My Open Source Experience Podcast

As humanity progresses, our dependency on digital infrastructure is growing and is now at a level where most of us cannot exist without it, it is part of our everyday life and our livelihood depends on it. Open Source is a fundamental building block, and yet, awareness and opportunities still seem to gravitate towards a few geographical regions.

In this episode of the My Open Source Experience podcast, Ildiko and Phil are chatting with Samson Goddy.

Samson got in touch with technology through a hands-on experience with the Sugar desktop environment, which turned out to be instrumental to his relationship with tech as well as Open Source communities. His motivation to work on tech has always been to solve challenges and help people who have been close to him, and over the years he transitioned into roles, like developer relations, that are focused more on the people.

Throughout his career Samson had to face that job opportunities, especially to work on Open Source, were much more accessible in the US and somewhat in Europe, which is challenging if you don't want to move continents. Driven by this experience he became one of the co-founders of Open Source Community Africa (OSCA). On the podcast we talked about Samson's first open source experiences as a kid and how he has been building and navigating a career path in Open Source since, along with OSCA and its regional impact.

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We often talk about collaboration in the context of open source, or at least externally to a company with partner organizations. However, especially in larger corporations, cross-team work is just as important as the teamwork itself. Working with other teams is often more complicated than it needs to be, for various reasons. These teams could be in different countries, or the company's structure might not allow them to work together efficiently. What can you do to fix that?

In this episode of the My Open Source Experience podcast Tom Sadler talks about how he explored open source and InnerSource, and how he became an upstream contributor through the latter. Tom also shares how InnerSource helped teams within BBC to work together more efficiently, and how it allowed the company to work upstream as well.

Learn more about:

Why and how to roll out InnerSource within a company

Metrics to measure team efficiency

Do you need an ISPO/OSPO?

What you need to know to consume open source safely and efficiently

Why you need to avoid having internal forks of open source projects

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If you do open source right, you get a lot of benefits, both as an individual and as a company or orgnization. On the other hand, misconceptions about open source often lead to bad decisions, where everyone in the ecosystem suffers.

Hear from experienced members of the ecosystem who you need to get involved, what to look out for, and how to approach your involvement the right way!

In this episode:

• Amanda Brock lists some of the biggest benefits of getting involved in open source as an individual, such as access to knowledge and new information first hand.
• Wayne Starr has been working on oepn source projects as part of his job for years. He shares his experience with different configurations to allocate his time to upstream work, which has been ranging from 100% all the way down to 20%.
• Clare Dillon shares a story to highlight how budget allocations can discourage teams within companies from collaborating, and how to approach this challenge when it arises.
• Stephen Walli explains the challenges the open source ecosystem is facing when approaching to secure the software supply chain, and examples to efforts to address them.
• Gregory Kurtzer introduces Open Enterprise Linux Association (OpenELA), and talks about the importance of having non-profit organizations to protect open source software and communities.

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Ildiko and Phil kick off 2025 in this My Open Source Experience podcast episode!

Learn more about:

The Cyber Resiliency Act (CRA), a new EU legislation affecting the open source ecosystem, that landed in 2024

The newly released 1.0 version of the Open Source AI Definition (OSAID)

Open-source-focused conferences to add to your schedule in 2025

A sneak peek into the rest of Season 2

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.