Open Source Summit NA 2025

I had the privilege of attending Open Source Summit 2025 in Denver (June 23-26) last week. It was my first non-writing technical conference since joining NGINX (F5) just over a year ago.

The Linux Foundation has hired an economist, @frank nagle. He share his study which shows, conservatively, Open Source has added US $8.8 TRILLION to the world economy.

One joy of working for NGINX is the userbase. People came up to me and shared what they do with NGINX. I starting thinking “use cases”! Sometimes, I even heard from people with feedback on our documentation!

As a techincal writer (documentarian), I valued the docs track. It gave me different perspectives on:

• Finding the best subject matter expert. So many of us look to to the primary developer. @kim nylander and @hedley Simons shared why it’s the Field Engineer.
• @manny silva described available tools which lower contributor barriers to entry. Premise: it’s critical for non-writers to contribute to docs.
• With @gitlab-style “radical transparancy”, @victor lyubslavsky described how he shares his open source documentation repository with the community.
• @chuck wolber, @kate stewart, and @gabriele Paoloni described their plans to enhance documentation of the Linux Kernel with a multi-part requirement template. Given the number of contributors… if you watch the recording, the Q&A is popcorn-level interesting!

The Open Source Summit also feeds the technical side of my skillset. With sessions on networking (the ifcfg kind), server security (with Linux Security Modules), and even a sponsored session on “Golden” (Docker) images, I opened my mind to current best practices in Linux.

The Linux Foundation co-locates several other conferences. The OpenAPI education mini-summit brought me up to speed with:

• The Arazzo specification, which translates groups of API calls into use cases
• The Overlay specification, which supports changes to groups of calls

The CHAOSScon session (That’s Community Health Analytics in Open Source Software) brought together organizers who work with dozens and even hundreds of open source repositories. But before getting to metrics, I need more of an action plan. We released our NGINX doc repository (https://github.com/nginx/documentation) as open source back in January. It’s gotten a great reception from the documentation community. CHAOSScon gave me ideas on how to push this further. Stay tuned!