Episode Details

The conversation covers: 

• The main function of an OSPO, and why Comcast has one.
• How Nithya approaches non-technical stakeholders about open-source. 
• Where the OSPO typically sits in the organizational hierarchy.
• The risk of ignoring open-source, or ignoring the way that open-source is consumed in an organization.
• Why every enterprise today is using open-source in some way or another.
• The relationship between cloud-native and open-source.
• Some of the major misconceptions about the role of open-source in major companies. 
• Common mistakes that companies make when setting up OSPOs.
• Why Nithya and her team rely heavily on the TODO Group in the Linux Foundation.

Links:

• Comcast: https://www.xfinity.com/ 
• Linux Foundation: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/ 
• TODO Group and The New Stack survey: https://thenewstack.io/survey-open-source-programs-are-a-best-practice-among-large-companies/ 
• Trixter GitHub: https://github.com/tricksterproxy/trickster 
• Kuberhealthy GitHub: https://github.com/Comcast/kuberhealthy 
• Comcast GitHub: https://comcast.github.io/
• Nithya Ruff Twitter: https://twitter.com/nithyaruff 

Transcript

Emily: Hi everyone. I’m Emily Omier, your host, and my day job is helping companies position themselves in the cloud-native ecosystem so that their product’s value is obvious to end-users. I started this podcast because organizations embark on the cloud naive journey for business reasons, but in general, the industry doesn’t talk about them. Instead, we talk a lot about technical reasons. I’m hoping that with this podcast, we focus more on the business goals and business motivations that lead organizations to adopt cloud-native and Kubernetes. I hope you’ll join me.

Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native, my name is Emily Omier, and today I'm chatting with Nithya Ruff, and she's joining us from the open source program office at Comcast. Nethya, thank you so much for joining us.

Nithya: Oh, it's such a pleasure to be here, Emily. Thank you for inviting me.

Emily: I want to start with having you introduce yourself, you run an open source program office. And if you could talk a little bit about what that is, and what you do every day.

Nithya: So, just to introduce myself, I started working in open-source back in 1998, when open-source was still kind of new to companies and organizations. And from that point on, I’ve been working to build bridges between companies using open-source and communities where open-source is created. At Comcast, I have the pleasure of running our open source program office for the company, and I also sit on the board of the Linux Foundation and recently was elected chair. So, it gives me a chance to both look at the community side through the LF and through corporate use of open-source at Comcast.

So, you also ask what does an OSPO do? What is an OSPO, and why does Comcast have one? So, an open source program office is a fairly new construct, and it started about 10, 11 years ago, when companies were doing so much open-source that they really couldn't keep track of all of the different areas of open-source usage, contribution, collaboration across their companies. And they felt that they wanted to