A governance toolkit for great communities

Isn’t it weird that the radically democratic miracle of open-source collaboration is so full of monarchical dictatorships?

ceejbot's talk from JSConfEU 2019. Contribute to ceejbot/economics-of-package-management development by creating an account on GitHub.

Sam Hartman has announced that he will not run for a second term as Debian Project Leader at this time. "TL;DR: Overall, being DPL has been incredibly rewarding.  I have enjoyed working with you all, and have enjoyed the opportunity to contribute to the Debian Project.  I hope to be DPL again some year, but 2020 is the wrong year for me and for the project. So I will not nominate myself this year, but hope to do so some future year."

Talks about reenclosure and other threats to open.

In my 2019 open source licenses year in review, I suggested that 2020 would see more adoption of licenses with a strong ethical focus.

Learn what open source licenses are, which one to choose, and why it matters.

In 1998, software engineer Bruce Perens co-founded the Open Source Initiative — a global non-profit championing Open Source ideal — along with fellow advocate Eric S. Raymond. And for the past two decades, OSI has acted as an influential steward of the Open Source definition. As 2020 started though, Perens very publicly left the group,…

The terms 'open' and 'openness' are widely used across the current higher education environment particularly in the areas of repository services and scholarly communications. Open-access licensing and open-source licensing are two prevalent manifestations of open culture within higher education research environments. As theoretical ideals, open-licensing models aim at openness and academic freedom. But operating as they do within the context of global neoliberalism, to what extent are these models constructed by, sustained by, and co-opted by neoliberalism? In this paper, we interrogate the use of open-licensing within scholarly communications and within the larger societal context of neoliberalism. Through synthesis of various sources, we will examine how open access licensing models have been constrained by neoliberal or otherwise corporate agendas, how open access and open scholarship have been reframed within discourses of compliance, how open-source software models and software are co-opted by politico-economic forces, and how the language of 'openness' is widely misused in higher education and repository services circles to drive agendas that run counter to actually increasing openness. We will finish by suggesting ways to resist this trend and use open-licensing models to resist neoliberal agendas in open scholarship.

2019 was the most active year in open source licenses in a very, very long time, with news from China to Silicon Valley, from rawest capitalism to most thoughtful ethics.

Earlier in April when I was preparing my keynote for the FLOSS UK Conference, which focused partially on issues of structural discrimination and lack of equality and diversity in open knowledge and…

Developers are protesting after revelations that the source-code repository GitHub contracted with ICE. But if you restrict access to open-source code, is it still open?

Russian search engine Rambler.ru claims full ownership of NGINX code.

Ten Simple Rules for Helping Newcomers Become Contributors to Open Source Projects - GitHub - gvwilson/10-newcomers: Ten Simple Rules for Helping Newcomers Become Contributors to Open Source Projects

Technology ethics are in focus after a developer retracted contributions to Chef for political reasons, causing outage. Some IT pros say ethical concerns factor into their choice of tools and shoul...

Very much in the Raymond mold.

Steve Klabnik's personal website