Safe as Milk

Writing more

I realised recently that most of my writing has been of the 140 character format recently…. I plan to rectify this, starting today.

Learning to let go

There are times in a long career when you have to turn your back on what’s gone before. In work, this is easy. People stop giving you a paycheck, you stop turning up to work. And yet, some of my best friends are people I worked with 10 years ago.

In open source, it’s harder. You build relationships, you grow emotional attachments to projects you work on.

When life moves you on from a project, you stay subscribed to mailing lists, you add mail filters to move them to a folder you read less and less frequently.

When you hit a threshold where you no longer consider yourself a developer or contributor, you keep watching from afar, and when the project takes a direction you disagree with, that you know you would have argued against, you feel a little sadness.

After a while, this build-up of guilt weighs you down. But letting go is hard to do.

I’m learning. Trying to get better at letting go. The next generation needs to find their own way. It’s liberating and saddening in equal measure. Old friends: we will stay friends, but I need to trust you to make your own way.

The value of open source (for customers)

Over at community.redhat.com, the Red Hat community blog, I have posted an article detailing some of the value I see to customers of companies who support and build on free software. The article is basically notes from a presentation I will be giving next Wednesday at the Red Hat Summit, “Community Catalysts: The Value of Open Source Community Development”. The problem statement?

It’s not always obvious, however, what the value of that is to our customers. The four freedoms of the free software definition which personify open source software – the freedom to use, study, modify and share modified copies of the software – at first glance appear to benefit only participants in open source communities. If you are a customer of a company like Red Hat, does it really matter that you have access to the source code, or that you can share the software with others? Aren’t customers, in some sense, paying us to “just take care of all of that stuff?”

This line of thought is not original, but it’s one I’ve had for a long time – and others such as Simon Phipps have given voice to similar insights in the past. Hopefully I can give it a fresh treatment for Red Hat Summit attendees next week!

Webinar: “RDO: An OpenStack community”

With my colleague Keith Basil, the OpenStack  product manager here at Red hat, I will be giving a “webinar” about OpenStack, and Red Hat’s community-driven distribution of it, RDO, this Wednesday at 3pm UTC (5pm CEST, 11am EDT, 8am PDT, other timezones). We will cover what OpenStack is, at a high level, why Red Hat cares about it, and what RDO brings to the table.

Register to attend – I’ll see you there!

The changing world of adding a service

1991

You: “I’d like to install a file server for the LAN – can I have the root password for the server, please”
Admin: “You’re kidding, right? Submit a ticket, we’ll install it when we get around to it”
crickets

1996

You: “I installed a Samba file server for the LAN on my own Linux machine”
Admin: “Gah! You messed up my workgroup. What happens when you turn it off? Bloody amateurs…”

2000

You: “I’d like to install a bug tracker for the dev team”
Admin: “The existing servers are overloaded – you’ll need a hardware req. Lodge a ticket, and get management approval first.”

2005

You: “I’d like to install a bug tracker for the dev team”
Admin: “I’ll create a VM for you to use. Lodge a ticket”

2013

You: “I’d like to install a bug tracker for the dev team”
Admin: “You have a self-service account on OpenStack, don’t you? What are you talking to me for?”

Awesome MediaWiki theme

For anyone who saw the recent launch of the new oVirt website a while back and was wondering how we could make such an attractive theme and lay-out for a MediaWiki wiki, wonder no more. In fact, you don’t even have to be jealous! Because the theme, called Strapping, so called because it’s based on the Bootstrap web framework, has just been published by my colleague Garrett on GitHub.

Kudos to Garrett, who did amazing work on this theme to make it as beautiful and reusable as possible, and I’m looking forward to using it for other websites in the near future. And so can you!

Open Source Parenting at OSCON 2013?

The OSCON 2013 Call for Participation just opened and the list of tracks this year is mostly the same as last year. I am a touch disappointed, because I suggested to some of the conference chairs that a track I’d love to see, and which I think would get lots of attention, would be on how we grown-up hackers ensure that we’re growing the next generation of open source hackers. In other words, as a parent, tips on sharing our passion for technology and the open source, free software, hacker ethos with our kids.

This generally fits into the “Geek lifestyle” theme, which is the most marginal of the tracks, but I bet that if there’s a critical mass of quality proposals on the topic, that we could have a separate open source parenting track at OSCON – and it would be standing room only all week.

Some things I would love to talk about or hear people talk about:

• Hackable living space – teaching kids they can control their environments
• Preschool engineering – toys and games that teach your child to hack before they can walk
• My First Electronics Kit – How my son and I learned how to make a solar powered car from scavenged parts
• Teaching kids to hack – coding literacy in K12

And anything else which gives me ideas for projects I can do with the kids and their friends, or that I can bring to the local school.

Wouldn’t that be the coolest track *ever*? All it needs to happen is to totally blind-side the conference chairs with a dozen high quality proposals that no-one could possibly refuse! Who’s with me? Won’t somebody please think of the children?!?

PlayTerm

Via Simon Phipps, I discovered PlayTerm this morning. You can record and play back terminal sessions, which allow you to show commands and their expected output, played at typed speed. This may be the greatest invention since screencasts.

Open Source communities

I was re-reading one of my favourite blog posts on running an Open Source community today, and thought I would share it.

Max Kanat-Alexander is the Bugzilla Release Manager, and put a variety of thoughts on leading an Open Source community together – Open Source Community, Simplified.

The TL;DR version, for those too lazy to click through, is:

1. Don’t freeze your trunk for long periods
2. Turnover is inevitable, so recruitment is vital
3. Respond to contributions immediately
4. Be extremely kind and appreciative
5. Encourage a total absence of personal negativity

His own tl;dr version of this is: “be really, abnormally, really, really kind, and don’t be mean”.

He then talks about removing barriers to contribution, promoting your project and getting new contributors interested.

All in all, an excellent contribution, and well worth the read.

“Community citizenship” survey

I spoke to Kevin Carillo about what makes a good community citizen a few months ago – he had already been working for some time on his research at that point, and I thought that his approach and ideas were interesting.

Recently, he blogged about his work, and released a survey targeting recent contributors to a variety of projects, including Debian, GNOME and Mozilla.

As a long-time participant in various open source projects, I regularly see sociologists posting announcements for surveys to lists asking for developers time without first trying to get a feel for the communities involved, and figuring out how their work can benefit the community. They are zoologists, studying the behaviour of strange and wondrous beasts they don’t understand.

Kevin, like Evangelia Berdou and Malgorzata Ciesielska in the past, has adopted another approach – talking to people one-on-one and crafting a survey after building an understanding of community dynamics. I have high hopes that his resulting research will be as valuable to us as Evangelia and Gosia’s work was in the past.

I encourage anyone who fits the target profile to participate in his survey.