Tobie Langel

What do you do when the interest of your different constituencies are in conflict? Who do you favor and why?

The 4 Freedoms and the OSD were designed for a small community of hobbyists. They offer little help when it comes to addressing the challenges open source faces today.

Does open source need a W3C-inspired "priority of constituencies?"

In this talk we’ll dig into the priority of constituencies, see how it could apply to open source, and get some interesting insights out of doing so.

From its inception, open source—and free software before it—was built around ethical notions: give people agency and power over their software so they could use, modify, and share it as they pleased to accomplish whatever it is that they wanted to do with it.

In a world where running software required programming skills, there was a lot of overlap between users and developers of open source, and so this rather simple framework was sufficient to deal with open source’s different constituencies.

Since then, open source has become ubiquitous. As a result, the number of constituencies has ballooned: there are indie and corporate contributors and maintainers, open source software vendors, developers building proprietary code on top of open source, end-users who don’t know anything about software, people impacted by open source software who are not even using it, cloud providers, etc., etc.

When the interests of these different actors are in conflict, which one of them do we favor and why? Neither the Four Freedoms nor the Open Source Definition (OSD) really helps us answer that question.

Faced with similar issues, other communities have designed really effective frameworks to guide their decision making processes. W3C’s “priority of constituencies” is such a framework.

In this talk we’ll dig into what W3C’s priority of constituencies is, outline its benefits, but also its limits.

We’ll then see how we could apply the priority of constituencies to open source, what that reveals about the complexity of the open source ecosystem, and in particular how the parts that are difficult to fit in such a framework are precisely those that have made the news in the past few years.

Today, pretty much all companies have embraced open source. But while they’re all keen to use open source, at lot fewer actually contribute to it.

And yet, there’s real value in doing so. Companies use their contribution to open source to boost recruiting (Facebook claims 75% of their new engineering recruits mention Facebook’s open source program as a key reason they accepted their offer), increase their market, build a moat around their business, or position themselves as leaders in their field.

In this talk, we’ll look at the different ways contributing to open source can benefit a business and become a competitive advantage. We’ll look at the open source strategies of different companies, big and small, and provide you with the knowledge to start building a business case for open source in your own company.

Most discussions around ethical licenses today consider the Open Source Definition (OSD) with the same reverence as Moses did the tablets delivered to him on Mount Sinai.

The OSD is in fact much more mundane than that. And it tells us more about its authors than about the open source movement in general; had open source been born in less privileged circles, ethical considerations would have been baked in from the start.

With that in mind, let's revisit what we're actually trying to collectively achieve through the open source movement and reconsider the notion that its mission requires we allow the software we build be used in violation of Human Rights.

There are minimally-disruptive changes that can be made to the OSD and to existing licenses which would puth ethical concerns centerstage, where they belong, and help us foster responsibility and accountability within our community and within software vendors.

We'll look at the past attempts at creating ethical licenses and why they have failed. We'll ask all of the hard questions, even those we don't have good answers to yet. And we'll propose a new, multi-pronged approach to this issue. One that we believe, while more demanding to implement, has a much better chance of success than previous attempts have had.

A few years ago, Heartbleed epitomized a massive open source sustainability problem for critical parts of the internet infrastructure. The bug, which affected the popular OpenSSL cryptographic software library, notably compromised the confidentiality of 4.5 million US patient records and cost the industry an estimated $500M.

It was soon revealed that the root-cause of the issue was that OpenSSL was precariously understaffed. Open source sustainability became a major theme overnight. Stories of maintainer burn-out made the headlines. And tentative solutions started to emerge, most of them donation-based.

In this talk we'll explore a number of existing strategies to fund open source and make it more sustainable, from patronage to dedicated ad networks. And we'll defend the idea that the best path to open source sustainability is to help companies understand the tangible business value they can get from contributing to open source.