Kumar McMillian on Open Source and Project Maintenance | ChicagoWebConf 2012
Hi, I'm Mike. I'm at Chicago WebConf today with Kumar McMillan, who works with the Mozilla Open Source, well, we all know Mozilla, we all know Firefox, but there's also a Firefox OS that is coming. Hi, I'm Mike. I'm at Chicago WebConf today with Kumar McMillan, who works with the Mozilla Open Source, well, we all know Mozilla, we all know Firefox, but there's also a Firefox OS that is coming. Meet Kumar McMillian from Mozilla at Chicago WebConf 2012! He shares insights on the open-source development of Firefox OS, the importance of structured guidelines, and the collaborative spirit of the community.
The Interviewer
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
The Guest
Kumar McMillian
open source and project maintenance
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Hi, I'm Mike. I'm at Chicago WebConf today with Kumar McMillan, who works with the Mozilla Open Source, well, we all know Mozilla, we all know Firefox, but there's also a Firefox OS that is coming out, and Kumar is working with the team to help interact with the community. Can you tell us a little bit about what Firefox OS is?
Kumar McMillian
open source and project maintenance
▶ Speaking
Yeah, sure. Okay, so mobile apps have been kind of dominated by Android and iOS, and so at Mozilla, we just really wanted the web to be the platform for mobile apps, and so we set out almost about a year ago to build a phone, basically, that's run by the Gecko engine. And you actually have one of those phones on you. I do. It's a real thing. Yeah, it's happening. It's there. You probably can't see it from the camera. I can't see the camera here, but this is working, and it's, I mean, it's been open from day one, and so that's sort of been a pretty interesting part of the project.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Yeah.
Kumar McMillian
open source and project maintenance
▶ Speaking
So as soon as we started committing code to the Git repo, we just had people come out and sort of say, hey, Mozilla, we've been doing the same thing in secret. Yeah, yeah. Let's, like, work together and build a phone together, and so that's sort of been the open source. It took a whole company out from the shadows and said, hey, let's actually start contributing to this thing and make it better for everybody. So they're going to benefit. Mozilla's going to benefit. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, and we have people, I mean, I tell a lot of people that one of the first times I started digging into the project, I was working on IRC with someone to help me kind of get it built, and I was having some problems. And I was, you know, this guy to help me. And then I was like, oh, hey, you know, do you, you know, I work for Mozilla in Chicago.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Where do you work?
Kumar McMillian
open source and project maintenance
▶ Speaking
And he said, oh, no, I'm in Greece. I don't work for Mozilla. You know, he was just somebody just on the project, and that's sort of how open it is. Anyone can jump on IRC. Anyone could get involved. Anyone can start submitting patches. You know, we have the Telefonica guys who are helping us do the launch in Brazil, and they're committing to our repo every day. They're committing to Git. They're putting. They're assigned bugs in our Mozilla tracker. They're just part of the project, you know. So is, when you're working on the open source project, especially one as big as, I mean, the Firefox browser is a huge project, but I can only imagine how huge a OS project is. Is there, like, oversight from Mozilla and, like, a direction, and then people just pick up things that interest them and they want to help out with?
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
How does the community interact with this? Yeah.
Kumar McMillian
open source and project maintenance
▶ Speaking
Well, it's really focused, as in, you know, Mozilla employs a lot of people to be working on this project. And so, you know, there's, like any project, there's deadlines, and, you know, there's a huge kind of, you know, QA infrastructure. There's a big code review process for getting patches into the mainline. But there's, like I said, there's just a lot of involvement from the community. We're working with people, you know, now who are strategic. We're working with strategic partners, like the Telefonica Network, also Qualcomm, who is working on some of the chips, also, you know, people in Europe, and a lot of people are just here that we now kind of have some professional working relationships with because we're shipping a phone. But because it was open source, they basically, you know, we didn't sort of say, we didn't come to them behind closed doors.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Okay.
Kumar McMillian
open source and project maintenance
▶ Speaking
So kind of like with the Linux project, there's... You know, Linus has come out with some pretty strong, you know, opinions on how people should contribute. Does Mozilla have its own kind of guidelines that people can look at and say, oh, this is how I can contribute and how I could... Oh, yeah, definitely, definitely. It's pretty structured. I mean, you have to, before any patch gets accepted, I mean, it has to go through a pretty extensive review process. And, you know, a lot of that is just, you know... It's stylistic reviews, but also, you know, we just, we need to make sure people are using the right APIs, and when, you know, people aren't so familiar with, you know, really low-level parts of the system, part of the code review will be like, oh, no, you need to, like, you know, pass messages back and forth with this API instead of this API, just stuff like that. And that keeps the quality at a good level, you know. And the, you kind of talked a little bit about this neat interaction with this. I agree, he's just not even on the team, but he's just helping you because he wants to contribute.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Has there been any other kind of really interesting interactions with people contributing from the community, good or bad?
Kumar McMillian
open source and project maintenance
▶ Speaking
Just, is there anything that, like, pops to mind aside from... Yeah, well, it's, I actually work more specifically on the Marketplace, which is our app store for the phone. And so I work also on payments. And so that's... It's a website, it's a Python-run website, and so that's kind of this, it's a standalone project, it's a little separate from Firefox OS. And it's been kind of hard to get outside contributors involved in that.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Okay.
Kumar McMillian
open source and project maintenance
▶ Speaking
We have a lot of documentation for how to set it up. It's not really easy to set it up, but, you know, we've documented everything, so you can set it up.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Okay.
Kumar McMillian
open source and project maintenance
▶ Speaking
But we've seen a lot of people jump in that, you know, find us wherever on the web, they just see that Mozilla's open source, they see that the app store that we're building is open source. And... And they try to get involved. They kind of jump on IRC and it's like, hey, I spent a day building this project, I'm stuck here. And, you know, we try to help them, but sometimes everyone's busy and... Yeah, you can't always help like you'd like to. Yeah, so people kind of come and go like that with open source. They get a little frustrated and then they leave. So, you know, we're doing stuff to make it easier. We're making, like, you know, vagrant images so that people can just do, like, a one-click install and have a virtual machine that's running a development version of the app store. So we're actually... We make a really strong effort, you know, time permitting, so that we can get outside contributors. Because that's the core of Mozilla. Mozilla is not the size of Google, you know, or, you know, the people we're kind of competing with, you know, are the size of Mozilla, like, the employees is basically the size of a single project at Mozilla, for example. Like, the Google Plus team is probably the size of all of Mozilla. And, you know... Yeah, that's a little scary. It's a scale difference. Yeah, yeah. So we're trying to build a phone and we're just Mozilla, you know. So it's actually, you know, one of the things we've always done and the reason why Firefox has been so successful, you know, in what it set out to do, which was, like, you know, make the web a kind of level playing field, take over Internet Explorer, which no one thought was possible at the time, is because we work with the community.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Right.
Kumar McMillian
open source and project maintenance
▶ Speaking
And because it's open source. And just before we wrap up here, you work with... An online radio station. Yes.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Can you just give a little plug for that and describe what you're doing there?
Kumar McMillian
open source and project maintenance
▶ Speaking
Because you said that's also open source. Yeah, it's tripradio. org. And it's, you know, it's funny. I tell people it's a nonprofit, just like Mozilla. And in a lot of ways, it's similar to Mozilla, but at an obviously very much smaller scale. Everything is open source. All our software is open source. And we really... We work with the community as much as possible. It's built entirely by volunteers. And it's a lot of fun.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
If somebody wanted to listen to it, what kind of music is it?
Kumar McMillian
open source and project maintenance
▶ Speaking
It's all kinds of music. Tripradio. org. We broadcast about 18 hours a day now. So, Chirp, like as in Birdie, Chirp, C-H-I-R-P. org.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Okay.
Kumar McMillian
open source and project maintenance
▶ Speaking
Yeah, one word, tripradio. org. All right. Thank you very much. Thanks, Mike.
Critical Insights
durable
"Mozilla employs a structured code review process to maintain the quality of open-source projects."
durable
"The open-source nature of Firefox OS led to strategic partnerships and professional working relationships with various companies."
durable
"Community contributions to open-source projects can be inconsistent, with some individuals becoming frustrated and leaving."