Welcome & Introductions

[chadwhitacre]

Welcome to "a loose confederation" of people who are interested in establishing a value system for Open Source that better reflects where we are today vs. the Free Software movement of the past. Sentry's Open Source values are:

1. sustainability for maintainers, and
2. access to technology and knowledge for developers.

Read more about what this means to us and the history behind it in our blog post, Sentry's Open Source Values. If you share our values then let's work together to move the conversation forward. Go ahead and introduce yourself in this thread and watch the repo to stay informed and participate.

Icebreakers:

1. Who are you?
2. What company are you with?
3. What are your Open Source values?

Updates

• Sentry hosted an event, "The Future of Open Source: SaaS, the Final Frontier," where we talked about some of these themes.
• OSI published "Open Source’s lost decade" about how Open Source did not keep up with the evolution of cloud and mobile in the tech industry.

[ljharb]

I don't use any non-OSI-approved licenses myself. However, I appreciate and share the values described in the blog post. As an open source maintainer, I certainly feel the weight of others making baffling amounts of money off of my labor without compensating me for it, and I can understand a business not wanting to find itself in the same situation.

I'd love to participate in the conversation. My "agenda" would be twofold: to ensure open source maintainers have an advocate in what will likely be an impactful effort, and to seek serendipitous ideas and solutions that could be brought back to the wider capital-lettered open source community to improve the lot of maintainers in general.

[davidarthurthomas]

Hey, what's up! Super pumped about this :)

My name is David and I'm one of the co-founders at Tunnel where we're transforming localhost into a collaborative workspace for product. We're taking a local-first approach to bringing teams together to iterate on code, experience the product, and collect feedback in one place.

Still working on our open-source values, and hoping to draw inspiration from the folks here

[ezekg]

Hey all, my name is Zeke and I'm the founder of Keygen. I haven't fully defined the company's open source values yet, but I have mentioned a few reasons I ended up going open source in a blog post. Like Sentry, we also try to monetarily support open source whenever possible (at a lesser scale than Sentry — but will continue growing that as we grow). I think putting in some time and really fleshing out our values will be on my todo list within the next few months. Excited to be a part of this conversation.

[morgante]

Hi there! I'm Morgante, the founder of Grit. We'd like to open source more of our software, but haven't decided on the right values and approach yet. I'm trying to be careful and diligent about this so whatever we commit to is maintainable long-term. Excited to learn from how others have approached this!

[dantelex]

Hey, there!

I'm Dante, founder of Onboardbase, a local-first secret infrastructure that gives teams automated compliance across developer machines and deployment environments. It's the first step towards collaborative security.

We have open-sourced part of our solutions, we believe that for security to be really effective, it has to be both open and collaborative.

[chadwhitacre]

Welcome aboard, everyone! I've kicked out a few new issues to get some conversation going:

https://github.com/getsentry/loose-confederation/issues

Jump in where you like, in particular we should probably talk about what outputs and outcomes we are all looking for here.

[djc]

I'm Dirkjan and an experienced maintainer of open source projects (these days, mostly in Rust) and CTO at Instant Labs (where we build on open source and have also released a bunch of open source libraries).

As a CTO, I'm happy when I can build on top of open source libraries, and always to happy contribute back. We restrict ourselves to libraries with non-viral licenses (using cargo-deny tooling) -- although we allow the MPL since it's a good example of a license that is viral in a way that makes it easy to allow building open source on top of.

As a maintainer of libraries that are fairly low in the stack of any given project, I'm very concerned about sustainability -- even though I think I generate a bunch of value as a maintainer of widely used projects like chrono, indicatif, rustls and quinn -- this generates very limited income for me (currently on the order of a few hundred EUR per month). Happy Sentry is leading the way here, as there are montly contributions flowing my way via thanks.dev for my work on chrono.

As such, I think sustainability and access are great values, but I also think the loose confederation could benefit from elaborating a bit more to explain where the trade-offs are here (which things might Sentry be willing to deprioritize in favor of sustainability and access?).

On the topic of access in particular, I also wonder if there is a way to codify what access could mean beyond just getting source code. For example, in increasing order of accessibility:

1. Source code tarballs are dropped for every release
2. All changes to the software will appear in a public VCS repository
3. Changes to the software will appear in the public VCS as they are developed
4. Changes to the software are submitted/reviewed in a public venue
5. External contributions will get a timely review

[chadwhitacre]

Gonna close this one out, we're off and running in #4. 💃