Presentation held in Tampere on April 22th 2016 by Otto Kekäläinen

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Collaboration in open source
Examples from MariaDB
Otto Kekäläinen
22.4.2016
Tampere, Finland

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What competitive advantage do the human species
possess that made us able to conqueror the planet?

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Symbols that can transfer complex information
across any distance or time with great accuracy

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Symbols extend our memory beyond
our brain.
Code extends our thinking process
beyond our brain.

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Towards the best solution in the world
Open source software development is exciting

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Funded by MariaDB.com, Booking.com,
Visma, Automattic (WordPress.com),
Odin/Parallels, Verkkokauppa.com...

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Ensuring continuity and
open collaboration

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Continuity
● The Foundation has the relevant
technical assets and tools (website
mariadb.org, version control repository,
build and release systems).
● The Foundation has copyright via staff
work and contributor work (CLA). For the
rest (some copyrights, trademark etc) the
Foundation has irrevocable licenses to
use (e.g. GPL, BSD).

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Foundation staff
● 6 persons, including ”Monty” Widenius
● Makes MariaDB available to as many
users as possible (porting, packaging)
● Single contact point for collaboration and
contributions
– The Foundation makes sure all pull
requests and patches are reviewed

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Open collaboration
The Foundation is open, inclusive and
enables everybody to contribute and
collaborate on equal basis.

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Open source is an opportunity
● Freedom to use
● Freedom to study
● Freedom to improve
● Freedom to redistribute
Freedoms, not obligations

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Open source vs. closed source
is like democracy vs. totalitarism
Even the best strategy
does not guarantee
successful execution

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Collaboration
Give and get

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All contributions are valuable
● code
● testing
● translations
● documentation
● graphics, design
● packaging and distribution
● marketing, advocacy
● good bug report, feedback, ideas

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Who are the contributors?
● codership.com
● freesa.org
● galeracluster.com
● gmail.com
● google.com
● hotmail.com
● iki.fi
● mariadb.com
● mariadb.org
git log | grep Author
See https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/log-of-mariadb-contributions/ for details
● mongosearch.org
● openquery.com
● oracle.com
● primebase.org
● skysql.com
● suse.com
● tokutek.com
● twitter.com
● xiphis.org
● yahoo.com

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Reasons to contribute
Scratch your own itch!

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Reasons to contribute

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Reasons to contribute

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Reasons to contribute

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Also for the fun of it!

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Cost vs benefit in contributions
Keep it simple
(but not too simple)

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Facilitate collaboration, be inclusive
● Publish code in real time, not just at release time
● Discuss and plan on public mailing list
● Chat in the public (e.g. IRC online, meetings offline)
● Public bug tracker, transparent progress and
priorities
● Respond quickly to pull requests on Github and to
bug reports that have patches attached
● Keep documentation up-to-date, develop
documentation alongside code and allow also
contributions in documentation

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How does one manage a big project
with millions of lines of code?
You don't.

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Interfaces and APIs
● Divide and conqueror: modularize everything
● Split long files into separate files.
– Easier to read and grasp, easier to merge in git.
● Define clear interfaces between components so that
anybody using the interface does not have to care
what happens “behind the wall”.
● Use semantic version numbers (1.0, 1.0.1, 1.1, 2.0.,
2.2...) and other common conventions.
● Contracts and promises that the interfaces will
continue to work in the future too.

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Be inclusive

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Be inclusive

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Be inclusive

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Collaboration problems?
Support requests and random ideas
vs
Real contributions and talent

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Collaboration problems?
Automatic testing to help review contributions and focus human time on best contributions

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Collaboration opportunities?
”Given enough eyeballs all
bugs are shallow” – Linus law

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How to contribute to
the MariaDB project?

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Read the docs!

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Read the source!

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Technical requirements
● Clearly defined problem with an unarguable
solution
● No regressions or draw-backs
● The code might have been difficult to write, but it
should not be difficult to read
● Running code and test cases makes the best
evidence (example mysql-test/suite/encryption/t/create_or_replace.test)
● File issue at jira.mariadb.org
– attach patch or
– link to git branch

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Legal requirements
● Signed MariaDB Contributor Agreement (MCA)
sent to foundation@mariadb.org

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Quality
● Quality of submission
– the benefit must be big enough to spark interest
● Quality of submitter
– clear and active communication
– resilience
– reputation from previous submissions

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Big or small – everything counts

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Big or small – everything counts

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Your contributions are welcome!

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Thanks!
mariadb.org
@ottokekalainen
otto@mariadb.org