Josh and Kurt talk to Fiona Krakenbürger about the Sovereign Tech Fund. This is a fund created by Germany to fund important open source projects. Fiona has amazing insight into how this fund was created, what it’s doing today to help fund open source. She discusses where we go from here and what the future will look like. The Sovereign Tech Fund is a forward thinking program to fund open source across the world. This episode is a window into the future.
Episode 367 – Open source will never be the same
Josh and Kurt talk about GitHub enforcing sanctions against an open source developer and Docker changing how their registry works. There’s a lot to unpack in this one. There’s a lot of happenings going on in the world of open source. We are seeing governments paying attention to open source like never before, change is coming and everything is going to change.
Show Notes
Episode 366 – Software liability is coming
Josh and Kurt talk about the number of dependencies that is now normal. Keeping track of thousands of dependencies used to be impressive, now it’s normal. In what instances should we know everything about our open source? The days of being able to ignore your software liability is looking like it’s coming to an end.
Show Notes
Episode 365 – “I am not your supplier” with Thomas Depierre
Josh and Kurt talk to Thomas Depierre about his “I am not a supplier” blog post. We drink from the firehose on this one. Thomas describes the realities and challenges of being an open source maintainer. What open source and society owe each other. How safety can help describe what we see. There’s too many topics to even list. The whole episode is an epic adventure through modern open source.
Show Notes
- Thomas on Mastodon
- I am not a supplier
- The Treachery of Images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe)
- Atlantic Council report
- The Field Guide to Understanding ‘Human Error’
- Google wants new rules for developers working on ‘critical’ projects
- Roads and Bridges:The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure
- Sovereign Tech Fund
Episode 364 – Using SBOMs is hard
Josh and Kurt talk about SBOMs. Quite a bit has happened in the world of SBOMs in the last year or so. There are going to be different types of SBOMs, like build, source, or runtime. Each will tell us different things depending on what we need to know. We also cover some of the community efforts happening around SBOMs. They’re still not easy to use, but it’s better better.
Show Notes
Episode 363 – Joylynn Kirui from Microsoft on DevSecOps
Episode 362 – A lesson in Rust from Carol Nichols
Josh and Kurt talk to Carol Nichols about Rust. Carol is an authority on Rust and helps us understand how Rust works, why it’s different. Why Rust doesn’t have the same problems C and C++ have, and what the future of it all could look like. It’s a really fun show with some great questions from Carol along the way.
Show Notes
Episode 361 – GitHub got pwnt, but it wasn’t very exciting
Episode 360 – Memory safety and the NSA
Josh and Kurt talk about the NSA guidance on using memory safety issues. The TL;DR is to stop using C. We discuss why C has so many problem, why we can’t fix C, and what some alternatives looks like. Even the alternatives have their own set of issues and there are many options, but the one thing we can agree on is we have to stop using C.
Show Notes
Episode 359 – The NOTAM outage and other legacy technology
Josh and Kurt talk about the recent FAA NOTAM outage. Keeping legacy things running for long periods of time is really hard to do, this system is no different. It’s also really hard to upgrade many of these due to corner cases and institutional knowledge. There aren’t any great answers here, but we do ask a lot of questions about long running tech.
Open Source Security 