I am pleased to inform you that we
received a first proposal for the Devroom.
We should also talk about a proposal to
be submitted by FASTEN team. Who will submit? title and abstract?
etc.
Speaker Name: Carole
Smith (
carols@microsoft.com -
http://fossygirl.com)
and Duane O'Brien (
http://duaneobrien.com)
Title: There's no sustainability problem in FOSS
Subtitle: Except that there is.
Abstract: The community seems to be rife with
conversations about our sustainability problems. Do we actually
have one? We’ll lead a discussion and debate around how we as a
community can think about these issues, while drawing out the
nuanced aspects of each as well as their potential solutions.
Full description: When something like left-pad or
event-stream happens, how much responsibility should be taken on
by companies who deployed a dependency that was critical enough to
their operations that removing it created immediate crisis, but
not well supported or understood enough that there was any kind of
mitigation strategy or backup plan?
And yet, when you look at OpenSSL, curl, and other pieces of open
source infrastructure that live in our dependency chains, there
are many examples of projects that are important enough to be
critical, but are under-resourced to the point that maintainers
are having to make quality-of-life tradeoffs to stay on top of the
project. We are responsible for ensuring that our shared
dependencies are sustainably developed. But who is holding us
accountable?
If a maintainer is driving themselves to burnout because they are
supporting too many of their open source projects, don’t they bear
some responsibility for that choice?
But how are we supposed to untangle which of the thousands of
dependencies that we use are in most need of support - and what
kind of support they prefer?
Is there a sustainability problem in FOSS after all?