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March 11, 2015
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Linux Kernel’s Code of Conflict

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The Linux Kernel recently has come up with an aptly named “Code of Conflict” to deal with some of the criticism inside that community:

There’s also an interview from the Linux Foundation Executive Director, Jim Zemlin about this topic:

While not perfect in my opinion, it is the step in the right direction to ensure a well behaving community. While most people will be excellent to each other, there will also be outliers. Also, it’s important to set expectations within a open source community and really just set the ground rules.

Finally as a prediction (and hope), I expect to see more open source communities, foundations and even companies start implementing these code of conduct style guidelines this year.

March 2, 2015
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FYI: Open Source Initiative (@OpenSourceOrg)

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If you aren’t aware of the Open Source Initiative (OSI), you should be. They are fantastic not-for-profit organization responsible for the Open Source Definition (which everyone should read once in their lives), they maintain a a list of compliant license definitions on top of promoting open source across the world.

They are also membership driven organization, which is supported by individuals and affiliates. As far as I know, they are the only organization that brings together a variety of open source individuals/institutions to cross-promote ways to work together improve the adoption of open source software:

AffiliateLogosFinal_6

They are also in the last month of their membership drive, so if you’re interested in supporting their cause, I highly recommend you consider joining as a member:

Also more selfishly, the OSI currently has nominations open for the board of director election which I’m partaking in. The current group of nominations include a great group of folks from all over the open source ecosystem and I’d love to have the opportunity to serve, my plans include expanding corporate membership and more.

So please consider supporting the OSI and vote your interests, they really make the greater open source community a better place.

January 15, 2015
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CFP and Sponsors: MesosCon 2015

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We of the MesosCon Program committee recently launched the MesosCon 2015 Call for Papers (CFP) and early bird registration:

If you’re interested in the future of datacenter infrastructure, I highly recommend attending. The conference will be co-located with LinuxCon North America 2015 in beautiful Seattle, WA and the early bird rates are priced at a reasonable $299 to start in my opinion (we also have student rates at $99).

As part of the registration process, you’ll have an opportunity to donate to a MesosCon Diversity Scholarship program which provides support to women, people of color and people with disabilities who may not otherwise have the opportunity to attend for financial reasons. Equal access and diversity are important to MesosCon, and we aim to remove this obstacle for underrepresented attendee groups.

In the coming months, we’ll announce keynotes and the program. We’re also looking for sponsors, so if you’re interested, please feel free to reach out to me.

January 13, 2015
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TravisCI Container Infrastructure: Faster Builds

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Just before I disappeared for the holidays, I sent out a tweet talking about testing out the new Travis CI container infrastructure:

Last week, I spent some time moving more @TwitterOSS open source projects on GitHub to take advantage of this and have been nothing but thrilled with the results (seen build speeds improve by 30% to nearly 50%). Faster builds lower the barrier to contribution and also translate into less wasted time.

Anyways, check it out, more people need to know about this rely on Travis CI.

December 10, 2014
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Malicious Open Source Contributions

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Yesterday, an interesting happened within the Eclipse Foundation community where someone sent a malicious code review…

We generally don’t see this type of thing in open source communities (mostly just contributions without tests), but I believe malicious contributions will continue and become more frequent. The opportunity is just there for bad actors and open source code is embedded all over the place, from your desktop, to your mobile devices to vehicles.

Looking back, there’s been some notable opportunities for bad actors to inject malicious code. One example I recall in particular is RubyGems and SSL and another more prominent example was when the Kernel.org servers were hacked:

Good times, stay diligent.

December 8, 2014
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Apache (and other foundations) considered useful

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I couldn’t resist writing a blog about this topic given the chance to use a witty blog title. A few years ago, I blogged about a post that Mike Rogers (@mikeal) wrote about “Apache considered harmful” in the GitHub era.

I agreed with Mike to an extent, but mostly around my frustration in how slow the ASF was in adopting newer tools (like Git) and how the organization was structured with volunteers responsible for critical infrastructure. However, we can save that frustration for another post (note: this has improved as of late).

The interesting part was that Mike recently has had some interesting thoughts about the role of companies in open source due to the NodeJS / io.js forking debacle:

In particular, his opinion is that no company alone can be trusted with the ownership of a community driven open source project. I generally agree with his thoughts however, there are solutions to his problem involving open source foundations. Open source foundations like the ASF, Eclipse Foundation and Linux Foundation (and more) are actually really useful:

The foundations I mentioned above have over a decade of experience being built for the sole purpose of allowing independent open source communities to flourish with fair governance models built on meritocratic behaviors (just take a peak at some of the Apache documentation or Eclipse development process). This is important because the incentives between individuals small companies, large companies, heavily funded companies and even academics are different and need to be accounted for in a fair open source governance structure. Some of these foundations like the Eclipse Foundation started out as the “Eclipse Consortium” and learned some of these lessons the hard way.

In particular, I would like to call out the Eclipse Foundation Working Groups and Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects concepts as some of the best ways to collaborate in the open for maturing open source projects.

On a funny note, as I was trying to get this post out last week, hilariously the container community was going through a fork of Docker with Rocket from CoreOS (in particular, this Hacker News thread was just cheeky):

What happened with Docker/Rocket was almost predictable given the way the Docker project was structured and how late to the game they were in establishing some level of governance and independence as more larger companies were getting involved. At least the competition should help container technology improve at a quicker pace.

In the end, I have to agree with this tweet from Jim Jagielski (@jimjag) about the role of open source foundations:

I hope that in the future as new open source projects become successful, they take a serious look at open source foundations (especially the ones I mentioned) as a proper place to grow and provide structure to their community. Their communities deserve it.

December 3, 2014
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Naming Mars+1 (2016 @EclipseFdn Release)

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It’s that time of year that members of the Eclipse Foundation Planning Council help spearhead the community-based naming process of the next Eclipse release (slated for 2016).

The rules are contained in this bug where you can submit names for consideration. Here are the guidelines for names:

The rules and procedure for naming Mars+1 will be similar to what has happened in the past. The name should be alphabetically greater than “M”

Preference will be given to “N” names, but no strict rule that others would not be considered. Preference given to names that fit the “moon”, “heavenly body gods”, or “scientists” themes we’ve had in the past.

I’m suggested Nova or Neutrino to start, but have taken a liking to Neptune as a potential option:

Have a better suggestion for a name? Well put it in the bug before we call for an official vote in the coming weeks.

Thank you!

 

November 7, 2014
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Open Sourcing the Twitter Emoji

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Usually I’m buried in the realm of just code, but yesterday I had the fun job of open sourcing the beautifully designed Emoji set we use at Twitter:

Why does this make me happy? First off, emojis are fun, hugely popular and standardized by the Unicode Consortium. One of the interesting sites I came across was EmojiTracker which shows real time emoji usage across Twitter.

Finally and more importantly, emoji have been historically plagued by licensing issues. Due to some of these concerns, WordPress reached out to us to see if we were interested in collaborating and opening up our emoji set. We thought this was a great idea, so here we are today.

In the end, my hope is that us sharing our emoji with a permissive license will help alleviate some of the IP issues and help open up the web a little bit more for everyone.

August 13, 2014
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One Week until #MesosCon 2014 (and LinuxCon)

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Over the last couple of years I’ve been heavily involved in open source infrastructure technology by way of the Mesos project, which my team and Twitter have helped grow outside its humble beginnings as an academic project. As a result, I’m really looking forward to the first #MesosCon next week (co-located with LinuxCon) which my team at Twitter helped put together in collaboration with the awesome Mesos community and the great folks at the Linux Foundation. It was interesting as we put together the conference in a fairly transparent fashion, but that’s a topic for another blog post.

 

 

 

 

The schedule looks great and covers a wide variety of infrastructure usage:

The final day we also have a Hackathon where committers and Mesos community members will be available to drive the project forward based on community interest (basically who shows up).

Also, right before #MesosCon there will be a Docker Meetup in Chicago which will have a talk about running Docker containers on Mesos.

Look forward to seeing everyone in Chicago, feel free to reach out to me if you would like to meet up and chat open source over a frosty beverage.

August 12, 2014
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Interview with @OpensourceWay

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I’m a bit behind on blogging but last week I gave an interview with opensource.com about how we scale our infrastructure at Twitter using Mesos, check it out:

Hope you learned something new!

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