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Conservancy Blog
Displaying posts tagged Member Projects
Donor Spotlight: Mark Wielaard
by on October 2, 2017
Conservancy depends on our Supporters and Donors. We rely on their financial support, of course, but they are also valued ambassadors who spread the word about Conservancy and the work we do. We continue our series featuring the companies and individuals who support Conservancy. If you're a Supporter of Conservancy and would like to be featured here please let us know!
This time, we're interviewing Mark Wielaard. Mark is a long-time free software developer. He was very involved in the libre java community in the early 2000's, spending many years as the maintainer of GNU Classpath , GNU's implementation the standard library for the java programming language. It took a long time, but he is happy that these days the Java Trap has been mostly dismantled. He still helps with the infrastructure for the IcedTea project, a free software community and collection of tools around core libre java compilers, runtimes and libraries. But his current work is mainly focused on analyzing and debugging natively compiled code. He contributes to Valgrind and elfutils to help make that possible.
Why do you support Conservancy?
Software Freedom Conservancy provides free software projects with a home. I like that, and I think it's important. GNU Classpath had a home in GNU, and a community, and as the maintainer that made me really happy. It meant that we could concentrate on what we loved to do, hacking code together. But with the knowledge that we had a fallback if we needed to deal with anything that couldn't be solved by just adding a bit more code. A place for all the administration that doesn't just fit in the code repository. I hope it makes other free software developers happy too, to have a place for their projects they can call home.
What makes Conservancy a good home for free software projects?
I trust Conservancy to support communities in a way that respects both the developers and software freedom. Free software is a good basis for people to collaborate. The services that Conservancy provides allow communities to concentrate on improving software together. Freeing project leaders from the stress that is involved when being personally responsible for all the non-coding activities. Individuals (and companies) can then join on equal terms, making sure the project and community will work together for the public benefit (and just having fun together hacking on code).
Why do you trust Conservancy to do that work?
Conservancy consists of people with experience, who care. I know Bradley Kuhn because he was the Executive Director of the Free Software Foundation when I worked on GNU Classpath. Having someone who takes care of all the administrative paperwork, someone you could forward tricky legal questions to, had a big impact. It meant we could all just concentrate on coding together. And everyone involved with Conservancy, staff and directors have years of experience with various Free Software projects and foundations. They really know what communities need to keep focussed on doing the thing developers love most, hacking on code.
Conservancy is unique in that it allows projects to define their own terms and conditions for how the community works together. Projects aren't forced to adopt a particular license, governance structure or tools and they aren't controlled by corporate sponsors. And another unique feature of the Conservancy is that they prepare from the start for projects to leave again. If a projects outgrows its home at the Conservancy it has the freedom to leave and setup their home somewhere else.
Anything else?
The Software Freedom Conservancy is now the home of a long list of diverse projects. I hope that more people will consider becoming a Conservancy Supporter so that more projects can call the Conservancy their home. With software controlling more and more of our daily lives it is important to provide a welcome home to communities that can provide us with more Software Freedom.Git Merge and FOSDEM 2017!
by on February 17, 2017
For me, FOSDEM this year started two days early with Git Merge, the annual Git conference. Git Merge is organized by GitHub, and so far in all three years of its organization the conference has donated the proceeds from ticket sales to Conservancy! I’d been hoping to get to Git Merge one of these years, so I was very excited with the organizing team asked me to do an talk introducing Conservancy.
I got to kick off the conference, and introduced myself by explaining how investigating my heart condition and defibrillator caused me to become passionate about software freedom. I then delved into what Conservancy does and in particular talked about some of the work we’ve done with Git. The talk had a good impact, and all day long I was able to speak with people who were excited about Conservancy and thinking about the ethics of all of our software. It’s always especially thrilling to speak at our member projects’ conferences. I love meeting up with leadership committee members and also putting faces to the names that we see go by while monitoring the activities of our projects.
Photo by Neil McGovern
FOSDEM is an extraordinary conference. A two-day whirlwind of activity, there are many more worthwhile things there than any one person can get to. The whole conference is completely community run and organized. Companies can buy neither stands nor talks in any of the devrooms, which keeps the quality really high. Thousands of people attend FOSDEM and there are great conversations happing everywhere. I find it incredibly difficult to balance seeing people, attending talks (even in my own devroom) and keeping the Conservancy stand running.
Fortunately for us, the FOSDEM organizers were very thoughtful and placed the Conservancy stand just across the hallway from the Legal & Policy devroom, which Bradley and I help organize. I spent most of the time running between the short distance between the two.
One of the major highlights for me was being at the stand with volunteers. Mike McQuaid (of Homebrew, another member project) and Spencer Krum both spent significant time at the booth loudly heckling people into becoming Conservancy Supporters. Stefan Hajnoczi (of QEMU, also a member project) took a quieter but no less dedicated approach. Michal Čihař spent a huge portion of his conference in our booth helping to promote phpMyAdmin and Conservancy. Having people who are giving of their time already so eloquently advocating for our organization was powerful, and helped me feel so energized about Conservancy. We’d launched our match donation that day, and I think it generated a lot of excitement at the booth. We also were lucky to be right next to the stand for one of Conservancy’s newer projects, the Godot Game Engine, which was very fun and convenient.
The Legal & Policy devroom is always fantastic, and while I wound up at the stand and in meetings for much of my time at FOSDEM, I still participated enough to really get a lot out of it. I spoke on a panel about permissive/dismissive licenses and another about fiscal sponsorship entities in Europe. FOSDEM video volunteers have been great, and video is already up for most of the sessions. A huge shout out to Tom Marble who does most of the heavy lifting in organizing the room. There are a lot of great places to discuss imporant legal issues but the FOSDEM devroom is one of my favorites. The talks this year were particularly interesting. I’m looking forward to catching up on the videos of the ones I missed.
I also really enjoyed Bradley’s keynote (we closed the stand down a little early so that we could all attend). Bradley is such an inspiring speaker, and I think he distilled a lot of the major issues facing copyleft and copyleft compliance.
I think part of the magic of FOSDEM is that it’s contained in a single weekend. While it’s inevitable to feel like you wished there were more time to catch up with all of the exceptional people who attend, and it’s exhausting to have no downtime over two days (I even missed the GNOME beers!) it’s just the right amount of time to fully immerse yourself in all things free software.
Looking Back on Homebrew’s First Year with Conservancy
by on February 2, 2017
This series covers new developments and exciting projects taken on by Conservancy member projects. To learn more about Conservancy member projects, or the non-profit infrastructure support and services offered by Conservancy, check out Conservancy’s Projects page. Please support Conservancy so we can continue to help all this important software.
There’s an app for that.
Need a way to download and save that cute cat video from YouTube so you can watch it offline? There’s an app for that. Want to collaborate with others using GitHub? There’s an app for that, too. But neither are in the App Store. Every day, hundreds of thousands of Mac users turn to Homebrew to download one of more than 3,000 useful software packages for their desktops and laptops that Apple does not include in its operating system and can’t be found in the App Store.
Since Max Howell began Homebrew in 2009 with the goal of creating an efficient package manager, over 6,000 people have contributed to the project. Max built the package manager to rely on software and libraries that come preinstalled in OS X and chose to limit support to recent versions of the Mac operating system so that the packages could be optimized as much as possible. Max delivered an early implementation and shepherded the project through 2013.
Mike McQuaid started contributing to Homebrew because he was an avid user. After employing Homebrew to outfit his work laptop with vital FLOSS software, he saw that there were ways that Homebrew could be improved. Mike rose from occasional contributor to maintainer to eventually become the project’s lead maintainer. Mike coordinates the technical aspects of the project, manages the vibrant community of volunteer contributors to the project and serves as Homebrew’s primary liaison with the Software Freedom Conservancy.
Software Freedom Conservancy recognized Homebrew’s technical and social successes and invited them to join as a member project in 2016. Software Freedom Conservancy was excited that they accepted the invitation and is proud to support them.
Mike was kind enough to spend some time answering questions about the project’s past success and its future goals.
We began the interview talking about the importance of having Homebrew join Software Freedom Conservancy. “I’ve been a fan of Software Freedom Conservancy for a long time thanks to using several of their member projects. Bringing Homebrew into Conservancy helps provide long-term security to the trickier financial and community aspects of Homebrew.” For example, Mike has been worried about the contingency plan for Homebrew so that its existence could outlive any single individual. Software Freedom Conservancy provides legal, fundraising and organizational support to this end.
On the technical merits, Mike described Homebrew’s cutting-edge architecture, implementation, and development practices. Every application available through Homebrew is described by a Formula. Each Formula is Ruby code and the process of adding and modifying Formulae is coordinated with Git. If a contributor wants to add a package for other Homebrew users to download and install, they can simply write a Ruby script and send a pull request to one of Homebrew’s maintainers.
Mike said that thanks to using Ruby and Git for describing Formulae and facilitating code changes, respectively, new contributors can make an immediate, positive impact on Homebrew. Using a popular language like Ruby and building a smooth workflow based on Git makes it easy for Homebrew maintainers and contributors to keep all of its Formulae up to date. Every day new features are added, bugs are patched and security vulnerabilities closed in Homebrew packages. If the process for updating Formulae was not as well designed as it is, Homebrew’s users could be stuck with outdated and insecure software.
The Homebrew community has spent significant time and energy building and implementing a continuous integration system. Continuous integration is a software development practice to test software for bugs every time new code is added. Every update to a Formula involves a modification to Homebrew’s code. Having an automated system to check Homebrew’s code every time a package is updated or added gives Homebrew’s developers assurance that the software is always ready for end users.
While Homebrew benefits from using the latest and greatest tools and techniques of FLOSS software development, it’s the active and vibrant community that really drives progress. Community is a very important part of Homebrew but such a positive, supportive, diverse community does not just happen. It takes leadership and Mike takes that role seriously.
In our interview, Mike talked extensively about the project’s commitment to community. Under his leadership, the project has established a code of conduct for its participants and created policies to encourage users to become committers, contributors to become maintainers and maintainers to become project leaders. Mike helped Homebrew create its code of conduct early on because he knew it would help create a more diverse community. While the code of conduct can be used as a tool to remove the rare disruptive member, it serves mostly to make explicit the community’s expectation that its members are to be respectful and welcoming to everyone who wants to join. “Homebrew is probably a little more diverse than your average open source project but it’s still woefully unrepresentative of society as a whole,” Mike said. “Homebrew has chosen to be proactive about diversity because studies have shown diversity makes better software and we don’t want anyone to feel alienated or excluded from our community based on who they are.”
This year Homebrew participated in the Outreachy internship program. Mike and the Homebrew team mentored Andrea Kao who worked on Homebrew’s continuous integration and testing system. Andrea said about her experience, “… [T]he Homebrew maintainer-mentors have all been so incredibly generous, encouraging, kind, and helpful to me over the past couple weeks and months. I’m so thankful for this generosity and for nabbing the Outreachy internship. In the space of two months, I’ve become an active member of several wonderful, worldwide communities—the community of Homebrew contributors, the Outreachy community, and the wider open-source software community.”
The project’s technical implementation and architecture and its commitment to building a positive, active community around Homebrew are evident from the number of its users and participants and the way they talk about the project. It is regularly among the top projects on GitHub. When version 1.0 was announced, a user commented, “[Homebrew is] great because the community is so vibrant, the user experience is so well thought out… it’s actually both a GitHub and Ruby showcase.”
Mike finished our interview by describing the project’s goals for 2017. The first goal is to improve support for installation of specific legacy versions of applications. There are many reasons why a user might need an older version of a package—to satisfy a dependency or to use a feature that no longer exists, for example.
The second goal is to improve Homebrew’s continuous integration system. As described earlier, having a continuous integration system is vital for a project like Homebrew whose code changes on a regular basis. Right now the system checks new code to make sure that it compiles. That’s a good start. However, new code could introduce bugs that are only evident when the software is run. In 2017, Homebrew will expand its continuous integration to test runtime functionality.
Conservancy is proud to have Homebrew as a member project and is excited to see what the future brings for the FLOSS package manager, its users and its community.
Conferences, Standards, and Sponsorships: Selenium’s Work in 2016
by on January 12, 2017
This series covers new developments and exciting projects taken on by Conservancy member projects. To learn more about Conservancy member projects, or the non-profit infrastructure support and services offered by the Conservancy, check out Conservancy’s Projects page. Please support Conservancy so we can continue to help all this important software.
SeleniumConf UK wrapped up November 16th! For three days, Selenium developers and enthusiasts got together to share ideas, work together, and spend time with other community members in London. This year, there were three amazing keynotes, a diverse group of twenty-six speakers, and four full day workshops. Talks are already posted online, and you can watch them on the SeleniumConf UK YouTube channel.
Selenium is a freely-licensed browser automation tool. While it’s most frequently used for testing purposes, it has capabilities beyond that. These include scaling and distributing scripts across environments and reproducing bugs. It’s currently functional in eleven languages, including C#, JavaScript, Python, and Ruby. All the major browsers ship with support for Selenium out of the box now, too.
Selenium has been a Conservancy project since 2010. Starting in 2011, Conservancy began to support Selenium’s efforts to host their own conferences, which have grown over the years to the successful events we know today. As a tool, Selenium has become an industry standard, with users ranging from individuals plugging away at their own projects to some of the largest companies in tech.
Selenium demonstrates a strong commitment to fiscal responsibility, and the project leadership looks to sustain Selenium beyond individual donations. In order to help power the project, the team promotes and manages large corporate sponsorships.
Earlier this year, Selenium 3.0 was released, replacing the original Selenium Core—Jason Huggins started developing the Core in 2004—with one based on Selenium WebDriver. Much like Selenium itself, WebDriver is becoming a standard in its own right. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has a draft specification for browser automation based on Selenium WebDriver, and members of the Selenium project are on the team to make this an official recommendation.
Interested in getting involved with Selenium? There are lots of ways to contribute to the project—check out the documentation for details! You can also help them along by donating to Selenium.
