On the day the email announcing "Wu Sheng was elected as the director of the Apache Software Foundation" was sent, Wu Sheng and his team were working at the Sanya off site - outside the company, contacting team members face-to-face, and synchronizing progress and upcoming tasks .
Similar scenes also occur in Wu Sheng's life from time to time, sometimes with teammates, sometimes with some like-minded friends in the open source circle to meet, work, and chat in different cities. This is exactly what attracts Wu Sheng to open source - work, socializing, and even travel can all come together perfectly.
Wu Sheng and his team off site in Sanya
Of course, the email itself is more worthy of celebration, "the most exciting moment of my six-year OSS journey".
In 2015, Wu Sheng opened a warehouse and wanted team members to submit code to exercise their skills. After accumulating some code, the project was open sourced in 2016, which is now known as SkyWalking. In December 2017, SkyWalking entered the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) incubator, and Wu Sheng started his journey in ASF as a P PMC.
Here, he will become a mentor for several open source projects donated by Chinese developers, and four years later, he will become the first Chinese to sit on the ASF board .
The most important condition for being elected as a director of ASF is to obtain enough member support. Wu Sheng revealed that there are about 30 ASF members in China, and he received far more votes in the election. "People are social creatures, this is actually very important", gaining the support of members means their approval. Wu Sheng is usually more willing to leave technology aside and chat with others, and often interact with friends on social networking sites, chatting about daily life, hobbies, Favorite food, etc. "Do you have a good opinion of a person? The technical understanding is too limited, unless you are working on the same project, but it's boring to just talk about the project."
For him, open source is a very unique way of socializing, like a business card, allowing everyone to have a common language. He claims to be a "hardcore open source enthusiast" and likes to write programs. Open source is an excellent way to ensure that he can stay in the technical circle without changing to a pure management position and without affecting social interaction. Compared with the engineers behind most commercial software, open source project engineers will have more opportunities to communicate with the outside world and meet more people. People can use technology to make friends, not just discuss company business.
"There are many similar people in the OSS field, and the OSS people are actually a group of people. Now this group of people has been pushed to the forefront, and the usual mentality is more because they like a certain technology and open source cooperation methods. So everyone gathered in this circle."
As for when he will leave this circle, probably only time can answer. Wu Sheng said that SkyWalking has an end. It may have 5 or 10 years of life, but there will always be a time to complete its historical mission. If he decides to leave SkyWalking one day, he is not sure if there will be another project that will require him to stay in the OSS field.
Author of the Socialist Buddhist Project
Regarding SkyWalking, Wu Sheng described it as a Buddhist project.
As the founder of the project, Wu Sheng doesn't care about SkyWalking's ranking on the list, nor is he interested in some common data to measure the development of open source projects. The number of stars, the number of forks, the number of contributors, etc. are all indicators that can be faked in Wu Sheng's view. "This kind of indicator is often just a game, we can talk about it, but it does not mean anything at the same time." Wu Sheng added Recognize that open source projects pay attention to their own changes, for example, see if their contributors, downloads, etc. have increased significantly in the past three months compared with the previous three months. If so, it may be what they have done in the past three months. Or maybe there are features in the new version that users really like.
Sometimes Wu Sheng even encourages users to use competitors' projects.
SkyWalking is an APM monitoring system designed for microservices, cloud-native and container-based architectures. In the same field, Zipkin is also a distributed tracing system . In the eyes of many people, the two are inevitably in a competitive relationship. However, Wu Sheng once told customers very bluntly that if they want simple functions and only need to track, they can use ZipKin with confidence, and there is no need to use SkyWalking.
In his view, competition is everywhere, but a competitor and an enemy are two different things. In the field of open source, products should solve technical problems, and treat competition with a normal heart. Maybe the other party's project is indeed better in a certain subdivision track, while its own product is better in other aspects, and the audience will actually be subtle. Difference, "Users will ask me to use yours or someone else's products. This is essentially a question that users need to answer by themselves, depending on what they need."
"This is why I have been in some projects that seem to compete with SkyWalking but are related to it all year round." It is Wu Sheng's consistent style to be happy to appreciate other projects and cooperate with other communities. In his view, each project has its own areas of expertise, and the premise of cooperation is to stand on a united front with the other party and understand the value of the other party. If you encounter projects in the same field, you will start to define good and bad, which will easily lead to division of camps and separate divisions, which is not conducive to sustainable development.
Interestingly. Later, when SkyWalking wanted to enter the ASF incubator, Wu Sheng found that there was an ASF incubator project management committee member Mick Semb Wever in the ZipKin community , so he asked him to chat about it. The other party readily agreed to serve as SkyWalking's mentor, and soon he found Jiang Ning and Han Qing who were qualified as mentors and successfully entered the incubator. The entire process was completed in less than 20 days.
"In the whole of open source, networking is the most important thing for me. Whether it's my own open source experience or the success of SkyWalking, the most important thing to make a difference is the support and cooperation of others."
Wu Sheng (first from right) and SkyWalking tutor Jiang Ning (first from left) and friends in the circle take a group photo
Meanwhile, from a "secular" perspective, Wu Sheng attributes the success of SkyWalking to the favor of commercial companies. Since 2019, a large number of professional developers from commercialization at home and abroad have contributed to the community. When commercial companies pin their success on the success of an open source project, but are unable to fully undertake the development of the entire project, they will participate in the community and maintain a certain project direction in exchange for others to undertake the project. The other direction, and finally achieve the effect of overall prosperity.
Wu Sheng is also enjoying the future development: "I am more focused on the commercialization of SkyWalking, focusing on Tetrate and other commercial companies, and how much economic value can be created by relying on SkyWalking. Because I think this can explain the economy of open source products themselves. Value and social value. SkyWalking is still inflated, and I’m actually curious about what SkyWalking will end up being.”
In addition to paying attention to the development of SkyWalking, Wu Sheng is also the PMC of many other projects. He is willing to help the project community to do cultural and technical compliance work, including the use of licenses, compliance with ASF internal rules, and so on. Sometimes he also helps projects under incubation to communicate copyright issues encountered. PMC is more often the role of a supervisor and an observer, and needs to help the project go on a normal track. His long-standing view is that in the field of open source, one must accept to do some work in non-technical fields, such as cultural preaching and compliance inspection, which may be more conducive to achieving extensive social interaction in the open source circle.
Apache SkyWalking 2020 DevCon on November 14, 2020
Leverage business company
To a certain extent, Wu Sheng's open source career was also developed under the direct "funding" of commercial companies.
Initially, after SkyWalking was open-sourced, he and his friends only occasionally wrote blogs and updated functions without much investment. In 2016, a company in the APM field recognized SkyWalking's technical direction very much and sent him a job offer. Only then did Wu Sheng, who received the invitation, realize that the open source project in hand can have commercial value.
Before long, he jumped to Huawei and started more frequent community operations. Before, if he wanted to do a SkyWalking theme sharing, he needed to ask a friend to ask if the event organizer had a quota. After getting the speaking quota, he had to pay for the travel expenses himself. These problems were easily solved with the support of commercial companies. After joining Huawei, there are sharing sessions almost every month, at home and abroad, at most, three times a month. In this way, the high-intensity publicity sharing has expanded the popularity of SkyWalking, bringing in many supporters and users.
At the same time, Huawei Wu Sheng had an opportunity to go out to communicate. From San Francisco to Seattle, he went to many well-known companies on the West Coast of the United States, including cloud manufacturers, companies specializing in monitoring, etc. "I met some friends, which will be very helpful to open source and globalization in the future."
While Wu Sheng was promoting SkyWalking, on the other side of the ocean, several entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley gathered together to discuss the idea of establishing a mesh company, which would later be called Tetrate. SkyWalking.
In 2018, the current CTO of Tetrate, Jeyapraggash Jeyakeerthi, found Wu Sheng, and the two met in Hong Kong. They chatted for a few hours and discussed the possible business direction of SkyWalking in the future. In the end, Wu Sheng decided to join the newly established startup company. Said that open source has learned a lot of knowledge, culture, and way of doing things from them.”
In Wu Sheng's view, Tetrate is more like a service provider to the project. The company will not give specific guidance on how to develop the project, but will help match it. For example, when Wu Shengliao puts forward an idea, the company will help to contact the partner, "This is not a daily action, most of the work still has to be contacted by yourself, but the company will give corresponding support. The leaders of Tetrate often say, you If you need help with anything, you can come to me where I am better at it, and if you think you are better at it, you can let it go.”
More importantly, Tetrate never uses community indicators to assess whether open source is on the right path in its daily work, but will focus on user feedback and replace hard indicators with soft indicators. This evaluation method of Tetrate has also become Wu Sheng's reference when evaluating the development of open source projects, that is, spending more time and energy to pay attention to whether the project is doing well and whether it has been truly recognized by the community.
"I can participate in open source after 2017, and I work intensively in the open source field, which has a lot to do with the support of the company behind it. In fact, it's just me, no matter how much I hope SkyWalking can do well, it's not realistic. It's something." As an open source enthusiast, Wu Sheng maintains a very rational view on open source: it is a good thing to do open source through interest, but if you have been in the open source field for ten years, you just want to keep going with your feelings and hobbies. , it is difficult to determine how far it can go.
Wu Sheng is also a paid open source cultural technology consultant for several companies. Few of the companies he approached in 2017-2018 were willing to pay open source consultants, and the environment has improved a lot. In his view, professional consultants and enthusiasts are already two completely different paths. The former needs to solve more complex problems and provide more professional advice.
"Personally, I mainly still do consulting work, because it has gradually become a professional existence. Of course, we will also help some good projects in ASF. There will be both lines, but relatively speaking, the current economy-driven There will be more patterns."
Apche Beijing Region 2020 Year-End Roundtable
Dialogue with Wu Sheng丨It is the developers themselves who really hurt open source
Q: SkyWalking often encountered downstream projects that did not comply with the license agreement. You would always choose to stand up and point out the infringing party's problem. Did they say anything about it? How much harm does this violation do to the community?
Wu Sheng: Some projects (allegedly infringing) will come over to find out what happened, and then quickly correct mistakes and make changes according to community requirements, like Boyun and Tencent before. There are also companies that have no feedback on this, and have introduced SkyWalking in their products, but have made no claims. We can clearly see that the vast majority of manufacturers are willing to comply with the requirements of the license, and the cost of compliance is not high and does not require financial resources.
Such infringements tend to have a greater impact on the environment. Maybe everyone has some opinions on the infringing company, which may lose a lot of cooperation with the open source community. Even after doing open source and stepping into the same field again, the project may soon be submerged in the public opinion war of a super-large community. I think this is something that companies and teams need to consider. When you infringe, it is very likely that you will not bring additional benefits, but will lose your reputation in the entire open source circle in the future.
I think awareness is far more complicated than action. But at the current stage, infringement is not the most harmful to open source.
Q: What hurts open source the most?
Wu Sheng: What really hurts open source is the developers themselves. The two most common problems. One is that developers, especially Chinese developers, believe that it is only right for software authors to help others, because you wrote the entire software, so when I ask you questions, you should answer them. If you don't answer, you are considered to be putting on airs. Instead of considering that because the software author used his own time to provide the service, it should be appreciated.
When there were only two users in the early days of an open source project, and the open source author very much wanted more users to use it, he would discuss it with users in great detail. But when faced with a very large-scale community, it is impossible for the author to give feedback on the minutiae. A common situation in the community is that there may be a user in a Chinese discussion group that a certain function has reported an error. I will be online tonight, can you help me solve it. But this is obviously a job where users get paid, why does it rely on others to solve the problem for free? This situation is actually the most harmful to the entire community and the environment.
Another thing that we have repeatedly mentioned is the use of English, which is also the most common contradiction in China. But let's put it in reverse, for example, when I was elected as the director of ASF, everyone is very willing to say that this is a good phenomenon. If my working language is Chinese, this thing will never be done.
The world needs communication, and it always needs a specific language at a specific time to bridge everyone. Especially in our current company, where employees stretch from Japan in the most eastern time zone to North America, if everyone speaks their native language, there is no way for everyone to communicate. So which language should I choose when communicating? If I don't choose it, will I not respect you or your country? It's a difficult topic to explain, so what I can say is that I never speak English to a Chinese audience in a speech , but at the same time I can't say that English doesn't matter.
Q: If someone wants to start an open source project, any advice?
Wu Sheng: I think that the actual problem must be solved first. In fact, this has nothing to do with code and technology. I have always felt that open source projects can flourish, one premise is that there is a problem in the world that needs to be solved, and there is no such thing as yet. was well resolved. For example, let's say that a company's business model is to solve customer pain points. At this point, there is not much difference between open source and commercial.
At first, SkyWalking was trying to solve the hard requirement of all-in-one monitoring in the field of APM monitoring in an open source way. At the beginning, we just chose such a point and made a surface from the point, but we can see that this field is empty, although some people have set foot in it, but they have not made it deep and complicated, so we decided to make it complicated.
And most open source projects may say that there is already a particularly complex software in this field, and I want to make it simple. The most common word is "easy-to-use tools", and one thing is the simplicity of another thing. Version. The problem brought by the simplified version is that you must solve only the part of the problem that the project was to solve in that year, then you will be in a dilemma, and you will become like it if you evolve.
Q: How to explore more business value through open source?
Wu Sheng:
I think there are two aspects.
The business model is more about users needing this thing. Take SkyWalking as an example, many companies are creating different business values based on SkyWalking. For example, some companies want to use pure APM; some companies will make security solutions based on SkyWalking; there are also some cloud service businesses to solve the problem of the last mile of cloud service customers connection, etc. These are only what I have contacted, it is impossible Covers all scenarios.
Often when people discuss business value, they are talking about start-ups, which is equivalent to my personal business value to SkyWalking. But in fact, for open source projects, the greater commercial value is the social value brought by the project, which is also the essence of open source that everyone is pursuing, that is, seeing broader value while solving problems.
For example, if I make a company, even if I expand it and go public, I get a lot of business profits from it, so this is also my personal interest. But for a wider range of participants, what they see are other interests, for the economy, people's livelihood, solving practical problems of enterprises, reducing costs and increasing efficiency for enterprises, etc. There are many things that are not me or a company. able to resolve.
Q: Will you do more to help Chinese open source projects after being elected to the ASF board?
Wu Sheng: Of course we do. Whether it is an ASF official or the ALCbejing team led by Mr. Jiang Ning, the Foundation welcomes Chinese projects in essence, but we welcome Chinese projects to view open source more maturely and rationally, and better participate in open source.
How many projects in China are in ASF, or how many Chinese members are in the foundation, this is just a relatively unimportant indicator. But a good sign, more and more people in China are participating in open source projects. In addition to the election of directors this year, we also have several new members and the first female member in China. I think this matter is more important than the board election. ASF increasingly recognizes China's contribution.
In fact, we have been saying that although ASF is the largest foundation in the world, its culture is not necessarily applicable to every development project. It is either in line with the Apache Way or good open source. There are many types and cultures of open source, and if you recognize the culture of ASF , the threshold of ASF is not high .
[Tracing the source] In each conversation, trace the stories about open source, and get to know those open source people who are geeky, free, and persistent.
The open source character interview column [Trace Source] launched by OSCHINA.
Tracing to the source means tracing back to the source and solving the problem for open source. Ask how the canal can be so clear, because there is a source of living water. Every open source participant is the most vivid source of the open source wave. All open source stories together build the open source world we see today.
In the decades since the emergence of open source, the hacker groups working for open source have suffered from indifference and rejection from the mainstream of society. Even if the current software industry has shouted the slogan of "embracing open source", the problem still exists.
We don't know how many obstacles open source contributors, open source evangelists, and all those involved in open source will face, but what gives us confidence is that more people are joining the open source cause.
Therefore, OSCHINA hopes to face the developer community, find everyone who actively participates in open source and have ideas about open source, understand them and their open source stories, and spy on the development law of open source business in the stories.
[Traceability] series of articles:
Shisi: Becoming an Open Source Evangelist
Wei Jianfan: The "World Expert" in the Open Source Circle
[Trace to the source] The column is collecting open source character stories. If you think you or the people around you have made unique contributions to open source, please fill out the questionnaire below and contact us
https://www.wjx.cn/vj/rRhC1S4.aspx
In July this year, Wu Sheng, as the producer of the "Comprehensive Technology" sub-forum of the Global Open Source Technology Summit GOTC, will bring you a series of dry speeches. This forum mainly involves topics related to partial architecture and system business, such as monitoring, distributed scheduling, gateway, message middleware, etc. At that time, there will be core developers from various open source project communities to share the latest trends in related technologies and in-depth discussions on the development trend of the domestic open source technology ecosystem.
The Global Open Source Technology Conference (GOTC) is a grand open source technology feast for global developers, initiated by the Open Atom Open Source Foundation and the Linux Foundation in conjunction with Open Source China. The summit will bring together leading open source companies and top open source projects, covering cloud native, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, blockchain, large front-end, audio and video, security, operating systems, databases, open source governance and other technical fields. During the 2-day period, it will bring the latest and purest open source technology in the world to developers, spread open source culture and ideas, and promote the development and construction of open source ecology.
GOTC focuses on "open source" throughout the whole process. The organizer, together with the internationally renowned open source software foundation, is committed to making it an annual world-class open source technology event.
For details, please check the GOTC official website: https://gotc.oschina.net