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**Arfon Smith:** There's one quote that calls this the 'democracy of the project'. Is it actually - 'meritocracy' is a dirty word these days, but is it the community that's contributing to this thing, or is it just three people who are actually rejecting the community's contributions and are just working on their own s... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Is it participatory, right? Can people participate? That's the question. |
**Arfon Smith:** Yeah. How open is this collaboration, is the way I like to think of it. Because I think that's the thing we tell ourselves, and that's one of the reasons that I think open source is both a collaboration model and a set of licenses and ways to think about IP. For me, the most exciting thing about open s... |
A lot of people do that, but they're actually working in a very small team, or working together. Actually, a while ago I tried to measure some of this stuff on a few projects that I use, and you can see quite clearly that some projects are terrible at merging community contributions. They're absolutely appalling at it.... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** You can name names. |
**Arfon Smith:** I totally won't, I'll absolutely not. Some of them are very poor. But then actually, just to counter that, okay, so what does it mean if you are very bad at merging contributions? Maybe that means your API is really robust and your software is really stable, right? It's not clear that being very conser... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** That's exactly what I wanted to tease apart a little bit. I just had a talk recently where I was looking at Rust versus Clojure and how both of those communities function, and they're really different. Rust is super participatory and Clojure is more BDFL, but one can make the argument that both are st... |
\[53:10\] So we talked about popularity of projects and then we're talking now about health of projects, and it feels like two parts of it. One is around "Is this project active? Is it being actively worked on and being kept up to date?", and you can look at contribution activity there. The other part is "Is it partici... |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** Yeah, I've been looking into this a little bit as a way of... The libraries will sort all the search results by kind of a quality metric and try to filter any ones that it thinks is bad. One of the best metrics for that kind of thing... "Is this project dead?" isn't really the activity in the commit... |
**Arfon Smith:** My prediction here is that the people and the organizations that are gonna solve this are gonna be the ones that are paying most attention to business users of open source. Because if you are a CIO and you're thinking about starting to use open source more extensively in your organization, then assessi... |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** \[57:12\] The Linux Foundation are a little bit around that with the Core Infrastructure Initiative, where they're trying to see, "Has this project had a security review? When was the last time it was checked for the people that are behind the project?", which I think is a harder thing to do automat... |
There's a fair number of metrics that we can pull in automatically to give you a light indication of if the project is healthy. I guess you have to split it in half again and go like, "Well, what do I care about the project? Is this thing that I'm doing a throw-away fun experiment or a learning exercise, or is it somet... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I think the methodology that they used is somewhat applicable here though. I know a lot about the CII thing because I'm at the Linux Foundation. The NodeJS project was one of the first to get a security badge. Essentially what they did was they came up with "How do we do a really good survey on proje... |
The Node project was one of the launch partners of this. It's really simple stuff, like have a private security list, have a documented disclosure policy, have that on a website somewhere. It sounds really basic, but the number of projects that are heavily depended on that don't do that is surprisingly big. And just ha... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I'm curious to kind of move this a little bit to thinking about analytics from a maintainer's point of view. So if you're a maintainer and you have a project, the project gets popular, what should they be measuring for their projects? What do you think they should be paying attention to at a high leve... |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** Someone asked me a question the other day on Twitter... They were wondering for a given library that they were maintaining what were the versions of that library that people depended on. They wanted to see for the 500 other projects that depended on it what versions were they using, because they wan... |
\[01:00:59.03\] But having that actual usage data around the versions, which some package managers really give you the data of a particular download for a version as well, so you can see, "Oh, this thing looks completely dead. No one has downloaded this anymore", as opposed to the last two releases that are really heav... |
Then also looking into the forks is something that maintainers might wanna do to be able to kind of go, "Oh, people are forking this off and changing things manually. They haven't wanted to contribute back? Why didn't they contribute back?" It definitely seems to me to come down to very human questions, as opposed to k... |
I was talking to the guy at Bugsnag, who do exception tracking, and they collect a lot of exception data that actually is thrown up by an open source library and they see it in the stack trace, like "Oh, this error has come from Rack", for example, and they were investigating if they could use or at least ask for permi... |
**Arfon Smith:** Yeah, I'm also interested in the types of roles of people on your project, as well. One of the projects I maintain for GitHub is called Linguist, which is actually one of our more popular open source projects, and it does the language detection on GitHub; it's kind of a somewhat self-serviced project, ... |
We've got a little bit of policy around who gets to do releases still, just because it's kind of coupled to our production environment, but doing that has just breathed new life into the project, and I think one of the things that was not straightforward, but you can get it from the pulls page, to see who's got the mos... |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** \[01:05:02.19\] My approach with open source projects I maintain like that is based off a Felix Geisendörfer's blog post, which was I guess a couple years ago. He basically just goes, "If someone sends me a progress, I'm just gonna add him as a contributor. Because what's the worst that could happen... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** And that really developed in the Node community, too. Eventually, that turned into open-open source and more liberal contribution agreements. It's really the basis now for Node's core policies as well. There's been a lot of iteration there on how you liberalize access and commit rights and stuff like... |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** It's been quite interesting to have GitHub actually go like, "Oh, this is the third pull request you've received from this person. You should consider adding them as a collaborator so they can do this themselves." |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, that'd be awesome. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** In the Node project we do a roll-up every month just to show, "Okay, these are the people that merge a lot of stuff", and then there's a note next to them if they're a committer or not, so that they can get onboarded if they're not. That's how we base the nominations. |
If that was automatically integrated into GitHub it would save me so much time... Not having to run those scripts and post those issues, it would be fantastic. |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** I think Ruby on Rails runs a leader board as well of the total number of commits into any of the rails projects, and you can kind of see a little star next to the ones who are currently Rails core. It kind of gamifies it a little bit, which I don't know if that's a good thing or not. I guess as long... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I think it'd be cool to see that for other types of contributions too, like people that are really active in issues or people that are doing a lot of triaging work, or whatever. I hear that from people, of "Well, I also wanna recognize all these other people that are falling through the cracks or that... |
**Arfon Smith:** Right, yeah. We did this blog post recently called "The Shape Of Open Source" that kind of just shows really clearly the difference between the types of activities around a project as the contributor pool grows. You can see that the lion's share of the activity goes from commits if it's just a solo pro... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, to wind this down a little bit and look more towards the future - are there any trends like that that you see actually growing over time? I'll ask this to both of you... We've talked a lot about what the data looks like right now. If you look at the data now, compared to last year or compared t... |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** \[01:08:47.15\] Well, for me there's an accelerating number of packages everywhere, across every package manager that is in a language that is still very active. Perl is slowed down a little bit, but most package managers seem to continue to gain more and more code. There's just more choice and more... |
The dependency graph does give you something like a page rank to be able to go, "If we used a combination of links to that...", either the GitHub page or the npm page, and dependencies from actual software projects, you would then have a good picture of the things that are the most considered to be useful. Which is som... |
**Arfon Smith:** Right. Clay Shirky has been mentioned once already on this today, but let's mention him again - he's like, "The problem is filter failure, not information overload." I think currently a lot of what we've talked about today, it's like it's hard to find the right thing, because the volume of open source ... |
I think it's almost becoming standard to hear some of these conversations happen. Now people are like, "Yeah, but how can we measure health? How can we know whether a project is doing well?" How is the data changing? I don't know that the data is changing necessarily that much; I think Homebrew's adding those metrics t... |
Some of this is there's data missing that we don't necessarily have, and it will be better to have more explicit measure of consumption in the use of open source. |
I think the other part of it, the biggest change that I'm seeing is that the conversation is moving pretty fast, and that to me speaks of a demand and a better understanding of the problem generally in the community, and I think that means that we're likely to see product changes and improvements that help solve some o... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** \[01:11:59.23\] Can't wait! |
**Mikeal Rogers:** That's great, I'm excited! |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** There's a lot of people working on that kind of area as well. Did you see the Software Heritage project that was released yesterday? |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Yes, yes. |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** So far they're just collecting stuff, but building those kinds of tools on top of all of that, like the internet archive of software, could be a really powerful way for collecting those metrics and making them distributed out and allowing people to do interesting things on top of them |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Yes. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I think we'll leave it there. Thank you all for coming on, this was amazing. |
**Arfon Smith:** Thanks for the conversation. |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** Thanks very much. |
• Building businesses from open-source projects |
• Turning side projects into full-time work |
• Experimenting with steady revenue sources |
• Raising venture capital |
• Open-source vs. commercial strategies for business growth |
• Challenges of maintaining open-source products as a business grows |
• Balancing community involvement and commercial goals |
• The relationship between companies (Disqus/Sentry, Joyent/npm) and open-source projects they developed. |
• David's experience developing Sentry while at Disqus and his views on the benefits of open-source. |
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