Chris Aniszczyk's (zx) diatribe

Over the years, I have spent a lot of time thinking about and working on open source communities… from bootstrapping projects out of corporations (or broken communities), to starting brand new open source foundations.

"Good governance never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern… The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders"

— Chris Aniszczyk (@cra) August 28, 2019

I was recently having a conversation with an old colleague about bringing an open source project out of a company into the wild and how to setup the project for success. A key part of that discussion involved setting up the governance for the project and what that means. There was also discussion how neutral and open governance under a nonprofit foundation can be good for certain projects as research has shown that neutral foundations can promote growth and community better than other approaches. Also the conversation led to a funny side discussion on the concept of gerrymandering and open source.

For those who aren’t familiar with the term, it’s become popular in the US political lexicon as a “practice intended to establish a political advantage for a particular party or group by manipulating district boundaries.” A practical example of this is from my town of Austin TX which is in district 35 which snakes all the way from Austin to San Antonio for some reason.

The same concept of gerrymandering can apply to open source communities as open source projects can act like mini political institutions (or bigger ones in the case of Kubernetes). I shared some of my favorite examples with my friend so I figured I’d write this down for future reference and share it with folks as you really need to read the “fine print” to find these at times.

Apache Cassandra

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is a fantastic open source organization that has been around for a long time (they celebrated their 20th anniversary) and has had a lot of impact across the world. The way projects are governed in the ASF are through the Apache Way, which places a lot of emphasis on “community over code” amongst some other principles which are great practices for open source projects to follow.

There have been some interesting governance issues and lessons learned over the years in the ASF, in particular it can be challenging when you have a strong single vendor associated with a project as was with the case with Cassandra awhile ago:

The Apache Software Foundation is really out of line in their actions with Cassandra IMO. Meeting notes: https://t.co/TQXvF0pfex

— Kelly Sommers (@kellabyte) November 4, 2016

As the ASF board noted in the minutes from its meeting with DataStax representatives, “The Board expressed continuing concern that the PMC was not acting independently and that one company had undue influence over the project.” There was some interesting press around the time this happened:

“Jagielski told me in an interview, echoing what he’d said on the Cassandra mailing list, that undue influence conflicts with project leadership obligations established by the ASF. As he suggested, the ASF tried many times to get a DataStax-heavy Project Management Committee (PMC) to pay attention to alleged trademark and other violations, to no avail. Whatever DataStax’s positive influence on the development of the project—in other words—it failed to exercise equivalent influence on governing the project in ASF fashion.”

The ASF basically forced a reorganization of the Cassandra PMC to be in more in lines with its values and then caused the primary vendor behind the project to pull engineers off the open source project.

Containerd

The containerd project is an industry-standard container runtime with an emphasis on simplicity, robustness and portability. The history of the project comes from being born at Docker where their open source projects had a governance policy essentially aligned with the BDFL philosophy with one of their project founders.

In CNCF, (which containered is a project of), project governance documents aren’t considered static and evolve over time to meet the needs of their community. For example, when containerd joined the CNCF their governance was geared towards a BDFL approach but over time evolved to a more neutral approach that spread authority across maintainers.

Cloud Foundry

Cloud Foundry is an open source community that has a large and mature ecosystem of PaaS focused projects. In the Cloud Foundry Foundation (CFF), they have a unique governance clauses in regards to how affiliates are treated and voting.

Pivotal Platinum Director Voting Power. The Platinum Director appointed by Pivotal (“Pivotal Director”) shall have five (5) votes on any matter submitted to a vote of the Board. (i) On a date one (1) year after the incorporation date set forth in the Certificate, the number of Pivotal Director’s votes will be reduced to three (3). (ii) On a date two (2) years after the incorporation date set forth in the Certificate, the number of Pivotal Director’s votes will be reduced to one (1)

To bootstrap the foundation, the originating company wanted a little bit of control for a couple of years, which can make sense in some situations as the beginning of a foundation can be a tumultuous time. In my opinion, it’s great to see the extra vote clause expire after 2 years, however, it’s still very unfair to the early potential members of the organization.

Another example of open source gerrymandering can be how votes are represented by member companies that are owned by a single entity:

At no time may a Member and its Affiliates have more than one Director who is an employee, officer, director, or consultant of that Member, except that Pivotal, EMC, and VMware, though Affiliates, shall each have one (1) Director on the Board).

This is an interesting tidbit given that Dell owns Pivotal, EMC and VMWare. In some organizations, usually there is legal language that collapses owned entities into one vote.

I personally I’m not the biggest fan of this approach as it makes things unfair from the beginning and can be an impediment to wide adoption across the industry. There can definitely be reasons of why you need to do this in the formation phase but it should be done with caution. If you saw the recent news that Pivotal was being spun back into VMWare and their woes with adoption, it shouldn’t come as a surprise in my opinion as one company was bearing too much of the burden in my opinion and not building a diverse community of contributors.

Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)

If you remember the early days of the container and orchestration wars, there was a lot different technologies, approaches and corporate politics. When CNCF was founded, the original charter included a clause that upgraded certain startup members from Silver to Platinum that were important in the ever evolving cloud native ecosystem.

“The Governing Board may extend a Platinum membership at the Silver Membership Scale rates on a year-by-year basis for up to 5 years to startup companies with revenues less than $50 million that are deemed strategic technology contributors by the Governing Board.”

In my opinion, that particular piece in the charter was important in bringing together all the relevant startups to the table along with the big established companies at the time.

In terms of projects, the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) defines a set of principles to steward the technical community. The most important principle is around a minimum viable governance that enables projects to be self-governing. TOC members are available to provide guidance to the projects but do not control them. 

https://twitter.com/CloudNativeFdn/status/1167455648768045056

Unlike Apache and the Apache Way, CNCF does not require its hosted projects to follow any specific governance model. Instead, CNCF specifies that graduated projects need to “explicitly define a project governance and committer process.” So in reality, CNCF operates under the principle of subsidiarity, encouraging decisions to be made at the lowest project level consistent with their resolution.

GitLab

GitLab is a fantastic open source project AND company that I admire deeply for their transparency. The way the GitLab project is structured is that it’s wholly owned by the GitLab company (they also own the trademark). To the credit of GitLab, they make this clear via their stewardship principles online and discuss what they consider enterprise product work versus project work.

nice "stewardship promises" from @gitlab based on their opencore business model, all opencore biz should do this https://t.co/mqGkOeejp3

— Chris Aniszczyk (@cra) January 13, 2017

I’d love for them in the future to separate the branding from the company, project and the product as I believe it’s confusing and dilutes the messaging, but that’s just my opinion 🙂

Istio

Istio is a popular service mesh project originated at Google. It has documented its governance model publicly: https://github.com/istio/community/blob/master/STEERING-COMMITTEE.md

However, as you can see, it’s heavily tilted towards Google and there seems to be no limits on the number of spots on the steering committee from one company which is a common tactic in open governance approaches to keep things fair. On top of that, Google owns the trademark, domains and other project assets so I’d consider Istio to be heavily gerrymandered in Google’s versus the community’s interest.

JCP

I had the pleasure of serving on the Java Community Process (JCP) Executive Committee for a few years while I was at Twitter. It’s a great organization that drives standardization across the Java ecosystem, some of the fine print is interesting though:

“The EC is composed of 25 Java Community Process Members whose seats are allocated as follows: 16 Ratified Seats, 6 Elected Seats, and 2 Associate Seats, plus one permanent seat held by Oracle. (Oracle’s representative must not be a member of the PMO.) The EC is led by a non-voting Chair from the PMO.”

This essentially gives Oracle a permanent seat on the Executive Committee.

Here’s another fun clause:

Ballots to approve Umbrella JSRs that define the initial version of a new Platform Edition Specification or JSRs that propose changes to the Java language are approved if (a) at least a two-thirds majority of the votes cast are “yes” votes, (b) a minimum of 5 “yes” votes are cast, and (c) Oracle casts one of the “yes” votes. Ballots are otherwise rejected.

This essentially gives Oracle a veto vote on any JSR.

Note: The coolest thing the JCP has done is contribute the EE specification work to the Eclipse Foundation and form the Jakarta project over there to steward things in an open way.

Knative

Knative, like Istio mentioned above, is an open source project that was born at Google and controlled by Google. There have been a lot of discussion lately about this as Google recently decided to not openly govern the project and move it to a neutral foundation:

I'm pretty disappointed to see Knative forgo open governance.https://t.co/fVhbP687rs

The growth and user focus of Kubernetes, Helm and many others show that CNCF is a great home for open communities.

OSS is better if we work together in neutral spaces

— brendandburns (@brendandburns) October 1, 2019

Kubernetes

Kubernetes operates under the auspices of the CNCF and openly governed by the Kubernetes Steering Committee (KSC). The Kubernetes project has grown significantly over time, but has done a great job of keeping things openly governed and inclusive in my opinion, especially compared to its project size these days. The KSC governs the project along with a variety of sub working groups. Also, the Kubernetes trademark is neutrally owned by the CNCF and openly governed via the Conformance Working Group which decides how certification works for the community, which there are nearly 100 certified solutions out there!

Spinnaker

The Spinnaker project was originally born at Netflix and recently spun out into the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) as an openly governed project. The project assets, from domains to github to trademarks are all neutrally owned by the community through the CDF.

Vault

Vault is a fantastic and widely used secrets management tool from Hashicorp. It’s a single vendor controlled open source project that has an open core model with an open source and enterprise versions (see matrix). What this essentially means is that the buck stops at the single vendor on what features/fixes end up in the open source version, most likely that won’t include things that they sell in their enterprise offering.

Conclusion

I hope you learned something new about open source projects, foundations and communities as these things can be a little bit more complicated as you dig into the details. It’s really important to note that there is a difference between open source and open governance and you should always be skeptical of a project that claims it’s truly open if only one for profit company owns all the assets and control. While there’s nothing wrong with this approach at all, most organizations don’t set expectations up front which can lead to frustrations down the road. Note, there’s nothing wrong with single vendor controlled open source projects, I think they are great but I think they need to be upfront, similar to what GitLab stewardship principles on what they will put in open source versus their enterprise version.

In conclusion, as with anything in life, you should always read the fine print of an open source communities charter or legal paperwork to understand how it works. The lesson here is that every organization or project has its own rules and governance and it’s important that you understand how decisions are made and who has ownership of project assets like trademarks.

Note: this article was original posted on https://opensource.com/article/19/4/ways-support-sustain-open-source

To make sure open source continues to thrive, we all need to find ways to sustain the communities and projects we depend on

The success of open source continues to grow; surveys show that the majority of companiesuse some form of open source, 99% of enterprises see open source as important, and almost half of developers are contributing back. It’s important to note that companies aren’t contributing to open source for purely altruistic reasons. Recent research from Harvard shows that open source-contributing companies capture up to 100% more productive value from open source than companies that do not contribute back. Another research study concluded countries adopting modern open source practices saw:

“a 0.6%–5.4% yearly increase in companies that use OSS, a 9%–18% yearly increase in the number of IT-related startups, a 6.6%–14% yearly increase in the number of individuals employed in IT related jobs, and a 5%–16% yearly decrease in software-related patents. All of these outcomes help to increase productivity and competitiveness at the national level. In aggregate, these results show that changes in government technology policy that favor OSS can have a positive impact on both global social value and domestic national competitiveness.”

In the end, there are many ways for a company or organization to sustain open source. It could be as simple as training your organization to contribute to open source projects you depend on or hiring engineers to work on open source projects. Here are eight ways your organization can contribute back to open source, based on examples in the industry.

Hire open source maintainers to work on open source

Companies with strategies to leverage open source often find the highest returns from hiring a maintainer of the projects they depend the most on. It’s no surprise if you look at the Who Writes the Linux Kernel report that the top contributors are all employed by companies like ARM, Google, Facebook, Intel, Red Hat, Samsung, and more.

Having a maintainer (full time or part time) on your staff can help your organization learn how to work within the project community and enable prioritization of upstream contributions based on understanding of what the community is focused on. Hiring the maintainers also means that the project will have people with enough time to focus on the details and the rigor that’s needed for a project to be useful; think security reviews, bug cleanup, release management, and more. A more predictable and reliable upstream project can benefit many in your organization while also improving the overall project community. As a bonus, maintainers can also become advocates for your organization and help with recruiting too!

Develop an open source award program or peer bonus fund

It is common for companies to have internal employee recognition programs that recognize individuals who go above and beyond. As an example, Red Hat has a community award program through Opensource.com. Some other companies have expanded their recognition programs to include open source contributors. For example, Google has an open source peer bonus program that recognizes external people who have made exceptional contributions to open source.

Congratulations to our Open Source Peer Bonus winners! https://t.co/LA1MsnsSQf

— Google Open Source (@GoogleOSS) April 26, 2019

Start an open source program office

Many internet-scale companies, including Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter and more, have established formal open source programs (colloquially called OSPOs) within their organizations to manage open source strategy along with the consumption and contribution of open source.

If you want to increase your contributions to open source, research has shown that companies with formal open source programs are more likely to contribute back. If you want to learn from organizations with formal open source programs, I recommend you read the TODO Group Open Source Program Guides.

Launch an open source fund

Some organizations contribute fiscally to the open source projects that are important to them. For example, Comcast’s Open Source Development Grants “are intended to fund new or continued development of open source software in areas of interest to Comcast or of benefit to the Internet and broadband industries.” This isn’t just for big companies; small companies have open source funds, too. For example, CarGurus launched an open source fund and Eventbot is supporting open source with a small percentage of its company revenue. Another interesting approach is what Indeed has done by democratizing the open source funding process with its employees.

Contribute a portion of your company equity to open source

Consider donating a portion of your organization’s equity to an open source project you depend on. For example, Citus Data recently donated one percent of its equity to the PostgreSQL community. This worked out nicely; Citus Data was acquired by Microsoft recently, so the PostgreSQL community will benefit from that acquisition, too.

Support and join open source foundations

There are many open source foundations that house open source projects your organization depends on, including the Apache Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation (home of Kubernetes), GraphQL Foundation, Let’s Encrypt, Linux Foundation, Open Source Initiative (OSI), OpenStack Foundation, NodeJS Foundation, and more.

https://twitter.com/CloudNativeFdn/status/1092544807900110848

Fund and participate in open source internships or retreats

There are many open source internship programs that you can participate in and help fund. Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is the largest, and it requires mentorship from employees who work on open source projects as part of the program. Or you can sponsor internships for underrepresented minorities in open source through Outreachy and CommunityBridge.

Introducing CommunityBridge, a platform to accelerate innovation, sustainability, funding, security, mentoring, and diversity in open source projects. Join the private early access program: https://t.co/22eGhqNbCt

— The Linux Foundation (@linuxfoundation) March 12, 2019

Another approach is to host an open source retreat at your company. For example, Stripe hosts open source retreats to contribute to open source projects it depends on.

Include open source in your corporate philanthropy initiatives

If your organization has a corporate sustainability or philanthropic arm, consider working with that team to include open source as a part of its work. For example, Bloomberg has a software philanthropy budget for projects it depends on, from Git to Eclipse to Python and more. In the future, I hope to see more corporate sustainability and philanthropy efforts—like Pledge 1%—that focus on funding critical open source infrastructure.

Conclusion

In conclusion, giving back to open source is not only the right thing to do, according to research, it’s also good for your business. To make sure open source continues to thrive and is sustainable in the long run, we all need to ensure that companies find ways to sustain the open source communities they depend on.

There has been a lot of discussions lately on open source sustainability and honestly, it’s something I think about on a daily basis through my current role at The Linux Foundation and myself being an open source contributor and maintainer for ~20 years.

Open Source Tip Jars

There has been a trend lately to have open source communities/projects open an electronic tip jar for individuals (or organizations) to give back. While a tip jar can raise some funds, it’s truly not sustainable long term, as outside of it not being an effective way to raise funds for project development, it puts maintainers unfortunately in a gig style economy without health and retirement benefits. There are only a handful of individual maintainers are making money from donations, most tend to abandon the approach over time.

Take Patreon as an example, a popular funding platform for all sorts of things including open source projects that has been around since 2013 and has paid out $1 billion to creators since then. While that’s an astonishing figure, Patreon isn’t a sustainable business with its current private company model and level of VC funding of $105M:

“Under the company’s current business model, 90 percent of funds are paid directly to content creators. Patreon takes 5 percent, and the remaining 5 percent covers transaction fees.” Patreon CEO Jack Conte said in an interview with CNBC, that the platform will soon be facing the challenge of maintaining a profitable model as the company continues its growth.

In 2019, the company is also on track to pay out $500 million to content creators, 5% of that is $25 million and Patreon has ~300 employees, so probably not even covering their labor costs. Also, when the creators don’t have much say in the governance of the organization they depend on, especially if it’s a privately funded company, the terms can change overnight.

“So today, Patreon is overhauling its pricing. Any creator can still get a 5 percent rate, but just for a Lite version without bonus tools or different fan tiers. All of Patreon’s extra features will now be in the Pro plan, with an 8 percent rate, but with existing creators grandfathered in at 5 percent. And the new Premium enterprise plan for 12 percent (9 percent for existing creators) will offer full-service merchandise sales, multi-user team accounts and dedicated customer support. Patreon now has 3 million fans paying 100,000 creators more than half a billion dollars per year, and it will cross $1 billion in payouts in 2019 after six years in business. But Patreon was starving on its 5 percent rate, which some venture capitalists tell me is why they passed on its funding rounds totaling $105 million led by Thrive Capital and Index. Now it might make enough to keep the lights on, retain ownership and maybe even earn a profit one day.”

I guess we will see if Patreon is truly sustainable in the long run for its community and investors, it currently isn’t working out so well for most creators (“No one makes a living on Patreon”).

As a note, this also applies to smaller open source mini-patreon style fundraising efforts such as BountySource, OpenCollective, GitCoin, Fundition, Librepay and more. For example, I strongly admire OpenCollective and their transparency for a private VC funded company (on a side note, I also admire companies like Buffer who go further with transparency dashboards), from their level of funding as a startup to more. However, they are facing similar sustainability problems on a smaller scale if you look at the financials over time (their burn rate allows for 6-12 months depending on their growth), also maintainers don’t own any equity in the company. If this was a normal VC company the investors would cut their losses in my opinion.

It’s also interesting to see some nonprofit options out there like Liberapay founded in 2015 in France that is running on a break-even basis for all that I can tell. I think part of the sustainable solution for funding platforms is to build one in a way where it lives in a neutral place where creators have a say in governance and ownership. Outside of supporting projects forming their own companies, I’m interested in innovative startups like Tidelift which are experimenting with new approaches to make it easier for open source maintainers to get paid for their work by essentially by offering a subscription product and acting as a guarantor of sorts.

Note: I don’t think any of the blockchain coins will solve this problem or any problem for that matter.

Open Source Gig Economy

My biggest issue with these fundraising platforms is that even if we ever get to a point where some developers are making money, who pays for their health and retirement benefits (I know this is dependent on country but in many countries employers assist with retirement benefits). There has been a ton of press and research as of late on the gig economy, usually featuring Uber/Lyft in the news:

• “Gig economy review delivers benefits but brings no job security”
• “Rethinking worker benefits for an economy in flux”
• “Uber or Deliveroo offers flexibility, but the isolation and stress can take their toll”
  

In the US and many countries, there are different protections for “employees” versus “independent contractors” and leads to a lot of situations where you lose protections depending on how you’re classified.

We can do better than having developers run in a hamster wheel of no benefits and protections offered via normal employment schemes. It’s not sustainable and not fair to developers.

Conclusion and Corporate Open Source Sustainability

I don’t think there is one solution for open source sustainability but I do strongly feel that VC-funded donation platforms that fuel the gig economy are not the best solutions for long term sustainability (even Patreon had to expand its business model outside just donations). There’s a part of me that feels some of this donation discussion echoes the past discussion of micropayments and publishers. This presentation from GitLab about how their business model evolved over time from the early days donations to consultancy to open core product business does a great job of showing the pitfalls of a variety of common approaches:

Also, we should revisit the premise that open source isn’t sustainable to begin with, I think many folks in the community are selling short the progress that has been made over time in supporting open source. I’d like to make the argument that we are better off today than we were in the past. In fact, some research shows that “about 50% of all open source software development has been paid work for many years now and that many small projects are fully paid for by companies.” The reality is that there are still projects that fall through the cracks like OpenSSL that were aided eventually by the Core Infrastructure Initiative, so as long as we can discover and catch those we will be in good shape.

We should remember that a big part of innovation comes from developers working at organizations adopting open source software at scale and using it in interesting ways. It’s these organizations that should be tasked to sustain open source software versus individuals, especially since they depend on open source software to survive as a business. I also think it’s high time that corporate sustainability and social responsibility initiatives include open source contribution as part of them. I’ve seen some initiatives recently that I admire from organizations:

• CitusData donated 1% of their equity to the open source community
• Bloomberg has a software philanthropy budget for projects they depend on
• Indeed democratizes the open source sponsorship process with its employees
• Stripe hosts open source retreats to give back to open source projects

I truly hope to continue to see the trend of companies giving back to open source through contribution (fiscally or code) as I believe it’s key to open source sustainability and one of the reasons I co-founded the TODO Group and collaborate today with an excellent set of peers teaching organizations about the benefits of open source programs and why contributing back is good for business.

In the end, there are many ways to fund and sustain open source projects, from starting companies that sell open source based products and deliver value for customers, to working at organizations and having them dedicate time to contribute to open source and many more. I highly recommend visiting the oss.fund sheet to see what funding options are out there (also look at oss.cash to see large businesses built around open source technology). On a related note, I’m personally excited about the Community Bridge platform from the Linux Foundation which I was personally involved with:

CommunityBridge will automate some of the activities the Linux Foundation performs as an organization to benefit open source sustainability, from basic funding, expense reimbursement, mentorships and to paid internships that may lead to full time jobs with benefits.

Anyways, thanks for reading and I hope you learned something new about open source and understand why I think the charity/donation approach won’t work well for long term open source sustainability.

What an M&A surprise in the tech world yesterday with IBM picking up Red Hat, the jokes on Twitter were of course on point:

Nobody got fired for buying Kubernetes

— Alexis Richardson (@monadic) October 28, 2018

To expand on Alexis Richardson’s funny joke above, the clouds wars are no joke amongst the hyper scale clouds of the world and the war continues to escalate. Microsoft recently closed its deal with GitHub at $7.5B to only have IBM buy Red Hat for $34B. I can’t wait to see what Google, Oracle and the other large cloud providers pick up in the coming months.

I’ve had the privilege to work at both IBM and Red Hat earlier in my career so I’m familiar with the culture of both companies; it’s going to be interesting to see how the acquisition plays out over time. IBM is a gigantic company known for its bureaucracy that has been around for over 100 years and has successfully reinvented itself multiple times to survive (see the Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance book by IBM former CEO Lou Gerstner for a case study on this). Red Hat is an early open source pioneer with a fantastic and unique engineering culture that has been supporting remote work before it was cool and pioneered the concept of an “open source conflict of interest” clause (which will be interesting to see if IBM adopts):

“Participation in an open source community project, whether maintained by the Company or by another commercial or non-commercial entity or organization, does not constitute a conflict of interest even where you may make a determination in the interest of the project that is adverse to the Company’s interests”

There has been some FUD going around that IBM doesn’t fund open source or participate much in open source:

This isn't true, though. IBM is a major contributor to Linux, the CNCF, Eclipse and Apache Foundations, Java itself, Docker, and a ton of other things. They helped create Istio and Knative. They were doing this long before MS was. https://t.co/Oddn1pBHLw

— Karl Matthias (@relistan) October 29, 2018

This FUD is absolutely crazy and needs to stop, IBM has arguably done more for open source than any other company to get where we are today with open source being prevalent in almost every industry and vertical:

we probably shouldn't forget that IBM has arguably done more than any company on the planet to make open source an enterprise play. it paved the way for all of us.

— Ruthless Netpromoter (@monkchips) October 29, 2018

IBM spent $1B on Linux before open source (and even Linux was cool)? Hell, I spent my early career working on open source at IBM where they had one of the first Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) and spent my time hacking on Eclipse full time, which was another open source project that IBM helped start that disrupted the whole commercial tooling industrial complex. You can read more about IBM’s commitment to open source here which I think provides a great timeline of the various open source projects they have been involved in before open source was cool.

Anyways, to my Red Hat colleagues, my advice would be to give this a chance for awhile as IBM has a lot of strengths that Red Hat could take advantage of, they are truly a global company and have a solid sales channel that is embedded all over the world.

To my IBM colleagues, don’t “bluewash” this company and almost treat this as a reverse merger, embrace the culture from Red Hat and you should honestly consider making Jim Whitehurst CEO of IBM and Chris Wright CTO of IBM. As Lou Gerstner said, “culture isn’t just one aspect of the game, it is the game” and this is one area that Red Hat can greatly help IBM as it navigates towards the cloud.

Here are also a couple other good takes on the acquisition I enjoyed:

My take on @ibm acquisition of @RedHat for $34B, the impact this will have on #opensource software, and what this means for @wso2. https://t.co/SbJGNqu0ja

— Tyler Jewell (@TylerJewell) October 28, 2018

IBM's Old Playbookhttps://t.co/DW3GAD3FTs

IBM has bought Red Hat in an attempt to recreate its success in the 90s; it's not clear, though, that the company or the market is the same.

— Stratechery (@stratechery) October 29, 2018

Finally, I’m really looking forward to see what IBM and Red Hat together, they have both been kindred spirits in making bets early on open source and I hope they bring that same zeal to the cloud. It at least makes my job running the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) more entertaining 🙂

While I’m not a huge fan of arms races, I have a unique perspective amongst open source foundations by having involvement from all the major cloud providers so I have an interesting vantage point in seeing a trend amongst them in ramping up developer advocacy hiring over the last couple of years. Furthermore, this hiring blitz is even more evident for me given the last couple of weeks have been conference crazy in the cloud native space with CloudNativeCon/KubeCon, MSBuild, Google IO and Red Hat Summit happening.

So what is happening with developer advocacy and the hyperscale cloud providers?

Note: If you aren’t familiar with the term developer advocate, I highly recommend this presentation by Patrick Chanzenon and blog from Ashley McNamara as an introduction to the profession.

Google

Google historically has been one of the early proponents of developer advocacy/relations and has invested in it since 2006 (see this excellent presentation for a historical perspective). A cursory search on LinkedIn shows a few hundred developer advocates employed at Google covering a variety of technologies from browsers to cloud. They also recently hired some heavy hitters like Sam Ramji and even Adam Seligman of Salesforce fame to help further build out their developer relations organization which was a smart move:

Excited to join Google and the @googledevs mission to help every developer grow their skills and career! Amazing team here representing devs around the world. Here we go!

— Adam Seligman (@adamse) January 17, 2018

Anyways, I consider Google a leader in developer relations and with folks like Kelsey Hightower on staff, they are ahead of the curve.

Maximize your career growth by basing everything you do on helping people succeed or gain understanding, even if that person is you.

— Kelsey Hightower (@kelseyhightower) March 4, 2016

I expect them to continue hiring like crazy to onboard more people onto their cloud offerings given their position in the market.

Microsoft

I used to work with Jeff Sandquist at Twitter and was delighted to hear he went back to Microsoft to build a developer advocacy focused organization. MS isn’t new at this game as some of us who are old enough and did MFC programming back in the day may remember Microsoft and their Channel9 advocacy program. Microsoft has been investing heavily in developer relations by making key hires (e.g., Ashley McNamara, Bridget Kromhout) and have rebooted their investment in open source to become one of the largest open source contributors in the industry. I’m not the first person to notice this trend by far, my friends at RedMonk noticed last year also. Searching the Microsoft job site, I see them hiring a handful of developer advocates mostly focused on cloud but they already have a large established roster of folks. It’s hard to get an exact count through the inexact science of flipping through LinkedIn search results, but I’d peg it 50-100 people currently employed doing developer relations.

Amazon (AWS)

In late 2016, Amazon started to expand their open source credibility by hiring folks like Adrian Cockroft, Zaheda Borat and Arun Gupta.

Started at AWS as Head of Open Source Strategy. Excited to be working with @adrianco

— zahedab (@zahedab) December 1, 2016

Using ancedata from my own experience being at events the last few years, Amazon has been aggressively speaking at conferences popular in the open source community. They have started to open source more examples and work with the community to improve them (e.g., https://github.com/aws-samples/aws-workshop-for-kubernetes)

It’s hard to get an exact number of people employed doing developer relations at AWS but going through the inexact science of LinkedIn search results, it looks to be in the 25-50 range which seems lower than I expected, but it’s hard as developer advocate is a fluid title (some people call themselves evangelists). In terms of hiring, searching the AWS jobs site I came across a couple of handful of developer advocate focused jobs so they seem to be aggressively hiring in this space. Also on a related note, I’m forever a fan of AWS for their execution and open discussion about hiring older engineers.

IBM

IBM traditionally has a strong position with their interactions with the open source community and even built a formal open source program within the company (I was also a fan of their DeveloperWorks initiative and even wrote technical articles for them in the past). They have also showed how making early bets on open source initiatives like Linux and Eclipse can reshape markets. In terms of developer advocacy, it seems about a year ago hired Jonas Jacobi to focus on developer relations from what I’ve been able to ascertain. They recently hosted an open source developer event in San Francisco called IBM Index which signals a desire to build developer communities outside the traditional IBM enterprise events like Think.

Best speaker gift ever! @indexconf made me a poster with tweets from some of the people I’ve helped over the years. pic.twitter.com/oURuBSXsR7

— Kelsey Hightower (@kelseyhightower) February 22, 2018

From a cursory LinkedIn search, IBM has 100+ developer advocates working on things from AI to Cloud. In terms of hiring, I’ve only found a handful of job descriptions currently open that are focused on developer advocacy. However, there were many job descriptions that were labeled software engineering that seemed to heavily focus on developer advocacy, for example, the folks that work on something called the IBM Cloud Garage seem to be a developer relations style job.

Oracle

Oracle has a burgeoning cloud business and according to some news sources, Oracle is actively trying to hire a new executive to run developer relations. A cursory job search shows that Oracle is ramping up their hiring, I see dozens of developer advocate positions open along with some more senior director level positions. I continue to expect Oracle to invest heavily in developer relations as this is an area they aren’t known for but has become table stakes in the public cloud business in my opinion.

Alibaba (and BAT+)

Alibaba and their cloud business is growing fast worldwide even though we don’t hear much about them in North America. In my opinion, they are making smart moves in Southeast Asia, India and other markets but that’s for another article to discuss. In my quest to learn about developer advocacy at Alibaba and even the other BAT companies, it was hard pressed to find any folks individually working on this. It’s clear to me that Alibaba has developer relations folks as if you go to their Alibaba Developers site there is some great content there but it’s been difficult to find current folks employed in devrel there and what they are hiring for. I’ll chalk this up to my inability to understand how job searching works in China and maybe one of my readers can shed some light on this. My hunch is that Alibaba will aggressively start hiring developer relations people worldwide if they didn’t start already, it will be fun to watch.

Conclusion

So what did I learn while I wrote this article? Well first off, getting hard numbers of how many job openings out there is a terrible science, sites like LinkedIn, Glassdoor and Indeed make it very difficult to extract data from their platforms to analyze. Second, developer relations is a nascent field and there’s no standard job description or career ladder. In many companies you have titles that range from “developer advocate” to “developer evangelist” to even “software engineer” that have primary responsibilities as developer relations. There have even been boutique communities popup to support people in the role of developer relations, see the Evangelist Collective slack as an example. Also the hiring of developer advocates isn’t just for large cloud providers or companies… you see some of the smart modern startups like Hashicorp, Turbine Labs and others hiring folks exclusively to make it easier to onboard developers to their tooling.

Finally, my prediction is that we will see cutthroat competition amongst the hyperscale cloud providers in hiring developer relations talent, especially out of the incumbents. The rest of the industry will learn from this experience that having a strong developer relations team is table stakes for any developer focused business. I’d love to write more on this topic but I’m short on time and I’m sure my friends at Redmonk can do a better job on this topic than me 🙂