Scotland Open Source Ashley Nicolson

On this episode we welcome Mike McQuaid, a long standing maintainer (10+ years) and project lead of Homebrew. We talk about Mike’s journey of becoming a maintainer and how he manages to sustain a healthy relationship with his project and it’s community by establishing a good work life balance and having a clear definition of a maintainer’s responsibilities. As a strong advocate for supporting maintainers Mike describes how he and Homebrew’s team of maintainers deal with the negativity of both the job and certain members of the community by the use of tools, bots and a supportive approach to day to day working with one another. We also talk about Homebrew’s progression to becoming a member project of the Software Freedom Conservancy and the benefits it brings to both the project and those involved.

We're joined by Dr Bernd Porr from the Engineering school of Glasgow University to discuss how and why he has introduced open source to his Biomedical Engineering students. We talk about the importance of teaching open source, especially those not in computer science studies, as well as what would encourage universities to implement more open source education. We also delve into how open source has benefited the neuroscience community with The Human Brain Project and Dr Porr's own contributions of the mapping of the limbic systems – plus I learn a few things about the reward system in Rats. Lastly talk about the University's support of open source by other departments, what advice he would give to contributors and Dr Porr's (many amazing) personal projects.

In this episode we talk to a well know figure in Scottish open source and influencer Jonathan Riddell, the creator of Kubuntu and KDE Neon (among other amazing open source contributions). We talk about his vision for KDE Neon and the KDE community by bringing open source apps to a wider audience through proprietary app platforms. We also discuss how we can apply the principles of open development to offline communities as well as the Scottish government and why we think its needed. Lastly we highlight the events that OpenUK, which Jonathan is the chair of the awards committee, are planning and their aspirations to promote open tech in the UK.

In this episode we talk to long time open source veteran Greg Sutcliffe, a community data scientist and part of the community team on the Ansible project. We explore the exploitations of open source developers and working for exposure is something we should not encourage. We discuss and contemplate how to encourage companies and government funded institutes to adopt open source from in-house developers, specific PR efforts and education on open source business models.

It's a not a topic that us open source maintainers and contributors want to think about too often. What if I get hit by a bus tomorrow? What happens to my code and all the users that utilise it? In this episode we invite Gary Ewan Park, a senior software developer from the core team at the Chocolatey project, to talk about his experiences when the unfortunate situation of one of their package maintainers had sadly passed away. How the project had to approach this difficult situation, leading to the project to place mechanisms and structure in place to promote and ensure the longevity of their package maintainers code.

Super excited to welcome everyone to Scotland Open Source first episode! We have the amazing pleasure of speaking to Tom Jones, an extremely successful tech and hackerspace organiser and FreeBSD contributor. We chat about our experiences with open source in education, hackerspaces in Aberdeen, fantastic advice on organising meetups, campGND, FreeBSD and Google Summer of Code.