Floor Drees - SOS: Sustainable Open Source
Channel: DevOpsDays London
Date: 2022-11-24

This is video is from the DevOpsDays London conference, held at the Oval on September 29th and 30th 2022. In this video, you'll hear from a top expert in the field of DevOps. We hope you enjoy the talk and take away valuable information that you can apply to your own work.

Free and Open Source Software is eating the world, but is at the same time a victim of its own success. Large enterprises rely on libraries maintained by a single individual who never suspected their project would take off like it did - and they are in over their head. Sometimes projects are handed over to other maintainers, who don’t always have the best of intentions. Individuals or organizations may restrict the use of their technology or EOL versions of their software, posing real challenges to organizations depending on that technology. How can we as organizations, foundations and initiatives, and individuals contribute to the viability and sustainability of open source? What role could an Open Source Program Office (or OSPO for short) play? What are some of the ways to support open source developers? Find out when - and how - to contribute with your time, versus when to pull out your checkbook. We need better support systems to avoid maintainer burnout, and to avoid regressions from creeping into our systems.

Floor is a Staff Developer Advocate at Aiven(.io), the open source DBaaS company. Previously she worked in Developer Relations roles at Grafana Labs and Microsoft. She co-organizes devopsdays Amsterdam and devopsdays Eindhoven, as well as several meetup groups including contributing.today, a monthly virtual-first-an-only meetup on open source topics.

Floor is an active member of the Ruby community, organizing conferences and meetups. In 2020 she worked on the Git Inclusion Summit with members of Google’s Open Source Program Office, for the 40-or-so core contributors of Git.

In her spare time, Floor tends to her chickens, dog and son (not necessarily in that order), and she knits.