Posts tagged sustainability
Contributing to open source: A short guide for organizations
- 08 November 2020
Over the years I’ve had a recurring question from people who are in organizations both big and small: how can we participate in open source communities?
Whether it is because of altruism or strategic importance, many companies, research groups, non-profits, etc want to be involved in open source projects (particularly large and impactful ones like Jupyter), but getting involved can be an opaque and confusing process if you’re not already familiar with open source. Each community has its own nuances and social dynamics, and approaching from the outside can be a challenge.
Open communities need to be partners, not sources of free labor
- 05 December 2018
In the last couple of years, we’ve seen an increasing number of organizations start to spawn products that take a largely open stack (e.g., the SciPy ecosystem) and wrap it in a thin layer of proprietary/custom interface + infrastructure. On the face of it, this isn’t a problem - I really want people to be able to make money using the open source stack - however, there is a big caveat. When you look at the work that those organizations have done over time, you often see a pretty thin trail of contributions back to those open source projects.
I’d argue that using an open community’s software without contributing back is straight-up exploitative (legal, sure, but still exploitative), and we should think about ways to suppress this kind of behavior. This post is a collection of thoughts on that topic.