Heroic and inspiring tales of open source

Description

Twenty years in, open source represents one of the longest human experiments in global collaboration and change, and there are important lessons to be learned from this history. However, those who have been working on open source have failed to adequately document the stories that shaped their experience and honed their FOSS reflexes.

Danese Cooper and Stephen Walli explain why studying the history of open source will help the next generation of FOSS practitioners move forward with more confidence—and keep them from repeating past mistakes. This talk is meant as a gift to those who will inherit the open source movement, so they won’t compromise open source out of existence.

Topics include:

• Open source takes courage.
• Open source doesn’t waste effort pandering to the money. It’s okay to make money, but doing unnatural things to appease VCs is a slippery slope that can quickly kill a FOSS project. The money will figure out how to play with your project when they perceive value, so focus on building the best project you can.
• Distributed ownership is preferable for FOSS projects, since single-entity ownership has allowed some very bad things to happen to several high-profile projects.
• Open source projects thrive when they are inclusive, but inclusion can’t be the only focus of a successful project. The culture of the project can be baseline inclusive if the founders and subsequent leadership makes it a priority.