Open Source Summit Europe 2024

Worldwide, we spend close to 2 trillion dollars per year for the loaded cost of software developers. If every company spent just 0.05% of that amount to fund open source maintainers, we’d unlock a billion dollars per year to fund the maintenance of open source. That would pay the full time salaries for thousands of maintainers, their managers, security training, etc. That seems fairly cheap for software that accounts for 70% to 97% of our software stack depending on how you count. And just imagine the positive impact on the security of our software supply chain! What are we waiting for? We’re way overdue making a clear distinction between open source developers and open source maintainers and professionalizing the latter. This talk will explore what doing so would actually look like and give an overview of the current efforts to support open source maintainers.

The goal of this presentation is twofold: Firstly, we want to demystify open source project governance. Do you freeze when you hear the term governance? Do you blindly copy and paste the governance of other projects hoping it works for your project too? Do you struggle to keep governance up to date or aligned with what's *actually* going on in the project? You're not alone. Secondly, we want to provide a simple, practical, and proven approach to writing governance that's directly inspired from coding best practices. The very same concepts that are used when writing code (e.g. Don't Repeat Yourself, Keep It Simple, or Separation of Concerns) have direct application when authoring governance documents and create the same kind of positive outcomes: governance that is simple to understand, flexible, and and easy to maintain. You'll never come back from thinking about governance as code. By the time you leave this presentation, you'll have an entirely new perspective on governance and will feel empowered by your ability to leverage your existing software engineering skills in this new domain.

When you join an open source community, do you ever wonder how it got started? Was infrastructure like CI/CD, code checking tools, docs, etc. started from day 0 or built bit-by-bit from day 1 onwards? Do people assume particular roles or does everyone just jump in to get things rolling? Do you build up some capabilities first and then open it up, or just go gung-ho? In this talk, we tell the story of how an idea germinated from the IBM AI research team and investigated on a dev laptop led to IBM and Red Hat building out an entire project to successfully create the InstructLab open source community in just 9 weeks. We will treat you to a behind the scenes look at how a huge undertaking like this can be realized - warts and all. We invite you to join us for our story of how a dedicated team working together took complex AI concepts that seemed near-impossible to make open source and built a community that allows anyone to contribute improvements to LLMs. Attendees will leave with a thorough understanding of how to create the scaffolding for a successful project opening in a short time frame, with all requisite buzzwords like “GenAI” included, but not obnoxiously so.

Well run open source software community projects are natural labs for teaching software engineering practices to undergraduates. What if we turned the classroom inside out? What if we taught students the fundamentals of software transmitted diseases? (The New STDs!) And intellectual property basics that every engineer needs to understand? This talk shares the experiences of building out Semesters of Code this past four years, and where the experiment is going to go next.

In an era where technology increasingly influences every aspect of society, the potential for open source software to serve public interests and empower nonprofit organizations is immense. Yet, despite its transformative promise, the intersection of open source and the nonprofit sector remains underexplored and underutilized, particularly in projects aimed at public welfare beyond the tech community. I'll delve into the untapped synergy between open source initiatives and nonprofit organizations, exploring pathways for adoption, community support, funding, and sustainable growth. I will demystify the process of integrating open source solutions within nonprofit projects, highlighting practical strategies for organizations to not only adopt technology but also to contribute back to the open source ecosystem. I will also explore case studies of successful nonprofit open source projects, identifying key factors that contributed to their sustainability and impact. Finally, and possibly most importantly I'll explain about securing funding and support for open source projects focused on the public good, as well as partnerships, and community-driven development opportunities.