Open Talk on Open Source

Robert:
Hello everyone. Welcome to Open Talk On Open Source. This is our premier episode and I am Robert Jacobi, director of Global Alliances at BotGuard, and my wonderful co-host for today, Courtney Robertson. Courtney, tell us about yourself.

Courtney:
Hello everybody. I am a developer advocate these days focusing on all things open source, a long time contributor to the WordPress Project. I think I’ve been around in the contributor space since 2009, have a background in education and teaching, and found my way into open source long before I found my way into WordPress. So happy to be with you discussing all the things open source today, Robert.

Robert:
It’s awesome. I’m so happy that we can do this kind of podcast on Do the Woo since it’s not necessarily going to be woo focused in the traditional WooCommerce Do the Woo kinds of ways.

Courtney:
Absolutely. I think there’s a lot of other open source. What really inspired me into this show was there’s a lot of ways that open source impacts our bubble of WordPress, and so we have an understanding as both being in the WordPress community in particular, we have an understanding of open source inside of WordPress, but there’s a whole big ocean of open source beyond WordPress as well that sometimes has a way of having some implications for what we’re doing in WordPress. So I was excited when Bob reached out about this show in particular. What draws you to the show, Robert? Why are you interested in open source broadly?

Robert:
So I love how you teed it up for me there, Courtney. The driver and mission of this show is to bring the greater open source world to folks primarily in WordPress, but even folks outside of WordPress who want to know how WordPress interacts with open source. The stack is huge. The amount of pieces and cogs and pegs and wheels and any other weird similes I can make are huge. Everything from the real deep bottom of the stack of Linux all the way up to JavaScript libraries that are powering Gutenberg and all that. And I think it’s critical for us to be able to communicate with those other open source communities, let them know what’s going on in WordPress, WooCommerce and vice versa. A lot of folks, I’ll just say anecdotally, don’t really have a full understanding of all the open source pieces and puzzles pieces and parts that go together to make WordPress the dominant open source content management system.

Courtney:
Absolutely, yeah. I think that there’s been some recent implications without diving into any particular news at this time, but in the future we’ll probably take a look at some of the implications that other projects have had on what’s going on broadly. One of the things that I can point to that WordPress especially is working through is the PHP folks are really ramping up the pace at which they ship releases. And that is having a wide impact, whether it is versions of PHP that hosts support or the chicken and egg scenario of not just core, but the plugins, are we adequately supporting whatever version of PHP that is currently available. The hosts can’t push faster than what the plugin developers and all of the ecosystem are doing. So there’s a lot to be learned about how the other projects impact us, how we can play a part in what the other projects are doing and just what we need to keep on the radar about how all of these things pile together to form what is now WordPress.

My first time ever using open source came about in college I mentioned of a background of a school teacher. I had the worst possible in the education space. We have this term LRE, which in America anyway, which means least restrictive environment. I had an MRE, I had not meal rations, but a most restrictive environment. The year was 1999. I might be dating myself a bit. It was an intro to C programming. So this was my first foray beyond Excel and access into actual programming. And so real code? Yes, real coding, yes, I had that in college except that we had paper and pencil, not even punch cards. We had paper and pencil and the professor had his computer on the screen. It was an evening class. The sun was setting the blinds were like mini blinds, not like blackout curtains. In 99, the projectors were not bright, so I could hardly see anything on the screen and I certainly couldn’t understand what was going on.

And when we occasionally went to the computer lab, we had to bring along our floppy discs mount and unmount them from the network drive, move them to the local machine temporarily to then Telmet, or people that are old enough will remember this. There was a command line interface to Telnet into the real server where you wrote in PICO and VI the precursor to Vim, and you would write in that environment, save your file, then you would issue a remote compile command, which was not part of an IDE, not part of VS code, right? So just imagine me who doesn’t know open source struggling through all of this. And I say that this is open source because my real saving grace was not the fact that we were dealing with Unix machines not open source. And so I don’t know if Pico VI were or not, but the saving grace was that I had a friend that was a cop sci major back home that lent me a spare laptop, which who in 1999 had spare laptops, but we stripped it down and put command line red hat on there.

So I had the most restrictive environment for learning. I would be the only one to bring my laptop as one of the few females in a class of 30 people with poor learning circumstances. And I learned to mount and unmount the floppy discs, put my coat on there, and then could go to the computer lab when I had to submit the assignments. But I was able to work locally because Red Hat was just a single variety, I believe of Red Hat at the time. There were still flavors of Linux, but a single variety of Red Hat back then, not the enterprise edition. And so Red Hat was open source, and so I could put it on as the operating system and work locally and squat the electric because again, getting the looks, because in 1999, people didn’t have laptops, so people weren’t squatting electric outlets in as badly. But that was my entrance into open source. And somehow if you’re like, whoa, I don’t understand because maybe I’m not a developer, that’s okay. I didn’t understand what I was doing either. I barely got through that class, somehow managed to come out as DevRel and still love the work of open source. So I had a most restrictive environment. Robert, please tell me that you had a better foray into what is open source and experience at using open source than I did

Robert:
My open source. I’m going to try to avoid dating myself. I’ll let you do that for me. But I did have a laptop in 1994, not a spare 2000, started a web development agency focusing on Java, which was open source ish

Courtney:
Question mark.

Robert:
So after the Oracle takeover and all that madness, and these are the kinds of fun, crazy topics we’ll get into, started an agency of course had to build our own custom proprietary CMS because that’s what you did in 2000. And after a few years was like, this is a pain in the butt. Our team was either going to be maintaining it or servicing our clients, and we decided it was more important to service our clients, dumped our in-house CMS, which was lightning fast. We built our own MVC, Geek Talk, Geek Talk, Geek Talk, and started looking for something in the open source space. So we knew that this OS world existed and it was really about what can we best utilize, take advantage of our time, our capabilities. And there was something called WordPress at the time. It was so quickly discarded, you wouldn’t believe

Courtney:
It was a blogging platform then. It was truly just for blogging.

Robert:
It really was. And the kinds of projects we worked on were significantly more complicated. We went with Joomla and that led to a really deep dive for our company and me personally into open source. We became the lead North American Joomla web shop and really were able to extend, because it was open source, because of all the benefits of open source, we were able to for a small shop, work with huge companies because if we get hit by a meteor, there were other developers that could pick up the pace. We could extend into the proprietary systems on premises because all the code was there. So it was open source was mind opening beforehand, but it was truly life-changing. After when we realized all the possibilities that Open Source allowed us, I wound up going through the sort of the open source community life cycle, eventually actually becoming president of Open source matters, the sort of holding firm for Joomla. So president of Joomla actually for a little bit. So I’ve seen really from one end to the other of at least a single open source project and obviously been involved in others as you have Courtney.

Courtney:
That’s fantastic. I’m trying to envision you giving presentations for the WordPress community in the spirit of Josepha and think you have your own way about this, but essentially being president was, I’m gathering roughly the equivalent to executive director that we have.

Robert:
Exactly. That’s pretty much it though, and I can’t wait till we get to this topic in one of our shows in the future, the differences in how communities are sort of structured, whether that’s, I’m going to use the term nicely politically structured or just legally structured. And there are pros and cons to how all the major communities do it, and it’s fascinating to dive deeply into what those things look like.

Courtney:
Tell me a little, and then I will share with you as well. You mentioned involvement. I mean, being the president of Joomla means that some, you actually went from using open source and or serving customers with it to helping contribute to the actual project itself. Can you tell me what you recall as your first, or take a guess at what your first contribution back to open source looked like?

Robert:
Oh, this one’s easy. The first contribution was a sponsorship to a Joomla Day in Chicago.

Courtney:
I love that you said a sponsorship is a contribution. Thank you. I work at GoDaddy enough said on that.

Robert:
It was a financial sponsor to help the event run. We get our slow sponsorship benefits, but I mean, Joomla never had the kind of mind share that even WordPress back the birthing days ever had just because of communities were very different and geographically different were press being much more a US initial focused, whereas Joomla was European. But yeah, it was a financial contribution to actually getting a Joomla Day Chicago going, and that was really exciting.

Courtney:
Fantastic. So my take was not my most restrictive environment story. There was no way I would have known at that point in time how to submit issues or any of that. I could browse the web command line, but that that’s just dating me in terms of actually doing something useful though, doing useful things for open source. I had installed Noodle, which is an LMS platform, a learning management platform in the early two thousands. And at that time, the proprietary version people would’ve known, would’ve been Blackboard. I used it some in my grad program in college, but the open source equivalent is Noodle. And with Noodle, that one was, it was interesting setting it up. My school did not provide a means for me to collect my students Microsoft office exam prep materials that they were doing in our class. And they did not provide me with a computer that had a floppy disk, but they wanted the kids to put their work on floppy discs and give it to me.

The teacher that I had replaced a year before was collecting everything on paper and being much closer in age to my students at that time. If I had hit tab on the computer, I would know the difference between tab and spacebar if I looked at the digital copies, not the paper copies. So I needed it to be digital. So I set up Noodle on a machine myself and made it for my classroom. The school wasn’t particularly thrilled, but I got it done. And the part where I started contributing to open source was in the midst of that, sending in some feature requests about how I wanted to see things. I wanted a more robust blog option, and Noodle circa 2005 six did not necessarily have some of those features. So I was constantly sending in feature requests and participating in the support forums from Noodle and learning from others, asking my own support questions, but answering what I could. And a lot of the people that would’ve been there were also educators and things of that sort too. Noodle’s equivalent to events were Noodle noots. And I almost found my way to one of those, but I still have not yet.

Robert:
I love that you actually mentioned Noodle because the LMS space, or back in my day we called it the CBT space. So from computer-based training to learning management systems, a lot of those folks were much more open to open source in general just because …

Courtney:
Budgets in schools.

Robert:
Yeah, you have educators, you have people who are curious, who want to learn, understand, dig into what’s going on, and why is something working that way. And open source tools allow you to do that. Let’s all try to dig into teams and see how that works. Good luck.

Courtney:
Yeah, that’s for sure. And now we see things like in the WordPress space and push among the learning management options that allow you to make WordPress into an LMS joining forces together these days. And I think that’s going to be interesting to see how that develops as well over the next few years. But yeah, that beginning early part, I began as a contributor by being in the support forums. WordPress, I began as a contributor because I forgot to buy a ticket in time. So the only way I could get in was to volunteer to be one of the attendee guest check-in people circa 2000 WordCamp Mid Atlantic. And I thank Aaron Brazall because that was my interest into the WordPress community.

Robert:
Oh my gosh. We could just do a whole episode on thanking the people who helped us get into the community. Oh my goodness.

Courtney:
Oh yes.

Robert:
My first WordPress was WordCamp Chicago. I was actually a speaker because I was president of Joomla at the time.

Courtney:
Wow.

Robert:
I had not actually really done anything in WordPress. That’s how crazy it was.

Courtney:
Yeah, and as you mentioned that I think about the ways that our community will eventually overlap as well. I know that there is an initiative going on throughout Europe. America has its own that I’m kind of involved with. In Europe, we have the Cyber Resiliency Act, and we saw many of the leading open source CMS, so content management systems all join forces together to draft a response to the Cyber Resiliency Act to ensure protection of the open source contributors largely and the expectations in that direction in America. A fun area that I’ve been working on, I don’t know how much I’ve shared with you or not on this, is related to SBOMS. So people are like, what’s an SBOM? I asked that question a year ago today when I was at Open Source Summit through the Linux Foundation. So an SBOM, if you build a house, you’ve got a list of all the materials that make up your house from all of the plywoods, all the drywall materials.

If you’re building for a business, you get a longer list, I would guess because going to be bigger. So bill of materials is a common industrial term. And in the software space we have software supply chain management, which means WordPress itself is going to also be dependent upon all of these other libraries that we call in to WordPress. We have multiple languages that make up the WordPress software that we know. But in addition to that, there is software that hosts use that could be part of your chain. There are little packages of libraries into some of that software that the hosts are using to maintain your WordPress hosting environment. So then you add in plugins, and I’m sure that NASA that recently had a WordPress site launch had a very long list of making sure that they knew all of the supply chain of all of their software, because governments tend to to know every bit of details. So in the US, there is a group working on issuing some white papers that is part of the Department of Homeland Security, but it’s something that I’ve been working on in that direction as well, helping to draft some of the white papers that come out, attending meetings, speaking on behalf of really the web dev community at these things. And I got connected because I went to a Linux Foundation Open Source Summit a year ago.

Robert:
That trail of accountability, huge. And we see it with, gosh, even was it yesterday or two days ago? Someone tried to inject something in some Linux stack thing. Everyone needs to know, it’s almost like buying local food where it comes from. But when you buy from the Mega Mart grocery store, how many hands touched this? And were some of them clean? Were some of them dirty? All that kind of stuff. And because WordPress is honestly the smallest part of the puzzle, people are like, yeah, I have WordPress. I hooked it up to a database. But was it MySQL? Was it Maria? Was it, I mean, you can do for a long time. We could easily connect up to Postgres. Heck, it’s open source. I’m sure there are connectors for other databases that we don’t even think of. So whether that’s MySQL or Oracle and so on.

Courtney:
And the WordPress playground is using SQL Lite.

Robert:
SQL Lite, that’s right.

Courtney:
Yeah. It goes on and on to understand all of the infrastructure, not just about WordPress and all of your plugins and themes and maybe SaaS services that connect to your site, but also what’s under your site and what’s under the servers. On and on it goes. And so there are so many layers to all of this, which is just fantastic. So I can’t wait to dig into some of those different areas.

Robert:
And that’s it. And that’s why we’re going to be here, not just once a month, starting twice a month, we got bigger plans, but starting twice a month to touch on the topics that have happened in the last week or two. Talk about the forks that may or may not have happened. The technical issues have wonderful guest speakers across the pantheon of open source projects that

Courtney:
Not sponsored by,

Robert:
Not sponsored by. Oh, okay. Now I got the joke.

Courtney:
There you go.

Robert:
The Expanse of Projects. How’s that work? Does that sound better?

Courtney:
There you go. Although we enjoy all the hosts,

Robert:
But really being able to get involved, touch on current topics, but also dive deeply into how certain projects do their thing, what are their connections with WordPress WooCommerce, what we run our lives off of on a day-to-day basis.

Courtney:
Absolutely. And I want to look too at areas where, let’s say that it’s down to a business owner, maybe a small medium sized business owner, building sites for their clients. What are the things that they need to know and understand? And then maybe what is the responsibility of if they select their hosts because the hosts support some of the tooling, if they partner with certain themes, plugins, because maybe they are the most aware of what’s going on in PHP and or helping with things like PHP, the language or PHP Code sniffer. Those are decision-making choices. I don’t necessarily think everyone should contribute to every layer of open source involved in what they’re delivering, that you would have no time, certainly not. But knowing that your host cares about the JavaScript Foundation, knowing that the theme and or plugin companies that are depending on PHP code sniffer to address the programmatic standards in what your site is, might be a deciding factor. And so how do you look for some of those things? What is the responsibility of the ecosystem to care for all of the things that we also depend upon, not just also caring for WordPress itself. So it will be a fun puzzle to untangle as we get going. I think Robert

Robert:
And I love that you mentioned, what does the ecosystem need to care about? And I know we’ll touch on this over the year, but how do open source ecosystems take care of their people? Because without the people, these projects die. And I’ve seen projects die because of lack of nurturing, feeding, and expanding future generations who will take part in open source.

Courtney:
Absolutely, yes.

Robert:
Also, I’m going to leave it on that positive note. We’re going to expand open source, expand open source knowledge. Thank you so much, Courtney. Thank you so much. Audience, Do the Woo. Bob Dunn, of course, who hides under BobWP. We look forward to catching up with you in two weeks. See you soon. Cheers.