Back in 2020, I was invited by a professor (who happens to be a friend of mine) from the Tecnologico de Monterrey to have a Q&A session around what I worked in back then with it’s course students.

Due to pandemic, the session was hosted virtually and today I stumbled across the questions that I was asked then. Since I really enjoyed that moment for igniting the open source passion to potential newcomers, I’m sharing the content of such questions (and my replies to those):

(Of course, all content below is based solely on my experience and opinions, which may differ from other people point of view or experiences)

1. What excites you the most from working as an open source engineer?

   I love the philosophy of sharing knowledge and to know that all new knowledge or technology derived from my work is available for everyone, in addition that I can receive feedback of my work from any person.

2. How do you use open source software/hardware/philosophies in daily practice?

   Communication: As open source is open to everyone and mostly open source developers are volunteer, they expect you not to spend their limited contribution time by asking simple questions or stuff you may get an answer from reading documentation or by searching better in web search engines, in summary; it teaches you to communicate better your ideas and questions to others, which helps not only within the open source space, but it also extends beyond (work and home).

   Sharing: You learn to be transparent with information for better decision making. This is because you’re used to having information and sources at hand.

   Learning: Not only by reading code, but also to learn best practices and get more professional outcomes at anything you do. During this process one learns to let go and adopt the best result. As a mentor mentioned me once:

   You’re married to your spouse, not to your code

3. What is the project you have worked on that excites you the most and Why?

   Along my career as a distribution engineer in the Clear Linux* project, I’ve worked on cloud technologies, distribution tooling and recently in the desktop development for the distribution and I’ve had lots of fun on all of those overall. This is because I continue to work in an open source environment and the teams I work with are just so great, so the learning experiences and the open source philosophy continues along all the ride and that’s what I find the most exciting part.

4. How and why did you start your path in the open-source community?

   Since I was a student at the university,I learned about FLOSS (Free Libre Open Source Software), its philosophy and its openness. It teached me more about “advanced” topics while using it and it allowed me to be steps ahead on my studies (i.e: learning about how an OS works prior to taking such classes at university). That ignited my passion for open source and even pushed me to look for organizing install-fests locally and evangelize about FLOSS at school. That eventually took me to look at non-local communities and learning from them took me to the job I work in currently.

5. How can we engage with Open Source projects / How can I start with open source from 0?

   The simplest way to start with FLOSS (Free Libre Open Source Software) is to use it. There are FLOSS solutions for practically any use-case you may have (e.g: music, image editing, writing, audio edit, programming, etc). The more you use it, the more chances you’ll have to reach an open source community for questions or exposing a use-case that you have.

   FLOSS is not only about helping with source code, just by speaking about it with others makes a huge difference! But there’s also other roles you may have when contributing to FLOSS: user, testing new features or fixes, documenting, writing about it (blogs, etc), participating in their events, designers, teaching. Any time you talk or use FLOSS, you’re engaging with the open source community and projects!

6. Why did you decide to work on open source?

   Since the experiences I had on the events I participated when I was student, I had the conviction of continue sharing knowledge and being open to share the work I do at a professional level, as well as continue learning from professionals who are willing to share their experience via open source, so I decided to continue on such path and I have enjoyed every day of it.

7. What should someone learn or study to be able to work on a project like Clear Linux / how can one become a distribution engineer?

   As this Open Source project is mainly around Linux distributions, I would expect for anyone looking at working on Linux distributions to know about software packaging (either specific to a project or in general; deb, rpm, PKGBUILD, etc), understanding of OS in general (starting process, the separation between kernel/user space, init process administration (e.g: systemd)) as well as some experience with scripting. Most Linux distributions have lots of roles, from architects, programmers, packages, quality assurance engineers, technical writers, and more!

8. What’s your main objective when giving a lecture about open source? What do you want everyone to remember?

   I guess it depends on the lecture/speech I’m giving but it’s all about letting attendants to know that open source is more than just open code. From licensing, to community and the different roles there are to get involved, as well as the benefits from FLOSS to their personal lives and their community around them.

   For example, I presented a couple of times themes such as “Why students should license their projects”, even if they’re just course evaluation material, the key takeaway there is to teach them about the importance of (open source) licenses on software, their rights and obligations when writing code.

9. What is the coolest thing about Open Source in your opinion?

   The inherent fact that due to its open nature, everyone can jump in with ideas or criticism that allows the projects to improve in all ways, from quality on the project, up to how their communities are managed. It also allows “forking” projects when there are community differences on how the project is being carried on (e.g: MySQL, OpenOffice, etc).

10. What is your favorite contribution that you have made to an open source project?

    Not all contributions are about pushing code upstream, there are pretty valuable contributions in the form of feature requests, bug reports or even test reports. The contribution I would say it weighted the most from my open source journey (up to this presentation date) would be to push a blueprint (suggestion) to the OpenStack community for OpenStack to support launching UEFI Virtual Machines. We had to do this because initially our distro was able to boot in UEFI-only mode and otherwise, we could not use it as an OpenStack VM.

11. How can we make a professional career in Open Source / How can we work in Open Source (beyond a hobby or a secondary activity)?

    You don’t look at open source as a professional career, but as a lifestyle and a life philosophy. From there it all just falls into place. (e.g: I had several chances to work in non-open source spaces, but my convictions and way of thinking “forced” me to continue looking for the right path)

12. What is the most common misconception that people have about open-source projects?

    “If you don’t do code, you can’t help open-source”

    I guess that would be the greatest misconception, as mentioned earlier, FLOSS involves lots of roles that require not-only programmers, but also other professionals to jump in.

    I use your software, and you owe me XYZ

    Additionally, from my experience, I’d say that people tend to forget that open source is mostly made from volunteering folks that sacrifice spending time with their families or in their stuff for you to enjoy pieces of software that otherwise wouldn’t be what they are. People is at times mean and urge FLOSS developers about X or Y issues that bothers them. While an amount of FLOSS is funded from some companies, not all of the FLOSS development comes from employees. Having that in mind helps when reaching a community for help.

13. Is it difficult to coordinate a whole community when it comes to solving issues in an open-source project?

    It is interesting to reach a middle ground when trying to solve a problem or develop a feature that affects several “stakeholders”, in the sense that the way you plan to address it may not work for others, so there’s a tug-of-war between implementation discussions, but at the end of the day what matters is that the problem or feature gets resolved, despite your idea taking turning into reality or someone else’s idea, remember that

    You’re married to your spouse, not your code