Growth Mindset Show Ep. 7 - 2022

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nice friday here a little cold today this is maheshan i'm your host today i'm founder of

cshar corner and host of this growth mindset show um if you are joining us first time welcome to the

show. If you are joining us back, welcome back to the show. If you are joining us back and you are

a regular visitor, I'm sure you know that this show is all about you. Just chime in, ask your

questions, post your comment on wherever you are joining us from, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter

on C Sharp Corner platform. Feel free to chime in and ask your questions. Again, we want to make

sure that we answer your questions. Today's topic is different. We are going to talk about

open source, anything about open source. If you have any questions about open source

we have a guest, Sean. He's been in open source for several years. I would say probably 20

if not more. We will talk and ask him more. And let's see what else. Is new coming or improved

in open source in past 10 plus 20, 10 to 20 years

Besides that, we have some upcoming conferences coming up. We will talk about that in the end of the show

And then we take your questions in the second half. So feel free to start, you know, chime in, post your questions

anything about open source. If you have like, if you're starting open source project, you know

or you are already involved in open source project or anything, you have experienced bad experience good experience feel free to share with us

but before that i'm sure everybody's watching the ukraine situation it's pretty sad i'm sure

you know many of us are you know watching from us india and europe we are in the same situation

just watching and see it looks like it's pretty bad out there in ukraine i don't even know what

to say and what to do besides this you know prayer for the people in Ukraine and surrounding

countries they're going to suffer end of the day all these wars you know few people these

these so-called leaders whatever they do for their personal gains end of the day is the poor and it's

the children and it's the people who are you know like common people they are the one who suffer the

the most. So we hope that whatever happens, this thing resolves without too many casualties

And if you know any situations, you're involved in any part of that, just feel free to share this

We always talk about the current affairs. So with that said, let's bring our guest today's guest

Sean. Happy to be on the show. All right, Sean, how are you? I'm fine. Yeah. All right. Excited

Yeah, where are you joining us from today? I live in Jupiter, Florida, so just a little bit north of West Palm Beach

Yeah. It's not cold here. It's nice. Yeah, it's cold here. I'm outside of Philadelphia, and it's raining, cold, 30 degrees. It's not good

It's about 80 degrees here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what do you think about this Ukraine situation? What's your thought on that

So we actually, so I work for Cognizant. And I came to Cognizant through a few acquisitions

And so we have had a studio in Ukraine for many years, probably almost a decade

And so we have a studio of about 100 folks that live in Lviv

Lviv is on the western side of Ukraine, very close to Poland, actually

So it's quite a ways away from where the conflict is happening now, but it's still a major cause of concern

I mean, my thoughts are definitely with all of my friends and colleagues that are part of that studio

I know that they weren't expecting things to escalate as they have

And now, you know, they're really trying to think about how do they take care of their families

how do they protect their country um and it's yeah it's just not a not a easy situation to deal

with at all yeah i have a couple of people they work for me you know we get some you know um

graphics work done there and it's just uh i don't even know how to help them it's just there's

nothing can do and my wife she's from belarus and belarus in midst of all this situation there's

belarus is what's his name whoever the president is so anyway well hopefully you know we all we

can do is pray and i think whatever help we can do uh maybe after this uh some charity or something

but uh well hopefully all you know everybody stays at this safe and whatever happens and this

looks like goes away in the next few days that what the hope is um let get back to our today topic So today Rijwan welcome to the show Satya welcome to the show You are our regular Feel free to ask your questions Any questions about open source today that what

we are going to talk about. So, Sean, I know you, not personally, but I knew your name and

involvement with open source community from .NET New Days. And I think I started C Sharp Corner in

like literally in January 2000. And the purpose was really anything I was learning at that time

I would just start writing so more people can just learn from the same thing

and they don't have to reinvent, you know, reinvent the wheel, right? Because I already learned it

And, you know, at that time, learning was not easy. It wasn't like, oh, Google, and here's a code sample

Right. So, yeah, tell us about your, like, first thing is what, in your early days of open source, your history, what open source is and how actually you got involved

Yeah, so, obviously, .NET Nuke was the first open source project that I started myself, but I had used open source prior to that in, you know, a variety of different ways

But being a consumer of open source is obviously a lot different than being a producer of it

On the consumer side, of course, you get a lot of value from open source. You can utilize the great work that others have done to build amazing products and applications

On the other side, when you're creating open source, I mean, it's definitely there's a lot of work that goes into it

And usually that work is done by people who are volunteers, essentially

It's not paid work. It's sort of a hobby or a passion that people are investing their time into

And it's amazing what actually can be produced within an open source project in terms of the value it creates

But typically, most of the work is done by about, I think, maybe 5% or less of the overall community

Actually, probably closer to like 1% or 2%. So, I mean, there's very few people that are actually contributing, but a lot of people are getting value

And that was something that I guess I wasn't aware of when I started .NET Nuke

Yeah. Yeah. And so I guess one of the things that I was curious about covering in this show, based on the fact that this is like the growth mindset show, is that growing an open source project is difficult

right so taking it from its very early stages of just an idea building out something that's maybe

functional maybe a proof of concept and then scaling it to something that you know is very

robust and that people can rely on and there's a community around it there's sort of evolutionary

steps that have to occur and each evolutionary step is more and more involved and requires more

and more effort and more and more help. And I think that that's not something that people generally understand

like how much goes into actually just maintaining a large open source project

Yeah. Yeah. And again, to me, it's not easy. That's a big challenge on each of these steps, as you said

And how about some of the open source consumers? They are actually, they complain

and people don't really contribute, don't understand how much work it is required

They are the one who complain the most. Yeah, I like to say you have to have a really thick skin

when you're an open source maintainer because you're right. People who are using your open source product

will come and they'll report issues and they'll basically say things like

your product doesn't work, when maybe it wasn't intended to do the things

they're trying to do with it. Yeah, so people can be pretty critical. And so sometimes it's hard not to let your emotions get the worst of you in those situations. So you see a lot of, you know, heated arguments that can happen in open source communities

but I guess like I said you just have to have a thick skin in those situations I know that

and people don't mean any ill will they just showed up and they're expecting things to work

for them in a certain way and maybe maybe you know maybe the project wasn't designed for that

yeah yeah and I remember agree and they really they just sometimes they're frustrated by

themselves and they're just posting that they're really not taking it personally you know towards

anybody i remember in early days when i was writing c-sharp code in back in 2000 2000 2001

so when i was learning i probably had this old article which i just learned c-sharp and says

hello world or whatever and i just posted on the site this is how you say and then somebody posted

a comment big comment on that this code sucks this is the worst code ever blah blah and then

the guys going on and on and on so yeah you have to have a thick skin if you're involved in you know

anything community or publicly uh agree with that uh so let's let's think about like so some of us

especially on c-sharp corner a lot of majority of people are they come from um enterprise background

they work full-time they work for companies they are not open source i don't there are only few but

But not, as you said, if 1% of our audience are open source, I'll be surprised

They're even less. Most of them have full-time job, work for large corporations or medium companies, full-time job working for years

So they don't really get too much involved in open source. Now they are in past few years

But before that, companies used to say no open source. Right? Remember those days

But now it's changing. So if anybody listening here and they have never been involved in open source

it doesn't matter their experience or not, if they want to get involved, what is the best way they can get started

I think the best way is, you know, if you're going to use an open source product

you mean truly, like, use it. Because what I find sometimes is that there are those folks that are sort of casual participants

and open source where they'll just browse to different open source projects and read

the questions and try to provide feedback, but they're actually not users of the product

so that they don't have the right frame of reference. So the first thing to do is actually download the code, try to use it in a production environment

right? And you'll quickly find out that there might be some issues with the project that you're

running into. and then in a very polite way actually explain what those issues are that you're having

Because it's actually super valuable to get that kind of feedback from users of the open source product

It terrible when people don report issues because then you just completely blind to some of the problems that might be in the product Because no product is perfect right Every product has flaws And so you actually really appreciate those people that take the time to report issues

and actually report them in a professional manner, meaning like provide all the steps to reproduce

the problem and maybe even do a little diagnosis on your own to try and identify what the problem

is. All those things really help the maintainer resolve the problem as quickly as possible

And then after you've done that for a while, you know, in terms of reporting issues and maybe helping out other people who are having issues in understanding how to use the product, maybe then you'd like to graduate to the next step, which is, you know, contributing some code in terms of, you know, bug fixes or whatever, or enhancements and submitting those as pull requests

but usually it takes some time to sort of work your way into the community become a known quantity

you know make some relationships with people even if it's not in person right you still

establish relationships if you're going back and forth and having conversations online and that

helps build trust and then eventually you know you'll be considered you know somebody that can

contribute to the product yeah so a couple of things here and yeah if you want to get involved

with open source project, I think first find the project that you probably need right now

So rather than rewriting your own from scratch, see if you can go to GitHub

and that's where everything is these days and search if there's a similar project

is already there. That's probably the best way rather than trying to work with something

that you may or may not need, right? Right. And then try to basically, as you said

get involved, test it out, find any issues, try to post it but one thing you have to be careful in the beginning is you gotta be patient

and you gotta be nice because i see a lot of people they just jump in they ask questions

and then other you know project owners start maintainers start saying wait wait wait relax

and they get frustrated and they leave and they go complain i see all the time like oh i went to

this project and those guys maintaining are rude to me and uh i don't like to get involved well and

I will say that some maintainers do have that sort of personality type where they are immediately

defensive and they don't always make people feel welcome. And I think that that happens over time

If you have too many people who are constantly asking questions that are taking up your valuable

time, you start getting a little impatient and you start to lose your cool. And maybe that's at

the point where you need to take a little step back, think about why you're doing open

source in the first place before you, you know, act rudely to people

Yeah. Yeah. And it's both sides, both sides to be patient. And we're just talking, anybody who's listening here, at least we should, you and I can, you

can actually educate them. Hey, just expect that it's okay to, you know, just okay to walk away from somebody posted

bad command. You don't have to go back and forth. Yeah, because I think that that's like a pet peeve that most people have is when you're doing something out of the goodness of your own heart or just volunteering, you don't want people criticizing you, right

Most people don't react well to that. And that's essentially what open source is, right

It's a bunch of volunteers doing work for free. And so when people show up and criticize their work, it doesn't go well

Yeah, I agree. Yeah. And, you know, I think, and again, this, you know, we are programmers

We also do have our own egos from time to time. And we start thinking like we are building this thing

So it goes both ways. And hopefully both sides, if you're listening, you maintain open source

Just be nice to others, especially the young people who don't know. So advantage of that will be there will be more and more people will get involved

Right. And obviously that's the end goal is get more people involved. So more users, more builders, more contributors

Yep. Yep. All right. So welcome, Amit. I see Amit joined XN Gameplay

XN Gameplay, I wish you had your name. Ravinder Anup, welcome to the show

We are today talking about open source. We have Sean Walker. He's known for .NET Nuke and now building another Blazor version of .NET Nuke, I would say, Octane

We will talk about that a little later. But yeah, any of you have any questions you want to share your, your, any experience working on open source projects, or as a user or as a contributor or as your own owner founder, feel free to share your comments here

So Sean, let's, you know, how we are just talking about today, open source and a couple of things here I want to include here is that sustainability and I always wonder, right

So I personally got involved in smaller open source. I've not really worked 100% on open source because C Sharp corner takes my time, all rest of whatever time I have

So, but I always wonder like, you know, open source project, especially creators and maintainers like yourself, you spend so much time

So I think first thing you have to be passionate about whatever you're doing, because it's chances are it may not bring if you're looking for a success or looking for money or looking for some bigger deals, it may never come

so yeah that's one question and to add to that question the second question is that

that when somebody like you start that what is the main purpose behind that like just because

you're passionate you want to share or there's more i think that most people start open source

projects because they've created something that they believe is interesting right whether you know

And it's something that they've solved the problem that they think other people might have as well

And they want to share their solution with others. I think a lot of people, though, how they get started is they simply create a repo on GitHub and upload it

And then they think that it'll just magically move forward from there

And the reality is that open source projects are essentially real products

And so all of the things that you would have to do to manage a commercial product are the same things you would need to do to manage an open source product

You need to promote it. You need to maintain it. You need to enhance it

You need to release new versions of it. You can't just sort of throw it over the wall and expect that magic is going to happen

And so I think that a lot of people who create open source projects aren't prepared for that

And so it's interesting because I like to say that sometimes success is harder than failure

So in that sense, like if you are not like you might have been very passionate and committed to the code that you wrote, but you might not be that committed to maintaining an actual project in the long term or building a community

So if you throw it over the fence and no one picks it up, then it failed immediately, essentially

And you didn't waste any time on it. Whereas if you throw it over the fence and it sort of gets a life of its own and a lot of people are asking questions all of a sudden it starts consuming a whole lot of your time And maybe you weren expecting that was going to happen And so it becomes sort of this extra burden on your life in addition to probably

your full-time job and your family. And then, of course, that becomes a balancing issue, right

to try and find the time for it. Because once it's out there in the public domain

there's nothing that you can really do to slow down the momentum, right

So if people are actually very interested in it, they're going to pull it along and you're going to be either like a passenger

on that train or you're going to get left behind, right? And so it's a tough place to be

Sometimes it's, you know, and often when you get into creating an open source

project, you really don't know what's going to happen. Yeah. So is there, so that's again

following question, is there a better way, is there a better way to kind of manage that

Like, is there a kind of guideline or kind of blueprint? Like, for example

rather than you starting by yourself solo, maybe first come up with a partner with three

four friends who are interested in similar work, something like that. So there's a better chance

of being successful, right? Yeah, I think that would be optimal if you could

I haven't seen that happen very many times. Usually you end up finding other people

who are interested in your work by publishing it, and then they will find the work online

through maybe GitHub, and then they'll start to get involved. I've met many, many people online

Like, for example, when I started .NET Nuke, I started it on my own

And I met nearly all of the sort of core team members just through working with them through like online

Yeah. So, but I guess so what I was talking about. So when you start the open source project, usually you start it on your own

Maybe it starts to pick up momentum. But at some point, it actually will get so, like, if your project has been successful, it'll get so busy, and it'll command so much of your time, then you'll start to think that the only way that you can move forward with it is if you actually find a way to dedicate your time to it, maybe full time, right

But in order to do that, then you have to be able to make money some way

And so that starts the thoughts about like, what is a viable open source business model? And I think that that's going back to your comment about open source sustainability. That's where the real challenge comes in, because there isn't a single business model that works for every open source project

It's just like any business. There's not a single business plan that works for every business. So that's where some of the challenge then comes in

And unfortunately, some of the decisions that you made early on when you created the open source project can sometimes come back to haunt you because it's not easy to change some of the aspects of the project

For example, one of the main things is maybe the open source license that you chose when you started

It's difficult later to change that license to perhaps make it more restrictive

which might provide you with theoretically an easier business model to pursue

But some of those early decisions that you make, you're going to have to live with them, usually for the longer term

And that's something you don't think of when you're just initially publishing an open source project and you have no idea if anyone's going to be interested in it

Yeah. Yeah. And again, yeah, you don't plan that. You just start with it. Yeah

So with that said, right, so I'm going to now take the other side for the sustainability

Right. So I'm a company or I work for a company and I want to go and I found an open source project out there on GitHub

I want to use that in my project, real project, for example, can be a logger for .NET Core, right

Yep. So one of the biggest challenges as a company is that what happens when that project is left alone

And there's so many projects are left alone, right? Because I may start today, but five years later, I have kids and now I'm family and other problems, whatever

I can't do this anymore. So it happens, you know, often. So what is your recommendation if any of our, you know, viewer is watching here and they want to go and start using one of the open source projects

What is your like what they should look for? So I think that

So the vast majority of open source projects don't really have a business model behind them

So they don't offer any way for companies to fund the development of them to ensure that there's long-term viability for the project

So that's partly on the side of the maintainers, not providing channels where companies can support them

there's also you know a whole group of open source maintainers that really have no interest

in commercializing their their product it is it was treated as a hobby and they plan to keep it

as a hobby indefinitely and some of those projects that are hobby projects are very very large

projects and very critical yeah and so it's not always clear to an enterprise

what, like, when they put a dependency on an open source project

what is the sort of support and maintenance model behind it? They don't know if the maintainer is sort of, like

maintaining it as a hobby or as something that's more serious than that

I think it's usually a good idea, of course, like, if you can look for an open source project

that actually maybe has a company behind it in some form, and maybe that company is doing consulting around it

or selling a commercial version of it. Or all of those things can provide a higher level of confidence

that that project is going to be around for the longer term. Yeah. Or the team members, they may provide

the contributors may also say, oh, we do consulting, hire me if you need extra help, right

Yeah, so a large community can also be a good measure to determine if you're going to be able to rely

on the community for support when you run into difficulties. Yeah, because end of the day, most people who are contributing to open source, they are working somewhere or they are consultants or they have their own small companies, a majority of them, right

So they're looking for work anyway. Ideally, if you combine these both sides, ideally, to me, if an open source project maintainers can create this another level that, hey, these three members are also available for consulting

in charge enterprise, whatever. All of a sudden your team is getting money they need, and they probably can even spend more time on the project

And now the users of the project probably are getting support. Yeah

You know what I mean? Maybe that's a workable model from both sides. Yeah, and it really depends, I think, on the type of project

Sometimes, like, if it's a project that has a very narrow focus

maybe it's like a library of some sort that does something that's very specific

it would be much harder for people to maybe do consulting around it because it doesn't have a broad focus

Whereas if it's more of a framework or a platform, you know

like those types of projects tend to have larger communities and more people who are able to utilize them to make money

So, of course, then they're willing to support them more. Yeah. Yep. Yep. All right. That's great. That's great

So, everybody, we are today talking about open source in this Growth Mindset Show

As we know, it's a growth mindset. We talk about different topics, something you need to think about, something you're not used to doing day to day

And today's everything about open source. So if you have any questions, concerns, comments, experience with open source, please share here

So let's talk about a little bit more on your personal experience

Like when you were maintaining this project, now you have the second

Maybe let's start with your new project you're working on Oktain. You want to talk a little bit about that

and then maybe then I will ask other questions. So what did you start, why did you start, and where it's going

That's an interesting question because when I – so I, of course, was involved with .NET Nuke from 2003 till 2014

so 11 years. That was a long time to be involved in an open-source project

and to work on it through the various levels, right? From starting it to creating a small business around it

doing consulting to getting venture capital. And every stage of that journey had additional challenges to it

But I do feel fortunate that .NET was able to grow and I was able to actually focus my full-time effort on it

for probably eight of those years, which most open source maintainers, you know, can't say that they're able to do

Usually it's, you know, they're able to make some part-time income from it

but not do it full-time. So anyways, once I got through .NET Nuke in 2014

I kind of thought I'll probably never do another open source project again

just because of what I had learned in that journey, right? It was hard

It was a lot of work. There was a lot of risk involved

A lot of challenges. And so I'm not quite sure why I started another open source project, but I guess it was in 2018 I started getting involved with Blazor, saw the potential for it, and saw that I could build another modular framework with some of the similar capabilities that .NET Nuke had, but build it on completely new technology stack

and so I started building it more for my own purposes at first which is exactly how I had

started .NET Nuke and then thought okay well this time at least I know what I'm doing I'm going in

with my eyes wide open so to speak right I know what to expect and I sort of I think I sort of

know how to maintain focus and manage expectations better when it comes to the open source project

than I did the first time around. And so I did create Octane as an open source project

That was, I guess I finally announced it as an open source project in early 2019, I think

And so it's been a couple of years now. And for the most part

I've been able to manage it as a part-time effort outside of my regular full-time job

And it's grown quite considerably and it's starting to get a community around it

And I think it will have some of the same potential to build like an ecosystem around it that .NET Nuke had

So I am excited about it. I think it does have a lot of potential

And I mean, I'm really keen on the technology stack. The latest stuff that Microsoft has done with .NET Core and Blazor is amazing

I really enjoy developing in it. I agree, agree. So I never did web development myself, but after looking at Blazor, I'm like, okay, I can do this

Yeah. So, yeah, that's great. And everybody who's watching, check out Octane's project and see what you think is in Blazor

So if you want to get involved in Blazor, that's the best way to try to check it out first

So it looks like you are kind of addicted to open source. You're coming back to the open source

if you can stay apart from it. Well, I guess even though I had sort of a break

from being a maintainer of open source from like 2015 through 2018

I was still heavily involved with the .NET Foundation during those years

So yeah, so I never, you're right. I never really stepped fully away from open source

So I guess you could call it an addiction. I don't know if it's a healthy addiction

It's one way to stay close to the community, right? Yep, true

Yeah, because that's another part of our lives, right? Some of us, we like to get involved in community

and either it's speaking or writing or maintaining open source projects, whatever it is, right

We just feel internally happy about it, right? That's what growth mindset is all about

that certain things you do because you just like to do and you enjoy doing it even though it not easy Yeah no you right No it a passion I do enjoy it Yeah So you know my startup journey I probably got involved or started or co 20 startups

And out of that, probably three of them are really, they are like self-sustainable

Forget about success if they are self-sustainable. Sometimes you're just addicted to doing certain things

Yeah. Actually, it's interesting because you're right. An open source project is much like a startup

There's a lot of risk involved. There's a lot of work involved. You don't know if it's going to be successful

So, yeah, very much the same. The expectations are low. The only difference is expectations are low

And you don't have paid customers, so they cannot come and ask for refund

Right. Well, they can still come and ask for things, but you don't have to actually fulfill if you don't want to

Yes. And it's a good and bad, right? So the, and I want to get to my next point is that, you know, in GitHub, there's a contributions, right

You can contribute to these open source projects. I never understood that

The reason I never understood that because we as a developer, I mean, let's agree that we are not somebody where we, we don't donate a lot

Maybe few of us do, but majority of, there's no, a lot, donations don't come a lot from the developers, right

because we believe in giving free. We give in open source. So we also expect free, right

And today's world, right? We don't pay for code, so we don't feel like, you know

nobody should get paid for code. Right. No, and I think that you're right

that that's absolutely the case is when people use open source, the fact that it was freely given to them

means that they feel like they don't need to give anything back

Yeah. That's the way the world works. Yeah, and I blame some of it, a lot of it myself too, because I know back in the days, developers used to buy books and pay for the things

And because we launched, put so much online content for free, it has become a habit

And then we wake up like today, a young developer comes, they search Google, everything is free

And all of a sudden, somebody comes and asks for $5. They're like, whoa, what is this

I thought everything is free here. Yep. Right? So we have, we means open source guys and community guys, they have built this habit

So it's not, nobody's fault, right? If today our kids, we teach them, oh, here's my wallet, son, take whatever money you want

They will not never understand that. Oh, I don't need to make work because I'm getting from this wallet already

Right. Yep. So the whole thing about getting the milk for free

Exactly. Right. So my next question was, what can open source community and people who are watching, is there anything they can do to make it more sustainable

Like this whole, you know, obviously communities, they are spending time and make it more sustainable

Yeah, so going back to like, well, to answer that and the earlier question

So generally what I find is the people who are contributing to open source projects, they're not just doing it for fun

I mean, they're the people that have actually adopted the open source project and are using it in some kind of a critical engagement

and perhaps they find a bug in the code. And then because they have skin in the game

they're motivated to fix it, right? At least report it. And if they want it actually fixed on a faster basis

than waiting for the maintainer to do it, then they'll actually find the problem

fix it and contribute the code back. And that's the interesting thing, right

It's because they've adopted it and because they're using it, they have skin in the game. And so because they have skin in the game, they feel like they should contribute. But, you know, there's not, you know, a ton of those types of people. And for the most part, the open source projects that people utilize are fairly well written and don't have a lot of issues in them

and so if it's working fine then there really is nothing to contribute back right if it's working

fine for your purposes there's no reason for you to go above and beyond and and contribute anything

back so those are some of the dynamics that kind of go on and making a decision around whether you

should contribute to a project or not yeah and i think good part is good part is if you do

You know, a lot of these open sources, you can download the code and if maintainers are done maintaining it because the version they had, it's working fine

You can go and change yourself as well, right? Yep. And a lot of companies and people do that

Yeah, and I think that that's sort of one of the other benefits of open source is you're right

You can go look at the code and you can actually learn some pretty interesting things about techniques that other people have done to solve problems

And then you can use those techniques in your own code. Right. And so you're not necessarily you're not contributing anything back, but that knowledge is being shared

Right. And everyone's products are getting better as a result of that sharing

Yeah. Yeah. Because end of the day, you are writing somewhere a new product or updating your company

It doesn't matter if it's your company. Yeah. Right. So a couple of more questions

Again, everybody, thank you for staying with us today. It's a Friday

I know it's late. If you have any questions you want to share, comment, feel free to do that

You want to ask some personal questions, also chime in. Let's talk about a little bit

I think we did cover this a little bit more. It's risk and rewards for being involved in open source

Anything else you want to add on that side? So I think we covered maybe so on the reward side obviously there the like if you depending on an open source project then if you can contribute to it and help it become better and more capable

Because a lot of these projects, they're essentially like tools or frameworks that you build other things on top of

And so the things that you build are going to become more and more powerful as you increase the capability of the open source project

So that's obviously a big benefit. By contributing in the community, you get some level of, I guess, accomplishment and notoriety

So people will recognize that you're capable of doing great work. And I've heard that companies are actually looking at people's GitHub contributions now to maybe assess what their capabilities are

And a lot of companies do like to see developers putting in some of their own time and volunteering on open source projects

It basically demonstrates that they have a real passion for technology. They're not just a nine to five worker

If they're doing things on their own time on GitHub, then it shows that they really love technology

And those are the best kind of employees to have. On the risk side, that's a whole different thing

So on the risk side, you need to make sure that you understand the legalities of your employment agreement in terms of, you know, who owns the IP that you create

Sometimes it could be your employer. Sometimes it could be the client. But rarely in the way that contracts are written, is it actually your IP to do whatever you want as you see fit

So that's probably the biggest risk is you need to be sure you understand if you're going to do contributions to open source

you need to understand that you have the right to do contributions depending on where the code came from

Yep. And to add to that, if you are using an open source project, you go to GitHub and find something

you want to use in your commercial product or your company's products

Is there anything they should keep in mind that, hey, stay away from this kind of license

Anything you have to share on that side? Yeah, there's a lot of information

kind of out there written about this. Before that, let me add you that. A lot of people, I know a lot of people

they don't even care about, they don't look at the license. They just go download and start using their projects

Yeah, it would be helpful for people to have an awareness of open source licenses. And it's definitely like any software that you use, whether it's commercial or open source, you need to understand the terms under which you're allowed to use that product or project

So definitely you should be looking at the license. There are some open source licenses like the copy left licenses like the GPL, which, you know, have some clauses in them that you need to be that you need to understand, especially if you're going to create products on top of them or derivative works of them

them. So yeah, I tend to focus only on using open source licenses that are permissive licenses

like Apache and MIT and BSD. And I mean, there's a whole series of permissive licenses, but they

provide you with the most freedom to use those projects in a variety of different ways. And so

if you choose to use those types of products that are offered under those licenses, then you can be

it's pretty safe that you're not going to get yourself into difficulty. Yeah

Although if you're at a company, usually, usually, you know, the company will have a legal team and they'll also want to make sure that

you're using only products that are like licensed under the official licenses

that they support. You will be surprised. You will be surprised. Well, yeah, no, I've seen this before too

Usually sometimes the developer has a specific problem they need to solve and they go online and they find something that matches their needs and they just download

it and shove it in, right? Without even thinking. Yep. Forget sometime

I would say most of the time. I work with large corporations and we are, there's no team looking for you

They're like, when can we get it done? Right. Because everybody's so behind

They're like, yeah, nobody's really checking, you know, your licensing, you know, where

did you get this code from? Yeah. Yeah, all right. So that's great. I think we're almost done. I have a last, you know, last question is, is that and then, you know, I will let you go that if as a, you know, software developers, all of us combined who are watching this or in future, somebody will watch this recording

We have to help this open source world. What can we do as our part to make this better

Well, I think that it would be helpful for people just to naturally acknowledge that there's a lot of work that goes into open source projects, right

And so if you're just consuming them, you have to realize that there's actual people that developed them and continue to maintain them and enhance them and provide you with value

And so you should be thinking about ways that you can support those people who are doing that work

because the downside is if nobody supports them, then those projects that you're relying on

are eventually going to be abandoned and disappear. And maybe you'll be able to find an alternative

but as we all know in software development, there's significant switching costs moving from one product to another

And so it would certainly be much better if you could support the existing project in the ways that it needs to be successful Whether that contributing monetarily or by contributing by fixing bugs or documentation

or enhancements. I mean, there's many ways that you can help. But the first step is just to

realize that there are people behind these projects. Well said, well said, definitely

And I think, yeah, you can start by saying thank you if you use a project and you see those team members on Twitter or wherever

or even in the community, you can say thank you that I'm using this project

and it's helping me. That's, I think, everybody can do. And then if you can contribute a few bugs here and there

and as you said, if you can solve bugs, you find some issues you did solve

in your own version, yeah, just get involved. and definitely be nice, right

That you can do without any cost. It doesn't cost a lot of time either

You said it right. Like, you know, these open source projects, maintainers are, you know, doing it part-time

They have families. They have a full-time job. And also, you know, they're more frustrated sometimes

because of the work there. So just be nice. That will help

Yep. All right, great. Anything else? So you want to talk a little bit how people can go, where they can go about Octane and get involved and give you feedback or anything they can do

So the main website for Octane is octane.org. And it's spelled strange

O-Q-T-A-N-E. Simon, you want to put that link in there? Yeah. Yeah

So that's the open source project that I'm currently most involved with

And obviously, the .NET Nuke project still continues to move forward as well

It continues to have user conferences. There still is a lot of use of .NET Nuke in the world

So it's still a very, very capable CMS. So yeah, and I mean, there's so many other really amazing open source projects that are out there

I actually maintain a site as well called dnfprojects.com, which stands for .netfoundationprojects.com

Yeah, and that maintains sort of daily trends of the activity that are going on in various open source projects that are part of the foundation, both Microsoft projects and community projects

And so I would say that, you know, there is a lot of outstanding work that's being done in the .NET community

And so, yeah, definitely people should check those out. All right. Great. That was great. Sean, thank you so much for hanging out with us and coming on short notice

We really appreciate. I'm sure everybody enjoyed learning about your background on open source and how they can get involved

So hopefully, you know, we're going to check out this Octane. We are actually poking around anyway

I'm going to see if my couple of developers can get involved in this

not just from consumer side, but also contribute. It's just hard to push

Sometimes developers, you know, I can only tell, but they kind of have to go do stuff

Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes it takes some time just to work, like to really understand what the project's capable of

Yeah. Yeah. Got to get your hands dirty. Yeah, yeah. Yep, yep. So thank you so much

And we'd love to have you back in a couple of months, you know, when you have time

Thank you. Yeah, thanks for having me. All right. Great session. All right, with that said, so today

thank you everybody for watching us. I see a lot of people join us

Again, if you have any questions about open source licensing or anything, if you want to share with us

we will be happy to bring in upcoming, you know, series. So next thing, a couple of more things we'll do housekeeping here

We have upcoming conference coming up that is on leadership. It's a little different

As you know, that growth mindset is a little more than just coding or being a developer, right

It's all about growing growth, not only just professional growth, but also personal growth

So we have a, you know, any during this, you know, as a partner C Sharp Corner has partnered with several conference organizers

And so one of the upcoming conference, leadership conference, check it out

I am speaking there. So it's on March 22nd. All these people who are speaking are leaders

They are well-established leaders in their areas. And, you know, my topic is going to be some of the leadership skills

and qualities in how leaders think different. so check that out and I think we are going to announce a couple of other

conferences in coming month too all right so with that said I think that

concludes our today's show unless Simon anything else I'm missing with that said

anything else Simon you good here I think Simon said we are good so everybody

thank you so much for hanging out with me on this Friday I will see you next