Companies vs. Foundations: Who Should Steer Your Open Source Project?
UB5.230 | Day 2 | 10:30 - 10:50 | Speakers: Ray Paik, Fatih Degirmenci
Abstract
In the last several years, a number of open source companies have attracted significant attention after announcing license changes. Not surprisingly, these shifts sparked backlash from open source enthusiasts, prompting some to create community-driven forks under open source foundations.
Now there is growing skepticism toward (single) company backed open source projects, with many arguing that open source projects should be run by neutral foundations to prevent future bait-and-switch tactics. But is foundation backing really the answer?
Drawing on over a decade of experience in both open source foundations and companies, Fatih and Ray will compare foundation-backed and company-backed projects across key areas such as governance, roadmap planning, community, and funding. They’ll explore real-world examples of successful—and not-so-successful—projects in both models.
Finally, Fatih and Ray will discuss why funding models should be just one of several factors in assessing the long-term viability of open source projects. They’ll offer a holistic approach for evaluating open source projects, helping developers and decision-makers make informed choices about which projects to adopt, support, or contribute to.
Speakers
Ray is a Community Manager for TiDB. Prior to TiDB, Ray managed open source communities at Cube Dev, GitLab and the Linux Foundation. Ray has been a speaker at open source conferences such as All Things Open, Community Leadership Summit, FOSDEM, GitLab Commit, Open Source Summit, and SCaLE.
Ray lives in Sunnyvale, CA with his wife and daughter and all three are loyal season ticket holders of the Bay FC women's soccer team.
Fatih is a Senior Manager, Core Infrastructure QE at SUSE, specializing in automation, infrastructure, CI/CD, DevOps, and QE.
Before joining SUSE, Fatih served as the Executive Director of the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) at the Linux Foundation, where he led initiatives to enhance cross-industry and cross-community collaboration in the CI/CD domain. Prior to that, he was a Principal Developer at Ericsson, where he played a key role in several large-scale CI/CD initiatives.
Fatih is an active contributor to the open-source community. He has served on the OPNFV TSC and the CDF TOC. He founded the OPNFV Cross Community CI (XCI) project, the CDF SIGs on Interoperability and Software Supply Chain, and co-founded the OpenCI Initiative.
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