Smaller companies need open source contribution policies too, but those can be radically simple. — Open source contribution policies fascinate me. They’re generally left to management or legal to figure out. Developers rarely know of them. And yet, they shape the way companies practice open source… and thus how they write software I spoke about creating open source contribution policies that don’t suck at the…

Software foundations have increasingly started helping non-corporate backed contributors with travel expenses. W3C has been lagging way behind. Until last year, “invited experts”—W3C jargon for individual contributors—even had to pay to attend the technical conference in which they come work for free. It’s time for change. — The context: across its different working groups, W3C has over 150 invited experts that contribute to spec work in various capacities, sometimes doing a lot of the heavy lifting. …

According to GitHub’s 2017 open source survey, 37% of contributors to open source projects don’t know whether their work contract allows them to contribute to open source outside of work. Another 12% need to get permission before doing so. — The big picture: employers regularly seek to hire open source contributors, so much so that the word out on the street today is that if you’re a software engineer, your GitHub profile is your resumé (that’s a an issue in and of itself, but not the topic of this article)…

In a recent Huffington Post’s article about Ocasio-Cortez’s interrogation of Michael Cohen, the authors claimed that “[o]ne advantage Ocasio-Cortez has over some colleagues is that she consistently attends even the most mundane committee hearings, since she does not spend any of her day calling donors for money.” That’s a second-order…

Developers often intuitively assess the health of open source dependencies they decide to take on. What can we learn from their practice? — Last week, I posted about measuring the health of open source projects you want to take on as a dependency. A mailing list reader replied that they really like the simplicity of just focusing on the date of the last commit (shared with permission). …

Open source software doesn’t come with service level agreements. You can decide to rely an open source project today, only to see its core maintainers leave and its community dwindle within a year. Sure, you’ll be able to continue using the software, but you’ll be the one responsible for keeping…

An unrolled Twitter thread — Unrolling this twitter thread. We’re seeing the same thing today with CSS that we’ve seen seen with HTML/JS before and which led to the current JS framework situation: 📱 A competition with native for slick app-like user experiences. 🐘 Larger teams working on more complex apps with needs that aren’t…

Yesterday, Stratechery’s Ben Thompson wrote a thought provoking article about the current AWS / MongoDB kerfuffle that’s been keeping the open source community’s echo chamber humming for the past couple of weeks. It’s refreshing to have an outsider’s perspective on the topic. It’s a great piece and you should absolutely…

How open source widens wage and position gaps in tech and what companies can do about it. — Open source is largely built on engineers’ free time. And free time isn’t evenly distributed. People who work two shifts, who care for elders and children—care-giving is still predominantly done by women—or with long commutes due to housing cost, just don’t have the time to contribute. The gender imbalance in…