An Open Source Project Called "Failure:" Community Antipatterns to Know and Avoid

Josh Berkus is primarily known as one of the Core Team of the world-spanning open source database project PostgreSQL. He has been involved with various open source projects since 1998, including SPI, OpenOffice.org, LedgerSMB, Bricolage and OpenBRR and is on the selection committee for OSCON, Sun Microsystems employs Josh in its Database Technolgy Group as the strategic lead for Sun’s PostgreSQL for Solaris product offering. He also makes pottery.

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chromatic is an editor at O’Reilly Media by day, a free software hacker in the evening, and a fiction author when he should be sleeping. His current projects are the Parrot VM and a novel about superheroes.

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Ben Collins-Sussman is one of the founding developers of the Subversion version control system, co-authored O’Reilly’s “Version Control with Subversion” book, and later helped port Subversion to Google’s Bigtable platform. Ben co-founded the Google engineering office in Chicago, and now manages Google’s open source project hosting service. As a technologist, Ben enjoys investigating the intersection of art and science. He has received multiple awards for musical theater composition and interactive fiction authoring; he’s also heavily into photography, plays bluegrass banjo, and loves to give talks about the social nature of software development. Ben is a Chicago native, received his mathematics degree from the University of Chicago in 1994, and continues to live in Chicago with his wife, kids, and cats.

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Brian Fitzpatrick started his career at Google in 2005 as the first software engineer hired in the Chicago office. Brian leads Google’s Chicago engineering efforts and also serves as engineering manager for Google Code and internal advisor for Google’s open source efforts. Prior to joining Google, Brian was a senior software engineer on the version control team at CollabNet, working on Subversion, cvs2svn, and CVS. He has also worked at Apple Computer as a senior engineer in their professional services division, developing both client and web applications for Apple’s largest corporate customers.

Brian has been an active open source contributor for over ten years. After years of writing small open source programs and bugfixes, he became a core Subversion developer in 2000, and then the lead developer of the cvs2svn utility. He was nominated as a member of the Apache Software Foundation in 2002 and spent two years as the ASF’s VP of Public Relations. Brian has written numerous articles and given many presentations on a wide variety of subjects from version control to software development, including co-writing “Version Control with Subversion” as well as chapters for “Unix in a Nutshell” and “Linux in a Nutshell.”

Brian has an A.B. in Classics from Loyola University Chicago with a major in Latin, a minor in Greek, and a concentration in Fine Arts and Ceramics. Despite growing up in New Orleans and working for Silicon Valley companies for most of his career, he decided years ago that Chicago was his home and stubbornly refuses to move to California.

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Karl Fogel is an open source developer and author. After working on CVS and writing “Open Source Development With CVS” (Coriolis, 1999, cvsbook.com), he went to CollabNet, Inc as a founding developer in the Subversion project. Based on his experiences there, he wrote “Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project” (O’Reilly, 2005, producingoss.com). After a brief stint as an Open Source Specialist at Google, he left to found QuestionCopyright.org, writing and speaking on copyright reform and on the application of open source principles to areas outside software. He works as Open Civics Development Specialist at O’Reilly Media.

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