Episode 23: Why Companies Should Invest Money in Open Source with Josh Simmons

Sponsored By:
Panelists Pia Mancini | Eric Berry | Justin Dorfman | Richard
Littauer | Allen “Gunner” Gunn Guest Josh Simmons
(https://joshsimmons.com/) Salesforce | Open Source Initiative Show
Notes In this episode we talk with Josh Simmons, Senior Open Source
Strategist at Salesforce Engineering. He is a community strategist,
open source advocate, and dusty- foot philosopher. He also serves
as Vice President of the Open Source Initiative (OSI). 4:10 Josh
talks about how he started in Open Source and his background. 7:27
Josh explains why companies/people should invest money in Open
Source even though it’s free and why it’s a good business, adding
features, fixing bugs, and risk mitigation. 10:28 Richard says, “As
a dusty-foot philosopher,” Josh believes it’s ethical to give back
and non-ethical for enterprise companies not to give back. 11:03 We
are lucky to have this concept of Open Source. Our fore fathers
twenty plus years ago realized there was another approach to
intellectual property. Open Source was such a radical concept.
Also, as contributors, if we don’t give back who will? If no one
does, what are we here for? 20:50 A panelist asks Josh, “What are
the challenges of running an OSPO?” In an organization with over
8,000 developers, Josh explains how he tries to pull all the docs
and pool everything together and create coherent set of documents
and policies. Also, the main challenge is the outreach to the
staff. 25:27 Josh tells us tools he likes using such as CLA
Assistant (BOT) and OSS Review Toolkit. He also gives a shout out
to the TODO Group: talk openly, develop openly which is a project
for the LINUX Foundation. Both tools were found through the “To Do
Group.” 28:16 Josh talks about his role in OSI (Open Source
Initiative). Josh is Vice President of the Open Source Initiative.
He gives us the history of how it started and how their goal is to
protect and promote Open Source, including maintaining the approved
OSI license list. 36:55 Richard and Josh debate whether or not OSI
is a vehicle for the community. Richard brings up how dual
licensing does not fall under Open Source under OSI’s definitions.
Spotlight 50:04 Justin's spotlight this week is cURL 50:20 Eric’s
pick is Ruby-Grape.org 51:22 Gunner’s pick is F-Droid.org 51:52
Richard gives Pia a shout out to Open Collective 52:02 Richard’s
pick is SpoofMAC on GitHub 52:40 Josh’s spotlight is Drupal.org
Sponsor Linode (https://promo.linode.com/sustain/) Links Josh
Simmons Website (https://joshsimmons.com/) Josh Simmons LinkedIn
(https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshsimmons) Josh Simmons Twitter
(https://twitter.com/joshsimmons) TODO (https://todogroup.org/) The
Linux Foundation (https://www.linuxfoundation.org/) F-Droid
(https://f-droid.org/) SpoofMAC
(https://github.com/feross/SpoofMAC) Drupal
(https://www.drupal.org/) Open Collective
(https://opencollective.com/) Open Source Initiative
(https://opensource.org/) CLA Assistant (https://cla-assistant.io/)
OSS Review Toolkit
(https://github.com/heremaps/oss-review-toolkit/blob/master/README.md)
Special Guest: Josh Simmons.