Balancing Yin (Community) And Yang (Company) In OSS

The Kubernetes Annual Report [1] shows that there are very few contributors, especially senior and experienced folks, who are paid to work on k8s. The report also shows that PR reviews were down -24% across the k8s repo. The existing contributors are burnt out and have started to move away from the project. This is affecting the sustainability, quality and velocity of the project, with major regression-related backports in recent releases. It clearly shows that most companies profit from k8s but don’t contribute back. Continuing this model is a huge risk to the whole CNCF ecosystem. We will show strategies on how employers can practice “Business Aligned Open Source”. We will cover how to: - Add value to internal products, improve speed to market and innovation - Build expertise and better support customers - Have employees dedicate a certain percentage to upstream - Incentivize career growth - Surface areas of risk that require investment - Establish company’s influence and credibility in the community [1] https://www.cncf.io/reports/kubernetes-annual-report-2021/