In this episode, John James Jacoby and I discuss a thought-provoking post published by Morten Rand-Hendriksen that takes a deep look at equity in open source software. Morten suggests that the mantra of decisions are made by those who show up be changed to decisions are made by those who (more…)
Google has launched a new educational site at opensource.dev that offers a succinct and approachable introduction to open source software and licensing. WordPress is cited as one of the more well-known examples in the opening paragraphs: It’s in your phone, your car, your TV, and your wifi-connected light bulbs. Open (more…)
Alain Schlesser hosted the first WP-CLI Hack Day last Friday and by all accounts, it was a smashing success. The main goal was to merge 20 pull requests during the event but due to technical issues with Travis CI, only 12 were merged. Travis CI is open source software used to (more…)
WordPress 4.9.8 Beta two recently shipped and although much of the focus will be on the “Try Gutenberg” call-out, there’s a patch included that addresses a memory leak that was quite a problem for some users. When WordPress 4.9.7 shipped, the WordPress.org support forums saw an increase in reports of memory (more…)
The WordPress Foundation is sponsoring a new series of workshops and training events that will introduce people to WordPress and related open source software. The program targets communities in Latin and South America, Africa, Oceania, and Asia. “Specifically, we want to shine more light on the potential of open source (more…)
Contributing to WordPress or other open source projects can be intimidating for first-time contributors. Sometimes, all you need is a helping hand to overcome fear, intimidation, or other barriers. In 2013, with the help of Konstantin Obenland, a WordPress core developer, I overcame my fear and contributed my first patch to (more…)
Open source software has made its way into nearly every industry, but a recent open source security and risk analysis shows widespread license compliance risks, with 75% of the audited applications including GPL license conflicts. Although most violations are unintentional, there are some cases where companies do not comply with (more…)
More than 100 open source project maintainers and industry leaders gathered at the GitHub headquarters in San Francisco last month to discuss the long-term sustainability of open source software. The Sustain event, put on by a relatively new organization called SustainOSS, did not follow a traditional conference format with talks (more…)
Nadia Eghbal and Mikeal Rogers recently joined Sonal Chokshi for an episode of the a16z Podcast to discuss the changing culture of open source. Eghbal works in community programs at GitHub to better support people doing open source work. Rogers is the community manager at the Node.js Foundation. The episode (more…)
The founders of VersionPress have launched VersionPress.com, a WordPress managed hosting service. VersionPress.com is the best of what VersionPress offers paired with features such as, staging sites and backups, on an Amazon Web Services infrastructure. VersionPress is essentially an undo button for WordPress or full version-control. At the click of a button, (more…)
Open source software usage is growing across all industries, but this year’s Open Source Security and Risk Analysis (OSSRA) report from Black Duck shows the pervasiveness of security vulnerabilities and license compliance risks. Black Duck conducted audits on more than 1,000 commercial applications in 2016 and analyzed the anonymized data. (more…)
Open Collective is a new service that aims to make it easy for individuals, groups, and organizations to raise money in a transparent way. Although many projects have communities ready to offer financial support, the paperwork, taxes, and accounting involved in collecting money under the proper legal entity can be (more…)