Open Source Contribution Policies That Don't Suck

title: Open Source Contribution Policies That Don't Suck

date: 2018-10-23 08:00:00

desc:

Open source contribution policies are long, boring, overlooked documents, that generally suck. They’re designed to protect the company at all costs. But in the process, end up hurting engineering productivity, and morale. Sometimes they even unknowingly put corporate IP at risk.

But that’s not inevitable.

It’s possible to write open source contribution policies that make engineers lives easier, boost morale and productivity, reduce attrition, and attract new talent. And it’s possible to do so while reducing the company’s IP risk, not increasing it.

In this talk, we’ll look at the general structure of contribution policies, examples in the wild, and tactics to make them suck less.

We’ll also look at how to turn these policies into self-service software, preventing the tedious email back and forth between engineering and legal in most cases and making open source contribution a breeze.

timezone: Europe/London

image: https://on.notist.cloud/slides/deck1939/thumb-0.jpg

notistSlug: open-source-contribution-policies-that-don-t-suck

notistID: TETzxX

talkSlug: contribution-policies

slug: 2018/ossummit/contribution-policies

year: 2018

notistUrls:

https://speaking.unlockopen.com/TETzxX/open-source-contribution-policies-that-don-t-suck
https://speaking.unlockopen.com/TETzxX/
https://speaking.unlockopen.com/TETzxX

event: Open Source Summit Europe

address: Edinburgh, UK

lat: 55.953252

long: -3.188267

countryCode: GB

url:

pdf: https://on.notist.cloud/pdf/deck-656b85e72a924043.pdf

slidedeck:

$What is a policy that doesn’t suck? Legal perspective\* Minimizes risk. Avoid: • giving away competitive advantage, • giving away IP that can be used defensively (or—shudders— offensively), • reputational damages and accidental infringements. Consistently followed across the company. Keep contribution under your radar. Avoid compliance issues. Savvy about written information. Sometimes you want a paper-trail (e.g. compliance), sometimes you don’t. * IANAL (I am not a lawyer). Please come and see me if you are and want to help me improve this slide. Doesn’t drown critical problems in a sea of menial issues.$
$Contributing outside of work “How does your employer's IP agreement/policy affect your freetime contributions to open source unrelated to your work?” Other 4% Don't know 37% But again… this is a highly biased sample. “Respondents were sampled randomly from traﬃc and qualifying activity Yes! 47% to licensed open source repositories on GitHub.com and invited to complete the survey through a dialog box. A smaller sample was recruited from open source communities sourced outside of GitHub, \[…\]” Must ask 12% Source: GitHub 2017 open source survey (http://opensourcesurvey.org/2017/).$