Unveiling the Impact of Open Source on Businesses and Society

Ever wondered if open source could be the secret sauce to the success of your business? Felicity Brand hosts a conversation between Jeffrey A Maguire and Mathias Bolt Lesniak about this very issue. We share remarkable insights from Mathias's recent DrupalCon presentation, 'The Big Impact of Open Source', that triggers thought-provoking questions. Together, we dig into the correlation between open source and business, its role in societal improvement, and the personal gains it offers. Experience first-hand our open source journey as we ponder the worth of open source for business and society. We also shed light on the diversity within open source communities that leads to more informed outcomes and a strong ROI. 

We move past the conventional understanding of open source being merely about software creation. We discuss the pivotal role of the TYPO3 Association in using open source as an effective tool for international aid and development. We connect the dots between open source and democracy to form self-organizing communities. We also lay out the potential for governments to adopt open source software for open data platforms. We wrap up with a stimulating debate on the need for collaboration and marketing within the open source realm and the necessity for unity among its communities. Tune in for a mind-opening dialogue on the far-reaching impacts of open source.

Show notes

• Mathias at DrupalCon Pittsburgh 2023: The Big Impact of Open Source
• Aiden Dean Dunn’s article in the Drop Times: Open Source as a Humanitarian Opportunity
• Mathia’s micro podcast: Open Source Utopia
• Catch Jam and Mathias at DrupalCon Lille, October 2023: Defend FOSS: From innovation to positive change, we need to remind the world what we're about
• TYPO3 Report: Open Source Standardization of Government Websites in Rwanda

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Transcript

Carl Richards: 0:07

Hi, I'm Carl from OSP and this is Communicate Connect Grow, the OSP podcast. In this episode, we're talking about the value and impact of open source At OSP. We do a lot of thinking about what makes for effective, consistent communication. In this podcast, we want to show you how we translate between technical complexity and business value to create strategic product communication at OSP and we want to learn more from you and our guests. This episode is part of our Grow series on the podcast. Grow episodes cover strategic approaches to understanding and expressing the value of what you do. Today, OSPeas Felicity Brand, Jeffrey A Maguire and Mathias Bolt Lesniak discuss an article that was written in response to Matthias's recent DrupalCon presentation the Big Impact of Open Source. The article was published in the Drop Times and raised some unanswered questions that the group have fun exploring. Please enjoy this conversation about the Big Impact of Open Source.

Felicity Brand: 1:28

G'day everyone. I'm Felicity Brand, communications consultant at OSP. Today I'm joined by my boss, Jeffrey A Jam Maguire and my colleague, Mathias Bolt Lesniak, and today we're talking about open source ethos and free and open source software, also called FOSS. So both Jam and Matthias recently attended and presented at DrupalCon, Pittsburgh. Drupal is a massively popular open source CMS and you are both interested in specifically the impact of open source on business and society. So, Matthias, your talk was called the Big Impact of Open Source, and Jam, I know you are a FOSS evangelist and have recently given a presentation called Open Source Impact from innovation to positive change. So I'm going to let you both speak in a moment, but I just wanted to frame this conversation.

Felicity Brand: 2:29

After DrupalCon, the Drop Times, which is a Drupal newsletter, published an article written by Aiden Dean Dunn, who said that Matthias's presentation contained some unanswered questions, and Aiden went on to ask some unanswered questions of his own. So today we want to talk about some of those questions and some of those answers. The way I see it, there are three broad topics that we should touch on today. One is business and open source. The other is business and the betterment of society and thirdly, the benefits to individuals of open source. So let's kick off with our open source experience and credentials Jam. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Jam: 3:16

Thank you, felicity. I would For me that you called me your boss out loud. I don't hear that every day. I co-founded Open Strategy Partners with Tracy Evans and really proud and happy of what we do here. I have an open source background that goes back to about 2005 and my first open source project was, in fact, drupal. I've been involved centrally or peripherally in a bunch of other projects and communities. My day to day work is creating strategically relevant communications for technology organizations and, as the name kind of hints at, open Strategy Partners specializes especially in helping agencies, product companies, open source projects who use, build, work with and sell the fruits of open source software.

Felicity Brand: 4:15

Wonderful, great to have you here today, Mathias. You are on the board of the TYPO 3 Association, a large open source CMS, and you are also the creator of the podcast, open Source Utopia. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Mathias: 4:30

Yes, so I am Mathias Bolt Lesniak, I am a board member of the Association and I also make the podcast, the Open Source Utopia, which is actually a micro podcast, just to correct you there for a moment and also to just draw the line. I mean, you talked about the boss and stuff, and if we're in Super Mario, then of course Felicity is Super Mario and Jam is the boss and I am the magic mushroom in this constellation, I guess.

Jam: 5:02

Now, Mathias, it's not the size of the podcast. It's what you do with it Exactly.

Felicity Brand: 5:07

All right. Well, let's make some magic here today. So one of the things that Aiden spoke about in his article is business and open source, and he says if you were speaking to a business who cared only about their business, not about morality and societal ethics, how would you convince them to join Open Source? Is this a valid question? What do we think about this?

Jam: 5:33

I want to say first off that if I were speaking with a company that truly didn't care about morality and ethics, I think it would be a very short conversation for me. First of all, I think that it is a legitimate motivation to want to make money and I am pleased to be in a position where my company is making enough money and providing services so that we help our clients, who are friends and colleagues from my open source path, and help everyone keep their rent paid. I was thinking about this question and there's a really interesting parallel. It's pretty clearly understood and accepted among many people that diversity within organizations creates better outcomes, more different perspectives from geography, background, age, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera please fill in all of the blanks generally leads to better informed outcomes, and there are many reports out there, as I understand it, that indicate hey, you can make more money with better teams and you can make better products with better teams, and so on.

Jam: 6:44

Diversity is not about being nice to people and letting people in because of something else. There's really hard business reasons for it. If you want to be responsible about your investment in your technology stacks to produce a better return on investment over time, more custom tailored, better, more interesting products. There is a large swath of areas where open source, free and open source software and applications are going to give you and by the by interestingly, free and open source software communities tend to be open and diverse too You're building on a very broad basis. I don't think there's a moral question to any of that. I think it makes good business sense.

Felicity Brand: 7:39

It's more than just the obvious point of open source software is generally free. You're not paying a per seat license to a proprietary company. That is better for your business. Anyway, Matias, please chime in here.

Mathias: 7:56

I think it's a very interesting observation that I can make around what Jan just said. That is, I think, really the crux of the matter here. I mean, jan didn't talk anything about business. He actually talked about people and humans. I think that is really the important thing here that companies don't have a will of their own. If you talk to a company, you actually talk to people. If there is a company that is so thoroughly rotten that it doesn't care about it humans at all you're going to have a really hard time turning that company around. But as soon as you can actually talk to the people, I think it's a totally different conversation.

Felicity Brand: 8:39

Indeed, do you think we need to be convincing businesses to join Open Source?

Jam: 8:46

Yes, absolutely Tiny bit of backstory about our two presentations that you mentioned in the introduction. They both stem from the same conversation and the same impulses over the course of 2022 and 2023. Matthias and I have noticed a bunch of things going on and came to the conclusion that, in fact, there was less open source evangelism going on than we think we need, and we is the open source communities, open source businesses, open source projects, and we postulated several reasons for that. And I find it very interesting, out of the same set of notes and the same bullet points, we went off and independently created very different presentations which have both been very successful at several events, and in September, october we're actually co-presenting. We're going to get merge all of those two presentations into each other and see what we can do at Drupal Con in Lille in France. So that's really interesting.

Jam: 9:54

I feel like, starting with the financial crisis of 2008, projects like Drupal and TYPO 3 really flourished. Content management is a little bit easier to explain than some other kinds of software and people were looking at their bottom line really, really hard more than ever, and just being able to say, hey, it's free quote, unquote, of course was a huge argument I've got to say before we go any further open source is not free. You are free to use it, and there's a lot more that we can go into about that. But that was a really compelling, easy argument and since then, open source software underpins most of the internet. Open source software is in every single computerized automobile, is in every single airplane, is in every single smartphone, and open source kind of won. And the tech stack underneath the internet is, I don't even know 90% open source, but half of the websites that we can see and visit online are built on open source community projects, right. So we kind of won. And then, if you're not looking at the video, I'm doing giant air quotes. We won and I have friends and agencies who have been at 120% capacity since 2008.

Jam: 11:19

And they don't need to evangelize and they don't need to think and they don't need to work very hard to do great and do good things in the world Right. But I think because we had an incredible decade and now getting onto 15 years since the financial crisis 2008, it's been really easy not to worry and we've forgotten to tell people why we're special, why we're different, how an economy of plenty is fundamentally completely different to economy of scarcity, how you, you know all of the business things about open source, redirecting your budget to features, not licenses, adding more features, not, you know, not going cheaper, going better, and so on and so on and so on. And I think, because we've done so well, we've gotten quite complacent and I there have been several tenders in the last year that have gone to non open source projects where there was a really good reason for it to be open source. And there are more coming up and Matias and I agreed that it was time to go out and tell people. So, yes, absolutely we need to go talk about it.

Mathias: 12:23

Yeah, and I think the interesting thing as well with our two presentations is that we take a different approach to the urgency. I think jam has a much urgent message than what I have. I am more of an idealist and I guess evangelism is can be done at both those levels. But the thing that is, I think that we actually forgot, is that open source is actually not a choice for everybody. We've made open source so popular that it has become products, and people are choosing products without thinking about the deeper philosophy behind it.

Mathias: 13:09

So one of the big messages that I am trying to give out when I have my presentation is really that when you talk about you know open source content management systems like Drupal and and WordPress and and Joomla, well, we have to stop talking about them. What we have to do is we have to convince the client that open source is the right choice first. Then the customers will have to choose the open source system that is best for them, that has the features that are best for them, and finally, which is very important, they don't just choose the system. They also choose the agency or the partner that has the expertise that is necessary in their roles, and that's a process that we've very much forgotten about, and that means talking about open source as a white label technology is really, really important. If we don't talk about it that way, the choice will always be between some brand and another, without really giving the client the opportunity To making the right choice from the get go.

Jam: 14:22

That was a really interesting point that you came up with, matthias, running into people who say Open source I tried that 10 years ago and it didn't work for me or open source we had that once in my previous company and I hated it. And in our communities, you know, we have the tendency to be like oh wordpress, oh Drupal, oh, and at this very navel gazing level between styles of projects and interfaces and so on, when other people are throwing every single project into one giant bucket and sticking a big sticker on it. And it came out when I went to several conferences when I was working on my presentation and did birds of a feather sessions, did discussion sessions about hey, what are your impressions of the situation and what would you like to do. And it came out many times that you know people don't know that if you're going to make open source the big brand, right, if we represent big open source, there's tens to hundreds of thousands of people working on this and working with this every day and making it better every day.

Jam: 15:30

And even Apple, adobe, ibm, like, none of them, are as big as that. Right, none of them are doing as many projects or working as hard on features and testing and reliability and deliverability and usability for regular people and it's a superpower and a lot of people were saying to me like hey, we got to figure out how to make it a brand and of course then it dissolves into a lot of bike shedding about. Well, there's the Apache Foundation and yes, but this and the Linux Foundation was supposed to, and so that's. But that's all like, not the point of today. But we think at this per project, per website level, per community level and less informed people who could benefit from our technologies don't, yeah, and it's something we don't learn in school.

Mathias: 16:19

Most people are really far off thinking that we're using an open source. I mean, open source is really about just getting something away and not even expecting something back. You just have a notion that maybe somebody picks up what you're sharing them and can help make it better, and that is very, very different. But one thing that you point out there, jam, is also this fact that open source is actually bigger than the biggest tech giants today, and I think that illustrates in a way that, yes, open source is successful. This isn't really about just generating endless profits. It's about what you do with the NANRs that you put into the system. It's about what you do in addition to the actual projects, and I think open source projects have a much bigger task than just creating software.

Felicity Brand: 17:17

I think that's segues nicely into the second topic that we wanted to cover today, which is business and the betterment of society. So in his article, aiden raised this point there is a way to achieve the double bottom line of profitability and the betterment of society. But until you can present the specific details of how to make the change, the big concepts remain concepts. I mean, I guess he has a point. I guess he wants us to spell it out for him. What ideas have we got here?

Jam: 17:49

Well, I was rubbing my hands gleefully in the background. The one group of people who I have found incredibly inspiring over recent years is the Type 03 Association and the Type 03 community in general. I will start with the Type 03 Association and the Type 03 community have either created or certainly advanced a form of international aid and development help that is only possible with open source and is only possible because we are free to share, study, modify and distribute the software and the changes in software. The government of Rwanda got in touch with the Type 03 Association and said we've got a bunch of websites and the error messages say Type 03 on them and we don't know how to get into them and we don't know how to update them. And we're making a digital policy and we're working on our economy and please help and the association and didn't just like call its top five partner agencies or something and say, hey, you know, sure, the government of Rwanda, no problem, how many millions can you afford?

Jam: 19:10

The association said we are going to look at your infrastructure, we're going to tell you what the situation is. We are going to help you upgrade to current software in a sustainable way, while training government employees and local agencies and young people from the economy to do it for yourselves. So the Type 03 Association essentially gave a digital phishing poll to Rwanda and the Rwandan government now has more than 250 Type 03 sites on up-to-date, secure versions and there's more of the digital value iceberg exposed there. And there's this incredible power when it only costs the cost of a video call now, today, to train somebody, to have a conversation with them, to do support right, and we can enable them to do so. So very much with that Create economic opportunity, create educational opportunity and, matias, I'd like you to segue into how open source and democracy come together this way.

Mathias: 20:17

Yeah, I can do that. Let me just say first, because there is a really important thing here about how open source works, because open source is not driven first and foremost by financial gain. We talked about that a little bit earlier as well, and that means that the real success indicator for an open source project is not how much money the founder of the project earns. The success indicator is actually the size of the community. The bigger the community is, the greater the success of the project is, and that is because of the reciprocals process, where you give something out and somebody else picks it up and improves it and allows you to get it back and improve on it further, and it creates this whole synergy where more and more people can contribute and work on the system.

Mathias: 21:14

And of course, I mean, if you think about it in a well, say it a bit in an ugly way maybe you could say that that is anarchy.

Mathias: 21:24

But it isn't anarchy, because one of the core things of open source projects that are successful is that they have a governance structure.

Mathias: 21:35

It's not only about lots of people doing lots of things, it's about organizing all of these contributions into a fruitful system that really develops the product and that way of working together is something that happens between people, usually under the auspices of some kind of membership, organization or not-for-profit.

Mathias: 21:59

That helps that process come about and that means that there is this is a self-organizing community where people take up the responsibility that is needed for the success of the greater software product or the greater good, and that is very, very similar to what it actually is, something that we see in all healthy societies, and that is a civil society. Civil society plays a really strong role in every healthy society in organizing people around interests, but also organizing people in free speech and democratic training. We could call it. It is a training platform for working together and making decisions and, well, peaceful coexistence. So by working with open source, you're also strengthening the foundations of any democracy. And then you can come at that and say, well, a government that doesn't choose open source is a government that does not support its own foundations in democracy.

Jam: 23:14

And we said that we were going to prove that there are pragmatic aspects to this and it just doesn't have to be about ideas.

Jam: 23:23

But yeah, there are wonderful examples, for example, now in many countries where governments build open data platforms with open source software and, as an example, it's a few years ago and I believe it's not relevant anymore, but the government of the city of New York opens, open sourced, the data around the metropolitan transit authorities timetable and at one point there were 100 or 130 New York subway apps available in the app store that enabled people to feed their families and pay their rent and make a living, and it's not exactly open source.

Jam: 24:03

But this idea of spend public money on public code right, if my taxes are creating a data store, I would like that to be publicly, generally publicly available as well, and so on. So, yeah, there's a lot of there's a lot of pragmatism as well as this other side this software that helps so many people. So, the very, very pragmatic facts, like this software enables us to found agencies and do client business and pay the rent I'll come back to that from cross border, transparent, open communities who practice the to being their best selves and the best sorts of communication and democracy or consensus based decision making out in the open to arrive at the best results that we can at the time right, and those things power better businesses that deliver better ROI right. So for me it comes back. I mean it goes right from diversity to international cooperation and community driven projects, into legitimate business interest too, what you're talking about now as well, is well that.

Mathias: 25:17

That's true for developed countries and developing countries alike.

Mathias: 25:21

But if you look at developing countries or global south countries that still have a way to go to to reach those human development and Economic goals that are necessary, one of the reasons why those countries are where they are today is because of exploitation and colonialism, and that's in many cases the fault of the developed nations.

Mathias: 25:52

The developed nations have developed with the help of of the global south, still continuing that process of exploiting poorer countries, and open source can actually play a role in Leveling the playing field there, because open source does not have the built-in Dependency that very many proprietary software solutions have.

Mathias: 26:17

For example, with open source, you don't have to pay a license fee, you don't have to pay a monthly fee to have access to your data. That means that anyone can start a business around an open source product and that open source product can earn the money from day one. And instead of you first having to Find money maybe borrow it from someone, maybe borrow borrowing it from from overseas even and then Starting to pay money to someone else in order to be able to do your business, and that means that well, it's leveling the playing fields, but it's also not exploitative in any way. It's actually just giving you opportunities that you can take up if you want to, and On top of that again, it is building a situation where you might actually be able to have an expertise that might be interesting for you to both sell to your local community but also export to other countries.

Felicity Brand: 27:24

Yes, beautiful summary and jam. You mentioned earlier a digital fishing rod, and I assume what you mean by that is From the old saying give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime, and I I think that's a really beautiful analogy, especially around the really cool project and work that type o3 have been doing. Well, I mentioned the project that they did in Rwanda and your type o3 is also looking to replicate and Continue those good works in other developing nations.

Jam: 27:55

So we will link to the PDF of that Report about that project in the show notes here very interesting.

Felicity Brand: 28:03

Now let's move on to the final topic for our conversation, which is the benefits of open source to individuals. So, aidan said, the open source software community as a whole, I guess, must be prepared to explain to the wider world of users Exactly how open source can benefit them and why they are at a loss without it. So when I first read that, I was a bit taken aback, but I have thought about it and have since come into some interactions where it's obvious to me that I'm in an echo chamber you know, I'm drinking the open source Kool-Aid, so I'm already convinced. But I still encounter people every day who are new to open source. So so we do need to keep telling people what it is, why it's good, how it can benefit them.

Felicity Brand: 28:54

And there has been a recent example of, I suppose, one group of open source communities getting together, and that is the cross community meeting between several open source CMS's Drupal, type o3, wordpress and Juma and they specifically were getting together to respond to the cyber resilience act in Europe. But as I understand it, that is a group that's going to continue meeting and talking together, and so can you think of other examples, though? Jan, you mentioned earlier Linux foundation and do we need a broader body that represents open source Holistically, or is that never gonna happen? You know how do we respond to a no.

Jam: 29:38

There's a word in German called faeinsmaier I and it is how people behave when they join clubs, and Club life in Germany is, surprise, surprise, relatively bureaucratic, and you have to have a constituting document and you have to have an annual general meeting and you have to have a secretary and a treasurer and so on, and some people live for this activity of of being in the club right, and While some people just want to do the hobby right, there are a bunch of organizations and foundations out there and I have a lot of trouble saying yes, of course we should just get together and elect a chairman. And I've seen over the years, whether in government or in business, fear. I've seen lots of planning to plan and Preparing to prepare. So I would say, having been part of the process of preparing that, the letter to the European Parliament and Commission, and having attended that webinar, I think we should be talking with each other and I think it was really incredible to see all of those people in the same virtual room, having clearly spent time together and and come to the conclusion that we need to be a brand speaking as one voice. And Do you know what the European I'm not sure politicians, bureaucrats, people actually listened and that group got meetings when they presumably have the chance to influence the course of this particular decision. So that proves the point that we need a brand. That proves the point that if we get together and act with some level of coordination, we can move the needle, which is amazing. It's my home base, but I kind of wonder if we need some sort of a marketing Group. You know, for example, over in PHP land we have PHP fig which has done Some incredible things for software compatibility. That's awesome. That works.

Jam: 31:44

As far as I'm concerned, a patchy foundation has done great work. Great work and the idea that you can have an open source project and be absorbed into that so that they can take care of the Non-profitness and all of that kind of stuff and promotion and and so on. That's really cool. The Linux foundation has gone back and forth with its own problems. I don't know that I really want to walk into that to try and do something else, right, but we've got a bunch of great stories and we've got we didn't really touch on it yet but the work in Rwanda.

Jam: 32:16

There are other countries looking at it and there is the chance to develop a Digital government standard as an open source standard and then help people implement it right. And I think there's wonderful messaging to do and wonderful ways where we could package Distributions to be like here's your Drupal government started pack, here's your type of three government started pack, here's your API whatever, and like we could do so much together on a technical level. Or and Right, we could just put the messaging together to say like hey, really, really, open source is a great way to make a living, a great way to improve the world, and here's a bunch of like, here's why open source. You know, cms garden in Germany does Quite a good job at parts of this, but it's remained a bit of a niche effort and in in Germany. So so you know, I'm not sure it's the model I would suggest, but like yeah, I think a marketing something.

Mathias: 33:19

Well, we definitely, you know. I think we definitely have to get better at explaining open source. That is a fundamental truth, I think. And yes, we can create organizations and Collaborate as a sort of ecumenical whatever you want to call it Between different, different open source initiatives, but to me, it's actually much deeper than than actually organizing us when we're already a project. I think this is something that needs to go into the educational system. As I mentioned, this isn't something we're learning in school. People are learning old-fashioned, traditional economy, and open source is not like that. It is very, very foreign to anything that you learn in school today. And I would say that I think if you speak about open source to quote, unquote, normal people who haven't heard about it before they will have a real difficulty understanding how you earn money with it. Yes, and that is something we need to address, and on a very fundamental level Right, it's counterintuitive and weird.

Jam: 34:42

And, to my point from earlier, we have forgotten that it's weird, right, and we've forgotten that it's incredibly special and powerful that we have conferences where competing agencies who literally are pitching the same clients. They want to do the same work, they're in the same cities or regions, the competing with each other 50 weeks of the year right, go to two conferences, or text code sprints through the year and all these things and literally sit next to each other and literally work out how to make the technology that they both use better together, share code, share their best ideas, tell their stories to each other. And there are ugly words like co-opetition and something, but like the fact that we dared to give away our best idea one time, trusted enough to try that, and that thing came back better because one or 1,000 people saw it and they're like, oh, I needed that, thank you, that's awesome. And, by the way, I also added this other button that makes the thing green, because you only had blue and red and like you get your code back, your idea, back your business model back with improvements for free, right, it's incredible. It's incredible.

Jam: 36:08

And, in that vein, back to governments for a second. Not only is it non-exploitative. If you say, here's this code that you can use and here's all of our documentation, do anything you want with it, and here's a Slack channel full of friends that you can ask for help, right, people can run with that as far as they want to you. Also, instead of sending money out of your country to pay the big three or five or six tech companies for licenses to do a thing, you can pay local service providers to provide you services locally, and that means the tax money goes back into the economy and generates more revenue. You can employ local people to use exactly the same tools that people everywhere else at the highest levels of industry or government or education or anything. You can use the same tools, right, and that's amazing. So I'm getting this super vibe.

Jam: 37:03

That TS's micro podcast open source utopia is super idealistic and it's really weird and interesting and everybody should definitely listen to it. One, it doesn't take very long. Two, but TS blew my mind when he showed me the concepts before he recorded them, and they are new and different open source stories that I had never heard before, after having been evangelizing open source for 15 years. I think that we could do on this podcast. I think that we could do. I don't want to call it open source 101, but all of these base concepts that are deeply weird the economy of plenty, giving away your best ideas and so on and so on I think that they would be really, really brilliant like pragmatic concepts that would complement the open source utopia ideas quite nicely. I would love to contribute that.

Felicity Brand: 37:56

That sounds fantastic and I'm really hoping to speak with members from a group called the Open Organization, open AWOG, and I think they are a group who are looking to take concepts from open source and applying them into different domains, like education, like business. So I find that deeply interesting. I think we've covered a lot of ground here. We've answered a lot of questions. Is there anything that? Any final thoughts from either of you before we wrap up?

Mathias: 38:29

Yeah, I can add to what Jam said about government's investment and local agencies, and that is that what happens when you put that money into your local workforce is that you're also developing local expertise and that expertise can be used to create new business within the country as well, and not to forget that you can also create a business that goes across borders and that collaborates with other countries and that is generally creating peace. And the second thing I can say is we need to really get down to basics when I do my presentations. Now I did one yesterday for a rotary club and I mean, one of my favorite slides that I'm using now are actually cookie based. So I'm talking about cakes and I'm talking about gingerbread and I'm really taking it down to the most basic level of how do you think when you do open source.

Jam: 39:33

I'm really looking forward to seeing those new slides.

Felicity Brand: 39:35

Yeah, I hope there's recipes.

Jam: 39:38

My big conclusion from this conversation and responding to the Drop Times article, is that this is not a moral, ethical question. It doesn't have to be at all. Pragmatically, there are really good reasons to use open source a lot of the time and it is a clear winner on quality of technology, security, ease of use and, in the end, on return on investment for a lot of applications. And yet, at the same time, we have this halo around the pragmatic stuff. That is also real. We're building international communities of understanding People who are motivated towards similar outcomes tend to interact, learn to interact with each other peacefully and constructively, and we do have the ability to spread the benefit of what we do. And yet I still don't feel like I have to make some moral case to tell you to believe in open source.

Mathias: 40:51

And if you're an evangelist, it can't be a halo. It has to be a story.

Felicity Brand: 40:58

Well, I think that wraps it up. I would like to say thank you to Aidan Dean Dunn for writing that article in the drop times because, although it is disappointing, one gives a presentation in a public conference that not every response is. That was amazing. Thank you, you know. It's good. This has given us an opportunity to respond to some interesting points that he raised and we're going to continue this conversation and keep talking about it, keep evangelizing, because we believe in the power of open source and we want to tell people about it. So thank you very much for your time Today, both of you.

Carl Richards: 41:56

We hope you enjoyed listening to Felicity's conversation with Jam and Matthias. If you have questions, head on over to the show notes, where you'll find links and references to the material mentioned today, and feel free to reach out to us as well via Twitter at open underscore strategy, or email. Hello at open strategy partners dot com. Thanks to everyone who contributed to this podcast all the P's and OSP. Thanks to our clients who believe in us. Shout out to Patrick O'Maw for our high energy maple syrup flavored theme music and to Mike Snow for additional horn arrangements. Thank you for listening and subscribing.

Carl Richards: 42:37

About our three themes on the podcast you'll hear from different members of the OSP team hosting episodes over time. Communicate All things. Communication we share how we tackle writing, editing, word choices, formats, processes and more. Connect In-depth conversations with interesting, smart people about who they are, what they do and how they approach their life and work as communicators, technologists and leaders grow. We cover strategic approaches to understanding and expressing the value of what you do, including tools, templates and practical applications. We also feel strongly about building a mindful, positive, human first culture at work. That's bound to pop up from time to time too. This podcast is us figuring out, communication, connection and growing together. Subscribe now on YouTube, apple Podcasts or the podcast channel of your choice. Follow us, suggest guests and topics, ask us questions. On social media, we are at Open Underscore Strategy on Twitter Until next time. Thanks for listening to Communicate, connect, grow the OSP podcast.