Sep 2016: The Risk of the Commons

Open Source, as a development methodology has revolutionized how we innovate, how we develop, and how we consume software. Now, any cutting edge technology software is presumed to be open source. So what does software methodology have to learn from 19th century economics of farming? Unfortunately quite a lot. While the open source methodology allows tremendous speed in the rate of innovation; but all too frequently we consume without any idea of how well software is maintained. This has led us to unhappy situations where we find that the most heavily used encryption library in the world, was maintained by 4 people, in their spare time. Or the incredibly important GPG suite of tools - was maintained by two people, one of whom was an intern. Of course these aren't new problems, but how do we solve them without experiencing a tragedy of the commons.

This talk is presented by Apache Software Foundation's David Nalley.