{"id":9573,"date":"2022-10-24T21:34:05","date_gmt":"2022-10-24T21:34:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/andrewdoran.uk\/blog\/?p=9573"},"modified":"2022-10-24T21:34:05","modified_gmt":"2022-10-24T21:34:05","slug":"thoughts-on-wb-40-at-openuk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/andrewdoran.uk\/blog\/2022\/10\/24\/thoughts-on-wb-40-at-openuk\/","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts on WB-40 at OpenUK"},"content":{"rendered":"
The latest episode of the excellent WB-40 podcast<\/a> is filled with a series of interesting interviews from the recent OpenUK<\/a> Open Source Software thought leadership event. The conversations are wide-ranging and well a listen.<\/p>\n

One of the discussions noted that open source software development was resilient in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, given that contributors worked remotely and asynchronously in the first place. This got me thinking about Automattic<\/a>, the company behind WordPress. They are remote-first, with staff spread all around the world<\/a>. Last year, Matt Mullenweg, Automattic\u2019s founder, appeared on the Postlight Podcast<\/a> where he enthused me with his passion for all things open source:<\/p>\n

\n …WordPress is actually not the most important thing in the world to me, open source is. […] essentially a hack to get competitors to work together and sort of create a shared commons of knowledge and functionality in the case of software, that something getting bigger, it becomes better, where with most proprietary solutions, when something gets bigger, it becomes worse or becomes less lined with its users. Because the owners of WordPress are its users. And […] the sort of survival rate of proprietary software like they\u2019re all evolutionary dead ends, the very long term, that might be 20, 30, 40 years. But it\u2019s all going to move to open source because that\u2019s where all the incentives are. I think even a company like Microsoft, being now one of the largest open contributors, source contributors in the world, is astounding, and something that I think most people wouldn\u2019t have predicted 10 or 20 years ago, but I believe it\u2019s actually inevitable.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Another interview covered the concept of a \u2018software bill of materials\u2019, where applications come with a breakdown of the components that they use. Driven by the US Government Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency<\/a> (CISA), the goal is for organisations that use specific software to quickly identify where they may be exposed to security vulnerabilities in the underlying components. For open source projects that have not published this information, there are some automated tools such as It-Depends<\/a><\/em> that go some way to discovering these dependencies.<\/p>\n

There is often an argument that open source software is safer than closed source, proprietary software. The idea is that open source software will have more eyes on it and therefore people will have the ability to discover, report and fix critical security defects. I wonder if there is always a point where a community has built up around a product to make this true, with less popular products being more at risk of vulnerabilities or deliberately rogue code?<\/p>\n

Ben Higgins and Ted Driggs from Extrahop<\/a> appeared on an episode of the Risky Business podcast last year<\/a> to take the \u2018software bill of materials\u2019 idea one step further. They advocate for a \u2018bill of behaviours\u2019<\/a> where software is supplied with details of what its users can expect, e.g. external and internal network destinations, and a list of ports and how they are used. These behaviours would be published in a format that common security products can understand. I love<\/em> this idea and hope it gains traction. Driggs gave an update on the podcast in February<\/a> about how the initiative is going.<\/div>\n

The latest episode of the excellent WB-40 podcast is filled with a series of interesting interviews from the recent OpenUK Open Source Software thought leadership event. The conversations are wide-ranging and well a listen. One of the discussions noted that open source software development was resilient in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, given that […]<\/div>\n<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"webmentions_disabled_pings":false,"webmentions_disabled":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[23,16],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-9573","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-podcasts","7":"category-technology","8":"h-entry","10":"hentry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":8848,"url":"https:\/\/andrewdoran.uk\/blog\/2022\/04\/05\/8848\/","url_meta":{"origin":9573,"position":0},"title":"\ud83c\udf99 It\u2019s great to get\u2026","author":"Andrew Doran","date":"5 April 2022","format":"status","excerpt":"\ud83c\udf99 It\u2019s great to get a couple of my questions featured on the WB-40 podcast again. Great show.","rel":"","context":"In "Snippets"","block_context":{"text":"Snippets","link":"https:\/\/andrewdoran.uk\/blog\/category\/snippets\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6045,"url":"https:\/\/andrewdoran.uk\/blog\/2020\/04\/23\/6045\/","url_meta":{"origin":9573,"position":1},"title":"Really interesting interview on the\u2026","author":"Andrew Doran","date":"23 April 2020","format":"status","excerpt":"Really interesting interview on the latest WB-40 podcast with Steve Price on home schooling during the pandemic. He seems to be winning at parenting. My children are a bit older and don't need as much help and supervision, but am thinking about how cool his projects sound.","rel":"","context":"In "Snippets"","block_context":{"text":"Snippets","link":"https:\/\/andrewdoran.uk\/blog\/category\/snippets\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6984,"url":"https:\/\/andrewdoran.uk\/blog\/2021\/03\/02\/6984\/","url_meta":{"origin":9573,"position":2},"title":"\ud83c\udf99 This week\u2019s episode of\u2026","author":"Andrew Doran","date":"2 March 2021","format":"status","excerpt":"\ud83c\udf99 This week\u2019s episode of the WB-40 podcast brought back memories of having a TV repair man (and it was always a man) visit us at home. Last time must have been in the 1980s. In the early 2000s I tried in vain to find an electronics repair shop to\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Snippets"","block_context":{"text":"Snippets","link":"https:\/\/andrewdoran.uk\/blog\/category\/snippets\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8010,"url":"https:\/\/andrewdoran.uk\/blog\/2021\/09\/04\/8010\/","url_meta":{"origin":9573,"position":3},"title":"\ud83c\udf99I\u2019ve had so much value\u2026","author":"Andrew Doran","date":"4 September 2021","format":"status","excerpt":"\ud83c\udf99I\u2019ve had so much value out of the WB-40 podcast and the wonderful community that they\u2019ve built over the past few years. Looking forward to the next set of interesting guests and conversations they have lined up when they return this month. https:\/\/twitter.com\/ballantine70\/status\/1433880167802417158?s=21","rel":"","context":"In "Snippets"","block_context":{"text":"Snippets","link":"https:\/\/andrewdoran.uk\/blog\/category\/snippets\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9028,"url":"https:\/\/andrewdoran.uk\/blog\/2022\/05\/13\/not-for-profit\/","url_meta":{"origin":9573,"position":4},"title":"Not-for-profit","author":"Andrew Doran","date":"13 May 2022","format":false,"excerpt":"The second WB-40 podcast episode in their series on organisations with purpose is a fascinating listen. The hosts are joined by Kate Davies, CEO of London Housing Association Notting Hill Genesis. The concept of being a non-profit that generates significant revenue in order to do more good with that money\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Podcasts"","block_context":{"text":"Podcasts","link":"https:\/\/andrewdoran.uk\/blog\/category\/podcasts\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7330,"url":"https:\/\/andrewdoran.uk\/blog\/2021\/05\/21\/the-year-without-pants\/","url_meta":{"origin":9573,"position":5},"title":"\ud83d\udcda The Year Without Pants","author":"Andrew Doran","date":"21 May 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Finished reading The Year Without Pants by Scott Berkun. I picked this up as I\u2019ve started to think about the potential shift back to the office as the pandemic abates here in the UK. I\u2019d previously read and enjoyed Berkun\u2019s Confessions Of A Public Speaker. He has a very readable\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Books"","block_context":{"text":"Books","link":"https:\/\/andrewdoran.uk\/blog\/category\/books\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/andrewdoran.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/andrewdoran.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/andrewdoran.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andrewdoran.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andrewdoran.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9573"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/andrewdoran.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9573\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9574,"href":"https:\/\/andrewdoran.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9573\/revisions\/9574"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/andrewdoran.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andrewdoran.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andrewdoran.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}