Technologists talk about open source: it's not just about generating electricity with love

In recent years, Chinese developers have become an important force in the global open source system. According to incomplete statistics, Chinese code accounts for about 40% of the global open source community. At present, among the more than 60 million developers in the world, at least more than 20 million are from China.

Open source is one of the manifestations of a company's technological influence. goes to the community to cooperate with other ecosystems, to expand the application fields of technology, and to contribute to external needs while also allowing its own technology to mature.

In the past 2021, Ant's technical students and developers around the world have jointly participated in the construction and maintenance of open source communities.

the 2021 CNCF China TOP10 contributors, 4 are from Ant Group. In the past 2021, Ant's technical classmates and developers around the world have jointly participated in the construction and maintenance of open source communities. Two of the technical students are mainly involved in Dragonfly and Nydus, two interrelated open source projects.

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Dragonfly

Dragonfly is an open source cloud-native image distribution system, which mainly solves the image distribution problem of the distributed application orchestration system with as the .
 

Nydus

Nydus is an image acceleration project based on the Lazy load principle initiated by Ant Group. Cooperating with Dragonfly for P2P acceleration, it can greatly shorten image download time, improve efficiency, and provide end-to-end image data consistency verification, allowing users to be safer and faster. to start container applications, which is currently a sub-project of Dragonfly.
 

The editor chatted with these two students and their team leaders about open source in their eyes.

@ ｜ Participated in Dragonfly open source for one year

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Open source itself is a dedication worth pursuing

 

I started to contact the Dragonfly project in 2020, and now I am mainly involved in the overall 2.0 upgrade of the project. The maintainers of our project come from different companies and groups, such as Alibaba Cloud, ByteDance, Qunar, Intel, and Shanghai Jiaotong University.

I think that the task of the project development is to formulate standards. Once the standards are formulated, it will be easier to reach an agreement as a result. Although everyone comes from different companies, regardless of the technology, the understanding of the code is different.

The ultimate purpose of is to be responsible for the quality of the , and it is a relationship of cooperation and collaboration.

 
At present, I think that the situation of open source in China is mostly practical, and more dedicated programmers are needed to participate in open source work. Of course, in recent years, many technology start-up companies have emerged in China, and they have begun to invest in open source projects, rather than relying on programmers' own interests and using their spare time to invest.

Open source itself is a devotion worth pursuing

My original intention as a programmer is that hope to change some things with my own , and open source also requires some technical beliefs. Because open source is a free work, not a commercial thing, but hope to find technical points that can be broken through.

 
As one of my personal favorite programs David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) said:

 
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Writing open source software and giving it away for free has without a doubt been my most professional rewarding endeavor yet。\"
 

 

In fact, people who do open source are more tolerant and simple in their work, all in order to do one thing well.

 

write code not 0 and 1

Some programmers are more idealistic, and when they see a problematic part, they must point it out and correct it. For example, myself, I am not used to things that are flawed, and I will definitely stick to the right things.

Writing code depends on specific scenarios and specific needs. There is no absolutely perfect answer, but you must always urge yourself to be close to perfection.

On September 9, 2021, Dragonfly 2.0 was officially released. This is the first open source project I fully participated in from 0 to 1. It is more fulfilling and emotional. Although it took a year from the development to the release of the first version, and there were problems and arguments during the process, everyone was very happy and excited on the day of the actual release. Our classmates are very strong, and we will continue to maintain the project and create a cloud-native scenario based on P2P mirroring and standard file distribution solutions.

 
My personal short-term goal is to graduate Dragonfly to CNCF, and I will continue to pay attention to the problems that can be solved in cloud-native scene image and file distribution in the later stage, and conduct in-depth research.

 
Graduation means more people will use it and the project really starts.

 

@

Building the global reach of open source projects,

need standardization and industry co-construction

 
The open source work I participate in on a daily basis includes functional development, optimizing project performance, improving compatibility and stability, and code optimization. He also often participates in online discussions in the community, and spends a lot of time and energy in the Dragonfly developer group and online community to help others answer questions.

 

participates in open source, not just using

Participating in open source does not mean that you are involved in using it, but you must actively feedback some problems and try your best to make it continue to develop in a good direction.

For example, a project helps you solve a project problem, but the project itself has some problems that are not covered. At this time, you should not ignore it, or leave it alone if it does not involve your usage coverage, but we need to go to the community to give feedback in time.

This kind of feedback can make the product better and better and make more contributions to open source. Especially for projects used within the company, some improvements are not suitable for the upstream community, and there is no way for the community to enjoy the dividends of open source.

 

both standardization and engagement

To form the influence of open source work, standardization of is very important. If a technology cannot be used as a standard, it is difficult to promote it and gain industry recognition.

At the same time, it also requires participation and . Only if industry partners can use and participate in the co-construction, can the technology be recognized.

Advancing standards and engagement is what allows projects to thrive. For example, Google wants to promote K8s as a standard container orchestration platform in the industry, and has spent a lot of efforts to make a good standard practice, so that the industry can participate or agree, and finally the CNCF community is formed.

"Everyone is for me, I am for everyone" can promote the positive cycle of the open source community.

I hope that China's open source projects can reach a higher level in community operations, allowing more people to use them, creating more exchanges, and promoting them to more people.

I also hope to push the Dragonfly project into a graduation project through my own efforts, and do something more meaningful in combination with other projects.

@ Wang ｜ Team leader of

than 10 years of open source experience

OIF Project Kata Containers Co-sponsor

Mulan Open Source Community TOC Member

 

 

Open source team management should avoid tying targets to data,

case you won the commit and lost the community

 

I think as a team manager, managing open source well, the biggest challenge is probably not business pressure, but one's own courage.

Someone always asks me a question -

 

How to balance open source and business?

My idea is upstream first , that is, upstream first .

After you work according to the upstream requirements, you will consider leaving space and interfaces for relevant partners at any time, properly decoupling the core functions and extension functions of the project, and make reasonable compromises and trade-offs. But don't ignore the risks.

After adopting the upstream first way of working, there will be no irreconcilable conflict between business support and open source, otherwise it is necessary to carefully consider whether the wrong project is selected.

In terms of goal setting, I do have the goal of increasing the influence of open source and nurturing new people. However, during the inspection, we focused on whether the work results of this year have really improved the quality of open source, rather than decomposing them into commit rankings and then comparing them.

to participate in open source work, the more important thing is not the number of assessments, but to stimulate the innovation of participants .

open source team management in my eyes (team open source management)

Looking at from the goal, it should be more inclined to "stimulate" the OKR method, to avoid tying the goal to certain data, in case of winning the commit and losing the community.

Looking at from the process, there must be continuous adjustment and guidance to help the project adjust or firm its direction, and enhance the team's ability to participate in the open source community.

at from the working method, there must be the same pursuit of the correct working method as the open source upstream, so that the open source community work and its own business can be unified.

In the past year, Nydus has maintained interaction with other projects in addition to its own construction and cooperation with the Dragonfly project.

The Nydus team integrates seamlessly with its lead-maintained KataContainers secure container. In addition, the Nydus team also cooperated with China's earliest CNCF project, an enterprise-level open source image repository project Harbor, to connect the complete life cycle of cloud-native images, and then cooperated with NEC's foreign developers to jointly promote the OCIImage standard. evolution.

At the beginning of this year, NEC contributed the snapshotter written by Nydus for containerd to containerd org as a sub-project.

The diverse needs and backgrounds of the various developers that come together in the open source community can help code unlock potentials that their designers could not have foreseen when they were written.

open collaboration is the value of open source!