I was thrilled to be invited to attend the United Nations Open Source Week in New York joining a few hundred people from over 40 countries to talk about open source.
The OSPOs for Good day on June 18, kicked off with a keynote by Amandeep Singh Gill, Under-Secretary-General and Special Envoy for Digital and Emerging Technologies, UN-ODET, who talked about how the UN sees open source as a foundation for digital transformation, but one that requires the UN to move beyond its historical focus on governments to engage multiple stakeholders. Looking around the room, you could see this reflected in the event attendees who represented governments, companies, universities, not for profit organizations, individuals, and more. Later in the day, Dmitry Mariyasin, Deputy Executive Secretary, UNECE, talked about how he sees open source as an inspiration for how the UN can operate more broadly in their role to create public goods using digital solutions to improve sustainability and increase transparency and trust.
You can watch the livestream of the event, but here are a few highlights or common themes from the OSPOs for Good day.
Historically, many open source conversations were about cost savings, but this wasn’t the case at this event. The conversations have shifted to collaboration, innovation, and using open source to build trust.
Several of the people representing governments talked about how having an OSPO helped them build connections to other people involved in open source within their organizations while also allowing them to build connections and partnerships to collaborate and learn from others. Many countries view open source as being critical to their success as a country and in serving the needs and improving the livelihoods of their people.
The newly formed Trinidad and Tobago OSPO and Kenya OSPO are part of an initiative to create a replicable, scalable model of OSPOs across the global south with a goal of serving countries beyond just their governments to promote open source.
Governments want to use open source, but struggle with procurement processes, which requires different policies to contribute, add new features, and maintain open source projects. Governments have been more willing to fund new features, but often struggle to fund the invisible maintenance of the software that everyone uses, which creates risks for the public that they represent. Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund (now under the Sovereign Tech Agency) was created as one way to address these risks and make strategic investments in core digital infrastructure.
So far, I’m really enjoying the event and am looking forward to the next two days!
I wrote a blog post earlier this week, Contributor Sustainability Impacts Risk and Adoption of OSS Projects, focused on helping maintainers and open source project leaders understand how companies view risk and how this impacts adoption of their projects. Marko Bevc commented on Bluesky that “there is another side of this coin while companies evaluate the risk (as they should), they should also look into how they are going to support those projects they use (either with contributions or/and other resources – e.g. funding).” This is a really important point, and it’s something that I always bring up when talking to companies about evaluating risk (20 min into this video, for example), so I decided to write a part 2 for the original post, but this time focused on what companies can do to mitigate contributor sustainability risks when adopting open source software.
As part of spending a lot of time over the years thinking about the sustainability of open source projects, I’ve given a bunch of talks (see Additional Resources section below) about how companies can assess the risk and viability of open source projects, but assessing viability is the beginning of the process, not the end. Understanding open source project viability is an ongoing process that needs to be monitored and decisions revisited as projects evolve. As a company, the best way to monitor the ongoing viability of a project is to have your employees contributing and participating within the project. This serves another important purpose beyond just monitoring. By having your employees participating in a project, you can help to continuously improve the viability of that project to increase the chances that it will continue to be viable over the longer-term.
However, most companies use so many open source projects that you can’t possibly employ contributors to participate in all of them. Generally, I recommend that companies focus their contributions on strategic open source projects that are critical to your ability to deliver customer-facing products or services. For the other projects that you don’t contribute to directly, you might still be able to help them increase their viability in other ways, like through funding, for example. Some companies have funding programs where they fund key dependencies and other projects (e.g., FOSS Funders, Microsoft’s FOSS Fund, Bloomberg’s FOSS Fund). However, it’s also important to think about the impact of providing funding because throwing money at some projects can create friction within the project that can sometimes have a negative impact, while in other projects, funding can make a big difference in increasing viability. We discuss these and other funding issues regularly as part of the CHAOSS Funding Impact Measurement Working Group, and we also maintain a list of resources and research about funding.
To wrap this up, open source sustainability and viability are not something that you can think of as all or nothing. No project is perfect, and each project will have areas within them that are more or less sustainable. Companies can help make projects more sustainable and more viable over time by providing resources, like direct employee contribution and funding for those projects.
I’ve spent a lot of time over the years thinking about the sustainability of open source projects and the role that contributor sustainability plays in overall project sustainability. When I was co-chair of the CNCF Contributor Strategy Technical Advisory Group, contributor sustainability came up often as a concern for CNCF projects, and the most common question was about how to get more people contributing to our projects. This is a hard problem, but there are some resources at the bottom of this post to help grow your contributor base and increase the sustainability of your open source projects.
What I think many people underestimate is how contributor sustainability is viewed through the lens of risk by companies who are deciding whether to adopt your project. It’s easy to think that your project is different. No one will leave, and the project will be wildly successful forever, but that’s not how many companies think about open source adoption. Some companies think hard about which projects to adopt, especially if those technologies are crucial for delivering solutions to their customers, and would be difficult to replace if the project suddenly wasn’t available. Projects with a single dominant contributor or contributions coming almost entirely from a single company are going to be perceived as riskier and companies will be less likely to adopt or use those projects. This is especially true given the recent wave of companies relicensing open source projects and putting them under proprietary licenses. Put in simple terms, contributor sustainability risk makes it harder to get people to adopt your open source projects.
When I was Director of Open Source Community Strategy at VMware, I would often evaluate the risks of adopting specific open source projects, especially if we were considering building commercial products that incorporated those open source technologies in ways that were critical to delivering products to our customers. Contributor sustainability played a big role in deciding whether we would adopt a project. This was especially true for projects that were more strategically important for us, and which would be hard to replace if the project became unsustainable in the future. Given the choice, we’d select projects with better contributor sustainability, which would be a lower risk for us as a company.
Just last week, I was looking at an open source project where almost all of the contributions came from employees of the company driving the project, and there was a single lead developer who made the vast majority of the contributions and code reviews / approvals. That lead developer and their employer are single points of failure for the project. These single points of failure introduce risk for potential adopters and are likely to cause people to think twice before using a project. If I was a company looking for a solution, I would be unlikely to select a project that could suddenly cease to be updated (including security updates) if something happened to the dominant contributor or the company.
In summary, contributor risk stemming from a single person or a single employer makes your project riskier and less likely to be adopted.
While growing your contributor base is hard work, there are quite a few resources to help you improve contributor sustainability along with gaining a better understanding about how companies think about risk when adopting open source projects. Here are a few of those resources, most of which also have links to additional resources:
When I started in the role of Director of Data Science for CHAOSS, one of the first things I did was start the Data Science Working Group (WG) as a way to build community around the data science work that many of us were already doing within the CHAOSS project. I am incredibly proud of what we’ve accomplished in less than 2 years.
Yesterday, we published a CHAOSS blog post about what we’ve been working on lately, but here are a few highlights.
We are also driving several research projects out of the working group. I’ve already blogged about the Relicensing and Forks research that I’ve been working on, but we also have research looking into projects that move from private ownership into a foundation, archived projects, and a collection of research taxonomies.
I also wanted to remind people that like all of the CHAOSS working groups, the Data Science WG is open to everyone! All you need to join the Data Science WG is an interest in using data to understand the open source world around us. Most of our work is analysis of data, writing guides, and discussions about using metrics. You don’t need any special skills, and you don’t need to know any advanced statistics, machine learning, or AI. We’re even planning a CHAOSS Data Science Hackathon, which will be co-located with Open Source Summit North America and CHAOSScon in Denver, CO on June 26, 2025. To learn more, visit our repository, join our meetings, or reach out to us in the #wg-data-science channel in CHAOSS Slack. We hope you’ll join us!
In the Computer magazine article, I talked about how the CHAOSS project is providing advice and resources for proactively using metrics to improve open source project health and sustainability before a crisis occurs to make software more sustainable and reliable for everyone. Here’s a short quote from the Computer magazine article:
“Building sustainable open source projects over the long term can be a challenge. Project leaders, maintainers, and contributors are busy people who don’t always have the time to focus on growing a community along with maintaining their software. Using metrics is one way to help identify potential issues and areas where a project can be improved to make it more sustainable over the long term. Metrics are best used if they aren’t used once and never again. By monitoring the data over time, projects can understand trends that might indicate areas for improvement as well as see if those improvements are having the desired effect. Being proactive about improving sustainability before it becomes a crisis can help make open source software more sustainable and reliable for everyone” – Read the rest of the IEEE Computer magazine article for more.
The newest guide in the series, Practitioner Guide: Getting Started with Building Diverse Leadership, was written by Peculiar C. Umeh. It expands on the theme of improving health and sustainability of open source projects by creating a welcoming and inclusive environment that encourages contributions from a wide variety of people. Here’s a quote from the guide:
“A community or project with diverse leadership offers significant advantages because diverse leadership leverages diverse perspectives to build an innovative community, create a welcoming and inclusive environment, and empower individuals from all backgrounds to contribute their unique talents. New and existing contributors feel more included when they can see other people in leadership positions who are like them (Linux Foundation, 2021). When diverse leaders collaborate, their intersection sparks innovation and creates a more harmonious global leadership system. It represents a global and diverse user base, which improves the usability of the project because more users’ voices are represented in decision-making about the project’s design and functionality. It enhances decision-making processes by incorporating various viewpoints and experiences, leading to better problem-solving and more effective strategies. It promotes a culture of inclusion and respect, improving morale and engagement among community members and ultimately contributing to projects’ long-term success and sustainability.” – Read the Practitioner Guide: Getting Started with Building Diverse Leadership for more.
The other new guide in the series, Practitioner Guide: Getting Started with Sunsetting an Open Source Project, is also about making open source more sustainable by being clear about the future of an open source project so that users can make responsible decisions and avoid using open source technologies that are no longer being maintained or updated with security fixes. Here’s a quote from the guide:
“Many open source projects, even widely used ones, become abandoned for a variety of reasons (e.g., evolving interests, family situations, employment changes), but abandonment can be done in a responsible way by proactively sunsetting the project (Miller et al. 2025). Sunsetting is an important consideration for corporate environments where it can be easy to lose track of projects that were created by employees who later walked away from the project and left if abandoned. You don’t want abandoned open source projects with security vulnerabilities sitting in your organization’s source code repositories where someone might trust that project simply because they trust your organization. Finding inactive projects and responsibly sunsetting them is a good business decision and something that many open source teams / Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) do on a regular basis. It’s important to remember that not every open source project can or should exist forever: technologies evolve, corporate priorities change, and people’s interests change. Part of the beauty of open source is that we work in the open as we innovate, and some of those innovative projects will stand the test of time, while others should be responsibly deprecated via a sunset process. Sunsetting an open source project should take your user’s needs into account, and where possible, offer users time to migrate to a replacement technology. At a minimum, it’s important to signal that the project will no longer be maintained, updated, or have security patches so that users know that they should no longer be using the project.” – Read the Practitioner Guide: Getting Started with Sunsetting an Open Source Project for more.
As always, these CHAOSS guides are under an open source license, so you’re free to use and modify them to meet your needs.
I’ve spent a lot of time over the past year doing research into open source projects that have moved to proprietary licenses and the forks that were the result of those license changes. More recently (starting with a talk at Monki Gras), I’ve been thinking about how the power dynamics within the open source ecosystem have evolved and how rug pulls, relicensing, and forks can shift those power dynamics.
“With the rise in popularity of large cloud providers, the open source power dynamics are looking kind of similar to the feudalism example I talked about at the beginning of this blog post, but in the open source case, what’s different is that we have ways to shift or flip the power dynamics. A smaller company deciding to move a project away from an open source license can flip the power dynamic and gain power back from those large cloud providers. Still, they also shift the balance of power even further away from contributors and users at the same time when they decide to relicense that project. This encourages those with less power to take collective action to fork a project, flipping the power dynamic in favor of the contributors and users, often including the cloud providers as users. Within the open source world, we are better off than the peasants and serfs because we have certain freedoms that allow us to take collective action to regain power by forking projects when others abuse their power.” – read the rest of the blog post on The New Stack.
If you want to learn more about the research, here are a few places to get started:
Within the CHAOSS project, we know that people often struggle to make productive use of the tsunami of data about open source projects. One of my focus areas over the past 2 years within the CHAOSS project has been to develop a series of Practitioner Guides designed to help develop insights that can be used to improve the project health of an open source project. So far, we have 5 guides: Introduction, Contributor Sustainability, Responsiveness, Organizational Participation, and Security with more guides coming soon.
I’ve written about these guides in an OpenSource.net blog post and recorded a CHAOSScast podcast about each guide. I’ve also done quite a few talks related to the topics in these guides, which can be found on my Speaking page. The most recent one was a joint talk with Peculiar C. Umeh at FOSS Backstage with a video that is available to watch.
I won’t go into more detail here, since I’ve already linked to other blog posts, podcasts, and talks on the topic, but I encourage you to have a look at the Practitioner Guides to find ways to make your open source projects healthier and more sustainable!
It’s time again for my regularly scheduled (once every year and a half) blog post to avoid completely neglecting my personal blog. While I don’t blog often, I do still update my Speaking page on a regular basis, and conferences have really ramped up over the past couple of months! I’ll admit to being really tired of attending boring virtual events, so when the in-person events started back up, I went to all of them! In my rush of excitement about traveling and seeing people again, I agreed to do way too many talks – 10 talks in two months. Here are a few of the topics I’ve been talking about over the past year and a half, and you can visit my Speaking page to get links to slides and videos where available:
Navigating and mitigating open source project risk
Good governance practices for open source projects
Metrics and measuring project health
Becoming a speaker and getting talks accepted at conferences
Being a good corporate citizen in open source
I’ve also written quite a few blog posts on the VMware Open Source Blog and elsewhere on similar topics:
As part of my work on the OpenUK board, I was interviewed for a featured section about Open Source Program Offices in the report, State of Open: The UK in 2021 Phase Two: UK Adoption where I talked about VMware’s OSPO.
On a more personal note, we’ve been doing really well throughout the pandemic. We finally had our first real vacation in Malta, where we relaxed while eating and drinking our way through Malta along with swimming, snorkeling, reading, and enjoying the sunshine. I still keep an updated list of every book I read here on my blog if you’d like to know what I’ve been reading.
Since I don’t post here often, if you want to keep up with what I’ve been doing, I post more frequently on Twitter.
I realized that I haven’t posted anything in over a year and a half here, but I’ve definitely been busy! The biggest change is that Pivotal was acquired by VMware a few months ago, and I have moved into the Open Source Program Office as Director of Open Source Community Strategy where I continue to work remotely from my flat in the UK. I love my new job, and I get to work with a bunch of really amazing people! While I haven’t been blogging here, I have written several blog posts on the VMware Open Source Blog about building community and strategy.
I’ve been doing quite a few talks at conferences and other events, including some virtual ones, on a wide variety of topics including community building, open source metrics, Kubernetes, and more. Links to presentations and videos where available can be found on the speaking page.
I’m one of the rotating hosts for the new CHAOSScast podcast where we chat about a wide variety of open source metrics topics. I also wrote a post on the CHAOSS blog with a video that talks about how I’m using metrics at VMware to learn more about the health of our open source projects. If you’re as passionate about data and metrics as I am, CHAOSS is an open source community that welcomes contributors of all types, and it’s a fun group of people, so you should join us!
I’ve joined the OpenUK Board of Directors to help promote collaboration around open technologies (open source, open hardware, and open data) throughout the UK. We have weekly presentations that are free for anyone to attend every Friday, and we’re always looking for volunteers who want to help out on a wide variety of committees.
There are also a few other miscellaneous things that I’ve done recently:
Open source communities are filled with huge amounts of data just waiting to be analyzed. Getting this data into a format that can be easily used for analysis may seem intimidating at first, but there are some very useful open source tools that make this task relatively easy.
The primary tools used in this talk are the open source Metrics Grimoire tools that take data from various community sources and store it in a database where it can be easily queried and analyzed.
Tools covered:
CVSAnalY to gather and analyze source code repository data
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