All right, folks, we're just about another minute out.
This next talk is going to move us into governance, who's here's an open source project
and what changes as it grows.
Many projects hit a point where stewardship decisions stop being theoretical, especially
when companies or foundations are involved.
Please welcome Repake and Faith Digger Menti.
All right.
Thank you.
Good to be back in the community bedroom.
So, thanks for coming.
So, my name is Rui Peik.
I'm a community manager for TIDB to open source
distributed SQL database within around for about 10 years.
And yeah, go ahead.
Yeah.
Hi, everyone.
My name is Fatiha, my name is Fatiha.
And I work at Susay as the manager for a create team there.
And maybe I can say, because as we're like,
I'm looking at the Sweden and I being contributing to open source
for more than 10 years, I think, under different communities.
And you must all joke.
So, yeah.
No, that's all right.
So, I did.
But I mean, I started working in open source community management
a little over 10 years ago when I joined the LF.
And I was there for four years.
And ever since then, I've been at various commercial open source
offer companies, including my current job.
So, and then Fatiha, as he mentioned, he, you know,
I first met him when he was an active contributor
to one of the projects at the LF.
So, I think we both have an experience working
at both commercial open source companies and foundation.
So, one is sort of a share our perspective in the last thing
on the slide.
Like, we share an obsessive passion for the same game,
but we call it something different.
But, so, I mean, these logos should be familiar to you.
I mean, when I show examples with logos,
I'm not picking on these people.
It's not shot in for it.
It's just some of the examples just came to me at the top of my mind.
So, a lot of these companies, I mean, starting in like 2017,
a lot of these companies, they started with a
recognized open source licenses.
And then, for one reason or another, decided to change
their licenses to a variant of business source licenses.
And what's also been interesting with some of these projects
is that community fork were formed.
And like open source, faculty, and open tofu,
I think all of these are under the Linux Foundation.
So, when people got upset about companies changing the licenses
on community, they said, you know what?
We're just going to create our own fork
and put it under the auspices of foundations.
And a narrative started developing, especially on line
about, you know, can we even trust commercial open source
companies anymore?
Because a lot of folks are doing a bait in switch.
And we might as well just bring everything under the foundation.
And then, I think the following interaction
that I got involved in on hacker news is somewhat typical.
So, one of our colleagues posted, it was just a link
to our GitHub repo saying, hey, check out this open source database,
written and go.
And another colleague of mine sort of jumped in and offered a couple
more details about our project and also mentioned
some of the projects that we donated to the CNCF.
And not surprisingly, somebody jumped in and said, hey,
this is a VC back company.
They have a CLA.
So, we need to create a fork.
So, you know, that's fine, not unexpected.
And then, somewhere down the road, somebody else jumped in and said, hey,
we just need to move everything under our foundation
and have multiple companies contribute.
And this is when I jumped in, I said, look, I work for the company
that's supporting TIDB, but I also worked at the foundation.
And it's not that simple.
You need to have a more balanced look as to which models are appropriate.
So, that's obviously the theme of our talk.
And just a quick recap on how foundations typically work.
And some of these may be basic and I apologize if I'm boring people.
So, obviously, when the projects get formed,
like the funding comes from dozens of companies, which is nice.
You bring it a diverse perspective,
and diverse participants into a project.
And obviously, they're providing funding through their membership fees.
But what's also interesting is that not just scholars,
but a lot of the contributions come from these companies that are members.
And it's not always 100%.
But the level of their contributions, technical contributions,
there's a strong correlation with their membership level.
The higher, like, a platinum members, they typically contribute
not just most scholars, but also most developer resources.
And these developers, I mean, they're already on salary, right?
I mean, a couple of people here are smiling.
But they're already on salary, they're not.
So, these, a lot of these funding aren't going to pay for developers.
I mean, sometimes that happens on an individual basis,
but a lot of this funding is going towards like marketing activities,
like projects on it, like events.
And also paying for foundation staff,
like executive directors or like operation persons like me,
who was working with technical community,
I'm basically like a line item in the project's budget.
And the other thing I want to add here,
obviously, the governance and leadership come from the community,
or as it should, as it should.
And a lot of the decisions unlike corporations
are more consensus driven, right?
Which is nice, but also, there's a room for things
we're taking loosely longer than it typically does at corporations.
So, I mean, I can't take credit for this.
I think, fought to year them when who put together the slide.
I like the tagline at the bottom, it says the foundation
isn't going to solve all the problems.
You need share commitments from everybody.
Because, you know, one defoundation typically start.
If you're joined as like a platinum member,
like because you want the foundation to be around
for at least the first couple of years.
So, you make like a two-three year commitment to be a platinum member.
So, you're not just cutting the check for the first year,
but you're cutting the check for multiple years,
so that your foundation has some stability in the beginning.
But if you think about it, like a two-year is,
it's not necessarily a long time.
It's very similar to how, like a commercial self-recompanies,
you do around the funding with the VCs.
You're raising money so that you have a running way for a year to at least, right?
So, you, and then you do the next round of funding to keep the light on.
But the challenge is what happens after the first couple of years.
A lot of projects under the LF are doing well,
but there are projects that we've seen,
unfortunately, after a couple of years.
Like, you lose a couple of your platinum membership,
and there's a lot of risk, not just financially,
but you're also losing your developer resources
that are doing bulk of the work.
And this happens, because if you imagine like two-year period,
a large company usually they'll typically go through some re-org.
It's inevitable, and then like a VP, or whoever the executive sponsor was,
who was a big champion of the project,
that person may not be there anymore.
And then, you know, the dollars get taken away by new executives,
or in worst case, the developer resources get taken away as well.
So, it's important, like if it's a foundation staff,
not just to maintain the level of like a platinum member's,
but you also want to make sure that there's a contributed diversity.
Because if things happen, if you lose like a two-platinent member's,
you still have enough resources, both from the financial and technical side,
to keep the lights on.
I think next slide is your Fati.
Oh, sorry.
So, we found a couple of examples that show a cases where things could still go wrong,
unfortunately.
And so, first one is what matrix, I think it was about a year ago,
shortly after last year's falls, and there's a block post that came out from matrix
saying that we're at a crossroads, like they're having some severe financial difficulties.
And fortunately, I think things have started turning around.
There's another block post that I found that came out,
like shortly before Christmas, saying,
although they're still having financial difficulties,
but they're starting to make progress.
And this is a project that's been around for like 10 years.
And they're still struggling, and they're over relying on one of the members for a lot of the financial
backing.
So, I'm glad the things are going well, but it's not always rosy.
And the second one, when Fati sent this to me over a text, I thought it was a joke.
I don't know if you heard of like a scenario, and that's net.io.
So, when I read this, like a block post from CNC,
yeah, if I thought it was like a Kafka novel.
Like, what scenario did was not only say,
you know, we regret kicking the donating project to DLF,
and we want to walk away.
They said, we want our control of the GitHub repo.
They want the domain name back.
They want the trademark back, and it was surreal.
And then not unexpectedly, a couple of years later, they settled things.
So, things are, I guess, now back, back to normal.
But, yeah, you can't, let's just like bad actors behaving poorly,
even under foundations, that's sort of the point.
Although it's a very extreme example, I think.
Now, before I move to company back foundations,
I want to highlight something about foundations and the member companies.
Like, obviously, member companies provide the funding,
the resources, whether cloud resources or human resources in the form of voters.
But I just want to note that when I was at the LF,
I struggled a lot with communities not doing good job on the resources.
They are given by the foundations as well.
So, the community, or as in the usual countries,
we can do a lot of things to have the foundation says,
right?
For example, when I was there, half of the foundations
remain where it was spent on cloud resources.
And then we did RMS is half of that expense
was for things that haven't been needed or used anymore.
So, the AS committee members, we can have foundations
to support our projects by adding and doing some,
you know, okay, not reducing our infrastructure costs and so on.
So, those things can be used for the corporate events,
swags and other things.
So, it's again, it's not just foundations, it's not just companies
who are supporting those foundations,
but us as community members have a big role to play
to sustain the foundations where our projects are hosted.
So, that is something I personally had to deal with
and cause the end of problems for the communities in the end
because of high costs caused by the infrastructure costs.
So, when it comes to commercial company-based projects,
so as opposed to foundation backed projects or host projects,
the company-based projects usually get their major chunk of funding
from the companies who backed those projects.
And in some cases, it could be 100% coming from a single company
who is pushing the project forward but in open source
for me also commercial form based on open source version.
But in some cases, there may be other companies
contributing different types of resource-like cloud resource cloud
credits and so on.
But company-based projects are mostly supported by
the company who actually is behind that project.
And similar to funding the developer resources,
I was also coming from company.
So, if the company is going through a troubling period,
the developer resource could also go down.
And again, it is highly dependent on companies
performance as well as the company, the project success.
And obviously, if a company is putting out of financial support
and letting its developers contribute to projects,
they also have a bit higher chance of deciding the product-priority
or project road maps and this is inevitable.
Like, if more companies join and support the projects financially
or by providing dual resources, then they may
have a say in the project road map and so on.
But generally, the companies who back the projects
have a bigger say in the project road map.
Even though such projects, which I will talk about, for example,
soon, they get contributions from others who are not employed
by the companies who back the projects,
they may not have a final say in the project's future or road map.
They can obviously go and share their feedback,
but in the end, because the company is putting out of, you know,
backing to projects.
In some cases, the community's feedback may not be taken
into consideration by the companies.
And yeah, some of the successful companies let open source projects
like, I use Ansible on a daily basis.
I use GitLab on a daily basis.
And I use Docker in the past on a daily basis.
And these are all all some projects.
But they are mainly drawn by individual companies.
And again, as I said, some of these projects get
contributions or support from other companies.
But when you look at these projects, you can
direct think who is behind this project.
And this is in a way good, because the strong company support,
stewardship can drive long-term success for projects.
Obviously, this is heavily depends on company success as well.
Like, if company is making a return of the investment
from these projects, they will definitely
continue supporting the projects.
But if the company doesn't get what they
invest in these projects in return, they may make different decisions
based on their business priorities and so on.
And again, the decisions and progress can be faster in such projects,
because, again, some of the project roadmap is coming
from company product management.
And that could actually kind of steal the community
towards certain decisions to be taken faster, certain things
prioritized more than others.
Well, again, indent is our company back.
And even though we as community members want to go and contribute,
the main steering comes from the company itself.
And also, as I mentioned, like the funding is
played key for open source projects,
regardless of if this was by foundations or companies
and having a strong company behind projects had project to sustain
itself financially for longer term.
And similarly, the company employees become
contribute to the project, and they also could have
sustainability of the project from technical perspective
and ensure the project continues to provide support for
its open source users or commercial users.
And the last point is about the license changes,
like ways they mentioned that I've been quite a few license
change recently.
And it happens similarly with the company back projects.
And this QR code takes you to a GitHub repo,
writing down faster, created this table,
who is here in the run now.
So we look at her analysis and all the past decade
that have been only 20 license changes.
So again, license changes are not good, but it's not like
hundreds, it's limited in number.
And some of you know which projects change licenses.
And you can check the table to see what those projects are
and thanks don't for creating the table and making the analysis.
When it comes to how can me influence company
let open source projects?
And again, on a higher level, it's not so different from
from foundation, host or back or support projects.
We as committee members must continue our engagement
actively in the projects that are backed by companies.
And in some cases, people might think like,
oh, I can go and make code contribution to this project,
so they can hear my voice and help me get whatever
bug fix or feature prioritized.
But contributions can vary in form.
It doesn't have to be code contributions.
It can be the computation contributions.
It can be, as I mentioned, like maintaining cloud infrastructure
or helping with the event organization or marketing and so on.
And this way, we can help our voices hurt
even better by the project itself and the company
that backs that project because we are contributing our time
without any expectation from the company that backs the project.
And that might help elevate our, you know, profile with the project
and also within the company itself.
And this is also paved way for us to direct reach out to company
employees themselves because the people we are working
in the community there in place of the company.
And they are our fellow community members.
So we can just talk them about our needs and requirements
and see where in the line those things are getting done
or will there be any chance of those things to be done.
So again, the keyword here is simple and this is constructive feedback
that is pretty key because there is a company
with financial interests behind that project.
And it is doing its best to support the project.
At the same time, it needs to, you know,
care about its own well-being as a company.
So we have to make sure we should go and pass our feedback
and a constructive manner to the companies.
And finally, whatever we do,
as part of our committee engagements for such projects like
once I mentioned, our contributions would help pay users
and pay users of contributions would help us intern.
This is like shared ownership in a way,
regardless of if the project is backed by a foundation or a company.
So in that, there are a lot of similarities
between the projects hosted by the foundations
and projects backed by the companies.
What matters here is, as committee members,
to go and do our best to help the project,
regardless of who the project is.
Because in that, we are there to make what we want
to happen for quickly make the project better have others,
which we don't know who to make sure the projects stay healthy
and have its users.
Cool.
Yeah, so good, do a quick wrap up.
We've got a one-minute warning.
So you probably guess when you saw the title or the abstract,
like, should it be foundation or the company?
There's no simple answer.
I mean, the answer is it depends.
It depends on the nature of the project.
It depends on who's involved.
So it's overly simplistic to say, because you're VC backed
or you're a foundation backed, you're project
going to be better over the other.
I think it depends.
And the final point I want to drive is not the business model
or the funding model that determines how healthy the project is.
It's all the community members.
You need to hold the foundation people,
the executives at companies accountable so that the project
is open and it prosperous.
It's not just down to business model.
And it's easy to throw rocks at people,
but we all have shared responsibilities to make sure
that the project stays healthy.
And then it's choose a state to the open source philosophy.
So I think that's it.
We don't have time for Q&A, but we'll
we can duck outside if you people want to grab us
or you don't find us on LinkedIn.
Thank you.