Tag Archives: opensource

Open Source Glossary

When discussing open source with colleagues, I tend to assume that they already know the basics. But, as open source becomes a standard part of all software development, and the number of people working with open source grows, this has become less and less true.

What follows is a minimal viable vocabulary, which I’m posting here so that I can link to it elsewhere when having these conversations, and attempting to assume a lingua franca.

Open Source

Open source refers to software which is developed and released under an OSI (Open Source Initiative) approved license. Open source licenses are those that comply with the Open Source Definition, which sets forth ten tenets which are mandatory components of a compliant license.

Within these tenets, there is a lot of room for variation, and thus there are many licenses that qualify as open source licenses, ranging from extremely permissive (“Do whatever you want with this code.”) to much more restrictive (“You must do these things with the code.”)

While, strictly speaking, “open source” is a legal definition of the license under which software is released, it also implies a project which is run under the guidelines of the Four Opens – Open Source, Open Design, Open Development, and Open Community. In reality, most projects fall short of that ideal in some way, but it is an ideal to be striven for.

Fork

A fork is a copy of an open source project, for the purpose of making changes to the source code. Usually, this is done with the intention of offering those changes back to the original (“upstream”) project for inclusion in future versions (See “PR/MR/Patch”)

A private fork is when this copy is made privately, inside a particular company or organization, without visibility to the upstream.

A public fork, as the name indicates, is done in public where everyone on the project can see what changes are being proposed. This is always preferable, as it allows the project community to comment and participate in these changes, rather than them being a surprise.

A hostile fork is when a project is forked with no intention to ever contribute back, but, rather, to continue to run a competing project indefinitely. This should be considered only in the most extreme of situations.

PR/MR/Patch

A PR (Pull Request), MR (Merge Request) or Patch, are all terms for offering a change back to the originating project (“upstream”), for inclusion in future versions of that project. The terms indicate different ways that the change may be submitted, but all refer to essentially the same thing – a proposed change.

A PR is the desired end-game on any fork. Forks should be short-lived, and have a specific proposed change in mind, rather than being long-running or permanent artifacts.

Upstream

An upstream project refers to the open source project from which you are building. That implies the existence of a downstream – a project, product, or service which inherits some or all of its code from that upstream. For example, Apache Kafka is the upstream for Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK). (Which, of course, implies that MSK is the downstream from Apache Kafka.)

The upstream/downstream relationship is symbiotic. That is, a project relies on users, and a product or service relies on the upstream’s health and sustainability. As such, a downstream product or service should do everything in its power to support and sustain the project which it depends on. And project, in their turn, should listen to customers and users, and be responsive to them.

Maintainer

A maintainer is someone empowered to make changes to an open source project, and/or to make releases of that project. Ideally, a healthy project will have multiple maintainers, and there will be healthy discussion and debate around changes that go into a project.

Single-maintainer projects, or single-vendor projects (ie, where all maintainers come from the same vendor/company/organization) pose a risk to the sustainability of that project, since the change in direction from one source can result in the user community being suddenly disenfranchised or surprised. Thus, it is an ideal of open community that there be a diversity of inputs in the pool of maintainers, to ensure that all voices are equally heard when changes are made.

Upcoming events (June and beyond)

I’m about to head out for a few events again, and I’m in the process of planning several other events.

First, I’ll be in Berlin for FOSS Backstage , Berlin Buzzwords , and the Apache EU RoadShow. This is a trifecta of open source events happening at the Kulturbrauerei in Berlin. I’ll be speaking at Backstage about mentoring in open source, which, you might know, is something I’m passionate about. I’ll also be doing interviews for Feathercast, so if you’re going to be there, find me and do an interview.

I’ll be home for a week, and then I’ll be attending the ISC-HPC Supercomputing event in Frankfurt. This is the second time I’ll attend this event, which was my introduction to Supercomputing last year. I’ve learned so much since then, but I’m still an HPC newbie. While there, I hope to spend most of my time speaking with the EDUs and research orgs that are present, and doing interviews with the student supercomputing teams that are participating in the Student Cluster Competition.

Beyond that, I’m planning several events, where I’ll be representing CentOS.

In August, I’ll be attending DevConf.us in Boston, and on the day before DevConf, we’ll be running a CentOS Dojo at Boston University. The call for papers for that event is now open, so if you’re doing anything interesting around CentOS, please submit a paper and come hang out with us.

Later in August, I will (maybe? probably?) be going to Vancouver for Open Source Summit North America (formerly Linuxcon) to represent CentOS.

In September, I’ll be at ApacheCon North America in Montreal. The schedule for this event is published, and registration is open. You should really come. ApacheCon is something I’ve been involved with for 20 years now, and I’d love to share it with you.

October is going to be very full.

CentOS is proudly sponsoring Ohio LinuxFest, which apparently I last attended in 2011! (That can’t be right, but that’s the last one I have photographic evidence for.) We (CentOS) will be sharing our booth/table space with Fedora, and possibly with some of the project that use the CentOS CI infrastructure for their development process. More details as we get closer to the event. That’s October 12th – 13th in Columbus.

Then, on October 19th, we’ll be at CERN, in Meyrin, Switzerland, for the second annual Cern CentOS Dojo. Details, and the call for papers, for that event, are on the event website at http://cern.ch/centos.

Immediately after that, I’ll be going (maybe? probably?) to Edinburgh for Open Source Summit Europe. This event was in Edinburgh a few years ago, and it was a great location.

Finally, in November, I plan to attend SuperComputing 18 in Dallas, which is the North American version of the HPC event in Frankfurt, although it tends to be MUCH bigger. Last year, at the event in Denver, I walked just over 4 miles one day on the show floor, visiting the various organizations presenting there.

So, that’s it for me, for the rest of the year, as far as I know. I would love to see you if you’ll be at, or near, any of these venues.

Event report: OpenStack PTG

Last week I attended the second OpenStack PTG, in Denver. The first one was held in Atlanta back in February.

This is not an event for everyone, and isn’t your standard conference. It’s a working meeting – a developers’ summit at which the next release of the OpenStack software is planned. The website is pretty blunt about who should, and should not, attend. So don’t sign up without knowing what your purpose is there, or you’ll spend a lot of time wondering why you’re there.

I went to do the second installment of my video series, interviewing the various project teams about what they did in the just-released version, and what they anticipate coming in the next release.

The first of these, at the PTG in Atlanta, featured only Red Hat engineers. (Those videos are HERE.) However, after reflection, I decided that it would be best to not limit it, but to expand it to the entire community, focusing on cross-company collaboration, and trying to get as many projects represented as I could.

So, in Denver I asked the various project PTL (project technical leads) to do an interview, or to assemble a group of people from the project to do interviews. I did 22 interviews, and I’m publishing those on the RDO YouTube channel – http://youtube.com/RDOCommunity – just as fast as I can get them edited.

I also hosted an RDO get-together to celebrate the Pike release, and we had just over 60 people show up for that. Thank you all so much for attending! (Photos and video from that coming soon to a blog near you!)

So, watch my YouTube channel, and hopefully by the end of next week I’ll have all of those posted.

I love working with the OpenStack community because they remind me of Open Source in the old days, when developers cared about the project and the community at least as much, and often more, than about the company that happens to pay their paycheck. It’s very inspiring to listen to these brilliant men and women talking about their projects.

Three best features of open source events

As part of Stormy’s ongoing blog challenge, here’s my take on “Three best features of open source events.”

1. The hackathon

While there is considerable evidence that the term “hackathon” should be avoided (No, I can’t find the article right now. I’ll keep looking), the collaborative space at an event is, in my opinion, the most important part of an open source event.

Open source events are educational, of course. You can attend a talk and learn things. But most of the information that you need to learn is available, free, online. So to me the most important part of an event is the opportunity to meet and collaborate with the other people on the project.

Defining a specific space for this is critical to get people to sit down and play along. Signs identifying project teams or topics is even more welcoming. Having a white board where people can identify specifically what they are working on gives a way for introverts to be overtly welcoming of other people with similar interests.

Publicizing the collaborative space well in advance of  the event gives the opportunity for people to discuss what they might work on, and gives some people the added incentive to show up at all.

2. The after-party

While it’s indeed a cliche (because it’s true!) that open source events have too much alcohol, having an after-event, with or without food and/or drinks, is a critical part of the event. It gives a specific time and place for your community to get to know one another in a less formal atmosphere, and talk about something other than code. These kinds of community bonds will simply never happen on the mailing list, which is by design focused on the project, the code, the design, and so on, rather than on the personalities.

Open source communities fail because of personality issues at least as often as they do because of code issues. Providing a specific time and space to address these issues saves communities. As we say at Apache, Community > Code.

3. The keynotes

Picking good keynotes is really hard, because keynotes should be inspiring. As such, they don’t always have to be directly related to the topic of the event, but should be, in some way, of interest to the audience.

A keynote should be delivered by someone who is engaging and eloquent. And it should have some kind of call to action, or end on a note that inspires the audience to go do something.

I’ve been attending technical conferences for 20 years, and I remember only a handful of keynotes. I remember Douglas Adams because he was funny. I remember Hugh Howie because I got to sit on stage with him and grill him about the process of being an author and engaging your fans. I remember an OSCon keynote about maps, and one by a guy from WETA about the making of the Lord of the Rings movies. I remember Gema Parreño talking about using data to save the earth from collision with space objects. And most recently, Sandra Matz talking about what your social media profile says about you.

But there have also been a lot of clunkers, and a lot of product pitches, and a lot of Hey Look At Me talks. I can do without those.

Oh, and if you have any suggestions for great keynotes, please let me know. 🙂

No, Apache did not send you spam

Today, the ASF received yet another complaint from a distraught individual who had, in their opinion, received spam from the Apache Software Foundation. This time, via our Facebook page. As always, this is because someone sent email, and in that email is a link to a website – in this case, www125.forcetwo.men , which is displaying a default (ie, incorrectly configured) Apache web server, running on CentOS.

This distraught individual threatened legal action against the ASF, and against CentOS, under FBI, Swedish, and International law, for sending them spam.

No, Apache didn’t send you spam. Not only that, but Apache software wasn’t used to send you spam. Unfortunately, the spammer happened to be running a misconfigured copy of software we produced. That’s the extent of the connection. Also, they aren’t even compentent enough to correctly configure their web server.

It would be like holding  a shovel company liable because someone dug a hole in your yard.

Or, better yet, holding a shovel company liable because someone crashed into your car, and also happened to have a shovel in their trunk at the time.

We get these complaints daily, to various email addresses at the Foundation, and via various websites and twitter accounts. While I understand that people are irritated at receiving spam, there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it.

And, what’s more, it’s pretty central to the philosophy of open source that we don’t put restrictions on what people use our software for – even if they *had* used our software to send that email. Which they didn’t.

So stop it.

 

What does a community manager do

Last week I took some long-postponed vacation time and missed Stormy’s blogging prompt. But this particular question needs answering.

What does a community manager do?

Whenever people ask me what I do, I find myself struggling for words, because being a community manager is a daunting mishmash of interrelated tasks that range from marketing to HR to event management to journalism to … everything else.

During the Obama years, the term “community organizer” was bandied about, and that comes close to what a community manager does. And then there’s the confusion around the term “manager”, because I’m not a manager, and I don’t manage the community.

So what do I do?

Well, it’s a bit of this and a bit of that.

Cheerleading

A major task of community management is to be the lead cheerleader for the community. I’m the community manager for RDO, and so it’s my job to promote RDO to the various audiences that might care.

In the case of RDO, that includes the larger OpenStack community, cloud operators in the general IT work force, and also internally to people at Red Hat who need to be informed about what’s happening in the “upstream” community, and how it affects our “downstream” product, Red Hat OpenStack Platform.

To this end, I manage our Social Media presence, post updates to our mailing lists and blog,  make announcements on IRC, and so on. I also show up at conferences and answer questions from attendees, put together presentations to tell people about what we do, and speak at events.

Event planning

At Red Hat, we have an actual event planning team, and they are awesome at what they do – booking facilities, shipping stuff around, planning and setting up and tearing down the physical booths at events, coordinating and communicating with all of the people that will attend.

I don’t do that.

But I plan and coordinate events that my part of the community will show up to. I plan small social events around the main events. I make sure that those events work with the schedules of the people that I’m responsible for, and encourage them to come and bring their friends.

And I help out with small regional meetups, providing swag, as well as helping with (i.e., funding) travel and lodging for speakers that might not have budget to do that on their own.

Make personal connections

A major job of the community manager is to become an expert on the community members. Who knows what. Who is willing to speak on a particular topic. Who has the connections to make things happen.

Then, when a question is asked, or when someone has a need, it’s my job to connect them with the right person that can help them.

So … kind of like first-tier support, triaging problems, solving the ones that I’m able to, and referring to second-tier support those problems that are beyond my expertise.

There’s also some mentoring that goes in here – helping people new to the project know where to fit in, and where to find the information they need.

Look for stories

I look for stories of people using our project, and tell those stories to the world. In this part of the role, I’m the journalist, looking for ways to tell the story about how our project makes life easier. Much of this is amplifying stories that other people are telling. And then some of it is going out and gathering the stories, and then finding ways to tell those stories.

Everything else

While I don’t write code for the RDO project, I do a little bit of everything else – whatever people need done, I try to fill in, or find the right people to do those tasks.

So, that’s why it’s difficult to know how to answer when people ask me what I do at work.

Open source stats – but what do the numbers *mean*?

I recently sent a report to project management containing some numbers that purport to describe the status of the RDO project.

I got a long and thoughtful response from one of the managers – we’ll call him Mark – and it seems worthwhile sharing some of his insights. To summarize, what he said was, don’t bother collecting stats if they don’t tell a story.

1. Focus on the goals

Listing a bunch of numbers without context – even with pretty graphs – doesn’t tell us anything unless you relate them to goals that we’re trying to achieve.

Several weeks ago I presented a “stakeholder review” to this same audience. Any statistics that I present in the future should be directly related to a goal in that review, or they are just meaningless numbers, and possibly a distraction, and, worse still, might cause people to work towards growing the wrong metric. (Google for “be careful what you measure” and read any of those articles for more commentary on this point.)

2. Focus on the people

One of the stats that I provided was about how certain words and phrases feature in the questions on ask.openstack.org. Mark looked beyond the numbers and saw three people who are very active on that website, two of whom are not obviously engaged in the RDO community itself. Why not? How can we help them? How can they help us? What’s their story? Why are we ignoring them?

3. Focus on the blips

In February, our Twitter mentions, retweets, visits, and so on, went through the roof. Why? And why didn’t we do that same thing again in March?

As it turns out, in February there were two conferences that contributed to this. But, specifically, we captured a lot of video at those events, and the Twitter traffic was all around those videos. So clearly we should be doing more of that kind of content, right?

4. Ignore the stuff that doesn’t seem to mean anything

We track “downloads” of RDO, which roughly speaking means every time someone runs the quickstart and it grabs the RPM. Except RDO is on a mirror network, so that number is false – or, at best, it reflects what the trends might be across the rest of the mirror network. So we have no idea what this metric means. So why are we bothering to track it? Just stop.

5. Ask not-the-usual-suspects

This last one wasn’t one of Mark’s observations, but is what I’m taking from this interaction. We tend to ask the same people the same questions year after year, and then are surprised that we get the same answers.

By taking this data to a new audience, I got new answers. Seems obvious, right? But it’s the kind of obvious thing we overlook all the time. Mark provided insight that I’ve been overlooking because I’m staring so hard at the same things every day.

By the way, I’ve presented Mark’s insight very bluntly here, because it’s important to be clear and honest about the places where we’re not doing our job as well as we can be. Mark’s actual response was much kinder and less judgmental, because Mark is always kind and supportive.

3 ways you find the right type of contributor and where to find them

Another one of Stormy’s questions caught my eye:

“What are 3 ways you find the right type of contributor, and where do you find them?”

Thinking back to the last few years of work on RDO, several answers come to mind:

The people asking the questions

Watch the traffic on your mailing list(s) and on the various support forums. The people that are asking the most questions are often great potential contributors. They are using the project, so they are invested in its success. They are experiencing problems with it, so they know where there are problems that need to be addressed. And they are outspoken enough, or brave enough, to talk about their difficulties publicly, so they are likely to be just as willing to talk about their solutions.

These are usually good people to approach ask ask to write about their user experience. This can often be done collaboratively, combining their questions with the eventual answers that they encountered.

If they appear to be the type of person who is implementing solutions to their problems, ask them to bring those solutions back to your community for inclusion in the code.

In RDO, people that participate in the rdo-list mailing list will sometimes end up contributing their solutions to the project, and eventually becoming regular contributors. We probably need to do a better job of encouraging them to do this, rather than just hoping it’s going to happen on its own.

The people answering the questions

In watching the question-and-answer on ask.openstack.org I often see names I don’t recognize, answering questions related to RDO. Sometimes these are Red Hat engineers who have recently joined the project, and I haven’t met yet. But sometimes, it’s people from outside of Red Hat who have developed expertise on RDO and are now starting to pay that back.

These are the people that I then try to approach via the private messaging feature of that website, and ask them what their story is. This occasionally evolves into a conversation that brings them to more active involvement in the project.

Most people like to be asked, and so asking someone specifically if they’d be willing to come hang out in the IRC channel, or answer questions on the mailing list, tends to be fairly effective, and is a good step towards getting them more involved in the project.

The people complaining

This a tricky one. People complain because something is broken, or doesn’t work as they expect it to. The traditional response to this in the free software world is “Patches Welcome.” This is shorthand for “Fix it yourself and stop bugging me.”

The trick here is to recognize that people usually take the trouble to complain because they want it to work and they’re looking for help. This passion to just make things work can often be harnessed into contributions to the project, if these people are treated with patience and respect.

Patience, because they’re already frustrated, and responding with frustration or defensiveness is just going to make them angry.

Respect, because they are trying to solve an actual real world problem, and they’re not just there to hassle you.

It’s important that you fix their problem. Or at least, try to move them towards that solution.

Once the problem is addressed, ask them to stay. Ask them to write about their situation, and the fix to it. Ask them to stick around and answer other questions, since they have demonstrated that they care about the project, at least to the point of getting it working.

When people complain about your project, you also have a great opportunity to brush them off and persuade them that you are uncaring and unwelcoming, which they will then go tell all of their friends and Twitter followers. This can be a very expensive thing to do, for your community. Don’t do that.

When people come to #rdo on Freenode IRC to ask their RDO and OpenStack questions, I frequently (usually) don’t know the answer myself, but I try to make an effort to connect them with the people that do know the answer. Fortunately, we have an awesome community, and once you bring a question to the attention of the right person, they will usually see it through to the right solution.

Retaining community contributors

Stormy, at OpenSource.com, recently asked the question “What are 10 steps to keeping new contributors once you have their attention”

I’m not sure I have 10, but here’s what I’d say:

Celebrate their contribution, loudly and publicly

People like to be noticed, and they like to be thanked. Tell them that you noticed their contribution by telling the whole world about what they did.

There’s a number of ways to do this, from tweeting every first contribution, to including a Thanks section in your monthly newsletter, to doing a weekly blog post that lists new contributors for that week. Whichever approach you take, make sure that you personally send them a message telling them about it, rather than just hoping that they notice it.

If you have very few new contributors every week/month, then take the time to describe what the new contributor did. If you have dozens every time, this can be more of a challenge, but sending them a personal note is still a very critical part of the process if you want them to stick around.

Give them the keys

A lot of people in open source think that everyone should have to earn their place on the contributor list, by consistent, high-quality contributions over a long period of time.

I’m at the other end of the spectrum. I think you should hand out committer rights like candy. If someone shows initiative and contributes once, give them the opportunity to contribute again, immediately, with no barrier to entry.

What’s the worst that can happen? You have to revert a patch. This is why you have revision control.

So, give them the keys on day one. But there’s a caveat here, which is the next item on my list:

Give constructive criticism

Nobody likes a patronizing pat on the head. Give constructive feedback. After thanking them, tell them patiently and kindly what they can improve. This shows that you consider them to be a contributor to a serious project, and not merely a statistic to report to your boss.

If you have a style guide, and they didn’t live up to it, point them to it, gently and kindly, and give them specific pointers on what they need to improve.

Don’t be one of those jerks that throws it back in their face with a nasty remark. That will guarantee that they won’t come back. Remember that your goal is to retain new contributors, and train them up in the way that your project operates, not merely to act as a filter to keep out unfavorable contributions.

Ask them to do it again, with a specific request

People like to be asked. Asking someone, personally, to do a particular task, is much more effective than a shotgun “Hey, can someone …” sent out to an anonymous faceless mob on a mailing list.

Once someone has contributed something, that’s your opportunity to say, “Hey, I notice that you have some interest in the WhizBang feature, and Ticket 31245 is about that, too. Maybe you could take a look?”

Ask them to write about it

The new contributor experience is a rare and valuable thing. You don’t know what it’s like any more. You remember bits of it, but mostly you’ve forgotten, and become jaded with your second, third, and 700th contribution.

Encourage this new contributor to write about their experience. What was too hard. What was fun. What was unexpected, frightening, exciting. Who helped them. Who got in their way.

These are hugely valuable data points for your project. And they are also a great way to tell this new contributor that their input is valuable, and that you’re trying to make your project more welcoming.

And, of course, once they have written about it, share it with the developer community, along with the name of the contributor, and say, here are some ways maybe we can make this better for the next person.

Point them to the documentation

You have docs, and then you have hidden docs, and then you have the stuff that “everybody knows”. Steer this new contributor to the docs, and take the opportunity to turn the other two categories into actual docs.

Some of this will come out of the blog posts that these new contributors write. Some you will need to write yourself, based on their feedback of the new contributor experience.

This is tedious, but, remember, you’re making an investment in the next time. The better you make this process, the easier it will be for the next person, and the sooner you can pass this part of the job on to someone else.

Ask them to mentor the next new contributor

Ask them to turn that first-timer experience into mentoring another first-timer, as soon as possible. They’ll have the recent experience. They’ll know the potholes that you have long since learned to steer around. They’ll know which people in the community are helpful, and which ones are jerks, who you’ve long ago dismissed as “Oh, that’s just how Larry is.”

Too many beginners

Last weekend at FOSDEM I gave my “Write A Better Manual” talk. I got a question afterwards that I’ve never actually received before:

We’ve done such a great job of attracting new members to our community that it’s causing a problem. Our lead developers are spending all of their time mentoring beginners, and no code is getting written. What do we do?

Once I got over my “I wish I had your problem” moment, we had a great conversation about concrete ways that you can address this problem. And, of course, it is actually a problem, because it can lead to the demise of your project every bit as much as not enough new community members.

Here’s some things that you can do, even if you don’t have exactly this problem:

Turn the beginners into mentors

Someone has just come to your community, and asks a question. It’s one of the questions that you get every day, like “how do I find my IP address?” or “how do I connect to a wireless network?” or “where is the toilet?”

Rather than answering the question yourself, ask the not-quite-beginner to answer it. This does many things at the same time. It saves you the time and trouble of answering. It indicates your confidence that this person is part of the team. It lets this person know that it’s ok for them to start mentoring other people. And the next time the question is asked, you won’t even have to say anything – they’ll just answer it. You’ve taken the first step to making a mentor out of the mentee.

Take shifts

Mentoring beginners is amazingly rewarding, but it’s also exhausting. You shouldn’t have everyone doing it, and you shouldn’t have the same people doing it all the time. Take turns. Even go so far as making a rotation schedule – one week on, 3 weeks off. Your mentors will come back rejuvenated and ready to start up, and will get “off shift” just about the time that it’s starting to be frustrating.

Know when to quit

Even if you don’t take specific shifts, mentors should be told that they can, and should, take breaks. Mentoring is incredibly important, but it’s only part of your “job”. Work on code for 3 hours for every hour you spend answering questions on IRC. Or something like that. You’ll find that if you set yourself a specific quota of mentoring time, you’ll look forward to it more, and you’ll be more effective at it.

If you’re not good at it, don’t do it

Finally, some folks just aren’t that great at mentoring. Either they’re not very patient, or they’re not great at communicating, or maybe they’re just too valuable at writing the code or the docs, and should stick to that.

These people should be encouraged to stick to what they’re good at, because, frankly, some people do more harm than good when it comes to talking to beginners.

Celebrate your problem

But, at the end of it, recognize that most projects would love to have the problem you’ve got. Celebrate your beginners. Bring them along. Eventually, they will “graduate” and become the core of your community.