ANTHOLOGY — Maintaining maintainers (Interview)

This week on The Changelog we’re continuing our Maintainer Month series by taking to you back to the hallway track of The Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit North America 2023 in Vancouver, Canada. Today’s anthology episode features: Stormy Peters (VP of Communities at GitHub), Dr. Dawn Foster (Director of Open Source Community Strategy at VMware), and Angie Byron (Drupal Core Product Manager and Community Director at Aiven).

Special thanks to our friends at GitHub for sponsoring us to attend this conference as part of Maintainer Month.

Leave us a comment

Changelog++ members save 10 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

• GitHub – Harnessed for productivity. Designed for collaboration. Celebrated for built-in security. Welcome to the platform developers love.
• Square – Develop on the platform that sellers trust. There is a massive opportunity for developers to support Square sellers by building apps for today’s business needs. Learn more at developer.squareup.com to dive into the docs, APIs, SDKs and to create your Square Developer account — tell them Changelog sent you.
• Sentry – See the untested code causing errors - or whether it’s partially or fully covered - directly in your stack trace, so you can avoid similar errors from happening in the future. Use the code CHANGELOG and get the team plan free for three months.
• Typesense – Lightning fast, globally distributed Search-as-a-Service that runs in memory. You iterlly can’t get any faster!

Featuring:

• Stormy Peters – Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn
• Dr. Dawn Foster – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn
• Angie Byron – Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website
• Adam Stacoviak – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website
• Jerod Santo – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn

Show Notes:

• GitHub Sponsors
• GitHub Accelerator
• CHAOSS
• Drupal

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Timestamps:

(00:00) - This week on The Changelog
(01:31) - Sponsor: Square
(04:25) - Start the show!
(05:11) - Who's running GitHub Sponsors?
(06:00) - GitHub Sponsors' mission?
(06:45) - Sponsors now open to companies
(07:49) - Traction with companies?
(09:27) - What's a typical give?
(09:52) - Best has been FOSS Contributor Fund
(10:34) - Open Source pricing page
(11:34) - Maintainer guilt? Nah.
(14:01) - Serving a "Term of Service"
(16:59) - What's next for Sponsors?
(18:55) - GitHub Accelerator like YC?
(23:33) - Maintainer dashboard?
(29:18) - How do Maintainers get paid?
(30:14) - Sponsor: Sentry
(34:27) - Dr. Dawn Foster on the mic
(35:22) - PhD and the Linux Kernel
(38:02) - CHAOSS
(39:13) - Is there a score?
(41:01) - Measuring trends and who cares?
(43:50) - How is the data represented?
(46:14) - Choosing which metrics to meassure
(50:41) - Why push back on scoring?
(53:19) - How to recruit contributors?
(55:32) - Getting started with CHAOSS
(56:12) - Sponsor: Typesense
(59:29) - Is Drupal still a big deal?
(1:00:57) - Still in the Drupal community?
(1:02:27) - Adam really enjoyed episode #321
(1:03:17) - What's your maintainer story?
(1:06:06) - How did you decide "what's next"?
(1:08:30) - Licensing and "not open source"
(1:11:01) - This is where it gets icky
(1:12:43) - War for the soul of open source
(1:20:55) - Maintainer anti-burnout
(1:24:06) - Be a cog, not a linchpin.
(1:28:16) - Outro