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OCS 2020 Breakout: Mario Rodriguez

Mario Rodriguez is the Vice President of Product Management at GitHub, currently focusing on all things Enterprise. Prior to Github, Mario worked as Group Program Manager at Microsoft where he led the Azure DevOps Platform and Artifacts teams. Mario’s core identity is being a learner and time away from product engineering is often spent with his two daughters.

Relevant Links
LinkedIn - Twitter

Mario Rodriguez the VP of Product for GitHub Enterprise: Issues, Repos, and Codespaces - shares his views on the COSS ecosystem and more!

(JJ introduces Mario) Give us some background on your role and tell us what you're looking after for GitHub? - 0:00

I’m curious how you see the correlation between the really healthy open source ecosystems and commercial interests. Obviously, GitHub has a large platform, you cater to Enterprise customers, you sell your product there, GitHub Enterprise, but you are also the universal social network for code. Really, every developer out there is on GitHub learning, sharing and developing their work. - 1:24

(JJ talks about how building a successful open source project develops the same skills as building a startup) I’m really curious, in terms of GitHub’s success, how do you think about the rise of open source? Do you think there is a correlation between the existence of GitHub and the rise of open source in the last 10 years? - 5:35

Is there anything that GitHub is thinking about open source maintainers, maybe encouraging more entrepreneurial activity? Helping open source creators that are maintainers of large successful OSS projects that live on GitHub? Maybe helping them start a company? - 9:47

What are the biggest challenges that developers and maintainers are facing, that GitHub is thinking about and introducing more infrastructure for them? - 12:40

So, to summarize - security, license decisioning, platform health. Maybe to unpack what you were referring to by platform health: quality of interactions and inclusivity? - 15:00

(JJ talks about Homebrew Project’s decision to block rude Twitter users both on Twitter and on GitHub.) I think a lot of things come down to humans, to human decision making, right? - 16:09

(JJ talks about different kinds of licenses and the complex decision making process behind them.) I’m a big fan of how GitHub highlights which licenses are used in a repo. What creators maybe need help with - how can they decide which open source license to choose, and understanding the differences between open source licensing and source available licensing?
(JJ explains some of those differences)
- 17:30

There is another sort of subcomplexity here. I’m really familiar with the Kubernetes project, I was involved in it when it got started, and at the top it was the Apache 2.0 license. But, when you look at the dependency graph of all the projects Kubernetes depends on, there are a lot of different licenses. With sufficiently complex open source projects you get many licenses in this way, that’s another kind of thing to think about. - 21:44

Do you think we are gonna reach a billion developers in the next decade? - 23:10


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