Aligning Open-Source and Business Goals with Tobie Langel

This conversation covers:

• Laying the groundwork for a successful open-source program office (OSPO).
• Why legal and engineering are usually the two main stakeholders in open-source projects.
• Why engineering teams tend to struggle at articulating their perspective on open-source. Tobie offers some improvement tips. 
• How Tobie defines open-source strategy. Tobie also explains the risk of not having an open-source strategy, as well as his process for helping organizations determine the best strategy for their needs.
• Common challenges that businesses face when deploying open-source software. 
• The secondary — or non-code — benefits of open-source, and why many organizations tend to overlook them.
• Tips for engineers in non-technology organizations like pharmaceuticals or finance to approach business leadership about open-source. 

Links

• UnlockOpen: https://unlockopen.com/ 
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/tobie

Transcript
Emily: Hi everyone. I’m Emily Omier, your host, and my day job is helping companies position themselves in the cloud-native ecosystem so that their product’s value is obvious to end-users. I started this podcast because organizations embark on the cloud naive journey for business reasons, but in general, the industry doesn’t talk about them. Instead, we talk a lot about technical reasons. I’m hoping that with this podcast, we focus more on the business goals and business motivations that lead organizations to adopt cloud-native and Kubernetes. I hope you’ll join me.

Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native. Today, I am talking with Tobie Langel from UnlockOpen, and I wanted to start, Tobie, by just asking, you know, what do you do? Can you give us sort of an introduction to what you do, and how you tend to spend your days?

Tobie: Sure. So, I've been back into consulting for a number of years at this point. And I essentially focus on helping organizations align their open-source strategy with business goals. So, it can be both at the project level—so sometimes helping specific projects out—or larger strategy at the corporate level.

Emily: So, I actually recently had Nithya Ruff, who's the head of the OSPO at Comcast on the podcast. For listeners who don't know, that's an open-source program office. So, are you sort of an outsourced OSPO for companies that aren't Comcast’s size?

Tobie: So, that's a really good question. My answer would be no, but it tends to happen that I help companies build that capacity internally. So, I would generally tend to come up before an OSPO is needed, and help them figure out what exactly they need to build. For OSPO, my pet peeve is companies building OSPOs like they need to tick a checkbox on the list of the things that they have to do to be up-to-date with good engineering practices, if you will. 

In general, if you want to be successful, with an OSPO, it has to meet the particular needs of your company, and that's usually kind of hard to figure out if you just leave it to whoever in the organization is more interested in driving that effort. And so essentially, I sort of help in the early stages of that by bringing all of the stakeholders at the table, and essentially listening to them and making sure that what they want out of an OSPO is aligned between the different stakeholders and matches the overall strategy of the company.

Emily: And who are the stakeholders that you're generally talking to?

Tobie: So, essentially, open-sources is strange, for one reason, in terms of how it was adopted in companies from a historical perspective. Adopters have always been essentially engineers who just wanted better tools, or the package or the software that best fitted their current intention, and there's a very, very grassroots process by which companies start using open-source. And what happened at some point is companies sorted to see all of the software, and got concerned, and started trying to assess the risk. And so companies just tended to bring in the legal arm and lawyers at this point. And so to fulfill compliance questions, you bring in lawyers, and then the responsibility of grown-up open-source kind of falls on to lawyers, which tends to be problematic from the perspective of good engineering practice and velocity that you want from your engineering and product side in a company. 

And so clearly, the two stakeholders or the two main stakeholders tend to be legal and engineering, and there tends to be a tension between these two sides. And in lots of companies this tension, instead of being resolved to some degree, tends to be won by the legal side that understands business concerns better and is better able to praise or explain what they do in terms of business impact and business risks than the engineering side. And so this equilibrium tends to create OSPOs which are legal heavy, process heavy, and don't really give engineers the kind of freedom that they would need to be effective in their daily engineering practice. And the reason behind that being essentially over exaggerated risk perception of open-source because, to be frank, open-source is not well taught in legal school and clearly not part of the curricular that most lawyers are familiar with when they move into helping tech companies out. So, essentially, I sort of tried to bridge these two worlds.

Emily: I can imagine that being an open-source lawyer, that's a niche, that's a very specific niche.

Tobie: Yeah, actually there's a running joke in that community, which is, “As soon as you get your law degree and you’re an open-source lawyer, you’re one of the 25 best open-source lawyers in the world.”

Emily: [laughs]. That's awesome. Why do you think engineering teams are so bad at clearly articulating their perspective on open-source, and what can they do to improve?

Tobie: So, there are clearly multiple reasons why engineers aren't the best at articulating how open-source matters. So, I think one of the key ones, it's just, it's something that's part of their daily practice, and they don't really understand and never have been taught the actual intellectual property—IP—impact, that open-source has on their company, and they don't really understand how others in the company might perceive this IP impact. So, I think, one part of it is, essentially, this is just how engineers work. Like, you want to use a piece of software, you put it in it, right? If you want to fix something, well, you do a pull request. This is sort of, like, a common practice. And it's always hard to articulate things that are essentially part of your, like—you know, like a native language, like part of your culture. It's really hard to describe, why you would do this, and why it matters. So, I think that's one reason.

The other reason, I think, is that there is a lot of overlap between the way legal works, and the way business works in general. Few examples of that are, engineers tend to think really like in binary way, like, you know, something is true or false, something is on or off, whereas business and law a much more spectrum thinking and into the gray area of things. Similarly, law will share with executive manager’s schedule, versus a maker’s schedule. So, there's lots of cultural artifacts of law culture in corporat...