❤️FOSSY❤️
Last month, I attended the inaugural FOSSY conference in Portland, Oregon - where many of my friends live. History of portland and Open Source go way back - well connected to O'Reilly Open Source Convention. While I had never attended that, it was always the place for US based Open Source enthusiasts. FOSSY in a way, replaces that. FOSSY focuses on free and open source software, and included tracks on community, containers, compliance, diversity, gaming, and education. I got a chance to connect with friends and make new friends, see this amazing city, buy a new pen from a beautiful paper and pen store and I traveled 30+ hours one way to make it to there. It was an excellent event, and in this post I’ll just focus on some highlights.
FOSSY had some excellent sessions on issues in Open Source, both from the point of view of a contributor to open source projects, and in examining how various open source projects can help the policy makers. Paco Nathan gave a very informative talk about language tools available for creators, focusing on machine learning, graph technology, and natural language processing. I also really enjoyed Tom Spot’s talk on Open Source Anti-Pattern. He discussed common pitfalls (and their Antidotes) in Open Source projects. That talk deserves its own blogpost.
Sustainability
Richard Littauer's talk on "Where does "sustaining" open source fall down?" was quite eye opening. Not in the way of fixing things, but how I can articulate what I have always wanted to snap back when I hear "sustainability". Open source sustainability is a frequently mentioned topic. We need to "keep it going for the long haul", develop a "sustainable business model", and occasionally even "sustain sustainability conversations". There's even a conference about it (I love it). Why "sustain" in the first place, and for what, and for whom?
Now this would be a blogpost as well.
Open Source Philosophy
Another thought-provoking talk I attended was “FOSS in World Affairs” by Delib. This talk deconstructed the philosophy of open source until it could be applied more broadly to larger social issues such as abuses of capitalism and the breakdown of social contracts. It generated a ton of discussion, including talk about how a corporation could be completely open-sourced, in a way that would welcome both collaboration and competition. I came away from this talk with a lot to think about.
I also attended a talk by Keith Bergelt on Make The Commit – Community Best Practices for Patent Risk. He introduced me to the Open Invention Network, which I feel I should have known about before. This organization seeks to cushion large open source projects from patent litigation through various means such as building a “patent non-aggression community”. Bergelt was careful to point out that there are plenty of companies out there who seek to stall open source by leveraging patents.
Do it Again
FOSSY was great. I don't want to talk about just session - but overall, this was a session where I learned a lot it was really enjoyable to be around so many like-minded nerds. I got to celebrate my birthday with some of my favorite people! I hope we have FOSSY next year, and I’ll try to attend again.