Request For Commits

In this finale episode of Request For Commits – we regroup to discuss how we got here, lessons learned, community impact, and where the conversations around open source sustainability are taking place now and in the future. This might be the end of this podcast, but the conversation will continue on The Changelog. You should subscribe if you’re not already.

Lauren McCarthy joined Nadia and Mikeal to discuss her work on p5.js, contributions and culture, her before and after take on open source, her path to becoming a maintainer, how p5.js gets new contributors, how they keep them around, and why design isn’t better represented in open source.

Henry Zhu joined Nadia and Mikeal to discuss his work on Babel, how he became and accidental maintainer, why he thinks maintainers aren’t special, paid open source work, the Babel brand, and building community.

Daniel Bachhuber joined Nadia and Mikeal to discuss his work on wp-cli, the economics, origins, staying productive as a maintainer, fund raising, and the state of wp-cli today.

Danese Cooper joined Nadia and Mikeal to discuss the history of open source, how the term became a thing via Tim O’Reilly, feeling empowered as an open source contributor, companies’ relationship to open source, foundations and their role (or not) in governance and sustainability.

Christopher Hiller joined Nadia and Mikeal to discuss the ups and downs of maintaining Mocha - a JavaScript test framework that runs on Node.js and in the browser. Discussions included maintaining a popular project, getting funding, the challenges of having money, raising the profile of a project, focusing on the needs of a community, and managing burnout.

Ryan Bigg joined the show to talk about his open source work on the documentation of Ruby on Rails, fund raising, crowd sourcing, departure, handing off, not quitting, making the right decision, getting paid, sustaining, and more.

Todd Gamblin – a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Lab – tells Nadia and Mikeal all about bringing open source to his peers in the national labs. They discuss what it’s like to open source a project inside the government, how Todd found contributors for Spack, why he got involved with NumFOCUS, and much more.

Evan You joined the show to talk about his work on Vue.js. We learn how Evan found users and got Vue.js off the ground, the details behind their crowdfunding on Patreon, whether or not crowdfunding is a viable method of sustaining open source, finding balance in life and work, and plans for funding beyond the Patreon campaign.

In this special episode of Request For Commits we close out the first season with a look behind the scenes of the show. We talked about how the show was formed, who’s involved and why, how we approach producing this show, our theme music, as well as our plans and timing for season 2.

Brendan Eich, founder of Brave and creator of JavaScript, joined the show to talk about the history of the web, how it has been funded, and the backstory on the early browser wars and emerging monetization models. We also talked about why big problems are hard to solve for the Internet and the tradeoffs between centralization and distribution.

Charlotte Spencer joined the show to talk about making open source more approachable, Your First PR, helping people make their first open source contribution, attracting new contributors, and what projects can do to bring in, retain, and communicate with new people.

Heather Meeker joined the show to talk about open source licensing, why open source licenses are historically significant, how much developers really need to know, and how much developers think they know. We also talk about mixing commercial and open source licenses, and how lawyers keep up with an ever-changing landscape.

David Cramer (CEO of Sentry) and Isaac Schlueter (CEO of npm) joined the show to talk about building businesses in open source, why they decided to turn their side projects into full-time work, how they experimented with finding steady sources of revenue, raising venture capital, working with investors and with community, and different company approaches to developing open source projects.

On today’s show Nadia and Mikeal talk with Rod Vagg, Chief Node Officer at NodeSource, about liberal contribution agreements and the underlying mechanics of liberal contribution management, how to level up casual contributors, how projects transition into a liberal contribution mindset and whether there is a place for BDFLs in the future of project governance.