OSS sustainability — Open Space discussion at DevOpsDays Detroit.

OSS has very positive connotations, and companies like to be associated with that. The reason companies use OSS is usually to find the best solution (which very often happens to be OSS), as opposed to saving money.

Ways of contributing include:

• Maintaining the OSS projects you use
• Providing non-code contributions (e.g. documentation)
• Corporate sponsorship of local meetups
• Corporate sponsorship of a project

Ideas to encourage contributions:

• Corporate scoreboard that shows how much impact different companies have on the OSS ecosystem, weighted by numbers of contributions.
• Companies that let their employees spend a day a week on OSS, job perk.
• This works really well in a consulting model, because you’re solving a problem for the client but also solving it for others by virtue of it being OSS.
• Guidelines plus list of issues for first-time contributors
• Public kanban board that give the community visibility into what’s happening with a project.
• Spotlight projects that are on fire (vulnerability) or not maintained (or had a change in maintainer), so the larger community can swarm on them.

A lot of individual contributors want to be able to maintain their own OSS projects but don’t have the time.

• Very few developers actually do this in their spare time.
• Optimization function matters because you don’t want to corrupt the software development process or burnout developers who are tired of shipping shitty work. Paying for quantity of OSS output is likely a bad idea.
• Talk idea: “Lifecycle of an OSS maintainer”