Hello, Faustum, hi.
Wow, it's so good to be here.
You are the heroes of Faustum because I am the closing act and you have come to see me.
This is so good.
Thank you very much for being here.
Six o'clock.
Let's get the show on the road.
I am from the Linux Foundation and I have the privilege of doing research on the open
source ecosystem and I was brought in a couple of years ago to use data as a means to describe
what is taking place across open source communities and to provide greater insight for the purposes
of supporting all kinds of programs in the ecosystem.
If you were here for Abigail's talk previously, a lot of what she had to say was to do with
sustainability and funding projects and I am hopeful that the resource that we are creating
at the Linux Foundation is the utility that will help support grants and funding for otherwise
non-commercial open source projects, especially those that are contributing to sustainability.
So that's the perspective that I come from.
We want to investigate the impact of open source projects through research.
We conduct our research through quantitative and qualitative methodologies, surveys, interviews
and empirical research and we create this resource, co-create it with the community.
We create it by the community and we give it back to the community.
The reports are all published under Creative Commons.
You don't have to give your email and we're not going to spam you for reading them.
So they're a resource for everybody to leverage.
So check us out.
This is our home page if you want to scan and discover the publications that we produce
to date.
We have 26 publications and just shy of two years on a whole variety of topics that I'll
get into.
And the Linux Foundation has a history of doing some important research in open source.
Not that long ago they published the Linux kernel report, Linux kernel history report
as well as the 2020 FOSS contributor survey in collaboration with Harvard's Laboratory
of Innovation Science, which was a deep dive into understanding contributor motivations,
opportunities and challenges.
So if you haven't seen either of those reports, I'd encourage you to check them out.
The 26 reports we've done today are across a number of different frameworks.
It's really tough to package up open source conceptually and do a bunch of research to
say how are we going to organize this.
So we set about, actually before I get down that path, quick example of some recent reports
that you'll find at the top of our website include mentorship and open source, which
also plays into Abigail's speech about sustainability and the role of mentorship programs, enabling
collaboration across open source communities all around the world.
How do we enhance collaboration?
How do we break down silos and how do we reduce fragmentation?
Industry reports like the 2022 state of open source in financial services takes a deep
dive in an industry sector.
And for our friends at the SOTA Foundation, hello Stephen Tan, the 2022 data and storage
trends report.
So just a quick highlight of four recent publications that have come out.
We've got great stuff coming down the pike as well.
Looking at the idea of open source for digital wallets.
Why do we need an open source digital wallet infrastructure?
Well essentially we have centralization in the wallet community right now through Google
Pay and Apple Pay.
We're creating infrastructure through an open source foundation that's going to create
opportunities for any organization to build a secure digital asset infrastructure.
Web 3 and sustainability, looking at some of the challenges around blockchain and how
we can reduce the environmental and carbon impact of blockchain and how blockchains
can reduce our own through providing secure data sets and perhaps incentives, real monetary
tokens for us to change our behavior and start making sustainable choices and be rewarded
for them, be rewarded for buying the carbon neutral product and use the token to ride
public transit.
But you can't use the token to put gas in your car.
That's an example of the economies that are coming down the road.
And our deliverables, everything we do is available under Creative Commons.
We publish our data sets, our survey data that is free of personally identifiable information.
And we do so on data.world, data repository essentially, not unlike GitHub, but a little
bit more accessible for the non-coder to be able to find our data sets.
And if you want to play around with our data and create your own analysis, go to data.world,
check out the Linux Foundation data sets and feel free to explore some of our survey data.
And see what you come up with.
Let us know if you find something different.
We'd love to hear from you.
We produce reports, infographics and so on.
So check out these resources and if there's a way that you can use them to support your
project communities, go for it and let us know how you make out.
So the first way we conduct research is on geographic lines.
We think that there's some unique trends taking place in different regions around the world.
And what's happening in Europe that might be different from North America?
Is there a different culture?
Are there different opportunities?
And what's going on?
The first report we published was last year, our Europe Spotlight.
So if you're interested in how European open source communities are taking advantage of
the open source opportunity or not, give this report a read.
It's got some pretty interesting insights.
Second way we go about conducting research is along an industry analysis.
So if your project is specific to a certain industry, whether it's maybe it's film and
entertainment, maybe it's financial services, maybe it's energy, our research is very focused
sometimes on industry specific open source projects.
The energy example is really exciting.
And the more that regulators know about open source projects in an energy vertical, the
better because we need to transition off of older infrastructure and open source is the
path to doing that.
One example of an industry project is in the motion pictures industry with the Academy
Software Foundation.
Many of the projects that were used to create the Academy nine time nominated film, Dune,
was built with open source software.
And we host nine projects at the Academy Software Foundation.
And this research report tells the story of how it was formed and what needs to happen
in that community to keep it sustainable where the challenges are.
Technology horizontal is another way we approach our research.
Recent example being resiliency in cloud.
How do we achieve multi-cloud resiliency?
We did this with Cloud Native Computing Foundation and it was a result of a round table we hosted
at KubeCon in Valencia.
And finally, and this is where the developer community comes into play, you'll see at the
top of this graphic is the developer contributor framework to view open source opportunities.
What are the issues specific to developers, to maintainers, to sustainability, to diversity
equity inclusion, leadership, racial and social justice, and so on.
So we've got a lot of reports that don't fall neatly into a tech horizontal or an industry
vertical or a geographic framework, but they apply the whole ecosystem.
Recent example, DEI.
I happened to co-author this one with a woman named Jessica Groupman and it really talks
about the good, the bad, and the ugly about diversity issues across open source project
communities and how we can collectively work together to address some of the challenges.
But importantly, we've got more and more work coming that is focused on the developer
and maintainer experience.
And it is very, very important that we continue to explore the issues so that we can provide
better programming and resourcing to support our developer community.
How do we ensure sustainable projects?
How do we ensure diverse projects?
How do we ensure funding?
How do we incentivize developers to implement security best practices?
And we find the answers to these questions through research.
And today I'm going to share some of the insights that have come across the 26 projects that
we've done to date in all different ways that have some story to tell about the developer
experience.
So this is what this collection of next slides is all about.
Davos are having a really good time doing what they're doing.
Many projects that we've done have said that open source development is fun.
And like time and time and time again, this is almost a universal truth that people are
here because they find it a stimulating and rewarding place to be.
And that's kind of exciting.
It's really, it's great and it's probably why open source projects are so prolific.
People enjoy contributing code.
Out of our Europe study, fun really is a leading motivation here.
Much more so than, say, career development.
We concluded that, and also through interviews, that there's sort of a romantic thing going
on in Europe that is less prevalent in other geographic regions.
And it really is around doing good, creating solutions that have a purpose.
And there's a strong motivation for learning and fun in this community.
Open source is also an incredibly empowering space for our respondents, the majority of
whom are developers, that the opportunity to create infrastructure, to create projects
that have intrinsic value for a region that allow for sovereignty, that allow us to not
be reliant on certain vendors.
And this is a really motivating factor.
And this being in this space is an incredibly empowering and rewarding activity.
We have an opportunity to change the world if we don't like it.
What's fascinating is the extent to which developers are taking a personal interest
in their work.
They show up because they care.
And really, without that personal attachment and intrinsic motivation, we just wouldn't
be where we are, especially when we consider how many projects do not have funding.
And they are not part of a commercial ecosystem.
So this motivation keeps these projects going.
It also, if there's a, the other side of this coin is that if there's a loss of motivation
of some kind, if there's the feeling of sudden apathy, then a project can just be shelved
and somebody can sign off and say, I'm out.
So that is a risk that we face.
And we've seen examples of that recently, though I couldn't name the specific project.
You hear about people having a change of heart.
Training is also something that's incredibly important as new technologies are emerging,
as security is becoming increasingly important.
Organizations are looking for highly skilled, highly trained open source software developers.
And the skills that they're looking for now have eclipsed Linux as a focus point.
Skills are sought after in cloud, in DevOps, in security, and yes, very much so in Linux.
But we're also seeing new projects emerging in Metaverse, in AI, PyTorch being an example.
So training is very much in demand.
And fortunately, there are good resources available that are often free.
We host many of them at the Linux Foundation, so check them out.
The other bit of good news is that employers, if you're fortunate enough to be in a situation
where you're paid to contribute, companies are paying for training.
And 90% of hiring managers will say, we'll hire you, come here, and we will pay to skill
you up.
And the reason being, not only the hiring managers, but within organizations, we can't
necessarily hire our way out of digital challenges.
We have to sometimes work with the talent pools that we have and train our team members.
Because it's incredibly costly to go out and pay a developer who you think has the right
skills only for them to leave and go to a competitor.
So training a resource in-house seems to be a trend that we're seeing specific to DevOps.
And fortunately, everyone in this room is in a really good position because the demand
for your skills exceeds the supply of skilled people available to provide.
The service.
You're in a very, very good space right now, as industries are becoming increasingly software
defined, you are calling all the shots.
So leverage it to your advantage.
Sometimes there are barriers that prevent you from doing the things that you really want
to do.
I'll give you an example.
You have an industry full-time, you have a paid job, it's in a highly regulated industry
like financial services, and the company policy says that, sorry, not only can you not contribute
to projects on behalf of the organization and open source that might be beneficial, but
you also can't contribute to projects in your personal time.
And that's a barrier that industry needs to figure out how to solve because it is ultimately
to their detriment.
And the regulatory community, particularly in certain verticals, has to come to terms
with the realities of the way open source is developed and not put up so many barriers
that are non-threatening.
I'm thinking of community chat rooms on a repo within financial services and the SEC
freaking out in case regulatory policies were being breached in any kind of activity.
The other barriers are for certain types of industries are around access to Slack or access
even SurveyMonkey, we do surveys, really challenging to try to get data through some corporate firewalls.
So there are like non-tariff barriers.
Really very, very important and there are lots of tools out there that can help developers
better understand dependencies and the number one benefit, it's the number one benefit of
producing S-POMs, better understanding the dependencies in your projects.
Here is a truth and I think, I don't know if anyone here would disagree, but DOVs are
pretty amazing project ambassadors.
Carol Payne from Netflix speaks publicly and often about the projects she contributes
to and inspires other people to get involved, helps recruiting new developers to projects
and she feels that she has a responsibility to do that and we see so many DOVs advocating
because it's the right thing to do and it's incredible to building a community.
For all of those of you who are ambassadors for your project, keep up the good work.
Makes such a difference and it's so nice to see people being the champion of one project
or another.
Open source development in particular has its benefits.
I recently gave a talk to an organization that had a lot of people were just working
in a closed source environment and they're not necessarily aware of what the benefit
is to working in open source and of course everyone here knows that you have the opportunity
to learn from others and build on the work of others, you don't actually have to go
it alone, there's so much less pressure and less stress and tremendous upside but these
truths are not necessarily widely known so that's what I have to do is say look these
are great places, great spaces, there's a lot of benefit, open source is a good thing.
Take advantage of the opportunities.
I am a different kind of ambassador telling this story about why open source actually
works and what the value proposition is.
And devs mitigate risk by this very openness, by accepting external viewpoints.
One of the things that I had to come to terms with when I started working for the Linux
Foundation is the open sourcing of the research development process.
Having so many eyes on a research paper before it gets published, that was like a shock to
me.
And because of the culture I am in at the Linux Foundation, I work with incredibly smart
people and a whole bunch of different disciplines.
They are all weighing in on my report and I'll tell you something, I've never had such
high quality research as a consequence because people genuinely care, it's not necessarily
in their job description but they are weighing in on the document because A, they can and
so they do and they genuinely want to make something better.
So my experience is that this methodology really, really works to create high quality
outcomes, definitely onto something here.
And yes devs can further mitigate risk by taking personal responsibility of implementing security
best practices including the increasing use of multi-factor authentication tokens to increase
greater account security.
So we're spreading the word about how we can improve the security of software supply chains,
what are the tools available, what resources do you need and we're really just getting
started here.
This particular factoid came from the report we published this year with the laboratory
of innovation science from Harvard which was census two looking at essentially three software
composition analysis from sneak, FOSSA and synopsis ran scans to identify the most commonly
used application libraries so that we could have a measure, it's not a perfect measure
but it is a measure of the most popular software.
So if we know what the most widely used applications are we can prioritize our efforts to secure
them.
That's the rationale behind some of the research we're doing and that's where this particular
point came from.
And yes you shoulder a lot of responsibility.
The FOSSA census two validated again that the most widely used free and open source software
is developed by only a handful of contributors.
In one dataset 136 were responsible for more than 80% of the lines of code added to the
top 50 packages.
So how do we share that responsibility?
I don't know but we're working on it.
If you have ideas that's what we're here for.
I want everybody here to take away the opportunity that research through the LF is a mechanism
for you to be heard.
If a stat seems wrong or if you have an opinion let's hear your opinion.
We would love nothing more than to hear from you so as to change programming and resourcing
that will better support you.
So let this be your mechanism to share your perspectives and knowledge.
Toxicity and open source is real.
It came through our, it was real before we did research on it but one in five open source
devs have been discriminated or felt unwelcome or professionals I should say.
And it is minority groups that are most acutely affected.
The minority populations of our community really struggle in not feeling welcome in
open source.
And why is this such an issue?
Well, it's really important because diverse technologies are better technologies.
Diversity creates better tech.
For the longest time I'm from Canada by the way and we have a thing called postal codes
which differ from zip codes and they differ from European postal codes as well.
But because we're so often filling out forms specific to the United States I'd like those
forms to have an extra space where I can put my postal code in because that's just a technology
frustration.
But the designer of a form realized that they need more than zip codes for inclusion like
let's include the Canadians.
That's great.
That's how you get better technology you think outside your lane and you increase opportunities
for others to participate.
And Rachel Rose from ILM.
ILM is the Lucasfilm production unit.
So industrial light and magic, making all the Star Wars stuff and making some pretty
good films with open source software.
And nobody says it better when we have people with varied backgrounds and opinions we get
better software.
Thank you, Rachel.
We've got upcoming research that's very specific to maintainers because of the responsibility
that is shouldered on maintainers.
And what we did before I jump into this particular point, after we published the second census
report, census two that was scanning those application libraries to identify the most
popular software, we tried to reach as many of those maintainers we could to have a conversation
with them and say what is going on?
What do you need?
What are your challenges?
What are your constraints?
How's it going?
Do you have a successor?
What was your pathway to hear?
Are you paid?
How much time is on your hands?
And it is this methodology that is producing the next couple of slides.
This report is still in development.
We've got a really solid draft, but we will be publishing these insights at some point
in the quarter.
So really excited to get a window into the world of the maintainers of some of the most
critical software in the world.
And great quote that, you know, maintenance can fill an infinite amount of time if you
let it.
And that's true.
Sometimes I feel that way about the Linux rotation.
The more I give to Linux rotation, the more it takes from me.
But it's a gift that, you know, you give and you get so much back in return.
I think this is true for maintainers that they're just giving, giving, giving.
And that repo is always going to take it.
Maintainers need tools.
They need hacks.
They need productivity tools that are going to improve their workflows.
Forty-four percent of developers want their employers to provide these artifacts, sandboxes
and resources and things that help them do their jobs better.
And money, though, is incredibly important.
And Abigail's talk emphasized the need for funding people have to eat.
It is not the primary motivator for people to work on open-source software projects.
So it's not, maintainer constraints and challenges is not something that money necessarily solves.
Money can't buy me more hours in my day, and it can't buy me sustainable legacy for my work.
We need to approach things differently outside of financial terms alone.
It is part of the equation, but it's not the motivating factor.
And yeah, maintainership is very often a job.
It is not a hobby, and the pressure for maintainers is to build features and not fix bugs.
That's an equation that we need to change and figure out how we do it when we have a community
that is so constrained in terms of time.
How do we motivate intrinsically?
What tools do we need to provide?
So we're hoping to answer more of these types of questions as we continue to do more research.
So yes, please get involved.
Get involved.
Research is just a different kind of open-source contribution.
We issue badges.
If you contribute to a research project, either by way of writing a forward or doing a peer
review of a survey before it's published, maybe you're going to localize the survey to
Japanese or Chinese or German or French.
We've got an opportunity for you to get involved in this output.
And there's nothing I love more than when Phil Hollerin from GitHub shares his credley
badge on LinkedIn and says, it was great to be a contributor to research.
It was really, really rewarding.
And it was as rewarding for me to work with Phil.
I have enjoyed this experience immensely.
I've learned so much in my two years of doing research for the LF.
And working with people all across the ecosystem, from industry to community organizations.
I come from the blockchain space, I did blockchain research previously, but I really do love
the open-source community.
It's a great place.
I would love nothing more for you all to sign up and receive our newsletter and to learn
about opportunities to get more involved, to take surveys.
This year we're going to launch a panel and hope to get as many people on that panel as
possible so as to create better insight.
And to be given the opportunity to answer surveys and tell us what's going on, tell
us how to fix it.
So please stay in touch with us.
We're going to have more news on the development of our survey panel this year.
It's my mandate to create it.
And I'd love nothing more than for you to be a part of it.
And with that, thank you very much.
I'll be very happy to try to answer your questions.
Thank you.
Thank you, Larry.
We have questions?
Questions?
Sure, yes, I will move to the slide this one.
Thank you.
You showed us some statistics there which I found really interesting.
What's the most surprising thing that's come out of research that you've done or worked
on with Linux Foundation?
Wow, that is a great question.
What is the most surprising thing that I've learned through research?
I am surprised every single day.
Honestly, I learn so much every day I'm humbled by the amount that I learn.
I think what's fascinating is the community aspect of open source and that this is a community
by people that without community we would not have this technology infrastructure.
I think that's the most fascinating and inspiring thing that I have learned.
It's really wonderful.
So, yeah.
Thanks.
Thank you for your question.
More questions?
There's one over here.
Over here.
Sorry.
There you go.
Well, thanks for the presentation.
I'm curious whether do you have any data on how much of the research that we have in the
software industry that go to open source software versus closed source software, proprietary
software.
Do you have any data on that?
No, we have not done any research of that nature, I'm afraid.
It's an excellent question.
There are so many questions to answer.
That's an excellent question.
Another question that we get a lot and still have not found a good way to answer is what
is the consumption of open source software or the usage?
We know that there are a lot of downloads, but we don't necessarily have a good way of
measuring usage.
Very challenging to track.
It's a challenging space to research.
But good question.
Thank you.
You had a slide on diversity, a quote.
My personal observations on developers is that there's not so many women amongst them.
Is it also a topic of the Linux Foundation to look into that, or has some research being
done to find the reason why that is, and how to overcome them at some point?
Why are there so few women in open source is part of... I'm going to go back to that
slide so that you can see... You can download the report, actually, here it is.
In this report, we do offer some insight as to how we can help overcome the fact that
we have diversity challenges and why we struggle to recruit women.
I've come to learn through my exploration of COBOL as a programming language, a little
bit of the history about programming languages and computer science becoming more high value
work and engineering becoming more high value work, and societally, it actually migrated
from women programmers to men in the 60s.
The first programmers, the film Hidden Figures, women using FORTRAN, it was not necessarily
a high skilled activity.
In fact, COBOL is an incredibly teachable skill, and there's an amazing opportunity to
skill up anybody who wants to learn how to code, they generally can.
Over time, computer engineering became deemed to be high value work and became the work
of men exclusively, and the technology industry broadly, this is a function of tech in general,
the maths, the sciences, the humanities.
I don't think that we've done our daughters a great service in socializing them into the
sciences.
I was not socialized into tech, but I see that LEGO, one of the best toys I ever played
with as a child, has been marketed not as a gender neutral toy anymore.
There's LEGO friends in the pink boxes, and there's the helicopters and the other stuff,
and that's marketed in the boys section, and I think that's unfortunate, because the type
of LEGO products that are marketed for girls are around, it's a house, or it's a bakery,
or it's a beauty shop, so if I play with LEGO, I'm playing with the beauty shop, and the
shopping mall, but if I buy the other color of LEGO, I'm building the Death Star, the
Star Wars station, or the helicopter, that's really a problem, so I think we have generational
change to make, the way we socialize girls, and the way we socialize boys to do nontraditional
activities as well, and we're in a real non-binary kind of world, so we have to think about how
we socialize for the next generation.
Any more questions?
It's drink time!
Thank you everybody.
Were there any more questions?
I didn't think so.
This is awesome.
Thank you so much for coming at the very end of the day.
You're great.
Thank you so much.