who runs a mailing list everyone who does any of these activities that I was happy to see highlighted in the keynote this morning I hope it's like these are all ways that we make working together better so if you have a new project and you don't yet have a community what are some of the things you've mentioned some of them do you have some users and formally sure I think like the the recipe that I've seen a lot of open source projects uses you know the the code isn't github but like we mentioned before it's not just about the code github is kind of used for you know having your source control also has issues it's really good to have like a slack community because you you might have your you know initial users that are trying to figure out hey how do I just get this thing to work so Doc's are important from from a side thing but just being able to you know actually live talk to people is is huge because that's and I think it's one of the reasons why Cuba Nettie's like took off so quickly cuz it wasn't some kind of like user forum group that you go and you know send your question to and go to bed and come back the next morning and have like 30 responses and you type something and you know you wait 12 hours to get another response it's a lot more like live feedback and I think slack is really good for that and Cuba Nettie's does it super well because you have like the different SIG's so like the advanced users you know have their own forum to talk about you know whatever issues or whatever they want to talk about and you also have like new users coming in where you can ask the one-on-one kind of questions and you're in power to do that it's pretty huge we should gloss SIG's for new users these are special interest groups and that phrase is not unique in any way to kubernetes but kubernetes I think implements them pretty well and something that you were talking about there I forgot what it was [Laughter] sakes and new users coming oh yes so that was a lot of things which is why I forgot what I was going to say and I thought it would be important to point out that that is a lot of things and a lot of work so you have to have oftentimes in in open source communities you have a lot of different people that are helping run all these different initiatives to help get the whole community involved and to get a new community started with very few people you've got to know that you're gonna be wearing a lot of hats and you're gonna have to be putting in a lot of work to be able to get these communities going you've got to get slack channels going you've got to go to meetups there's all these different venues that you can take so you've got to pick a few and wear the hats that you can wear what I would say that that is most of the people who are paying attention to this particular information stream are into computers in some way and we do a decent job of computery things like say building distributed systems that are fault tolerant and I think that's really hard to do from a human point of view and if you are the single point of failure of your project your project is probably doomed because at some point you're gonna go on vacation or at some point you're gonna get sick or at some point you're gonna change jobs to one where you have no spare time so like I would say the base level of starting any project is you better distribute your knowledge base and your power base to some extent because otherwise it's you it's a personal project and that's fine but you're probably not going to be able to scale if no one else can do the build or if no one else can cut a release if no one else can approve pull requests like whatever it is that you're holding on to find somebody that you trust enough and distribute that power because that's how you grow but you better grow to more or we've seen what happens to some projects if they aren't funded and staffed and somebody burns out you could literally break yeah and you can take gently Jenkins is a great example where it was a small team initially and you know you look at it now it's a company and there's like millions of users actually like using Jenkins and also contributing back to it soo-ji and in the community side since we mentioned devops days earlier I'll say I am the global head of the DevOps days organization you can look at them upstaged or you can see that I think we had 70 cities worldwide last year I didn't go I think I went to about half of that many conferences last year and most of them weren't DevOps days and that's still way too many conferences for a reasonable individual I will say that but the when you when you want to grow from this year's of the tenth anniversary of that conference I didn't start it I I wasn't in the pioneers you know if we're gonna go with pioneer settlers town planners like I wasn't coming in as a pioneer I came in running the organization five years in and scaled it up and I think that if you ever if you want to scale something you need Docs and you need the ability to give people enough space to make it their own yep and you folks were running Austin before I even started running Minneapolis so like from your point of view you run things a little bit differently than some other folks but you can scale up scale down change focus make it your own mmm and I think that that's how projects can grow yeah and to kind of draw parallels for us like one of the secrets for DevOps days Austin is we actually have you know there's not one person that's a single point of failure our organization crews is like a crew of 15 to 17 people and then we have like 20 30 volunteers like every year so that's like a crew of 50 folks actually running a conference of you know 400 folks or or whatever we decide from a year-to-year basis and the greatest thing about that is you know everybody in our organization team in our volunteer team can actually go and like enjoy the conference so it's not to us it's not a job like oh I got to run this conference man I'm really like I got to do all the stuff but it's like you do one specific role and then you're empowered to go and you know enjoy the rest of time and the conference go and learn cuz that's we come together because we want to be learning and doing things that are interesting to us from you know a technology perspective and not be drawn down to hey that are not food for like everybody at the you know at the meet up today or at the conference today so it's really important it's really important to you know keep it you know from a large scale well and I will say that the Minneapolis DevOps Meetup ran at 1:00 in the morning Barcelona time this morning which you know was it was it yesterday I've lost track of days nose this morning today's Tuesday right I think so because you know I'm not a single point of failure we actually merged for this month with a new server list meetup in town to kind of help them kick off so like we basically just posted it on our meetup and said RSVP to theirs and then we had our people there and we also had a lot of our attendees you know showed up to that and I feel like that's that's another piece of community that is really important whether it's the cross organizational collaboration the collaboration on an open-source project or the you're pretty established meetup and you're going to get a new meet up off the ground by sending your people to it so DevOps days that's not a commercial oh no it's it's non-commercial yeah they're they're all it's it's basically like a distributed system that has nodes everywhere and has very loose consensus control like you get a template and so you get a template for how you should run your conference but you're not there's some there's some rules in there that you should follow but a lot of them are I mean there's there's some rules that like in 2014 and require added a code of conduct to DevOps taste Pittsburgh and that was the first DevOps days that had such a thing and when I took over running the org at the beginning of 2015 I was like hey that's a great idea we'll put it we literally put it in the template so that when people instantiate a new event with the jankey bash script that I wrote they would get that and we'd be like hey this is this is the standard expectations and I feel like that's a that's a good way to guide people give them these are your guardrails you're not gonna have / and this in any open-source project - we're not gonna have super strict you must follow these 60 bullet points cuz no one really wants to join a project where they have to spend all their time worrying about am i doing it wrong but like have very clear guardrails so this is what we do in this community this is how many people sign off on a pull request or this is what you have to do to launch a new event in the case of these events all right you you have a video chat with an organizer from you know the the global core team that we've grown over the years and make sure that you're okay with we're non-commercial yada yada yada and as long as you're okay with that like here's the guidelines here's the template we recommend you go with the standard template to start with but then iterate on it yep open source projects as well I mean they're there every project is gonna be different but I think that you've probably seen it I know we've seen that there are some things you're going to probably have to have like I like when you have automation on your issue life cycles like in an issue has been neglected perhaps do we want to update it or do we want to close it because we're not going to work on it like different projects handle that sort of thing differently but I think it's a good idea to be really clear about if you want to be a contributor this is you know this is how you get a commitment like making that stuff out in the open not making it a secret and only if you're pals with so and so I think that's pretty useful and I think something interesting about whether you're applying this to open-source communities or to devops days but just specifically talk about devops days I consistently hear from people that devops days events are some of the best conferences that they go to and there's so many of them and they're so distributed even though they have kind of this loose method of kind of organization like making sure that each one is similar I still hear consistently no matter which DevOps days it is that DevOps days conferences are great but here's the what I think what people are getting at with that is not even necessarily unique to that specific conference series because that conference series emphasizes community it emphasizes the open space is handy directed breakout groups are given a formal place in the schedule and I think that allows the attendees to create their own conference that they want the discussions they want to have more so than you'll get it many events where you you're just hallway tracking like formalizing that we want you to talk to each other and learn from each other I think is one of the things people really end up valuing that looseness and adaptability is probably part of why that mob stays is so successful if you took a one-size-fits-all approach to running these conferences it might not be as successful as it is with this kind of leeway that the community can use to fit the conference to what they need yeah I always like it because at DevOps events specifically I feel empowered to go and actually talk to a speaker sometimes other conferences I'm like man there's like a thousand people in this room I'm sitting in the last row and that that speaker knows what they're talking about I'm like kind of scared to go talk to them but you know in a smaller setting and with open spaces where everybody is kind of sharing their own journey or their own story you know you're actually empowered to be able to you know have conversation with not there's not not just the speaker but everybody else around you too so it helps you like build community around everybody that's there in the room I think when you're when you're talking about those communities online to that idea of being welcoming and of saying that everyone's voice can be heard is I think it's really important that in in your Docs and in your you know github repos and in all of the public facing communications what even in your error messages in your public facing communications that someone is going to experience when they when they encounter your project if they get this impression that they will be heard and people will care if they say I had this problem like that that means a lot this is the the sticky human parts of tech is if it looks like no one's going to care if you report this bug are you gonna are you gonna hit submit on yeah it almost like for some reason I like my brain trailed off and I was like this is very similar to you know having like autocratic or somebody ruling over everything and setting all the laws and guidelines or laws and rules for everything versus more for democracy where you have you know people coming into a consensus on different topics so like mapping it back to real world like it used to be more like hey a company would set direction they would basically tell you what was coming up but now in a more open source world you know like on the Oracle side we like held on and grew Alvie em and stuff like that where it's like everyone kind of works together to you know get to the point that they want to get to and open tracing and causing confusion for the users which one do I use I don't know I'm not gonna do anything and so about them money but directly I think that's a you bring up a really interesting point and this is germane to how the large enterprise software companies and clouds collaborate which is to say our competitors aren't necessarily each other so much as they are let's just stay in the data center for another year or two so if you're making the paralysis of choice worse by undercutting the competitors and making it confusing for the end-user that doesn't make them pick you that makes them pick nothing having good clear offerings and good clear collaboration makes the end-user realize that whatever they choose it's going to be okay because they'll be able to use everything they need to because they're using open-source anyway so they're not going to feel trapped or like their options have been limited and instead they'll feel empowered which is great from the point of view of people who would like to serve those markets yeah keeping things visible is always like a good strategy you can you can see what's there you know what's coming you know what was there before and so it keeps everything like open and up like out in the open reminds me of those customer meetings again when the customers are like why are you really doing this and are you really doing this yes we are and it's important to us and it's important to you and we know that it's all good so I'm hearing empowerment visibility involvement these are all kind of things you need to build a successful open source community one thing I was thinking of us buzzword bingo we went through a lot of buzzword bingo today but it's all really important buzzwords adaptability enabling people to do things that make them excited and being able to work with other people and not have them be the core point of failure is really important some of the main things I got out of today and today for some reason our conversation made me think of the book by Kathy Sierra called badass where she makes the point that and there was a subtitle as well but you can find it with that and the point that Casa Kathy Sierra is making there is that your end users are not sitting there thinking software gosh I really want to use some stuff for today they're trying to accomplish their goals and so everyone wins when you focus on helping them accomplish their goals yeah that's that's super true I think the one thing I want to say from somebody coming into like a new community too is it's okay to like ask the questions even if you think that they're really dumb it's okay to ask that on you know whatever forms you have because that's how you get started you know you day one you're never an expert you're you know walking you're walking the path so you know it's learned always like crawl walk you know you crawl before you walk so it's okay to like start wherever you're starting and be empowered to feel like you know the community that you're joining up inside a community that's welcoming and if they don't welcome you that's a warning sign right there right there and I will I will add to what Karthik said that if you have the newbies superpower of being able to read those Doc's with a fisheye please don't waste it please open the issue because I assure you the maintainer of that project will be so grateful they will not be angry at you for not understanding what they meant they'll be thrilled that you help them change the docs such that it actually communicates what they wanted it to and they don't have the ability anymore to do that they don't so only you only the people who are looking at a project for the first time actually can open the issues that are gonna solve things all right well I thank you all for taking time to talk with us and I thank the listeners and viewers out there in video land and I will see you as soon again on the new stack makers