Sustainable OSS Development
Bozhidar Batsov
Bozhidar is the author of RuboCop and the editor of the community Ruby style guide. He's involved in a myriad of open-source projects, mostly related to Ruby, Clojure and Emacs. Many people would probably describe him as an Emacs zealot (and they would be right)
About
Building a useful OSS project is a lot of work. Maintaining a successful project over an extended period is a ton of work. Most of it is neither appreciated nor paid for. Often, maintainers have to deal with unreasonable expectations and hostility towards their projects and them by association. Many maintainers quickly lose their motivation or burn out in the process. Good projects get abandoned to rot. Is there a way out? Can we do things better?
In this talk w,e'll cover some of the main challenges for OSS projects:
- Setting up good processes around a project
- Marketing your work
- Building a community
- Raising funding – Work/life balance
We'll approach the topic from the perspective of a project maintainer, but we believe that everyone will learn something useful, regardless of their level of involvement with OSS projects.