Sustainability beyond funds: Extrospective OSPOs
summary
Proposes an OSPO that hires a dedicated engineering team separate from product orgs to work 100% open source work on chosen dependencies, selected either semantically (what would break the business) or hierarchically (by dependency depth). Claims measurable effects: lower time to review, fewer open issues and more contributors. Gives concrete targets (examples: Kafka, Flink, Cassandra, Postgres, OpenSearch, ClickHouse) and sizing (≈15 upstream maintainers for a 500‑person company). Frames the unit as business insurance for faster vulnerability response and reduced bus factor.
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chapters (6)
- 0:00Introduction and audience questions
- 2:54Beyond funding OSPOs
- 9:13Reducing bus factor
- 14:10Ivin’s OSPO approach
- 17:03Sustaining business viability
- 20:17Call to action and Q&A
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