Open in app

Sign In

Write

Sign In

Tobie Langel
Tobie Langel

1.4K Followers

Home

About

Sep 12, 2019

Why invest in open source?

Tech giants aren’t philanthropies. There’s a reason they’re betting on open source: it’s good for business. — Open source is everywhere. It’s in your phone and in your car. It’s flying satellites to orbit and helping cure diseases. It’s powering today’s economy. Latest survey finds it in 96% of code bases, in which it represents more than half of the lines of code. And yet… whereas every…

Open Source

3 min read

Why invest in open source?
Why invest in open source?
Open Source

3 min read


Sep 5, 2019

Buffer’s no bullshit open source contribution policy

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…

Open Source

2 min read

Buffer’s no bullshit open source contribution policy
Buffer’s no bullshit open source contribution policy
Open Source

2 min read


Mar 23, 2019

W3C doesn’t help its invited experts. It should.

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. …

W3c

4 min read

W3C doesn’t help its invited experts. It should.
W3C doesn’t help its invited experts. It should.
W3c

4 min read


Mar 12, 2019

To attract top talent, companies need to adopt more balanced IP agreements

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)…

Open Source

3 min read

To attract top talent, companies need to adopt more balanced IP agreements
To attract top talent, companies need to adopt more balanced IP agreements
Open Source

3 min read


Mar 4, 2019

Behold second-order consequences!

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…

Open Source

2 min read

Behold second-order consequences!
Behold second-order consequences!
Open Source

2 min read


Jan 21, 2019

Measuring project health, community edition

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

2 min read

Measuring project health, community edition
Measuring project health, community edition
Open Source

2 min read


Jan 19, 2019

Measuring the health of open source projects

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…

Open Source

2 min read

Measuring the health of open source projects
Measuring the health of open source projects
Open Source

2 min read


Jan 17, 2019

Current issues with the CSS landscape and how to fix them 🏳️

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…

Web Development

2 min read

Current issues with the CSS landscape and how to fix them 🏳️
Current issues with the CSS landscape and how to fix them 🏳️
Web Development

2 min read


Jan 16, 2019

Developers’ appetite for open source fuels the cloud wars

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…

Cloud Computing

6 min read

Developers’ appetite for open source fuels the cloud wars
Developers’ appetite for open source fuels the cloud wars
Cloud Computing

6 min read


Jun 20, 2018

The Compound interest of free time

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…

Open Source

2 min read

The Compound interest of free time
The Compound interest of free time
Open Source

2 min read

Tobie Langel

Tobie Langel

1.4K Followers

Open Source & Web Standards Consultant.

Following
  • Tristan Zand

    Tristan Zand

  • Jonathan Stark

    Jonathan Stark

  • Cory Doctorow

    Cory Doctorow

  • Dion Almaer

    Dion Almaer

  • Jeremy Keith

    Jeremy Keith

See all (668)

Help

Status

Writers

Blog

Careers

Privacy

Terms

About

Text to speech