2020-06-18 –, Main Video Conference Room
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.
UnlockOpen
Tobie Langel is the founder of UnlockOpen, a boutique consulting firm that helps large organizations build a strong open source culture and leverage it to recruit, retain, and foster top software engineering talent, improve team efficiency, and boost innovation.
His clients include Google, Microsoft, Intel, and Mozilla.
Tobie Langel is the facilitator of AMP’s Advisory Committee and sits on the Advisory Board of OASIS Open Projects.
Previously, he was a member of Facebook’s Open Source and Web Standards team, and was Facebook’s Advisory Committee representative at W3C.
Previous speaking engagements include: QCON, JSConf.eu, Linux Foundation Open Source Summit, Open Source Strategy Forum, FOSDEM, OW2con, OpenExpo Europe, All Things Open.
Tobie Langel is known for having co-maintained the Prototype JavaScript Framework. He also edited a number of Web standards, including WebIDL, and led W3C’s Web platform testing effort.