Although I started writing code already at the age of 13 (generation C64), and I am a professional web and backend developer since 2007, I only started contributing to open source software quite recently - apart from the occasional bug report.

what is open source software?

Quote from Wikipedia:

Open-source software (OSS) is a type of computer software in which source code is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose.

interesting tidbit

The term was coined by Tim O’Reilly, Eric Raymon and Bruce Perens in 1998 - that’s just 20 years!

why care about open source software?

The company, I currently work for, makes heave use of open source software - maybe not right from the beginning, as the company predates the term open source software, but at least from the very start of the internet-age.

open source software in use (excerpt)

  • Drupal / WordPress
  • Roundcube / Dovecot / Postfix
  • Apache / nginx
  • PHP / Python
  • Linux
  • and many more…

why would you not contribute to open source software?

  • work and family related time constraints
  • money - at least at work

turning point

  • among others, I am maintaining a 14 year old custom intranet application built on a Zope 2 / Python 2 stack
  • Python 2 support ends 01. January 2020
  • that means I have to migrate
    • the application server (Zope 2)
    • the application itself
    • the database (ZODB, a NoSQL database before the name was coined)
  • resources - a team of one -> mission impossible!

… but … Zope is open source software!

  • literally: the source code is open - available for everybody to read and modify, so no legal restrictions
  • but that does not mean there is no business interest/money involved

Despite its age maturity Zope is still widely used, indirectly by the very popular and rock stable CMS Plone, but also for big custom applications, for instance union.cms, which gets used by ver.di and DGB.

That means that there is a broad interest of companies and unions alike to keep Zope going.

Focussing on the core competence, it is not always the best idea to employ software engineers yourself - at least not to build the basis technology.

Luckily, there are quite some consultants out there working with the Zope / Plone universe, e.g. gocept gmbh & co. kg, which get hired by companies and the mentioned unions, in order to work on Zope. gocept on the other hand also has great interest in Zope’s future, and therefore also heavily contributes back to the Zope universe, both with code contributions, but also by hosting so called sprints.

Sounds like a win win win situation!

sprint what?

A sprint is a fixed period of time during all kind of software developers come together to work on a certain project. In this case, the migration of Zope from Python 2.7 to Python 3.

history of Zope sprints @gocept

open source is fun and you’ll learn a lot!

  • new tools
    • travis
    • tox
    • sphinx
    • …
  • best practices
  • different coding styles
  • software architecture
  • collaboration
  • better utilization of GitHub and all its features
  • …

… but also historical facts …

src/ZPublisher/HTTPResponse.py

# Note that as of May 98, IE4 ignores cookies with
# quoted cookie attr values, so only the value part
# of name=value pairs may be quoted.

one last thing

Contributing to open source software should not exclusively be at the expense of your free time!

Ask your boss - today! Eventually, you’ll be surprised - so was I.

notes

I presented this topic as a lightning talk at Mobile Stammtisch/GDG Regensburg on 20. December 2018.