Serkan is a freelance software developer who has been developing web applications since 2001. Lately he has been working with Angular and ASP.NET. He shares that he has been studying sustainability of open source issues since 2014 and also shares the abridged version of how he came to be involved with the open source community. Richard then asks Serkan to share more details on how he as a developer became interested in open source.

This episode of Sustain our Software features Abigail Cabunoc Mayes. Abigail has a background in bioinformatics and computer science and has an interest in using computers to solve problems in biology. She works for the Mozilla Foundation where she is a practice lead working Open. She has been named in “100 Awesome Women in Open source” and mentioned in Github’s State of the Octoverse 2016. Abigail begins by sharing some of how she got started and what interests her in technology. The discussion then moves to altmetrics and how Abigail helps people publish code and get recognition for their work.

The special guest for this episode of Sustain our Software is Kevin Owocki. Kevin is the founder of Gitcoin, a service that links up freelance developers with people who need them and pays these developers in crypto currency. Gitcoin is a blockchain forward brand that is built on open source software and currently uses Ethereum as its crypto currency of choice rather than creating their own. They like Ethereum because of its relevance as the 2nd most popular cryptocurrency at the time of this episode. By incentivizing open source contributions, Gitcoin has become an important contributor to the funding of open source software.

Robert Kaye is the executive director of the MetaBrainz Foundation, the legal umbrella for MusicBrainz. He got started in the late 80’s and early 90’s hacking on some MP3 projects when most of the world hadn’t heard of MP3. The metadata on MP3s was terrible, so he started creating the database known as MusicBrainz.

In this episode of the Sustain Our Software podcast, Benjamin Nickolls talks with the panelists about the potential for an open source community that is self-sustaining. Benjamin helped create Octobox, a notification system for GitHub, which helps filter messages that one receives through GitHub.

In this week’s episode of Sustain Our Software the panel interviews Laura Gaetano. Laura is a developer and designer, whose main job was running was running Rails Girls Summer of Code. The panel considers how great Rails Girls is and all that they are doing. The panel also expresses their love for the Rails framework.

In this week's episode of Sustain Our software Titus Wormer joins the panel to discuss his experience maintaining Unified.js. Titus is built Unified and is working fulltime maintain Unified. He has a bachelor's in digital design and did his thesis on fixing natural language in wed design using syntax trees.

The panel interviews Lou Huang, who has a background in architecture and urban planning. Lou built an opensource app called Streetmix and uses it to help the panel understand opensource projects from a user's perspective. Lou starts by sharing his background, how he got into opensource and his work making Streetmix sustainable.

This week, Sustain Our Software welcomes Chris Ward, Technical Writer at Ethereum from Berlin, Germany. Chris shares his story of how he became a technical writer as well tips and resources for good documentation writing.

Heath Arensen is the Director of Business Planning and Sustainability at the Digital Impact Alliance's Open Source Center. He also supports Open Source projects with consulting and advising in Business Models for sustainability.

Bastien Guerry is employed by the French Administration in a program named Entrepreneurs d'intérêt général inspired by Presidential Innovation Fellows. He is also the Release Manager of Org Mode, an information management and outlining tool for Emacs. Bastien wrote his first software for his girlfriend to help her with her thesis.

Mehdi Medjaoui is the Steering Committee Member of The Maintainers and the founder of OAuth.io and APIdays Conferences. He is also the EU commission 2020 expert on open data and open APIs. He has co-authored O’Reilly Book “Continuous API management” and created the Maintainers Contract and ALIAS protocol.

Samson Goddy and Vipul Gupta join the panelists Pia Mancini and Richard Littauer to talk about open source activities in Nigeria and India. Samson is the Member of the Oversight Board at Sugar Labs and co-founder of Open Source Community Africa and Vipul is a Global Outreach Team Lead at Sugar Labs. Sugar Labs is an activity-focused open-source software learning platform for children.

Greg Bloom, the Chief Organizing Officer of Open Referral Initiative, a community of practice that develops data standards and open source tools that make it easier to share, find and use information about health, human, and social services.Greg talks about the evolution of Open Referral Initiative and defines what "commons" is. He mentions how some of the dilemmas developers are facing in open source software maintenance resembles some of the dilemmas dealt with in common resources management. The panel then talks about what principles or rules should be defined for using open source software resources by taking cues from the common resources management guidelines.

The panel discusses the announcement of the beta GitHub Sponsors, a new way to financially support the developers who build the open source software. They list the features they like that GitHub Sponsors offers but think the beta roll-out could have been handled differently. A lot of critical software is dependent on open source software and many of these open source software libraries are maintained by unsupported developers. The panel uses border patrolling drones that are used to identify threats as an example to demonstrate how everyday life can suffer if open source sponsorship is geared only towards finished products rather than libraries like these.

This new addition to the Devchat.tv podcast family is about software sustainability, open source projects funding and software maintenance. The panelists introduce themselves and their roles and backgrounds in software sustainability. The panelists also mention that 57% of all software built is open-source and the economic value of open source is over 360 billion dollars so it is crucial to keep developers who maintain open-source projects from burning out.