Donnie Berkholz

In this talk, I'll illustrate and analyze the health of the top configuration-management software, as well as making data-driven predictions and looking at major showstoppers. I'm going to draw comparisons across communities as well as within them, to make it clear where the critical mass and acceleration are.

Drawing on data from a wide variety of sources like GitHub, Stack Overflow, bug trackers, external modules, and mailing lists, I'll illustrate and analyze the health of the top configuration-management software. By looking at historical data, we can also make some rough predictions about future directions as well as pitfalls to avoid. I'll draw comparisons across communities like Puppet, Chef, CFEngine, Ansible, and SaltStack to help you understand where things stand today and where they're headed in the future.

Recent trends in software development have raised questions as to whether package management in Linux distributions is still relevant. Whether it's independent package managers in popular Web frameworks and languages (Node.js, Ruby, Python, etc) or bundling and containerization that's become increasingly popular in DevOps culture, it appears that integrated approaches to package management are on the decline. Yet at the same time we've seen package managers in the Windows world such as NuGet grow more popular. This talk from a leader of the Gentoo Linux distribution will explore the reasoning and history behind this shift and whether it's the right move for the FLOSS movement as a whole.

The strength of your community is the best predictor of your project’s long-term viability. What happens when that community is gradually infiltrated by assholes, who infect everyone else with their constant negativity and personal attacks? Although someone may be a valuable technical contributor, that person will never contribute as much to the project as the many others who are scared away and demotivated. This talk will teach you, using quantified data and academic research from the social sciences, about the dramatic impact assholes are having on your organization today and how you can begin to repair it.

The strength of your community is the best predictor of your project’s long-term viability, but you can't improve what you can't measure. It's particularly hard to convince developers that focusing on community health even matters without quantitative evidence proving its importance. The huge problems that occur if you fail to deal with issues quickly are nearly unbelievable, but over the past 10 years we've gradually begun to realize the need to think about the people involved in FLOSS projects and not just their output, whether its code, docs, or something else. The most important part of metrics is context -- you need to compare them to something, whether it's historical trends or other open-source projects. Furthermore, by understanding the qualities of data, including statistically expected variation versus unusual outliers, you can gain a true understanding of, and even predict, community health and growth.

This talk will start by covering X.Org's community health and metrics. X.Org didn’t get into GSoC (Google Summer of Code) last year so it’s also going to be a discussion of issues and potential solutions to change that for this summer.

This talk will illustrate community health and show quantitative metrics on the X.Org community, using many of the techniques described by this talk on context from the community devroom. X.Org didn’t get into GSoC last year so it’s also going to be a discussion of problems and potential solutions there, based on Donnie's experience in helping administer GSoC for Gentoo Linux as well as X.Org.

This talk is designed for developers and users of other Linux distributions to gain an understanding of the Gentoo approach and philosophy to package management. The goal isn't to get people using Gentoo but rather for attendees to walk away thinking about how they might be able to apply that to their own distributions or other projects.

We'll cover how the package manager (Portage) works, what packages (ebuilds) look like, our focus on ease of use for package authors, how we've iterated on our package format over time, etc.

Several distribution projects have existing initiatives and programs in order to coordinate and/or fund local communities as well as shipping or producing promotional material, going to events to promote the project, etc... Some projects are currently looking into setting up something like this, and others are rethinking their current model. Those programs all have their differences, but achieve pretty similar goals. In this session, we will bring together a bunch of people from different projects who are in charge or actively participating in such initiatives, in order to briefly present what they are currently doing in their project and, more importantly, share experience about what has worked well and what hasn't in an open discussion session. Let's learn from each others' ideas and mistakes.

Other people: Christoph Wickert Kostas Koudaras Laura Czajkowski Oliver Burger Petteri Räty Stefano Zacchiroli

The Google Summer of Code (GSoC) has been a huge boon to the world of free and open-source software, and to Gentoo Linux in particular. In this talk, I'm going to share some of our successes, like how we manage 15–20 simultaneous internships and how we recruit a very large proportion of our students to continue as Gentoo developers.