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History & Philosophy of Open Source

MozFest - Gradual

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Introductions

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Agenda

  • History & context from Tom (5-10 min)
  • The day-to-day of maintaining open source from Omar (5-10 min)
  • Open discussion

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History & Context

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Source: Doug Belshaw - Thought Shrapnel

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The day-to-day

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Background

  • Have worked at Cesium (cesium.com) for last ~3 years
  • CesiumJS is a large open source library for visualizing geospatial data on a 3D globe
  • 20k weekly npm downloads, 1 million lifetime downloads. ~350k lines of code.
  • Used by FlightRadar24, as well as NASA, Intel, Uber, lots of government use

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https://github.com/CesiumGS/cesium/

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How was this funded?

  • Compare to ThreeJS https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/, React, and TensorFlow.
  • Reasons to open source
    • Brand (amongst developers)
    • Brand (amongst B2B customers)
    • Good for society
  • Generally funded by
    • Services contracts (like PhaserJS, PixiJS)
    • Open-core business model (sell a subscription service, like Discourse)

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Open source != Free

Unreal Engine is a good example. It is open source but not free to use.

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Difference between free as in “don’t pay money for” and free as in “freedom to tweak and adapt”.

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OpenCollective

Most popular method of funding I’ve seen emerge in the last few years

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https://opencollective.com/discover

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What is it like maintaining a popular library

  • Really amazing to be a “voice of authority” in a community
  • Seeing people using it from all over the world
  • Very very overwhelming to keep up with
    • Verifying bug reports
    • Answering questions
    • Satisfying everyone’s particular use cases
    • And finding time to invest in improving docs, new features, and everything else you have to do for your business

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Helping out by contributing code

  • One-off code contributions often require a lot of work to:
    • Verify the solution works as expected
    • Verify it doesn’t break anything else
    • Adapt approach/code style to the rest of the code
    • Decide on if this is even wanted
    • Document the new feature
    • Maintain this code...forever
  • Other ways to help out
    • Fix docs
    • Write tutorials
    • Test things, create minimal reproducible test cases
    • Fund it

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Discussion

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Discussion

Miro board: https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_lRWjRq0=/

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  • Where do you see yourself in open source?
  • Where do you see it going?
  • Are there things you wish to change?
  • Or ways you want to contribute?

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Tumbler

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Come back kid -

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Myspace

Foxy the fox

Wikipedia

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Smart and ethical

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Trustworthy AI

Blockchain

Digital currency

Crypto

scuttlebutt.nz

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Decentralised social network

Mozilla

Mr Robot

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CERN

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