How to Build Open Source Sustainability

What takes an open source project from a hobby to international codebase that the world’s top companies rely on? How do you balance the wishes of the individual, creative contributor with that of corporate-backed finance and governance? How do you make the open source community a welcoming one? Open source sustainability and all these questions were on the table when The New Stack Editor in Chief Alex Williams sat down at our first Makers broadcast from Shanghai, China, at the Open Source Summit. For senior staff engineer at VMWare, Bryan Liles, this sustainability is all about the intersection of different open source projects within broader ecosystems that have a strong balance of governance and motivated community. Dan Kohn, executive director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), says open source sustainability relies on commitment to continue building, supporting and stabilizing core infrastructure and critical libraries for important upstream dependencies. He says the whole purpose of CNCF is that, when organizations recognize there’s open source infrastructure that matters, there is a way to build a community that can financially and publicly support it moving forward. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/4ZFlprmD7YA