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CHAOSScast – Episode 83

In this episode of CHAOSScast, Georg and Dawn chat with guest Edward Vielmetti, Developer Partner Manager at Equinix, where he oversees the Open Source Partner Program. Today, they delve into the significance of measuring open source community health using CHAOSS metrics. Edward discusses the importance of providing infrastructure support to open source projects and how Equinix uses CHAOSS metrics to evaluate project health and manage resources efficiently. The discussion also covers the challenges of maintaining open source project health, including governance, code quality, and resources, with insights into predictive metrics and the impact of corporate involvement in open source communities. Press download now to hear more!

[00:01:36] Edward introduces himself, tells us what he does, provides a background on Equinix, and talks about their dedicated cloud offering and support for open source projects. He discusses the absence of formal CHAOSS metrics at Equinix but mentions they compare them with internal considerations to ensure project health.

[00:06:24] Edward talks about external factors like internal conflicts or external shocks to the system and the importance of being a stabilizing force.

[00:9:59] Georg outlines three categories of project health: community activity, code quality, and resources.

[00:10:58] Edward talks about using spend as a top-line metric for resource adequacy and the importance of rapid build and test cycles for software projects.

[00:15:33] Georg acknowledges Edward’s comprehensive view, noting the need for specialized infrastructure beyond what hosting platforms like GitHub and GitLab offer. Edward emphasizes that developing certain kinds of software requires direct access to hardware rather than virtualized environments.

[00:19:06] Dawn brings the conversation back to CHAOSS, mentioning context working groups and Edward’s active participation in the corporate OSPO working group. Edward talks about the challenges at Equinix in forming a formal OSPO and the value of sharing and learning from peers through CHAOSS.

[00:22:33] Dawn appreciated the diversity of companies in the CHAOSS OSPO working group and the broad exchange of ideas. Edward reflects on his long history with open source, noting the evolution and professionalization of the industry.

[00:25:32] Georg asks about the future of open source and CHAOSS’s potential role, and Edward mentions the trend of open source projects changing control for financial gain and discusses how CHAOSS could help predict or quickly identify such changes. He proposes the collection of certain metrics, such as the number of legal notices a project receives, as indicators of the project’s environment.

[00:29:44] Edward shares a story, without taking sides, about Terraform relicensing by HashiCorp and the subsequent forks of Terraform, focusing on the OpenTofu fork and the licensing issues around patching from differently licensed software.

[00:34:05] Georg discusses observing early risk indicators in projects, such as when a single company’s influence increases, potentially raising the risk of unilateral changes, and he expresses a desire for a predictive model for open source project trajectories.

[00:35:44] Dawn calls such predictive modeling difficult due to the rarity of events and stresses the importance of community participation for early detection of issues.

[00:37:53] Georg brings up the Linkerd project’s approach to engaging with the vendor ecosystem and the changes in their release strategy to encourage commercial support, and Edward compares this with CentOS’s transition to CentOS Stream.

[00:41:48] Georg reiterates the value of participation in open source to be aware of and potentially influence project developments.

Value Adds (Picks) of the week:

[00:42:29] Georg’s pick is finding people that have something you need, and he found someone who was giving away dirt for free that he needed for his garden.
[00:43:29] Dawn’s pick is Barefoot Day - A family holiday every April 9.
[00:44:34] Edward’s pick is participating in Ann Arbor’s “Visit Every Park” challenge and keeping a log of all his visits.