• Call to apply for FSFE support for your local project

  It is no secret that the FSFE's activities are only possible with the priceless help of our contributors and supporters around Europe. In return we support local engagement with our expertise, information material, networks or even financially. To help formalize this process, we run our second call for FSFE community projects.

  From international campaigns to local information booths, our successful spreading of software freedom is based on many shoulders from active members within our community. This is why ever since the FSFE e.V. has been keen on supporting initiatives and activities from local FSFE groups to single supporters. We happily support you with our expertise, our information material, our networks or even financially.

• DataStax optimizes Cassandra for Kubernetes with K8ssandra

  DataStax is creating a new way for users to get the open source Cassandra database running on the Kubernetes cloud-native platform, with the K8ssandra project released on Nov. 18.

  The release comes during the same week as the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2020 virtual event, which is hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation to highlight the latest innovations across the Kubernetes landscape.

  Kubernetes is a container orchestration platform that has become increasingly popular as it helps to enables multi-cloud deployment for applications. Like many other database vendors, DataStax has been using what is known as a Kubernetes Operator to help users get the Cassandra database running on Kubernetes.

• How to Give and Receive Technical Help in Open Source Communities

  “As a developer, it’s exciting and challenging to stay up to speed with the latest trends in technology. Every day, new languages, frameworks and devices capture our attention and spur conversations in meetups, forums and chats. However, our developer community is made of people, not tools, and it’s fascinating to explore its sociopolitical aspects. We are always beginners at some things and experts at others. Along the way from beginner to expert, we ask a lot of questions, but it can be intimidating to ask for help.”

  This is how Sonia Singla, Cloud Native Computing Foundation intern and mentee, kicked off her talk at this year’s Kubecon+CloudNativeCon North America. Fresh off her CNCF internship with Thanos and Outreachy placement at Mozilla, Singla took the lessons she’s learned over the last two years in both toxic and welcoming environments to offer advice for both how to give and receive technical help in open source communities.

• New JOINUP Compatibility Checker Permalink

  The JLA analyses now more than 50 open licenses

  The main innovation of the JLA is the possibility to SELECT open licenses based on their content

  The JLA was also an example of synergy with the SPDX project of the Linux Foundation. The JLA adopted the SPDX license identifier as a standard and is linked with the license full text that is provided from the SPDX data base.

If you go to any hip product management conference, you'll hear about product teams. At a minimum, a product team has a product manager, but it often includes roles in marketing, technical architecture, and even user experience (UX). Previous articles in this series have covered open source as a supply chain model and defining products in the open source software supply chain, and this article specifically focuses on the role of product management within the product team.

Product managers and product marketing managers are the two most common product management roles, but product management can be further split into any number of roles, including competitive analysis, business strategy, sales enablement, revenue growth, content creation, sales tools, and more. With a very large product, even the product management role may be broken up into separate roles. You may even hear titles like technical marketing manager, product evangelist, and business owner, not to mention people-management roles for groups of individual contributor roles. For the purpose of this article, I refer to all of these roles collectively as "product management."

For the most part, 2020 was actually pretty good for open source. Enterprise-level companies embraced open source software even further, containers and the cloud became even more crucial to both businesses and consumers, the Linux community found a larger piece of the support pie from large manufacturers like Microsoft, and distributions continued to wow.

That doesn't mean the year was full of celebrations, as there were some rather cringe-worthy moments. A good number of major open source projects suffered from poorly written or out of date documentation, DockerHub started throttling image downloads, etc.

There was, however, one particular issue open source faced in 2020 that will not only go down as a thorn in the side of the community for the year, but will probably haunt us moving forward.

All (pure) open source licenses allow the commercial use of that software. Hence, anybody can take the open source software, rebrand it and then sell it online or offline.

Companies can use this approach for their own benefit; They can take a software like LibreOffice, modify it and change its name to make it better, and then sell it along with their support in their own local communities. Collabora Office – for example – is a fork of LibreOffice, and Collabora just add their modifications to LibreOffice and then sell it under a different name.

Localization efforts can go even further in this; Some companies in Brazil, for example, offer to perform the digital transfer of traditional companies from proprietary software to open source software, and hence they can earn money by providing logistics and support services to the users of these open source software.

All of this without having to get the consent of the original developers or any written permission from them, since open source licenses already allow such use cases in their definitions.

This type of usage is extremely popular in ERP software; One open source ERP software becomes so popular, then another takes its source code, rebrand it & modify it and then publish it under a different name in their own local community (E.g India).

Still, one point to take in mind is that it is very highly unethical to take without giving back. If you find an open source software very useful to you or your business, then you should give something back to the original developers of that software who gave it for you for free.