 So it's good to be here. This is my first flight in three years and four months and I can't think of a nicer place to go than Vancouver. Well, maybe Paris, but That's next month but anyway, I want to tell you a little bit about a project I've been working on for a while and Steve we can Drum up some some additional interest in it the project is called floss box, which is free Libra open-source software and the idea is to build a box a body of knowledge and When you think about all that's going on with open-source these days and as it's grown since The early days the amount of knowledge that you have to Pick up to be considered an expert in open-source is really quite overwhelming So I've Let me tell you just a little bit about myself. Let's see if I can make this work Yay. Okay. So oh by the way You know the Linux Foundation sent me a template To use and it was PowerPoint presentation PowerPoint demo. So I'm running Ubuntu and This is open document Impress or Libra Libra office. So I figured as long as we're doing open source, right? Me as we'll use the good stuff. All right Well, this machine actually boots up running a different operating system as well. So But my left my my Mac at home So this is my last month at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley. I've been there 18 years Teaching things related to product management and software product strategy and of course open-source software, which I first taught I think in 2006 So But my history around open-source goes back a long way when Early in my career, I had a stint in industry So I kind of half and half between academia and industry, but early in my career We built some software That used the BSD license because BSD was developed at at University of California, Berkeley And I had a lecturer's appointment there in addition to a faculty appointment at UC San Francisco So we built some software and we said, okay. Well, let's distribute it and we put a BSD license on it So this was in 1980 Nobody called it open source at the time, but of course it was and so That's a lot of history When I came back to academia In 2005 I decided to go back and do some more work on an open source not to write code You know, that's a good thing to do but the the project that I worked on was evaluation Adoption and use of open-source software. So the question then as now is There's all this stuff out there How do I find it? You go say, okay. I'm looking for content management system. What do you get? I don't know eleven hundred or fourteen hundred of them now if you're just some IT person or developer in a in a company and you say well, I want to use content management system Well, you can go to the proprietary vendors and they'll send a sales person They'll do a demo and they'll do all this good stuff, right? Nothing against that. I ran a software company that sold proprietary software It had open-source software in it, but that's that's a whole other story so How do you find in all these open-source projects, how do you find something now when we started this idea in 2005 There wasn't so much open-source and there was the two camps right the people who Used proprietary software and said no open-source and the people who said, you know, well, we're gonna use open-source and there wasn't much of a Middle right these were two distinct sets and And so here are these people who said well, you know, I'm valuing software for a project and what did they evaluate? The proprietary products because they didn't know about the other so the project that we ran called OSS pal Well, it was originally called business readiness rating and then after some years it evolved and became OSS pal If the idea was to help you find Open-source software that was quote business ready in other words it works. It's maintained It's documented There's a community all the kind of things that people expect to get when they use a piece of software and one of the things that was an important observation in in there in that space was that You know, there's nobody to sell it to you and there weren't a whole lot of commercial open-source businesses at the time So you had to go out and do your own evaluation And so even the idea that you could give people a short list of Open-source projects in a particular category was a valuable addition That's one of that's one of the things we did with OSS pal Now the idea of getting people to evaluate proprietary and open-source software side-by-side That was a different issue and and one that Has partly come to pass. It's not all there yet, but it's come you know part of the way so that's what OSS pal was all about and Then I was on the board of the OSI for a few years so this brings us to floss back and Really the idea of floss back is pretty simple Right a body of knowledge. What do you have to know about? this space and We'll talk about some of the topics as we go and the idea behind floss back is you know part of that idea of Finding things but but and there's another thing behind it which is getting Knowledgeable and being comfortable with the idea of using open-source software Now today, it's a whole lot easier because there are a lot of commercial open-source businesses And there are a lot of businesses that have derived from community open-source projects. So You know most of the time you can get support for the the most widely used projects, but In order to bring open-source software into your organization and use it properly you need to know a lot of things It's not just how to write code and and do full requests and you know be a maintainer on a project And and all these kinds of essential things, but you have to know something about licensing You have to know You know a whole bunch of other topics in the past Couple of years we've seen a huge growth in interests like cybersecurity That you certainly have to be aware of There's all the work that's been done around spdx and software bill of materials and open chain There they're all those those issues so It doesn't take very long before There's a whole lot of stuff that you need to be knowledgeable about for you to be able to effectively not just find and adopt open-source but to take the next step which is to make it part of your organization and part of the way that you do business if you accompany the idea that you're comfortable with using it internally and with Contributing well up as you go first of all putting it in products that you ship to customers or even products that you host in the cloud having open-source software in them and then the idea of contributing to open-source or as many companies have started to do is to have your own github repositories and You know if you've heard any of the talks from Comcast they were quite Aggressive in terms of taking software that they were building inside their company and making it available and Nietzsche Ruff whom some of you may know Who who started that effort and gave a talk about how it took them ten years to get there so this This idea of building up expertise in In your organization has led to things like open-source project offices Which become the central repository if you will for a lot of Knowledge and administrative activities around open-source. You know who's using which version? I've got a big company with a bunch of different divisions and I've got people here and there and they are using open-source software Well, you know who's using which version on which platform and it's contained in which product All those kinds of questions come up Okay, all the questions about whether People who work for the company can contribute to open-source projects Outside of the ones that their company is working on In some cases we know that people are assigned to work on open-source projects, but You know people go home from work and then they become hobbyists and they work on something else Is that okay? So there are all these kinds of questions and policies that come up around open source and it takes a while for an organization to You know build up its own culture and its knowledge about about open-source So if you're Wanting to work in open-source or if you're wanting to teach people about it if you're wanting to write a Book about it You need to cover not just the okay. How do I do a pull request? Or you know, how do I use Python and all the various projects that that are out there the various tools So I can't know like It's you know, what do I have to know to really be able to go in there and Bring in open-source and you know putting on my academic hat for a moment You know some of our students would go out and certainly in the early days of teaching open-source They would be the only one in their company who knew anything about open-source and so they immediately got put in charge of open-source Which is really kind of a funny notion if you think about it for a moment, but you know, it's that Knowledge that they build up about the technicalities of it and the business and legal issues of it and the organizational and community issues of it That constitutes a body of knowledge. So that's what really we went after Here's my word salad You can see it has mostly open source in there But so You know question one is well, what are the topics that? We need to think about in creating a body of knowledge And how do we organize it well fortunately we have some Historic precedents to look at there's the the one with which I'm the most familiar is the software engineering body of knowledge, which is now in its Almost fourth edition. There's a draft of the fourth edition out for review You know and I have some significant quibbles with the content of Three buck, but it's gotten better and Of course software engineering has grown Very quickly as a discipline too as people have moved into mobile and and people have adopted new kinds of architecture. So You have new kinds of human interfaces And and those are growing right? I mean the idea of speech input and output has been around a long time, but now it's Something that's expected in a lot of projects. So so that body of knowledge is growing Long before swibach was PM Bach the project management body of knowledge Okay, and You know what you can do. Okay, there are things called there's a thing called the project management Institute And you can become a member of that and you can study their material and you can be certified and To be certified You basically have to know the things that are in the project management body of knowledge So that's that's the motivation. There's also something Which I'm connected is the International software product management association. So what does the product manager do? What are the things the product manager is supposed to know in terms of creating roadmaps and plans for projects and talking to users and Planning the marketing campaigns and all those things. So again, there's a certification program. So those those kinds of things serve as the motivation motivation for Floss Bach and of course what it leads to once you figure out what it is is You can build courses. You can write textbooks. Your courses might be a short course on, you know Three days on some particular aspect of open source or it might be a more comprehensive thing You could think of as taking, you know, a period of months either in an academic setting or with any one of the online Coursera Udemy edX kinds of programs where somebody is going to Be able to learn and presumably get a certificate that says, okay This person has taken this open source course. So All right, so when we try to think about the topics that Might go into a body of knowledge, you know at a high level We can Think about all these different things, right? What is open source? There's an official definition as I'm sure Most of you know right you can go to open source org slash OSD if you haven't seen it and And there's a long history as I mentioned, you know, I Shipped open source software a long time ago the free software foundation came around in 1985 the open source initiative in 1998 and lots of other things going on before and after and as As you may have seen this year is the 25th anniversary of the open source initiative And so they've been going around the world giving various talks and presentations to try to build up Increase awareness and usage so You know these other topics contrasting open source with proprietary software and licensing issues Development processes we've all if we come from a technical background Learned software development practices many of them are individual software development practices rather than team practices So what are the development processes and how are they different in an open source project then they are in a proprietary project Now the pandemic has changed that Because when we think about how software was developed in companies Five years ago, you know, they put up a whiteboard everybody came in and nine o'clock in the morning You had a stand-up meeting and talked about okay. This is a this is a showstopper here. We got to fix this How are you doing? I'm ahead of schedule that kind of you know 15 minutes. Okay? What happened? Everybody scattered right so Five years ago. We thought okay having a stand-up meeting when everybody there was the thing to do very quickly it evolved right, so Then that now what is the development process? How do you keep track of people? How do you meet are the things that are different and of course there are right because In proprietary projects typically people have an assignment and they're working on something and they deliver it and integrate it and do the build In an open source project many of the contributors aren't core maintainers of the project right so They write some code to do a pull request then somebody reviews it and says nah, this can't go in Or you got to make this change right, so a whole bunch of changes come about as a result of The process of open source and Another thing that we always know about open source projects is How it differs from proprietary Kind of when you all work for the same company you see each other every day you meet at the Used to meet at the coffee stand But there's this idea of a certain degree of camaraderie Okay, we're all working for this. We're gonna make our stock valuable. We're gonna get our bonus well That implied a set of shared goals But an open source projects, you don't necessarily have that You have people who've come from with a bunch of different places some voluntarily some because they're assigned to it and They might be anywhere in the world So that affects processes because there's a lot of culture involved in development processes even though We'd like to think that there isn't so That's a topic where you know It's it's as much sociology as technology But it's an area that needs to be addressed in a body of knowledge So commu commercial uses there are a lot of different ways that organizations are able to make money from their project Some of the early ones of course included training But I remember going to a conference and the way they made money was they sold the t-shirts and the mugs Fine, I'll pay ten dollars for the mug and that's at least one way of Contributing and there of course other things like patreon and you know Ways to waste to contribute, but there are a lot of other differences between commercial tools and Community tools and foundation based tools and then they're the ones that are dual right, so you have Drupal is a community project with thousands of contributors of modules and themes and so on but Then the founders of Drupal started aquia Which is a commercial venture right to provide commercial support and Features so so there are a lot of places that we can look at and say, okay what are the differences between commercial and Non-commercial What are the kinds of applications? It's big list You know a lot of what happened in open source Certainly in the early days was infrastructure right Linux being a good example of that and The Apache HTTP browser infrastructure on top of that you have development tools Eclipse being a widely used one, but but there are hundreds of others So a lot of those really went into place but There are applications that use that build on that infrastructure historically what the situation was that The infrastructure and the development tools have become increasingly open source I mean even Microsoft with visual studio code is Part of that right so lots and lots of open source The applications have tended not to be They've tended to be proprietary and that's especially true in mobile when you look at the number of Open-source apps on mobile devices. It's sad It's a very small number almost everything is proprietary. So when you look at these two things together You see that there's this whole collection of applications and What we discovered actually long ago with the earlier project was that IDC which is a big consulting firm that caters to large enterprise clients They build a taxonomy of software It's an annually updated book and they have like 80 some odd categories And only a handful of them are development tools and infrastructure. Most of them are application domains for finance and for insurance and for Construction and and the like and that area Has not seen a lot of open-source software that tends to be proprietary so Understanding what applications are out there and what the opportunities are I was on email this morning with Somebody who was about to do Video production and Editing and I said do you know about OBS and shot cut which are really nice open-source video Production and and editing tools and she said No, I'll go check them out because she was using proprietary stuff So all kinds of applications people want to know about Open source communities there's been a lot done around community management and maybe many of you have seen Jono Bacon's books that The art of community with two editions and his Later work called dealing with disrespect So there's a lot of interest in open-source communities and summarizing that As I mentioned earlier There's a lot of recent work around supply chains and build materials and of course security As we heard this morning in the keynotes and and have had numerous talks So, you know if we start to think about those topics Think there to yourself. Well, how many of those? Do I feel knowledgeable about? To the extent that I could write Let's say a couple thousand words on any of them and You won't find a lot of people who can cover more than three or four of them Because you very quickly get into areas of expertise This is not a survey course It's a bunch of survey. It's a bunch of index depth courses that would come together So You know getting somebody who who's really knowledgeable about supply chains and build materials That's probably somebody who's been involved with open chain or spdx or any of the other related projects because they kind of know the The next level Whereas a lot of the rest of us who don't work in that space can kind of give you the 32nd overview and then You know, that's it so putting together that kind of body of knowledge for somebody who really wants to develop the Expertise around these different areas is really the challenge that we Face in trying to build a body of knowledge so we tried creating Floss Bach and you know We got started But one of the problems that we have is Student labor now nothing against students. I was once one But at the same time they come and they go and while they're there they're taking other classes and they're looking for a job and they're socializing and Looking for internships and so there aren't a whole lot of hours in the day that they have to Participate on any project even if you pay them as a research assistant 10 hours a week may maybe and of course they don't have the knowledge themselves. So That presented a challenge. So what what occurred to me is that, you know, we really need to Run this like an open-source project and try to get contributors and try to Hear from experienced professionals to get them to to join in so so One of my main reasons for being here apart from my love of Vancouver is the The effort to build the core team of people who want to see this this idea through and to either take ownership of some particular category You know or to Be a willing contributor to a category with somebody else meeting it but building this core team Would involve I think contributors in all these different chapters and sections and we could do it On GitHub, of course The first version of it was not done on GitHub. Well, it's there, but it's kind of not there But now if you have the the basic layout and the organization now people Could implement a scheme that works Similarly to any other project, which is a core team Maintainers contributors can submit a pull request. Here's my update to the document It can be reviewed put into the main body of the document and so on so that's the vision that exists and as I mentioned we had In the first version really very limited content on And it touched on half a dozen of the areas that I mentioned, but again, I don't think that They went into much depth So they were really not All that satisfactory in terms of taking things away that you could use For putting together the whole body of knowledge So I Think of the current effort as a reboot So we sort of know what we want to do We've kind of laid out the space and the goals and the audience target market It's the same thing if you're any other product that you go out to build What's the pain point the pain point is trying to learn about All the different areas of open source. What's the target market? We really talked about that and then Creating a product vision and creating a roadmap. It's just like building any other product. So You know part of it is getting the word out. So that's you know, what this is intended to start We're looking for sponsorship and financial support of course that makes it possible to pay people to to work on this even in a limited way and Create a schedule on the roadmap and try to get something out this year It's a little bit ambitious But you know if you focus on a couple of the areas then you can use those to build toward toward longer and of course the key question is can you help so This finds me it's easy Tony don't wash them in a Gmail is one of my many many email addresses I've had emails since 1974 So I have a hot mail address and an AOL address and all of these other you know Legacy kinds of things But I think this one probably works as well as any And That'll find me one of the things that I started doing 20 or so years ago Maybe even more is I always end my presentations with a photo that I've taken And it seems like the Vancouver skyline is a Good way to end. This is the picture. I took I know five years ago Maybe so there are more high rises now than there were then but They didn't leave much room on the For a beach It's high rises to the edge In San Francisco, we don't have that we have the piers and you can walk all out the piers and all along the waterfront and in Barca d'Aro and The high rises are back a couple of blocks All right, so let me stop there and Thank you for coming and thank you for your attention We have time for some questions if there are any Thank you. All right So I'm gonna be around today. I have to go back tonight for family reasons but if you Are interested, you know how to find me and you can catch me I'm gonna go to the Ospo reception at six o'clock. So I'll be around. Okay. Thanks all