The Coming Open Source Sustainability Crisis

This is a virtual event, be sure to register here as well to attend! https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_xwzFTx13SqmUxDxV7gFwnw

The .NET ecosystem has radically transformed over the past 10 years; in the distant past Microsoft actively discouraged and dismissed the possibility and viability of OSS categorically. Now, everything is open source and Microsoft is one of the single biggest contributors of open source globally. That same trend is strongly reflected in the .NET community - large companies include banks, insurers, airlines, manufacturers, and health care giants all feel increasingly comfortable using OSS products in the core of applications that generate billions of dollars a year in capital.

OSS has helped companies achieve higher and higher levels of productivity by leveraging the collective experience and contributions of tens of thousands of other users, largely for zero cost. And therein lies the problem - the OSS ecosystem has a crisis brewing behind the scenes: sustainability. Despite OSS being "free" for its users, the producers of this software usually see little to none economic returns from their work and eventually they burn out, which leads to abandoned projects, increasing technical debt, and risk + uncertainty for its adopters.

Even large organizations like Microsoft frequently abandon OSS projects and those users are left holding the bag.

In this talk we're going to cover the scope of the sustainability crisis, how it may affect you, and how to help prevent it both as an OSS user or as a contributor.

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Speaker: Aaron Stannard

My name is Aaron Stannard, and I’m the CEO and founder of Petabridge, where I’m making distributed programming for .NET developers easy by working on Akka.NET, NBench, and dozens of other OSS projects.

I also just recently founded Sdkbin - think NuGet meets the App Store, to help OSS and .NET developers build sustainable businesses around their work.

Prior to Petabridge I founded MarkedUp Analytics, a real-time in-app marketing and analytics service used by 1000+ developers. Prior to that I worked at Microsoft as a Startup Developer Evangelist.