VM Brasseur gives the definitive overview of open source challenges

Joining us this week is VM (Vicky) Brasseur from Open Source Initiative. Highlights 1 min 20 sec: Types of Companies Supported Companies don’t know why they want to do open source 3 min 23 sec: Can’t Abandon Software into Community Communities don’t instantly form around your software 4 min 22 sec: Is Marketing “Evil” in Open Source Marketing has become associated with advertising which is invasive 5 min 19 sec: Define Marketing Discovering the needs of the market and build to support it Technologists don’t really understand marketing 6 min 17 sec: Issues of Marketing in Open Source What is your goal in using open source? 8 min 15 sec: Everyone has their own Goal in Open Source There is no bullet point list of how to do open source 9 min 29 sec: Issues of Accessing Projects and Support for Free Open source done a poor job of talking about value being provided People assume big projects are paid for by large companies so they take advantage 13 min 19 sec: Difficult to Tell New User’s End State as Communities Invest in Helping them Learn the Technology Some communities set the bar too high for user participation Open source does a bad job in documentation typically 17 min 9 sec: What about CI/CD Systems? Not a significant issue today in open source for contributors 19 min 21 sec: How help People Build Empathy for Users and Maintainers and Impact when Corporations are involved 21 min 29 sec: How Communities Manage Competitive Companies Working Together Foundations play a key role in managing these issues Open source is not corporate! The vast majority of open source is not corporate based Is there less concern for the tiny project’s vs the large corporate projects? Substantial lack of awareness of this in user community 25 min 04 sec: Price to a Community when a Customer Pulls out and Uses Corporate Version of Solution? Should companies pay for open source software they grab from community? Many ways to contribute other than money 27 min 56 sec: Business Continuity Issues in Open Source Free and open source software needs to be part of business continuity plans Vendor software solutions are equally risky as open source solutions 30 min 36 sec: Define Copyleft 4 Freedoms of Copyleft from Richard Stallman Can never change the license of Copyleft software 32 min 43 sec: Open Core Model Analogy of a restaurant with more tables than it can serve Proprietary products with open source APIs / SDKs