Go to any network operator group meeting, and you’ll be met by a pre-meeting hackathon, encouraging participants to engage in open source software development of some description. The sense is that OSS is important to network operators. There’s also a quiet suspicion that network operators are not as engaged with OSS as they might, or ought to, be.
So, in October and November 2019, we canvassed people to provide responses to a set of questions about their experiences. We targeted “network operator communities”, and did cast the net broadly to collect data from anyone willing to share information about their use, contributions to, and supporting of OSS. In seeking better understanding of what were attractions, another aim was to better understand who is not doing some or all of the above. What are the sources of friction that can be addressed to improve engagement with OSS? What are the things that are immediate attractors, or outright buzzkills?
Read More »OSS and Operators: what was the question?