3rd Party Outbound OSPO
Outline
- Extrospective OSPOs
- Objectives
- Lessons Learned
- Why?
Extrospective OSPOs
Inbound vs Outbound
Outbound
- Policies around creating OSS
- Promote adoption of own OSS
- Governance
- Code production
But what if…
The projects the OSPO contributes to, belong to a 3rd party organization?
Meet Aiven's OSPO
And more to come…
Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, PostgreSQL and OpenSearch are trademarks of their respective owners.Some Aiven's OSPO: Facts
- Around 10 people
- Organized in chapters
- Distributed
- Growing phase
- 1 year old!
Principles we run with
- Community first
- Be recognized
- Be transparent
- More than just production of code
Consequences
- IP owned by others
- Little to no control over backlog
- No control over timings
- Collaborating with competitors?
Objectives
Given this…
Would you consider it a risk if one of these modules was maintained by your developers in their free time?
Why are we accepting it when it comes to open source?
We want:
- Critical infrastructure actively maintained
- Projects not depending on a single company or organization
- Diversity of opinions
- Relieve workload of current maintainers
Mission:
Ensure the sustainability and secure the future of the Open Source Software infrastructure used.
Lessons Learned
Hiring
Hiring
Pool is smaller than you think.
How many committers are there?
Hiring
You'll need to hire talent where they are!
Hello multiple time zones!
Hiring
Programs to promote OSS contributions internally
Plankton Program — OSS Contribution = €
Developer traits
Developer traits
Forget about quick turnarounds.
Code, release, observe, fix, release.
Developer traits
Self driven.
Developers should know how to prioritize their work.
Developer traits
Can understand community needs.
Developer traits
Resiliency
Lots of proposed changes will be rejected, and not always because of technical reasons.
Management style
Management style
Areas of impact are limited.
Timing, responsibilities… Suddenly, these are external.
Management style
Not the expert in the room.
Management style
Enabler from the side line.
Performance metrics
Performance metrics
You don't control a substantial part of the process.
Merges, releases, reviews… All these do not depend only on us.
Performance metrics
Internal time scales are arbitrary.
Performance metrics
We came up with:
- Number of issues worked on
- Number of patches reviewed
- Community engagement (blog posts, mailing list, talks)
Why does it matter?
More than money
Monetary donations solve massive problems in OSS projects.
Maintenance burden is reduced only with more people.
Scalable solution
More extrospective OSPOs = More OSS developer mass
More secure
It's not only about preventing incidents, it's about being able to react fast.
Everyone should have one?
NO!
Every company who could afford it should have one extrospective OSPO.
Let's build shared OSS projects, together!
Further information
Thanks!
Questions!