The Untold Stories of Open Source

Latest Episodes:

A New Model for Technical Training, with Clyde Seepersad Jun 16, 2022

Show notes

Clyde Seepersad is the Senior Vice President & General Manager, of the Training & Certification Project at The Linux Foundation. He carries the idea with him that failure is temporary. Knowing that can help you get through some pretty intense situations. On the flip side, knowing success is temporary gives you a chance to store away some of those good feelings, which can be used to temper the struggles as the cycle plays itself out.

"Life's a little bit like the stock market. Some days you're up, some days you're down, some days you're up big, some days you're down big. You're usually moving forward and up if you can stay focused. I say this to my team all the time. Things are going to break against you sometimes. And that's okay. Nobody's going to get taken out to the woodshed because things worked out different than what we thought.

"The important thing is we keep communicating: what did we learn? What did we do differently today than we knew yesterday. How do you build on that going forward? "

Clyde doesn’t see himself as a techie. He actually has a slide in his presentations that says “I am not a techie” and it has a giant red slash through the word ‘techie’. Looking at his background, I have to agree. In 1994 he graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Accounting from the University of the West Indies in Barbados. As a Rhodes Scholar, he received his MBA from Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, which is consistently ranked as one of the top business schools in the world. Then, in 1999, he completed his studies at the University of Oxford, receiving his Master of Science Degree in Economics for Development.

The Business Side of Open Source, with Patrick Debois May 24, 2022

Show notes

The first time Patrick Debois came into contact with Open Source was in the early stages of development of the Linux kernel, compiling it on floppies on his 486 machine. To tell you how long ago that was, the Intel 486 was introduced in 1989, It was the first chip in the line to include a built-in math coprocessor.

Patrick was an early adopter of computers, but one thing he missed was a community. In those days he had to copy software over electronic bulletin board systems. But with the Linux kernel, he found it amazing that you could just get it on a cd-rom and pass it around to friends.

From the Linux Foundation office in New York City, this is “The Untold Stories of Open Source”. Each week we choose an open source project or a person behind a popular open source initiative, to uncover the untold stories and details about major open source initiatives. If you work with open source, and you do whether you know it or not, you’re in the right place.

A Life in Open Source, with Brian Behlendorf May 17, 2022

Show notes

Brian Behlendorf came from a science and technology background. In fact, his parents met at IBM where his father was a Cobol programmer. During the 1980s, Brian was comfortable in front of a TRS 80 and a PC junior doing basic programming and term reports.

He quickly found his way onto Usenet and participation on mailing lists around the band REM or the record label 4AD. This eventually turned into a dedicated mailing list focused on the rave scene in San Francisco. Through setting up the mailing list, he stood up an FTP server with DJ sets, which eventually became a gopher server, which eventually became a a web server that was dedicated to electronic music and the electronic music scene in the Bay Area.

This was a time when you would only hear electronic music at certain events and not on the radio. Brian continued to go to school at UC Berkeley occasionally, but in January 1993, something else caught his attention. The first issue of Wired Magazine was published.

From the Linux Foundation offices in New York City, this is The Untold Stories of Open Source. Each week in our podcast project on GitHub, we uncover the history and people behind the open source projects that are the foundation of technological innovation. If you work with open source, and you do whether you know it or not, you’re in the right place.

Balancing Priorities at the CNCF, with Priyanka Sharma May 10, 2022

Show notes

Priyanka Sharma has had a long career in tech. After graduating from Stanford in 2009, she worked at Google in the Online Partnerships Group, was a technical consultant where she onboarded new DoubleClick clients, and acted as interim Product Manager for internal insights tools. From there she moved to OutRight, leading the promotional launch for the GoDaddy Silicon Valley office, and continued by leading the Outright product integration into the GoDaddy sales team catalog.

Priyanka noticed that her business partner had built a time tracking application for himself, and realized it might be useful addition to a developer tool kit when tracking time spent on specific project code.

By this rather unlikely set of events, she ended up getting into developer tools. Eventually the plugins were used by over 100,000 developers. It was featured at high visibility events such as TechCrunch Disrupt, and was chosen for Y Combinator.

There were challenges every day, as there is with any start-up, whether it comes to fundraising or getting the public visibility a company needs in order to get traction in the market. Getting into Y Combinar was a pivotal moment, forcing the team to come to terms with what it would take to work together, to make a real commitment to the project together, as a team. What looked great on the outside, however, didn’t account for the personality dynamics at play inside the company. It was decision time.

From the Linux Foundation office in New York City, this is “The Untold Stories of Open Source”. Each week we choose an open source project or a person behind a popular open source project, to uncover its untold stories. If you work with open source, and you do whether you know it or not, you’re in the right place.

The Untold Stories of Open Source - An Introduction to the new Podcast from the Linux Foundation May 09, 2022

Show notes

Open Source is embedded in every software application you touch today. It’s impossible to build a large scale application without it. The real question is, what’s the story behind that component, application, or framework you just downloaded? Not the specs. Not the functionality. The real story: “Who wrote the code? What is their backstory? What led them to the Open Source community?”

From the Linux Foundation office in New York City, welcome to "The Untold Stories of Open Source". Each week we explore the people who are supporting Open Source projects, how they became involved with it, and the problems they faced along the way. In today’s episode, we’ve include some short excerpts to give you a taste of what’s to come.