The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - BONUS - Sustain Open Source Software (Interview)

Episode Date: May 4, 2017

Justin Dorfman joined us for a special BONUS episode of The Changelog to share some details about Sustain Conference with you. It's a one day conversation for Open Source Software sustainers at GitHub HQ (SF) on June 19, 2017. No keynotes, expo halls or talks. Only discussions about how to get more resources to support digital infrastructure. Plus, we'll be there.

Bandwidth for Changelog is provided by Fastly. Learn more at Fastly.com. All right, we're here with this bonus episode for you. We're all about sustaining, right, Jared? Sustain is the thing. That's right. And we are excited to talk about a thing with Justin Dorfman. Sustain, it's not a conference. It's an event. It's a one-day conversation happening. June 19th, Changelog will be there. Everyone's going to be there. GitHub HQ. We're excited to share with you guys

what it is. Justin, thanks so much for joining us on this special Changelog. Hey, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. So Justin, you've been a supporter of us for a long time and a member of the community and a good friend. So thank you for that. We're excited to help support you in this effort to put together this conversation around

how we can sustain open source software projects. Tell us about this event and why you're even doing it. Sure. So, you know, I think we're living in the golden era of open source. I don't think it'll get as good as it is these days and i've been thinking about sustainability for seven 17 years ever since i got my my first pc not my family's just mine and my friend didn't install linux on it and i asked him how much how much it was and he said it was free and i'm like how can that be i don't understand how that's possible. So, I mean, going down the years, and I've been a sustainer for five years in 2012 when I was at MacCDN, and I started to realize that open source isn't free.

It's just someone else is paying for it. So when we set up a mirror for CentOS, it was a couple hundred dollars a year for us, but we were just one mirror out of like a hundred. So it's not that that's that's where I'm trying to get at, where it just doesn't. I don't think a lot of people realize that there's other companies covering the bill. And that's sort of what this is about. You said the word sustainer. What is that?

Or the term, what is a sustainer? An open source sustainer is someone who evangelizes and passionately advocates the needs for open source maintainers and contributors. Wow. So this event, Sustain, you can check it out at sustainoss.org. And of course, all the links to where you will need to find what you want.

It will be in the show notes. This is a conversation around sustainers. So who are the type of people that we would expect to come to this event? Well, I'm really excited. You know, the people that have been getting tickets and showing interest in it. There's going to be people from the small, medium-sized business world. There's going to be people from the very large enterprise world. There's going to be people from small foundations,

and there's going to be people from large foundations. And I think there's a lot of different perspectives that have to be accounted for. I come from a small, medium-sized business world. I never worked for a large company, so I don't know their view. And I think this is the beauty of the one-day conversation that we're having is that we're all going to sit in a circle around a facilitator and ask questions and try to find answers that will kind of help everyone and not just one type of profile, if that makes any sense. Possibly worth mentioning a few of the organizations working with us to put this event on so we have changelog of course open collective github yes gratipay libraries io sticker mule unix stickers also maintainer.io all coming together this is a group effort uh right we're trying to get a small

group of people into the same room people who are either maintainers or sustainers or potentials, and really facilitate a group conversation, like you said, about how we can come up with new solutions, new ways of sustaining this open source community that we all love so much. So it sounds like a great event. Tell folks how they can get involved, where do they go, and what do they expect to take away? I think the easiest thing, because it has links to Twitter and

GitHub and tickets and all that fun stuff, is, as you said earlier, sustainoss.org. And then what was the other two questions? I apologize. I already said what kind of people what do they expect to you know walk away with and maybe even got it how much does it cost what's the yes so the cost is fifty dollars flat uh there are tickets that you can do like a pay one pay it forward kind of ticket where it's like a hundred dollars and then someone else can go. We're also trying to get a fund together to get people outside the country

that don't have the funds to come out for a couple days to San Francisco. So yeah, and we also forgot to mention, we have really great sponsors that have really been amazing, like GitHub and Waffle.io, JS Foundation, and

Stackpath, and one more, oh my god. Oh god. Eighth Light. Oh, Eighth Light, thank you, and Iron.io. io thank you thank you they they've been really great and uh i can't we really couldn't do this without them so while uh yeah so they and also they're bringing people from their organizations and that are also interested in open source sustainability so people from those companies uh are going to be

there as well we mentioned the pay it forward ticket but uh we got also mentioned the little ones ticket that's cool like you can yes you're gonna have child care i don't know how that happened because like this is sort of like a bootstrap kind of thing you know and you have child care which is super cool because there's people out there who have kids and they want to do these things and they can't because, you know, kids. Yeah. And see, that's what's awesome about working with a diverse set of people like like Pia. She it was her idea. And it's like she has a kid. And I'm like, wow, I would have never thought of that. You know, I don't I'm single. I don't have any kids.

I would have never even think to bring if i had a kid to the conference but my use case isn't someone else's use case so yeah she's she's definitely really bringing the accessibility around it and just making sure that we we don't drop the ball uh we want everyone to come that's interested and if free uh child care will help that then absolutely we're gonna do it somebody's probably listening to this thinking wow i just heard about this it's the coolest thing ever it's like in a month and maybe that person is in a company or is has the means to sponsor this are you still taking sponsors what's the what's the situation there absolutely yeah we're taking sponsors till the last day i don't know what the last day i almost fell off my chair

you got excited about really excited oh i was like oh that hurt well i can literally say for you like sponsors like if you're interested in sustaining open source, that's that's that's what the whole mission of this conference is about. So, yeah, it's putting the conference on. It's making sure it's there, maybe even sustain the conference the next year, maybe becoming annual. What can they expect? Yeah, I mean, really, if you are going to sponsor this, it's a very new thing. I made up the definition in like last November. You know, it's what a sustainer was.

Yeah. And sustainers have always been there this is nothing new but to kind of organize around it and uh bring everyone together in an organized fashion uh you would be a part of that and you know we would like you very much for a long time that's the best way to say it we'll like you for a long time i yeah like sponsors for a very long time very very long time yeah, we're excited to be a part of it. And like I said, at the time of the show, we are going to be there. Specifically, I will be there.

I'm excited to see all of our friends in San Francisco and to record some great interviews. I'm sure I'll have a Change Dogs sticker. I'm sure there'll be

stickers galore. And t-shirts. T-shirts, stickers of all shapes and sizes. I need a new t-shirtshirt I couldn't find my new one thank you that's right Justin anything else before we wrap this up

no I just really appreciate you guys having me on and can't wait to hear Friday's show alright there you have it sustainoss.org. Go there. Check that out. There's an agenda there.

There's some details there. You can buy a ticket. You can support them. You can sponsor it. Tell a friend. Tell a loved one. Sustain open source. Thank you.