In this episode, John James Jacoby and I are joined by Jonny Harris. Jonny describes how he discovered WordPress and some of the core projects he’s been working on including, Site Health Checks, fatal error protection, and Multisite. We discuss WordPress’ focus on users vs developers in recent years, Jonny’s experience contributing to core, and…
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 can afford to show up.…
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 source components enable engineers to…
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 perform automated testing. In addition…
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 exhausted errors due to the…
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 software in countries where there…
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 WordPress. This is one of…
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 the license in order to…
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 and keynotes but was intentionally…
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 focuses on the human aspect…
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, users can undo an action…
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. The audits were primarily related…
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 a nearly insurmountable hurdle. “So…
GitHub took another step towards beefing up its support for open source projects this week with a new feature that makes it easier to understand a project’s license. If the project is using a popular open source license, GitHub will automatically add a short, plain-English description of the license and its permissions, conditions, and limitations.…
The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is experimenting with open sourcing more of its code on GitHub. Code.mil invites developers from around the world to collaborate with federal employees on unclassified code. The Defense Digital Service (DDS), which brings in experts from top technology companies like Google, Amazon, and Netflix for short assignments, is organizing…