NB: Over two years ago, I affirmed that I wanted to write and share more personal thoughts on my blog. Not only the professional and fully-polished things. Looking back, I haven’t really done that. Being a part-time perfectionist, I get stuck on the production value of the things I make. I feel like I have to get it just right before publishing. I have several unpublished stubs started on my blog (19 as of publishing time, to be precise). However, I have not yet overcome the hesitation of being content with a stub post just being a stub post. After all, if Wikipedia can do it, why can’t I? Furthermore, I can also write for the purpose of my own satisfaction and not the satisfaction of others.

So, here goes.

Me? Not represented? 🔗

After the Inclusion & Diversity summit ended and I returned to my hotel, I entered a thought loop. There was this uncomfortable idea stuck in my head that as a white American male, I didn’t feel represented there. Which depending on your view, either sounds very ironic or it might seem obvious (duh!). However, I did not want to suppress this uncomfortable feeling. I wanted to interrogate it, understand where it came from, and identify why I felt this way.

First, I came to see my feeling of under-representation was not (only) as a white American male—but instead as a privileged ally. Many speakers during the day called out issues in our industry, shared their work as advocates and champions in working to address these issues, or did both. But in our divided and divisive world of the 2020s, a feeling of frustration slowly overcomes me. Never all at once, but more often like the tides of the ocean—slowly rising, rising, until everything is underwater. What are my role and purpose? I care about DEI issues and I have made an effort to do what I can in the last eight years to make Open Source more diverse, more inclusive, and more equitable. I attempt to spend my privilege on others who don’t have the privilege and power that I was assigned at birth.

Noticing the white narrative. 🔗

However, at the same time, I can’t help but feel there is a narrative about people who look like me and come from where I come from. That narrative is white supremacy. The white supremacy narrative can be an integral part of identity to people who also look like me and come from places like I do. The narrative often comes from a place of anger. The narrative is often hateful. That context is understandable because the white supremacist narrative is always harmful to people who do not look like me and come from different places than I do. My daily life is least impacted by the white supremacy narrative.

However, I am not saying that white supremacy is unreal. On the contrary, Western media, news, and opinion articles quickly provide several easy affirmations that a white supremacy narrative holds real weight.

The paradox of the white narrative 🔗

Yet, I feel the narrative is also the exact problem. Does a white supremacy narrative override other narratives that a white person could relate with? I remembered a time when I took a History of Women in Science & Engineering course during my undergrad studies. While discovering hidden stories in history of accomplishments, struggles, and successes of women in STEM over hundreds of years, I was also intrigued to read about the allies who helped them. The allies I read about were white men who spent their privilege as sponsors to many of these early women innovators. They shared their own resources and enthusiasm as an act of asserting both the value of the women they supported and the work they did.

It was doubly sad to me that history relegated several of these stories to the sidelines, both the stories of these women innovators and the stories of their allies. These stories of early allies are under-represented because most often, they are simply not told.

No savior complexes. 🔗

At the same time, an alternate narrative to white supremacy must also not be a savior complex or white savior-ism narrative. True allyship does not look like a savior complex. The historical view could easily jump toward a conclusion with a savior complex narrative. There are no saviors; the only one we can truly save is ourselves. We can support, mentor, and sponsor, but there is no magic, quick solution that makes everything better.

In today’s world, I feel that healthier narratives are also not well-represented. I strongly believe in words that I attribute to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.:

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Today in the United States, white supremacy is going more mainstream (again). It is also one of the most visible narratives of White identity. This begs a question of how do we influence the narrative and also inspire what a better, healthier “whiteness” can mean? How do we promote stories of transformative love, incredible allyship, and true compassion? There are many stories in history if you look closely. But often they are relegated to the periphery and cast aside, alongside the experiences of other white people who fit outside the societal power structure of White society. We need these stories told too, should we create a more equitable society that allows everyone to realize their innermost human potential.

Where do we go from here? 🔗

I write this without full answers. My motive to write is because this thought comes up from time to time for me. Sometimes I just long for better role models. I want a society where more white people lend their support and power for dismantling hate and destruction. I want more white people who use their privilege and power as superpowers for love and justice. A future default narrative for whiteness should not feature pain and center hate. This is in spite of what is an undeniable part of the legacy and history. Yet that is the heart of it. I want the mainstream narrative to change. I want us to take real steps toward reparation to atone for that legacy and history.

But it is like they say, “it is hard to be what you can’t see.” Sometimes I feel exasperated by the narrative staring back at me and my ancestry. My identity as a white American man is bound by nature of my birth. But perhaps instead of waiting for the right story to be written, perhaps this is my own action item. I should be better at writing my own story. The only person I have to do it for is myself.

Photo by Rishabh Dharmani on Unsplash. Modified by Justin Wheeler.

However, this question only led to more questions. Much of the existing Open Source discourse on sustainability centers on defining, tracking, and understanding “dependencies.” Yet when we say dependencies, people typically mean source code, software packages, and license compatibility. So, how do we describe the value proposition of people and the impact of cross-pollinated communities?

So, what if Open Source dependencies weren’t just software? Furthermore, what if Open Source dependencies could mean people… or simply, human beings? In this blog post, we’ll walk through this thought experiment.

Open Source dependencies are people. 🔗

My purpose is to augment the idea of “dependencies” from exclusively source code to be more inclusive of its authors as well. We typically center software in our Open Source conversations, so I want to deliberately center people. There are many ways to cover this, but I will offer three ways we could think of Open Source dependencies as more than source code:

1. Community inheritance
2. Legacies
3. Love

Dependencies: Community inheritance 🔗

New, smaller projects sometimes form up underneath or within an existing larger project. Sometimes a new project is created to support the existing project. Sometimes it is a passion project led by a few that aligns with the motivations and values of a wider community. But these new projects begin with an added advantage of inheriting the collaborative ecosystem surrounding the existing project, instead of being tasked to create this from scratch themselves.

Why measure this? 🔗

Ask anyone responsible for building an Open Source community from scratch. The approach at this stage is experimental:

• Will using this feature encourage new contributors to participate?
• Does someone in a related field discover our project on a casual whim looking at GitHub?
• How do we make our project more accessible for contributors we do not yet have?

Many times, it is about forming a hypothesis and then testing it.

However…

If you exist within the dynamic of an existing community, you benefit from resources, people, and infrastructure that would be unavailable if you started independently. Finding communities with compatible values and motives exposes you to a wider network, and thus more visibility in a world where there is already too much information. Working within an existing community can cut light-years off of time-to-market or improving product sustainability and community resiliency (in the context of other variables).

Example of community inheritance 🔗

The Fedora Project produces Fedora Linux. Fedora Linux is a Free and Open Source operating system derived from the open source Linux kernel. The Fedora Project also creates other software in order to facilitate the production, creation, and updates of Fedora Linux. Examples of this are asynchronous meeting minute note managers, community calendars, gamified badges, software package distribution tools, and more.

While none of these smaller software projects are the ultimate purpose and goal of the Fedora Project, they are supplementary to the overall goal of producing Fedora Linux. The sustainability of these smaller parts ensure a healthier ecosystem around the larger project.

Another way to see this is as a planet with several orbiting moons, where the planet is an existing project and each moon represents another smaller project orbiting around the existing one. Each moon is different, yet each is still connected to the gravitational force and motions of the planet.

Dependencies: Legacies 🔗

Open Source projects are more than source code. Human beings are social creatures, and Open Source is a social activity. An individual or groups of individuals may influence the hearts and minds of others in the movement. To win hearts and minds is to merge the intentions of the individual with the intentions of the wider community. The power to change minds is the power to move mountains.

Why measure this? 🔗

Open Source is a social activity. It has both a written and oral story-telling tradition. There is a rich history from the movement that first took root in the 1980s. We use stories to expand our imagination, or to see a perspective in a way we might not have before. So, it is important to note the value these historical stories play in shaping our movement and creating leaders.

Legacies of kindness and love result in thriving communities where contributors look out for each other. People are not motivated by the will to survive; they are motivated by the will to thrive with a community. Legacies of discrimination and hate result in divided, splintered communities who are focused on counting their differences instead of seeing how alike we are.

Example of legacies 🔗

Seth Vidal wrote the Yellowdog Update Manager (Y.U.M.), and he contributed to Fedora. Matthew Williams helped others learn about Linux and Open Source, and he contributed to Fedora. Thomas Gilliaird helped me with using Fedora Linux in IRC as a teenager, and he contributed to Fedora. The ways we help other humans while on our own journey is how we create a legacy with wider wings. The impact of a few kind people is enough to inspire more to follow.

To ignore the impact of legacies in social activities surrounding Open Source is to deny the impact of charismatic leaders who lead in styles of either unity or division.

Dependencies: Love 🔗

Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The act of existence can be political. We cannot escape the sociopolitical environment of our world, no matter how much we wish to push it aside. If we choose to ignore it, there are others who choose to manipulate common ignorance, to the exploit of their own unbounded wealth. We must embrace and acknowledge the political atmosphere permeates our world; it does not disappear and hide away when it makes us uncomfortable.

Why measure this? 🔗

Open Source does not get a “get out of jail free” card.

Open Source is political. Its roots in the Free Software movement were firmly rooted in politics, even if they were narrowly confined to a few key issues. The real question is, how do we wield our own political agency and expediency? We should act from our hearts and move to inspired action to correct everything that stands against love.

Example of love 🔗

This blog post. These words are a radical act of love. Acknowledging it and choosing to embrace it is the first step in using our Open Source power responsibly.

Featured image arranged by Justin Wheeler. Original photograph by Ian Schneider on Unsplash.

I don’t say that casually either. I have involuntarily found Open Source as my calling. Or my people. I contribute to Open Source because I love to collaborate and work together with other people. This challenges me. It humbles me in a way that I know I can always learn something new from someone else. For this, Open Source and Free Software have enriched my life. They have also given me, again involuntarily, an odd but productive way of coping with my own mental health issues, anxiety, and depression.

So how do I make sense of the emotions and feelings I have now? How do I untangle this complicated web of events and reactions by other people? To ignore it doesn’t seem possible. If I remove emotion, I am left with a purely rational motive to involve myself in this contemporary issue. My work, profession, and career goals are directly affected by however this discussion goes. There is no way out for me. It’s my job, so I have to care. But if you add emotions back in, to stand still and remain idle is heartbreaking. To do nothing is to commit to defeat. Resignation. The darkness.

Yet what is there to do? The only thing Stallman ever directly gave to me in life was an email explaining elegantly how there was nothing he could do for the Minecraft GPL community fiasco. At a time when I was so personally lost as I saw a community I love tear itself apart, he stood by idly as the so-called steward of these licenses that I was just too naïve to believe in. That experience to me now is amplified in the light of the much more egregious things he is accused of.

So, the Free Software Foundation welcomes Richard Matthew Stallman back to its board. Wonderful. Congratulations Mr. Stallman. I am going to pause for a moment of sadness and hurt as I contemplate the impact of this moment on our fragile movement, which has much bigger enemies today than it has in its 40 year legacy. But then…

I will move on. Because we have to. The only way is forward.

This blog post was first written on August 28th, 2020.

Today is a sad day. Chadwick Boseman is dead. At 43 years old, he lost a terminal battle with stage IV colon cancer. As his great light dims, I am left to wonder what loss will happen next in 2020.

But like the ashes of a phoenix, we will rise. His death reminds me of the fierce urgency of now, as said by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. That in the moment of darkness that follows death, a new bright light will emerge. It is just so human for us to cling to the embers of hope, in the fear that we will one day be delivered from suffering.

Boseman was a social leader and source of inspiration for many. His life and many roles championed racial equity on the Hollywood screens. Boseman was passionate about what he did. He led a committed life.

Boseman’s death caused me to reflect on the definition of Freedom in the movement I am embedded within: the Free Software movement. Yet in this community I value, there are seeds of discontent. The fierce urgency of now has revealed that systemic social injustices continue to exist in our society, as they have for centuries. The generational question we must answer as witnesses to this moment is: will we continue to tolerate the systemic faults within our society? Or must we imagine a more fair society? A more just society? I know we can because we have to.

On the origins of Software Freedom 🔗

A background on the Software Freedom movement is helpful to understand this discourse on freedom.

Free Software is a social movement born in the 1980s in North America. In the beginning, it was mostly a set of ideals and values set forth by MIT computer scientist Richard Stallman. Stallman witnessed a dramatic shift in how the free market distributed software in the 1980s. Previously to then, software was usually trivial; an afterthought. Software was freely shared between companies, universities, and individuals. Part of this is to blame on the industry’s intent focus on hardware during the Cold War. At the time, there was no standardization to hardware development, so software source would have to be rewritten to compile on different hardware architectures from competing vendors. However, this mindset eroded in the 1980s. There were a few lead architectures at the time, mostly championed by Intel. Software had to be compiled less often. Now, this freely shared source code could be repurposed much more easily.

At this point, the software industry went mainstream. Software began to receive acute focus by companies with computer science talent. Talent needs moved beyond hardware. Stallman saw all this, and believed the shift was at a great loss to the personal freedoms of the individual. So he coined “Software Freedom”, and a movement formalized.

With that background, the word “Freedom” has a specific, coded meaning to people who believe in the principles of Software Freedom. Software Freedom protects a set of digital rights that the movement leaders first advocated for in the 1980s and 1990s. The Four Freedoms (to use, to study, to share, to improve) are entrusted to the individual user of a computer system.

Freedom in 2020 🔗

However, it is 2020. Not 1985. Not 1991. 2020.

Questions about what Freedom means could never be more removed from the context of right now. Software Freedom asserts rights fully-realized by participants in the new digital society. Yet billions of people on Earth remain unconnected to the Internet. How can you realize rights that were never accessible to begin with?

Even if you are participating in digital society, freedom to read source code and make changes to it are just one of many different examples of freedom. But what other definitions exist?

The freedom to be safe asleep in your home without being gunned down by those entrusted to protect you.

The freedom that your children may live in a world where they may realize their fullest potential.

The freedom to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

In comparison, the freedom to read the source code of the web browser that keeps crashing on an unsupported device does not practical value to people who have different questions in the pursuit of freedom.

Reconciliation and intersections 🔗

But surely there is somewhere we can reconcile these different definitions of freedom. They may conflict at times but they are not in opposition to each other. There must be a way to realize both the freedoms of the individual to live a better life, and the freedoms of witting or unwitting participants in a digital world governed by increasingly invisible hands.

The intersection is surprising. Before identifying it, it is important to understand its purpose. The purpose of the intersection of these two definitions of freedom is to unify and empower people to be in control of their own destinies. Our destinies and futures are influenced but not entirely controlled by our environments. Both types of freedom believe in the right of the individual to understand the ways a system works, in order to understand how the system impacts them.

Said simply, the purpose is inclusion. The purpose is to bring together. The purpose is to empower. The purpose is give individuals the tools to shape their own destinies.

The name of this intersection is digital intersectionality.

Digital intersectionality makes inclusion a first-class citizen. It must take an intersectional approach from the outset if it is to accommodate the hyper-globalized world we live in. Albert Einstein once reflected in a letter to schoolchildren in Japan about his great delight in being able to communicate across such distances—something that was unheard of at the time. It is a cute memory, but also emphasizes the ways the world has changed since the most widely-known events of human genocide. Digital intersectionality has no borders. Its borders are decentralized; its borders may or may not have nationality. Copper wire, fiber lines, satellite receivers; these are the conduits that digital intersectionality resides in.

Digital intersectionality must be about inclusion. Digital intersectionality by definition must always be intersectional. Digital intersectionality must always consider the role of the individual in contributing to healthy, collective society. Digital intersectionality must embrace love.

What now? 🔗

Chadwick Boseman is gone. But we are not.

We are in the same world. Breathing the same air. Living under the same sun, and the same stars. As I see the void and grief left behind in his wake, as I look around me in a global pandemic that places the heaviest burdens on those with the most to bear, as I continue to see the effects of unjust systems perpetuate, I am thinking more about my own role in shaping the world we must create.

So I will continue to advocate and celebrate both freedoms, software freedom and inner freedom, under the mutual banner of digital intersectionality.

Special thanks to my early editors!

This post does not describe what the Principles are (click that link to learn more about them). This post describes the story behind the Principles, and how our Sustain Working Group worked together over three months of virtual facilitation during the COVID–19 crisis to build these Principles.

Overview 🔗

This blog post is a story, or perhaps open source lore. So, here is the abridged summary:

1. The Sticky Idea: How did a discussion topic at a one-day open source sustainability conference evolve into a three-month extended collaboration?
2. Facilitation, Roosevelt-style: The people are here. How do you facilitate a conversation with no scope and few bounds?
3. Is there a next chapter to this story?: The Working Group is winding down. What happens to the Principles next?

If you are hooked, read on.

The Sticky Idea 🔗

How does a discussion topic at a one-day conference evolve into an inter-organizational, international collaboration that spans three months?

When the accountability and transparency discussion groups formed at Sustain Summit 2020, none of us knew what would come after the event. Not to mention, there were several different sustainability topics explored at the Summit.

So, the conversation about corporate accountability was about the same as every other conversation during that morning: someone was motivated enough to step up and say, “I’ll do it – I’ll facilitate this conversation!”

Open Source Accountability Goals 🔗

Duane O’Brien volunteered to lead facilitation on defining goals for open source accountability. Duane proposed four goals to iterate on in the Summit break-out groups:

1. Set and publish a goal for open source contribution relative to value capture
2. Adhere to principles of authentic participation
3. Publish documentation of open source policies, processes, and project governance
4. Well defined reporting process that is publicly available

The morning discussions broadly focused on these goals. After the ice was broken and conversation was flowing, themes and patterns emerged in the stories we shared with each other. Later that day, Allen Gunn asked me if I would lead an afternoon discussion session. The second goal, these principles of authentic participation, were personally interesting to me, and the morning group was engaged too. So I said, “Yes, I’ll do it!” Even though I did not really have any idea what I was going to do yet.

Facilitation of Authentic Participation discussion 🔗

After lunch, I gathered folks for the discussion group to discuss what authentic participation means. If we could propose a basic set of principles that we agree on, could this be a useful tool for the pain points of stories shared in the morning session?

The afternoon discussion was insightful, but lacked firm conclusions. We had great ideas and lots of stories, but nothing to tie them together. I collected email addresses of folks who wanted to continue engaging on the Principles of Authentic Participation. However, I wasn’t sure what the next step would be at the time.

At the Summit, I committed to facilitation of a public Discourse forum discussion, but some attendees voiced that Discourse was not accessible for them. To compromise without exhausting myself across too many platforms, I promised to host a few online discussions for folks to gather and talk about these things again later.

The embers were hot on this discussion at the Sustain Summit. But it was still just embers. How do we get these embers to “spark” into something bigger? Enter the Fireside Chats.

Facilitation, Roosevelt-style 🔗

So, skip ahead a couple weeks. I was ready to push the conversation forward. The time was right for the first follow-up email to the discussion group participants. As promised, I opened a Discourse discussion that summarized our notes from the conference and asked open-ended questions. Later on, I announced the first of four Fireside Chats. The Fireside Chats became the primary vehicle of collaboration for the working group.

Text-based communications are my preference. But video?? I would have to swallow my introverted shyness if I was going to lead this. I never facilitated an online discussion group before. There were also not many public examples to learn from either. The style I took to the Fireside Chats was mostly my own. I relied on my past experience of facilitating open source project meetings and development to drive these Fireside Chats. And I borrowed a little inspiration from former American president Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fireside chats during the 1930s/1940s.

For the first Fireside Chat on 2020 February 28th, I had no idea what I was doing. I prepared a loose agenda, but I left it broad so people could bring their own interests and passions into the conversation. I figured doing this would allow people to bring their own needs, desires, and wants to the conversation. It was unrealistic to expect a collaboration driven by my own motivations.

A successful collaboration requires all participants to have an opportunity to satisfy their own personal motivations for showing up in the first place. So, my approach centered our collaborative work on the group and not just myself, to avoid a high initial interest that dwindles down over time.

How did facilitation start? 🔗

The first Fireside Chat was exploratory. It was our first time talking about the Principles since the Sustain Summit. We caught back up on where we left off, detailed what we wanted to get out of this collaboration, and began scoping out what we thought we could accomplish together.

Although the first chat was mostly unstructured, it was essential to to identify themes and ideas that led to more focused, structured discussions for the next three Fireside Chats. The Discourse thread was also useful as an accessory for the Fireside Chats. I published notes from each Fireside Chat on the Discourse thread, and there was some asynchronous discussion between Fireside Chats.

Beyond the first Fireside Chat, the agendas became easier for me to write and the feedback became more focused. Fortunately, most of this work happened in public on the Discourse thread. So, if you are curious for more details on how the final three Fireside Chats went, take a look at the discussion thread.

Is there a next chapter to this story? 🔗

For now, the Principles of Authentic Participation Working Group is going dormant. We met our original goal of drafting some basic principles.

So, now what happens? So, let’s try to predict the future! (That can’t be that hard, right?)

My hope is that the Principles of Authentic Participation leads to more story-telling about what it means to authentically contribute to open source, whether you are an individual or an organization. To help curate the stories, I created a template to encourage folks to share them with us. The template provides question that makes it easy for a maintainer to copy and paste the story into our published Principles of Authentic Participation website.

Whether this hope comes true or not, we will see. But the Principles have a life of their own now. It doesn’t mean the Working Group will never meet again, or that we won’t revisit these ideas over time. But these Principles are now the “property” of the community to continue building. I will continue to participate where I can to curate stories about the Principles.

Closing thoughts 🔗

My hope in sharing this story is to help other facilitators and activists in the open source world approach digital-only organizing. Digital facilitation and organization is a skill we are all learning, for better or worse, in a COVID-19 world. But it isn’t a new skill. Lots of folks have been doing this for a long time, especially in the digital-first world of open source.

So, I hope this paints a picture of how we pulled off the Principles of Authentic Participation and how others can take what we did and improve on our processes.

It is possible to work collaboratively with new people on digital initiatives across different backgrounds and sectors. Remote facilitation is someone being brave enough to step up and lead, even if they have no idea what they are doing. After all… isn’t that what many other white American men like me do anyways? So can you.

Why does this matter? 🔗

This exploration and thought experiment is important to understand when revisiting social movements in technology in the current day. In the FOSDEM 2020 talk Mike and I gave, we presented three possible digital “freedoms” for artificial intelligence. The rights-based approach we presented at FOSDEM 2020 was inspired by the origin of the Free Software movement.

But to understand how we got to today with thousands of contributors to the Linux project, billions of dollars in open source company buyouts, and the words “open source” used on mainstream cable news channels, we have to start from the beginning, in 1983.

27 Sept. 1983: GNU Project announced 🔗

On 27 September 1983, the GNU Project was announced by Richard Stallman. The GNU Project was a collection of Free Software tools for building a free operating system. But it was also more than that. The GNU Project came with a vision to give computer users freedom and control of their use of computers. To do this, the GNU Project advocated for four fundamental freedoms:

• Run software in any way desired
• Copy and distribute the software
• Study it (i.e. reading the source code)
• Modify it and make changes

Today, we call these the Four Freedoms.

So, the GNU Project was founded with these fundamental freedoms as the motivation for why they did what they did. It was more than shipping code for code’s sake, but to lead by example in how software could be developed without sacrificing the rights of users.

4 Oct. 1985: Free Software Foundation founded 🔗

Next, skip ahead to 4 October 1985. Two years after the launch of GNU, the Free Software Foundation (F.S.F.) is founded to support and sustain GNU and the Free Software movement. The values of the GNU Project were important and valuable, but it wasn’t enough to leave them out in the world on their own.

At first, the F.S.F. focused on employing software developers to work on Free Software and the GNU Project. Later, the F.S.F. transitioned to legal and structural issues to support the Free Software community.

So, it is one thing to have your values and ethics out there, but they need to be protected and respected by the rest of the world too. The F.S.F. represented the sustainability of protecting these rights and beliefs, originally put forth by GNU.

While the F.S.F. does help sustain those rights, how does a nonprofit foundation actually enforce these rights in practice?

25 Feb. 1989: GNU General Public License created 🔗

Finally, we skip ahead four more years to 25 February 1989: the first version of the GNU Public License (G.P.L.) is created. This is the license that gave “copyleft” a name. It was written and released for the GNU Project, but the license itself was stewarded by the F.S.F.

The G.P.L. put power in the hands of individual people and activists to shape how others used their software. Thus, copyleft is put into a practical legal policy. In a sense, the G.P.L. allowed software developers to place the Four Freedoms at the core of their code.

Although enforcement of copyleft licenses has a blemished history, it was still the “teeth” in translating these values and values to the rest of the world. It took inspiration from how copyright was not something often considered when distributing software until the early 1980s.

And thus, copyleft becomes a radical invention in software with the proliferation of the G.P.L., especially in its adoption in prominent projects like the Linux kernel.

Is the past relevant to social movements today? 🔗

So this was a lot of history. Is the past relevant to where we are today? First, consider how the early Free Software movement responded to these emerging societal issues in the 1980s.

Free Software was a response to the changing ecosystem of software distribution. Software became more valued because of a standardization on hardware that didn’t exist previously. There were simply fewer architectures to compile for!

Suddenly, the value of software increased. It became a commodity.

Before this commodification of software, the Four Freedoms were, in a sense, the default way of distributing and sharing software. After commodification, this was no longer true. The Four Freedoms were rooted in a belief that there are essential rights that belong to all users of computers and computer systems. Stallman observed this change directly at the MIT Media Lab in the 1970s and early 1980s. This motivated him and many others to stand up for Software Freedom by asserting these freedoms.

To respond to commodification of software, Free Software took a freedom-based approach to established their values, as the Four Freedoms. So, looking back 40 years ago, is it possible to extend and make the past relevant again in today’s changing world?

Before we can answer that, we have to first ask. How has the world changed?

Your future is the new commodity. 🔗

The history of Free Software overlaps with what is happening now.

Today the world is about predictions: predictions about human futures. This is accomplished by the combination of software and data. Human futures are a simple formula: Data + Software. Or, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

But how are human futures becoming a commodity? In the 1980s, software became the thing we “sold”. It had inherent value. Today, the ability to predict what you are doing to do next is valuable. This makes both your and my future the new commodity. Where will we go next? What will we buy next? Who have we contacted recently?

But data is only one piece of this big puzzle. It is the enabling force for determining our futures. Third-party organizations collect the world’s data on a massive, centralized scale. Your data is what allows companies to sell your future.

To add a metaphor, data is like oil, not gold. You consume the input (data) to sell the output (human futures).

Where are we today? 🔗

So, how have we responded to our changing world?

There have been some successful resistance to the new value of user data and human futures. The privacy movement and legislation like G.D.P.R. are representative of this.

However, data privacy is only one part of the big picture. Focusing on individual empowerment does not protect us from societal effects. Consider predictive policing and court rulings as two examples.

Ultimately, the data privacy movement has been a key factor in combating the effects of surveillance capitalism, but there are still gaps. Mike and I noticed we need to approach topics like artificial intelligence not in pieces, but as a whole.

And some organizations have recognized this challenge and are working to address it. “Working groups” and reports with non-mandatory recommendations are on the rise. However, these groups are not effective on moving forward ways of ensuring people are effectively protected from the unforeseen harms of AI systems. “Light self-regulation” works on an opt-in model, and it is against the interest of some actors to opt in.

So, if we are in the middle of this societal shift from software as a commodity to human futures as a commodity, where do we go from here? Do we choose chaos or community?

At time of publication, I am still wrestling with these questions. As are a lot of people! To get a wider picture of what is on my mind in 2020, read my event reports from my pre-coronavirus 2020 travels.

Photo by Shane Rounce on Unsplash.

This blog post is a story roughly covering 2010 to 2014 on the meaning, values, and promise of open source. This story impacted a community of hundreds of thousands of people, mostly adolescent children, teenagers, and young adults. It is a tale about the simultaneous success and failure of the GNU Public License (GPL).

From the beginning: Bukkit, Minecraft, and the GPL 🔗

In the beginning, in December 2010, there was Bukkit.

Bukkit is an up-and-coming Minecraft Server mod that will completely change how running and modifying a Minecraft server is done - making managing and creating servers easier and providing more flexibility. Learning from the mistakes made by other mods, Bukkit aims to be different and fill the void left by them: built from the ground up we’ve focused on performance, ease-of-use, extreme customisability and better communication between the Team and, you, our users. The overall design of Bukkit has been inspired by other mods and our experience as Minecraft players just like yourselves, giving us a unique perspective and advantage going into the creation of the Bukkit Project.

About Us, Bukkit.org

Bukkit was an open source server for Minecraft. It provided an API for developers to create plugins that extended Minecraft in unique and fun ways. While Bukkit was not the first open source Minecraft server, it was the first organized project. Bukkit launched with the GNU Public License (GPL) v3 license.

From 2011 to 2014, Bukkit was the de-facto standard for running a Minecraft multiplayer game server. Over time, more Bukkit servers (and derivatives) were used than the official server software distributed by Mojang. Mojang is the company responsible for Minecraft development.

Hard work on Bukkit recognized 🔗

The project’s success was also recognized by Mojang too. At the first-ever Minecraft convention in 2011, MINECON, four Bukkit lead developers were hired by Mojang to work on Minecraft. All but one of the hired employees then departed from Bukkit. That one developer who remained active in Bukkit would depart from Mojang mysteriously in 2013.

Had a great time working for Mojang but it's time for me to pursue other interests. As of yesterday, I am no longer working for Mojang.

— EvilSeph (@EvilSeph) October 2, 2013

However, there was always one caveat. Bukkit was an open source project licensed under the GPLv3. However, it also reverse-engineered some parts of the Minecraft game code to build its server code and API. This was never a problem for Bukkit or Mojang:

“When we started up Bukkit in December of 2010, we decided we wanted to do things right. Right from the beginning we wanted to be sure we were bringing about a positive change to Minecraft, one that Mojang themselves would approve of. To that end, we set up a meeting with Mojang to get a feel for their opinions on our project and make sure we weren’t doing anything they didn’t like. The gist of the meeting was that Mojang “liked what we were doing” but not how we had to go about doing things. Unfortunately, we both knew that we had no alternatives, so we continued along - albeit now with the reassurance that our project would most likely not be shut down any time in the future.”

EvilSeph (Warren Loo), “Bukkit: The Next Chapter”

Nobody ever raised a copyright issue over the reverse-engineered code from Minecraft in Bukkit. Yet, for years, the GPL code released by Bukkit included bits from official Minecraft code.

Act 1: The Minecraft EULA 🔗

An alternative perspective on the Minecraft EULA is in this Guardian article. “Minecraft: how a change to the rules is tearing the community apart.”

All was fine for a number of years. Bukkit was a volunteer-led project even after some of its core developers were hired to work at Mojang. However, in 2014, unrelated tension started to grow in the Minecraft community.

The tension was about the language used in Minecraft’s End User License Agreement (EULA). The EULA used ambiguous language over the monetization of Minecraft multiplayer servers:

“The one major rule is that you must not distribute anything we‘ve made. By “distribute anything we‘ve made” what we mean is “give copies of the game away, make commercial use of, try to make money from, or let other people get access to our game and its parts in a way that is unfair or unreasonable”."

2014: account.mojang.com/documents/minecraft_eula

While many open source projects flourished around Minecraft, a huge game server industry also co-existed in this ecosystem. Multiplayer server owners running Bukkit (or derivative projects, like Spigot) created web stores for their servers. Players paid real money to buy in-game perks for a specific multiplayer server. Using open source plugins, players paid for things like item packages with diamond swords or virtual currency to spend in-game.

This behavior was allowed to flourish for years. However, the EULA was discreetly edited in December 2013. In mid-2014, someone in the community noticed the changed language. They tweeted and tagged a Mojang employee asking if this meant multiplayer servers had to stop selling in-game items for real money. In as much detail that a 2014 tweet with a 140-character limit allowed, the Mojang employee confirmed the EULA language did technically forbid that.

Panic! In The Bukkit Server 🔗

“Then, everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked.”

The community erupted into chaos. Suddenly, a community that had mostly co-existed peacefully was at a virtual war with each other. The situation was understandable from both ends, if for different reasons.

Anyone could start their own multiplayer server. So it was possible for malicious servers to scam players (usually young children) of money. Usually this happened by failing to deliver on the purchases or closing down after a period. Frequently, Mojang was contacted for help (usually by angry parents) about game servers Mojang did not control.

At the same time, many good people built (probably unwise) business models around the permissive nature of Minecraft intellectual property. The open source software made it easy to extend Minecraft in ways Mojang did not intend.

Act 2: The Bukkit cards are revealed 🔗

Tension was already high between the the trinity of business owners, open source developers, and Mojang. By 2014, Mojang was a multi-million dollar company (even before their multi-billion Microsoft buyout). The EULA tension placed a heavy burden on the open source developers, who received pressure from both ends.

Then, the unexpected happened on August 21st, 2014. The Bukkit project lead, Warren Loo (EvilSeph), announced the end of development on the Bukkit project:

.@CraftBukkit: It's time to say goodbye - http://t.co/LRG2uiMbDe

— EvilSeph (@EvilSeph) August 21, 2014

Read the full announcement from Bukkit team

Bukkit gets “owned” 🔗

This was sad news. But the real shock came an hour later when the lead developer of Minecraft at Mojang shot back on Twitter:

Warren over at bukkit seems to have forgotten that the project was bought by Mojang over two years ago, and isn't his to discontinue.

— Jens Bergensten (@jeb_) August 21, 2014

Two other former Bukkit developers working at Mojang chimed in too:

We took ownership of the Bukkit github repos & project. We'll see what happens from here.

— Erik Broes (@_grum) August 21, 2014

To make this clear: Mojang owns Bukkit. I'm personally going to update Bukkit to 1.8 myself. Bukkit IS NOT and WILL NOT BE the official API.

— Nathan Adams (@Dinnerbone) August 21, 2014

It was now revealed that the Bukkit open source developers hired by Mojang in 2011 had given up their personal copyright and rights to their open source contributions as part of their employment contracts. The open source developer and business owner communities both learned this abruptly over a 140-character tweet.

The community was confused, upset, and angry.

“The decision to keep the acquisition of the Bukkit codebase a secret was made between Mojang and Curse, which only recently came to light. I was completely unaware that I had spent the last two years of my life as a Bukkit Administrator, and successor to the project lead, under the illusion that the project was independently ran. Had I known back then perhaps my choice would have been different, perhaps not. It’s easy to speculate on what might have been, but unless faced head on with the choice, the decision is not always clear.”

TnT, “So long, and thanks for all the fish”

What is known now was that for about three years, the volunteer-driven open source project was “owned” by company valued for millions of dollars that did little to support the open source project that helped build a community around the game. The only visible contribution made by Mojang to Bukkit was the explicit permission to continue their endeavor in the legal gray area.

Act 3: DMCA take-down of Bukkit 🔗

On September 5th, 2014, a lead developer not hired by Mojang, who had contributed over 15,000 lines of code to the project, invoked a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) take-down on all of his personal contributions to the project (and all derivative projects). In a day, all the source code for a project used ~3x more than Mojang’s official server software disappeared from the Internet.

It is easy to understand why this lead developer did what he did. To find out the last few years of your life spent volunteering on a game project that was secretly owned by a multi-million dollar company is a shattering experience. It’s essentially free labor. But at the same time, this was a project used by hundreds of thousands of people around the world. It was more than a project; it was also a community.

One of the lead developers of Bukkit said this of the project in their resignation letter to the community:

“The Bukkit Project is so much more than CraftBukkit, getting updates out and providing API. It’s about giving the community a place where they feel welcomed and can program to their hearts’ content with the use of our product. The Bukkit API gave people the ability to change the behavior of Minecraft, but it would have meant nothing without the contributions from the plugin developers in the community.”

feildmaster

The DMCA take-down wasn’t just a take-down of the software; it also was a take-down of a community. The overnight disappearance of Bukkit left a huge power vacuum full of bitterness, personal harassment, and doxing. (Don’t forget this was also the era of #GamerGate.)

Who was this community? 🔗

The project I participated with, Spigot, was a fork of Bukkit created in 2012. Like Bukkit, Spigot was also hit by the DMCA take-down, although the Spigot team worked out a clever legal workaround to continue development.

A huge plugin community and third-party software around Bukkit’s API grew around both Bukkit and Spigot. The unusual thing was, with few exceptions, most of the leaders of these communities were young adults in their 20s, teenagers, or even 11 year old kids. Open source wasn’t a strongly understood concept in this community. It was just what everyone did. The messaging around licensing was not always great, but working in the open was the nature of how this gaming community operated.

The spirit of open source died 🔗

For this community, the promise and glory of open source died. For years, the Bukkit developer team shared their belief in open source with the community:

“Bukkit chose to go the open source route with our API for several reasons. Not only is open source awesome, but we knew that there were many talented individuals within the Minecraft community that could help us evolve, mature and grow our project much faster than we could have ever dreamed on our own.”

EvilSeph (Warren Loo), “Bukkit Project Changes and Improvements”

But with the complications of a project doomed to failure under the GPL that never should have been, combined with the hidden secret of ownership and DMCA take-down of open source code, the promise of open source both helped and failed this community.

Who was right? Who was wrong? 🔗

On one hand, the lead developer who issued the DMCA take-down was able to vent the frustration faced by those who discovered their secret “free labor” agreement with Mojang (at a great personal cost, as he was harassed, stalked, and received death threats). On the other hand, the collective community faced the end of an era brought about extraordinary circumstances that actually voided the GPL as a valid license:

“A license is a contract. There are many reasons why a contract would be void, and many conditions that make a contract invalid from the get-go. One such condition is being “tricked” into the agreement, which would include agreeing to work on a project under false pretenses. As stated above, an open source project being secretly purchased by a company, in hopes to have that company’s game be improved through it, is as close to a loophole for free labor as you will find. Free labor was outlawed in this country a while ago. We had a whole war about it.”

/u/VideoGameAttorney, “My Response to Vubui, Mojang, and the hundreds (yes, hundreds) of you who asked me to weigh in on this.”

The only conclusion I can muster on this saga is from that same Reddit thread: “But at the end of the day, don’t just believe one side is “good” and the other “bad” here. These things are rarely so simple.”

Why did I write this? 🔗

Because I keep coming back to this story, across my life. I was writing an event report about a copyleft licensing conference I went to in February 2020, when I recapped this same story to someone there in-person. It wasn’t the first time I told this story at a conference though. It’s such an interesting case study of copyleft licensing.

Because it is in the open source gaming world and the largest demographic of this particular gaming community is under 30 years old, many folks who have been “around the block” in open source are unaware of this story.

But as my first open source community and also something I invested nearly a whole decade of my life into (as have countless others), this experience shaped my outlook on open source and community in an unusual way. It’s an experience I can’t forget. Even if I only have an abrupt ending to this story, it’s a story that I think deserves to be told, in respect to those who invested far more time, energy, money, and tears in this than I ever have.

I never intend to adjust myself to injustice.

“I’m proud to be maladjusted.” https://t.co/TFBiWBy6Xc

— Be A King (@BerniceKing) December 12, 2019

Unfortunately, as I write later in this blog post, the “window of inspiration” to finish this draft has closed. So I figured it better to publish it as-is than to let it waste.

Unmodified text: “Nothing will be the same” 🔗

The sun slowly slips into the horizon, darkening the sky as the street lamps and buildings illuminate. On the main road through the city, the taxi works its way through the evening weekday traffic in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. My luggage is stowed in the backseat and I’m seated next to the driver, an older gentleman in his late 40s or early 50s. Unlike other countless taxi rides, the car wasn’t silent inside. The driver was curious. Through gestures, signing, and broken English, we shared stories with each other, about the past, the present, and the future. He asked me about America and the election, and if Americans are really like what is shown in the news. I asked him about life in Sarajevo, and he told me about the problems with employment and people searching for work.

Behind his weathered face, there were eyes that had seen some of the worst tragedy in the region. He lived in the city during the Siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s and remembered Srebrenica in 1995. He lived through years where hate and spite penetrated the hearts of neighbors. Yet, through it all, the man was cheerful and still hopeful. Even from our conversation, he had a resounding hope about the people of Sarajevo. In thirty minutes, I understood a different kind of history in the region than I had during the four years earning my high school diploma.

This is one memory that persists from my experiences over the past five months. On January 17th, 2017, I moved across the oceans to Dubrovnik, Croatia. I studied in Dubrovnik from January until the middle of May.

During the semester and after, there were incomparable experiences that opened my eyes to a world that previously I only imagined. With my experiences with writing, there is a window that is open for a short time. The window is your inspiration. If you look out the window and see something incredible, you are filled with inspiration and you want to capture it. But when you step away, the window only remains open for a short time after. If you miss the opportunity, the window will close and the writing will never reflect it in the same way. This is my cumulative attempt at trying to capture the last five months of my life.

Home is a suitcase 🔗

I began the third year of my degree and moved for the fifth time in two years when I made it back to Rochester in August. This time, I found somewhere to ideally live longer than only a few months of the year. I moved into a house with a few other roommates with more space than I’ve had before. For the first time in a while, it’s somewhere I’ve made to feel like home.

This move came months after I ended a semester of a study abroad program and lived in a city for an internship. Most of 2017 made my suitcase feel like a home, but it afforded many unique experiences.

Croatia: Study abroad 🔗

From January to May 2017, I participated in a study abroad program with my university to Dubrovnik, Croatia. RIT has full campuses in both Zagreb and Dubrovnik. This made planning the semester abroad easy, but also encouraged me to go somewhere I might not have gone otherwise.

My choice to study in Croatia was well-rewarded. On paper, I earned 12 credit hours, but I took away more than what I learned in class. My most important lessons came in the form of midnight bus rides to Albania, photograph exhibits capturing genocide in Sarajevo, and hugs from normally faraway friends in Czechia. My time abroad began a process in finding myself that has continued since my time in Europe.

DevConf 2017 / Fedora Diversity FAD 🔗

At the beginning of the year, the Fedora Diversity Team held a “Fedora Activity Day” (FAD) event in Brno, Czechia. If you’re outside of the Fedora community, think of a FAD as a focused, in-person team sprint. Together with our team in-person and remote, we mapped out our goals and plans for 2017 and set out to continue the work we began nearly three years ago.

In addition to the work we accomplished together, it was fulfilling for me to see my teammates that span three continents. I spent a week with not only my teammates but also my friends. The days we get to spend together are a privileged few in the year, and it was fulfilling and motivating for me to spend some of our time together in a way that wasn’t Pagure tickets or IRC meetings.

Read more about our team sprint in this event report:

https://communityblog.fedoraproject.org/fedora-diversity-fad-2017/

FOSDEM 2017 🔗

In February, I attended the Free and Open Source Software Developers European Meeting (FOSDEM) for the first time. FOSDEM is the largest open source conference in Europe, bringing together over 8,000 open source enthusiasts, contributors, and leaders from around the globe.

I had the privilege to attend as a member of the Fedora community, so my time was between the Fedora booth to meet the community and catching interesting talks. I also gave a talk of my own on the main track, What open source and J.K. Rowling have in common! I gave this talk to a smaller audience at DevConf, but the FOSDEM audience was considerably larger.

In retrospect, my original talk topic is relevant but I have ideas on how I could have delivered my message more effectively. Regardless, it was a learning experience for me to present in front of a new audience. Public speaking opportunities filled my youth, both in theater and in presentations, but I had never presented to a technical audience before (let alone on a non-technical topic). The experience at FOSDEM helped build my understanding and I hope to return with a new topic someday in the future.

Exploring the Balkans 🔗

Outside of open source and Fedora, my time in Croatia included a lot of time outside of Croatia. When many of my roommates went to explore the wonders of Western Europe, I lost my heart in the shadows of the Balkan mountains. My spring break was a solo trip split between Sarajevo, Bosnia and Hercegovina and Tirana, Albania.

Sarajevo 🔗

The three days I spent in Sarajevo were short but significant. I was truly alone on this visit and it was up to me to make the most of it. Originally, I was skeptical to go alone, but I knew that I would never have a better opportunity to go. My fascination with Sarajevo stemmed from a year of studying European history in high school, and knowing the cultural significance of Sarajevo as a meeting point of western and eastern cultures. In the end, I decided to go, and I was rewarded for it.

Most of my trip in Sarajevo consisted of museums. I visited various museums, ranging from eighteenth to twentieth century history. The most rewarding for me were the Galerija 11/07/95 and the Tunnel of Sarajevo. The gallery documented the Srebrenica genocide in July 1995 by the Serbian armed forces. The exhibit was eye-opening and perspective-shifting. The Tunnel of Sarajevo, sometimes called the Tunnel of Hope, is another perspective-shattering experience. The museum introduces the tunnel used during the siege of Sarajevo during the 1990s, when Serbian forces surrounded the city for an almost four-year siege. The tunnel was the only way for citizens and resistance forces to contact the outside world and keep the resistance alive. A small part of the tunnel is preserved, and the other artifacts make it a gripping experience (not to mention it’s a short drive out of the city, so you also have a chance to mentally prepare and later unpack the experience).

Tirana 🔗

I visited Tirana, Albania four times on my trip abroad. In Tirana, my heart was captured by the people there. For years, I read about the Open Labs Hackerspace community based in Tirana and I always imagined an opportunity to see it in person. I actually remember my first encounter with their community was an Ada Lovelace Day event report. And somehow, the circumstances shifted where I was able to meet their community and immerse myself in the culture, if only for a short time.

During my times in Tirana, I participated in the first-ever 48 hour hackathon to support the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the first edition of Linux Weekend, and the annual Open Source Conference Albania (OSCAL).

https://fedoramagazine.org/students-fedora-linux-weekend-2017/

India 🔗

At the end of my study abroad experience in Croatia, a unique opportunity presented itself to me. I did not buy my return airfare back to the US before I left for Croatia. When price-checking for my trip back, I noticed it was a few hundred dollars extra if I decided to spend a week in India before flying back to the US.

I booked the tickets.

The last day of my classes finally came, and the next day, I was traveling further east, to Mumbai (or Bombay, if you prefer). I had the great fortune of having two great friends who invited me to the homes of their families during my trip. I visited Bee in Mumbai and Amita in Pune, all split across a single week!

My trip to India was eye-opening. For years, I’ve had a fascination with Eastern culture and philosophy, but it was something completely different to experience. Bee and her family took me to the Global Vipassana Pagoda, a personally fulfilling experience for me. We visited the Bandra–Worli Sea Link, Shree Mahalakshmi Temple, and several other places in Mumbai. I remember walking through the streets more than anything.

In Pune, Amita and her family showed me their favorite places. I had a chance to meet many other Fedora friends in Pune too. One of my favorite memories of Pune was a historic gurdwara. Amita took me and the others in our group to visit. For a moment, I finally got to see something I’ve only read about right in front of my eyes. The history and reverence in these places was absorbed into my mind.

I never expected an Indian visa stamp in my passport in 2017, yet it happened. I’m equally filled with wonder at how the circumstances unfolded as I am grateful this experience sneaked into my year.

Chicago: Urban experience 🔗

After my semester abroad and visiting India, I was whisked back to the United States, only to pack up once again for another new experience. From June to August, I lived in Chicago, Illinois to work an internship at Jump Trading. Chicago had a feeling of nostalgia for me because much of my father’s family has origins tracing back to Chicago. But I would find myself losing more of my heart in Chicago than I realized.

The internship 🔗

I worked with a fantastic team of people on exciting projects. Professionally, my time in Chicago was motivating and empowering. I was provided the opportunity to learn and also contribute. I walked in with a dreadful feeling of imposter syndrome and left feeling more confident in my own learning abilities. Docker, Kubernetes, and time-series data became a part of my daily work life, when I had little to no knowledge before then.

By the time my internship finished, I helped contribute to our team’s goal of standing up Kubernetes and contributing a few patches in Kubernetes projects like Minikube. I have great mentors to thank for not only direct, technical assistance but also motivational mentorship and empowerment too.

Everything else 🔗

There was more to Chicago than only the work too. Before long, I felt like a true Chicagoan, traveling the subways into the Loop, catching free concerts in Millennium Park, and indulging in the Chicago tradition of deep-dish pizza.

Unlike other cities I’ve visited, like New York City, Chicago felt easier to integrate into. The culture was notably “slower” than the fast-pace life of NYC, London, or Washington DC. I discovered Middle Eastern markets that became a regular part of my weekends, made friends with the baristas at a local coffeehouse, and had the privilege of hosting friends from three continents for short stays.

I left Chicago and was offered a new contract for the following summer in 2018. I’m looking forward to be back in June again.

Year of Fedora 🔗

2017 was full of time and effort spent in the Fedora community. In addition to the Diversity FAD, I was elected to the Fedora Council (on my third attempt), attended the annual Fedora contributor conference, Flock, and also narrowed my scope for contributions.

When I began contributing to Fedora, I was contributing to many things. Marketing, community operations, Fedora Badges, Fedora Magazine, Ambassadors, Games SIG, Join SIG, the Diversity Team, and maybe a few more things. After a while, I realized my contributions carried great width but poor depth. In 2017, I “reconfigured” my time in Fedora to focus in on the areas where I felt my time yielded the highest impact. This is Fedora CommOps and the Diversity Team.

I resigned as Fedora Magazine editor-in-chief and also formally stepped down from other teams. It made me sad, but I knew it was the right decision for me. I’m happy to spend more time working in fewer projects at a greater depth and focus than I had before.

Flock 2017 🔗

Flock, Fedora’s annual contributor conference, was held from Aug. 29 to Sep. 1 in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Every year, Flock is an empowering experience for me because of the face-time I get with the people I spend much of my year working with remotely. This year was no different, and many new faces were mixed in with the old ones.

The highlights for me were in three forms: the CommOps session, the Diversity Team session, and the Fedora Magazine session. Together with Sachin Kamath, we led the CommOps session. You can read more about our session here:

https://communityblog.fedoraproject.org/metrics-docs-flock-2017/

The Diversity Team and Magazine sessions were also valuable for both teams to get feedback from the rest of the community. In the Diversity Team session, we had many active participants outside of our team that reminded us the importance of narrowing our focus for higher impact. I also attended other interesting sessions held by the community, like the future of fedmsg by Jeremy Cline.

CommOps FAD 🔗

Towards the end of 2017, I worked together with our team in CommOps to organize our own team sprint, or FAD, in 2018. We successfully planned the event and organized it in Brno, Czechia, similar to last year’s Diversity FAD.

More details on this will be found in its own event report!

ListenBrainz indie study 🔗

In my fall semester of 2017, I took on an independent study to further explore the ListenBrainz project. ListenBrainz is an open source social platform to document the music you listen to over time. If you’re familiar with Last.fm or Libre.fm, it’s a similar concept, but the focus is more on the data than the social features. ListenBrainz is supported by the MetaBrainz Foundation, also the guiding body for the more well-known MusicBrainz project.

In my independent study, I had a chance to contribute documentation and community tools (like issue / PR templates), as well as explore how the project gathers and builds metrics. I didn’t make my original milestone of major code contributions to the project, but I better understood the community and tried to help in the areas of low coverage, like documentation.

The experience was insightful for me and provided me an excuse to work on something that I am genuinely passionate about. Music is a powerful part of human culture, and the MetaBrainz Foundation takes a serious approach to documenting music, especially in a technical sense. ListenBrainz represents an opportunity for us to better explore and understand ourselves through our music listening habits. I hope someday that ListenBrainz will be a platform for data journalism and research about music. That’s my dream.

Opensource.com community moderator 🔗

At the beginning of 2017, I was brought on board as an Opensource.com community moderator. Together with other community moderators and site staff, I help contribute new content and source new writers to the site. My invitation to the community moderator team came shortly after the announcement that I received the 2017 People’s Choice Award. When Rikki Endsley invited me to the team, it felt like a natural alignment to my passion for storytelling.

All Things Open 2017 🔗

I was invited to All Things Open, an annual open source conference in Raleigh, by the Opensource.com team. The day before the conference, I met the rest of the team and other community moderators at the Red Hat HQ in Raleigh. We spent the day locked into a room together to hash out plans and goals for the next year. It was a productive opportunity for the team to work together and also a great opportunity to meet the other members of the community.

Some of my best takeaways from this experience were catching coffee with other community moderators, meeting Jim Whitehurst to talk about Opensource.com, and giving my talk, What open source and J.K. Rowling have in common, for the final time.

I hope I have the opportunity to go again next year to meet the awesome team behind Opensource.com. (If you haven’t considered before, come and write for us too!)

Happiness Packet Challenge 🔗

Another unusual milestone for my 2017 was the first rendition of the Happiness Packet Challenge. I was introduced to the Happiness Packets website in 2016. Happiness Packets are an easy way to say thank you to someone who has had a positive impact on you. I came up with a challenge to my friends and network to write one Happiness Packet a day, every day, for a week.

I followed up with the team behind the project to evaluate the impact of this idea, and I was pleasantly surprised. Here’s the number of messages sent for the two weeks prior to the Happiness Packet Challenge, followed by the week of the challenge:

• Week starting 2017-03-27: 2 sent
• Week starting 2017-04-03: 35 sent
• Week starting 2017-04-10 (challenge week): 72 sent

You can read more about the challenge in my original blog post. Keep an eye out for it again in 2018.

https://jwfblog.wpenginepowered.com/2017/04/happiness-packets-challenge/

Living openly 🔗

Earlier in this post, I alluded to how I felt like I began to find myself when I was abroad. My study abroad experience was the beginning of a longer process that leads into present day.

In April, I went public with my depression, both to help take a weight off my shoulder and to be a voice for others who are afraid to speak up. I was always concerned of the reaction from publishing something like that, but I was met with nothing but loving-kindness from friends and strangers. It gave me new confidence to live more openly and wear my values in the open.

The story continued in October, when I decided to delete my Facebook and Instagram accounts.

https://medium.com/@jflory7/cut-the-plug-deleting-facebook-and-instagram-6cbe7c86d9c9

I considered this for a couple of years before, but I pulled the trigger in October. Like many others, it felt almost too much of a task to disconnect myself from this huge network of people and friends. But the negative impacts of it were draining me and trapping me. Since I deleted my accounts, I’ve noticed a positive impact in overall levels of happiness and awareness. However, I don’t think the social media accounts alone are the reason for this.

In the near future, I hope to do a follow-up post to my decision to cut away from the Facebook and Instagram machines. Keep an eye out for more.

2018 🔗

It’s already February in 2018 when I finished this post. This year, I thought it would be the year when I get the post out closer to the new year, but somehow I always slip. In either case, it gives me a chance to take in some of the new opportunities and excitement of the new year before reflecting and looking back.

This year, I’m working an internship with UNICEF to help lead on open source community engagement and supporting the non-technical areas of their MagicBox platform. In the one month I’ve been doing this, I feel like I have tens of articles I could write about, but the experience is still maturing for me.

I also have another round in Chicago to look forward to over the summer. I’ll get to work with the same team as last year on similar projects, and I’m looking forward to going back.

As for the rest, who knows what’s to come? So many things that made 2017 what it was were the things I didn’t expect. The surprises in life are the salt to the regiment of daily life, and add flavor and spice in unexpected ways. I have no idea what my 2018 Year in Review will look like, and that’s okay. I’m looking forward to seeing what will make it in.

Thank you 🔗

Above all, every year, I think back on the people who positively impacted my life and contributed to the “flavor” of my year. A close friend reminded me recently that we all stand on the shoulders of giants. And isn’t it true? We all have our great mentors, great friends, and unexpected sages that help us find our own footing on this great path of life. We become ourselves from the various pieces impacted on us by others.

I’m thankful for all of the people who have made my year into the experience it was. The list is too long to write and I fear I would leave someone out – even significant impacts were made by people who had a short-term role in this last year.

A long time ago, my open source experience was jump-started by someone who did something kind and exceptional for me. It was a continuing trend since that moment. My only aspiration is to pay forward the good will that so many have bestowed unto me.

Thanks for making it this far down, and I hope to see you in 2018. Or who knows – maybe it will just be me reading this far down for next year, when I go to write my next year in review. Hi future me!

This post is my quiz submission for the Spring 2016 semester Quiz #2.

HFOSS Spring 2016, Quiz #2 🔗

Expand each of the following acronyms. 🔗

1. IRC: Internet Relay Chat
2. FOSS: Free and Open Source Software
3. OLPC: One Laptop per Child
4. DVCS: Distributed version control system
5. FSF: Free Software Foundation
6. PR: Pull Request

What is the short, two-letter name for the OLPC computers used in the final project for this class? 🔗

• XO laptops

What is the one-word name for the interface used in the OLPC computers? 🔗

• Sugar (SoaS)

What is the grade level we are targeting our OLPC applications for? 🔗

• 4th grade students

Briefly define the following instructional theories, giving the role of the instructor in each. 🔗

• Didactic: Lecturing; instructor speaks to class about topic
• Dialectic: Similar to the Socratic seminar; discussion-based instructional teaching with interactions between the instructor and the class
• Constructivist: Teaching style that combines experiences with teaching to create a learning experience that lends power to the learner; the instructor acts as a facilitator rather than a traditional lecturer

Several elements are combined in different ways to form the Creative Commons licenses. Match each shorthand given in the list with the description of that license element below. 🔗

1. NC: Non-Commercial; You may not use the work for commercial purposes.
2. SA: Share-alike; You must convey the same rights “downstream” that were conveyed to you by “upstream”.
3. ND: No Derivatives; You may not make changes to the work.
4. BY: Attribution; You must attribute the contributions of the original or upstream creators of the work.

The presence of which license elements make a license “non-free” according to the FSF? 🔗

• (1) Non-Commercial; You may not use the work for commercial purposes.
• (3) No Derivatives; You may not make changes to the work.

Which license element is a copyleft? (give the letter, 1 pt) 🔗

• (2) Share-alike; You must convey the same rights “downstream” that were conveyed to you by “upstream”.

Name two projects that distribute a body of non-software, free culture data, and briefly name or describe the kind of data. 🔗

1. Fedora Project Documentation (CC-BY-SA 3.0): Provides documentation and instructions on using the Fedora operating system and how to achieve certain tasks using it
2. ManyBooks (mixed variety of CC licensed works): Provides downloads of freely licensed literature, novels, and books

List or describe “the four R’s” as a shorthand for the freedoms attached to software for it to be considered “free and open source”. 🔗

1. Read
2. Run
3. Revise
4. Redistribute

Bonus Questions 🔗

True or False: You cannot sell GPL’d software. 🔗

• False

True or False: You can fork a GPL licensed Project and release it under an MIT license? 🔗

• False

True or False: You can fork a MIT licensed Project and release it under an GPL license? 🔗

• True

When does a work become “copyrighted” by an author? 🔗

• When it is created

This post is my quiz submission for the Spring 2016 semester Quiz #1.

HFOSS Spring 2016, Quiz #1 🔗

What is the name of the version control system we use in this course? 🔗

• Git

Bonus: Give the name for another version control system. 🔗

• Mercurial

We refer to sites that host source code as “forges”. What is the name of the primary forge used in this course? 🔗

• GitHub

Rearrange the following to make the best matches. 🔗

For the next several questions, rearrange the items in the column on the right, as necessary, so that they best match the names of key figures in the column on the left.

For example:

1. Randall Munroe
   1. Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
2. Zach Weiner
   1. XKCD
3. Walt Disney
   1. Mickey Mouse

…becomes…

1. Randall Munroe
   1. XKCD
2. Zach Weiner
   1. Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
3. Walt Disney
   1. Mickey Mouse

1. Andrew Tannenbaum
   1. Minix
2. Linus Torvalds
   1. Linux
3. Bruce Perens
   1. Debian Free Software Guidelines
4. Richard Stallman
   1. Free Software Foundation / GNU Project

We discussed several concepts involving rights, restrictions, and licensing. Match the term on the left with the most appropriate description on the right. 🔗

1. Trademark
   1. Lasts as long as used & defended
2. Copyright
   1. Life of the author plus 70 years
3. Patent
   1. 20 year term

1. Trademark
   1. Protects consumers from confusing one product with another
2. Copyright
   1. Arises as soon as a work takes tangible form
3. Patent
   1. Precedence is given to the first to file an application

List or describe “the four R’s” as a shorthand for the freedoms attached to software for it to be considered “free and open source”. 🔗

1. Read
2. Run
3. Revise
4. Redistribute