Kevin P. Fleming

Sometimes, you can't find a service provider that meets all of your requirements, and you know that there is open source software which can meet them, but you'll have to take on the task of deploying and maintaining it yourself. This talk is about my journey to provide a fully-featured DNS service for my personal domains, using PowerDNS Authoritative Server, at very low cost and without subscribing to any 'big tech' services where I would be the product and not the customer!

In my case, fully-featured includes DNSSEC with online signing, DNS UPDATE (RFC 2136) support (primarily used for ACME DNS-01 challenges for Let's Encrypt certificates), SVCB/HTTPS records, and more. The talk will also cover the way that I use Ansible to manage zones and their content in the authoritative servers, using Ansible modules I created and published. As a bonus, I'll also talk about how I manage recursive resolvers on my LANs with the ability to resolve names from my own domains even if Internet connectivity is lost, and with nearly immediate updates when the zone contents are changed.

All large companies use free and open source software. Many of them contribute to free and open source software, and some of them publish their own free and open source software. All of this is good, and should be encouraged to continue.

In addition to that, though, many large companies have philanthropic arms; charitable foundations either operated by the company or closely aligned with the company, and primarily funded by the company. These foundations generally have focus areas, which include almost every conceivable charitable cause except... free and open source software!

This presentation will talk about Bloomberg's journey to add software philanthropy to its global charitable contributions, including the mundane aspects of running volunteer coding events, soliciting mentors/leaders to participate, organizing employee (and non-employee) participation, and others, but also how this type of philanthropy can be included in 'employee giving' and similar programs. Anyone who runs an Open Source Program Office, or similar group, within a company that also has a philanthropic arm should consider including free and open source software contributions in their plans, and this talk will help you get started.

If you run an open source project, and you'd like to get contributions from employees at medium-to-large companies, the simplest way to provide a smooth contribution process is to not use a Contributor License Agreement. If your project requires one, though, there are steps you can take to ease the burden this causes on contributions from company employees, and this talk will cover a number of issues encountered during 4+ years of managing contributions from a 20K+ employee global company.

While there is a growing movement in the open source community away from Contributor License Agreements, many important projects still require them. Some of these projects are focused on 'enterprise' usage, so as a result employees of major companies want to contribute. However, the mechanisms used to execute these CLAs vary widely (it seems that every project builds its own CLA system), and none of them take into account the various legal and logistical requirements of a major corporation who wants to contribute. This talk will present a series of problems encountered as a contributing company, and propose ways that CLA-requiring projects can resolve them.

These problems include (but are no means limited to): requiring the agreement to be executed on a social media platform; providing no ability for the authorized signer and the manager of the authorized employee list to be different people; requiring FAXed copies of agreements; failing to provide the ability to authorize employees to contribute to specific codebases within a large project; and more.