How OSS Conquered the World: Insight from Veteran Developers

FOSSA staff engineer and serial startup CTO Konstantin Gredeskoul is joined by Bryan Cantrill, the co-founder and CTO at Oxide Computer Company, for an informative and entertaining podcast on open source software.

The two veteran developers take listeners on a journey from the earliest days of open source to present, chronicling the highs and lows along the way. They also address important elements of open source licenses from a developer's perspective, including warranty disclosures, contributors, copyright notices, and more.

Finally, Bryan and Konstantin discuss the fate of MySQL, and opine on ZSH, Bash, and TCSH.

Segments

Start - 2:45: Introduction

2:45 - 6:00: Predictions on open source: Did Bryan and Konstantin expect it to get this big? And why do they think open source will continue to grow?

6:00 - 20:45: Reflections on shareware and the origins of open source and software development, including the eternal September of 1993, usenet, and the Australian Internet Awards

20:45 - 24:30: Open source licenses that surprised

24:30 - 32:00: The relationship between open source licenses and patents

32:00 - 44:00: Thoughts on the MIT License, GPL, and the philosophies and principles behind stronger and weaker OSS licenses.

44:00 - 47:15: Copyright notices

47:15 - 50:30: Warranty disclosures

50:30 - 56:00: What happened to MySQL

56:00 - 105:30: Closing and re-licensing open source projects, and perspectives on listing project contributors in copyright notices

105:30 - 107:45: Why Bryan likes the Apache License 2.0 and Mozilla Public License 2.0

107:45 - Close: Thoughts on shells like ZSH, Bash, and TCSH

About the Participants

Bryan Cantrill, Co-founder and CTO at Oxide Computer Company

Bryan Cantrill is a pioneer of systems software. From the guts of the kernel to client-code on the browser and much in between, he's helped spearhead numerous developments. Along the way he's helped design, implement, and ship DTrace, a facility for systemic dynamic instrumentation, co-founded the Fishworks group at Sun, and (prior to being Joyent's CTO) was VP of Engineering at Joyent, where he built out the teams responsible for the core technology portfolio. Bryan is also a popular speaker at technology conferences, with appearances at USENIX, LISA, OSCON, Velocity, and Surge, among others.

Konstantin Gredeskoul, Staff Software Engineer at FOSSA, Serial Startup CTO

Konstantin Gredeskoul is a veteran software engineer, architect, and CTO. He's spent more than two decades building web software, working at every level of the stack, including architecture, DevOps automation, front-end, and feature development. He’s served as CTO of four VC-funded startups and is a frequent speaker at tech conferences across the globe, with his presentations reaching nearly a million views. Konstantin is an avid open source contributor who has authored nearly 50 ruby gems with more than 35 million cumulative downloads; he also contributed to the libraries written in C/C++, CMake, Arduino, Bash, and Chef.