Mature company-aligned projects often hire professional developer advocates to serve as the face of the open source community. This helps mitigate the risk of key individuals leaving or getting burned out, as maintaining a project can be a significant workload. Developer advocates allow principal engineers to pursue other interests and help alleviate the burden of project maintenance.
Michael Cheng, Chief Legal Officer at Aalyria Technologies, is a master at strategy and execution for open-source products and companies. From his humble beginning spearheading the open source team at Meta (formerly Facebook), Cheng has honed his knowledge about the interworking of open source and utilizes it to its fullest potential.
In this episode of The Business of Open Source, Cheng talks about his time as Meta's lead in open source as well as what it's like to be an individual working for a large company. He also explains what happens in mergers and acquisitions with open source projects and the legality of being a small fish in a large pond!
Highlights:
- A little insight into Meta's open source (2:06)
- Detractors on a project (4:25)
- It's hard running a large company open source (7:47)
- Is it a problem to be individually driven? (9:45)
- Creating projects while working for large companies in open source (13:25)
- Do they have a right to reprimand? (16:16)
- What happens in a merger for an open source company (17:53]
- Recommendations to an inquirer (21:47)
- Personality-deprived communities (24:48)
Links:
Michael