Who Owns Open-Source Software?

We discuss all things open-source, leaving Michael and Joe to hold down the fort while Allen is away, while Joe's impersonations are spot on and Michael is on a first name basis, assuming he can pronounce it. This episode of the Coding Blocks podcast is about the people and organizations behind open-source software. We talk about the different incentives behind projects, and their governance to see if we can understand our ecosystem better. This episode's show notes can be found at https://www.codingblocks.net/episode150, if you're reading this via your podcast player. Sponsors Datadog – Sign up today for a free 14 day trial and get a free Datadog t-shirt after your first dashboard. Linode – Sign up for $100 in free credit and simplify your infrastructure with Linode's Linux virtual machines. Survey Says Which company has the best open source projects? Take the survey at: https://www.codingblocks.net/episode150. News We appreciate the new reviews, thank you! iTunes: @k_roll242, code turtle Upcoming Events: Joe is presenting at the San Diego Elastic Meetup Tuesday January 19th 2021 #CBJam is right around the corner, January 21st to 24th Subscribe to our Coding Blocks YouTube channel for all the upcoming keyboard reviews You Thought You Knew OSS Q: What do most developers think about when they think of "open-source" software? Q: Is the formal definition more important than the general perception? Formal Definitions of Open-Source opensource.org: Open source software is made by many people and distributed under an OSD-compliant license which grants all the rights to use, study, change, and share the software in modified and unmodified form. Software freedom is essential to enabling community development of open source software. opensource.com: Open source commonly refers to software that uses an open development process and is licensed to include the source code Pop Quiz, who created…? C: Dennis Ritchie Linux: Linus Torvolds Curl: Daniel Sternberg Python: Guido von Rossum JavaScript: Brandon Eich (Netscape) Node: Ryan Dahl Java: James Gosling (Sun) Git: Linus Torvalds C#: Microsoft (Anders Hejlsberg) Kubernetes: Google Postgres: Michael Stonebraker React: Facebook Rust: Mozilla Chromium: Google Flutter: Google TypeScript: Microsoft Vue: Evan You Q: It seems like most newer projects (with the exception of Vue) are associated with corporations or foundations. When and why did that change? GitHub Star Distribution Q: What are the most popular projects? Who were they made for, and why? https://github.com/EvanLi/Github-Ranking Who uses open-source software? There are a lot of stats and surveys…none great All surveys and stats agree that open-source is on the rise You kinda can't not use open-source software. Your OS, tools, networking hardware, etc all use copious amounts of open-souce software. Individuals Many (most) smaller libraries are written and maintained by individual authors, and have few or no contributors Some large / important libraries have thousands of contributors 10 most contributed GitHub projects in 2019 VS Code has almost 20k contributors Flutter has 13k contributors Kubernetes and Ansible have around 7k Q: Why do individuals create open source? What do they get out of it? Corporations A lot of corporate "open source" that are utilities or tools for working with those companies (ie: Azure SDK) Many open source projects are stewarded by a single company (Confluent, Elastic, MongoDB) Many open source projects listed below are now run by a foundation Let's look at some of the most prominent projects that were started by corporations. Note: many of these projects came in through acquisitions, and many have since been donated to foundations. Microsoft Maybe the biggest? Maybe? .NET, Helm, TypeScript, Postgres, VS Code, NPM, GitHub https://opensource.microsoft.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_and_open_source Google Kubernetes, Angular, Chromium, Android, Go, Dart, Protobuff, TensorFlow, Flutter, Skaffold, Spinnaker, Polymer, Yeoman https://opensource.google/projects/explore/featured Facebook React, PyTorch, GraphQL, RocksDB, Presto, Jest, Flux https://opensource.facebook.com/projects Amazon Well, lots of toolkits and sdks for AWS… Oracle Java, MySQL https://developer.oracle.com/open-source/ Focused Corporations Sometimes a company will either outright own, or otherwise build a business centered around a technology. These companies will typically offer services and support around open-source projects. DataStax Elasticsearch Canonical MongoDB Q: Why do corporations publish open-source software? What do they get out of releasing projects? Foundations Foundations are organizations that own open-source projects Foundations have many different kinds of governance models, but generally they are responsible for things like… code stewardship (pull requests, versions, planning, contributors, lifecycle, support, certification*) financial support (domains, hosting, marketing, grants) legal issues (including protecting the contributors liability) Most big open-source projects you can think of run under some sort of foundation Typically they are funded by large corporate backers There are a ton of foundations here. including many "one-offs": https://opensource.com/resources/organizations ** WordPress Foundation, Python Foundation, Mozilla foundations Foundations are run in a variety of ways, and for different reasons, some even offer many competing projects https://opensource.guide/leadership-and-governance/ ** BDFL – Python, small projects, one person has final say ** "Meritocracy" (not a great term) – Active contributors are given decision making power, voting ** Liberal Contribution: Projects seek concensus rather than a pure vote, strive to be inclusive (Node, Rust) Apache (1999) Governance: https://www.apache.org/foundation/governance/ Org Chart: https://www.apache.org/foundation/governance/orgchart https://projects.apache.org/ Non-Profit Company, mostly Java, tons of libraries, data All volunteer board, 350+ projects Projects HTTPD, Kafka, Spark, Flink, Groovy, Avro, Log4…, Maven, ActiveMQ, Lucene, Solr, Cloud Native Computing Foundation Kubernetes, Helm, Prometheus, FluentD, Linkerd, OpenTracing A whole bunch of others that start with a K Linux Foundation Linux Kernel Kubernetes..? Ah, they're over CNCF, and many, many, many other things Let's Encrypt, NodeJS (through the OpenJs Foundation) Q: Why do corporations donate projects, why do individuals? Who really owns open-source code? Resources We Like USA Facts – Our nation, in numbers (usafacts.org) Tip of the Week Peacock – Subtly change the color of your VS Code workspace. (marketplace.visualstudio.com) SketchUp – 3d model *all* of your projects. (sketchup.com)