Draft Open Source Working Group Minutes RIPE 90

Thursday, 15 May 2025, 11:00 - 12:30 (UTC+1)
Chairs: Marcos Sanz, Marco d'Itri, Sasha Romijn
Scribe: Antony Gollan
Status: Draft

View the recordings
View the stenography transcript
View the chat logs

1. Administrative Matters

The presentation is available at:
https://ripe90.ripe.net/archives/video/1646/

Sasha Romijn, Open Source WG Co-chair, welcomed attendees and ran through the agenda. The minutes from RIPE 89 were approved without changes.

2. Money and Open Source Sustainability

Victoria Risk, ISC

The presentation is available at:
https://ripe90.ripe.net/archives/video/1648/

Victoria discussed various approaches for financially sustaining open source projects, drawing from ISC's experience with DHCP and Kea. She explained that funding primarily came from grants, donations, premium feature sales, and professional technical support. Premium features were minimally profitable and overly complex for users, leading ISC to move back to open-source licensing. What had been successful for them was providing technical support services, though it took years to build a recurring revenue base.

Martin Winter, NetDEF, thanked Victoria and said that one thing that worked for them was a kind of sponsored feature model where people who wanted a specific feature could fund development, but once it was completed, that feature was available to everyone. He asked if ISC had tried this.

Victoria said they had. In one case, a sponsor had insisted that they embargo the feature from open source for a while. This was during a financially difficult period, so they had agreed. Overall, this model hadn’t been a significant funding source for them.

Rinse Kloek, Delta Fiber, said they had been satisfied Kea users for four years. However, he raised concerns about the bronze support tier, explaining that despite the significant cost, not all premium plug-ins were included. This led to client dissatisfaction, and he thought that businesses paying substantial fees should get access to all premium features.

Victoria said that the only excluded feature at the bronze level was role-based access control, which was still in its early stages. She added that the subscription model had since been simplified with all subscribers receiving the same software now.

Rinse acknowledged this change in the latest version and said he was against future model changes, as businesses preferred consistency.

Gerardo Lisboa, speaking for himself, asked if the support team had a connection with the developers.

Victoria said their team included seven professional support engineers, most of whom were senior operators before joining. These engineers meet with the development team at least weekly for support escalations. They also used a chat client while working and so were in contact all the time.

August Bournique, Frame Shift Consulting Amsterdam, said he was curious whether they had considered using compliance specific with the CRA as a potential funding model given the emerging regulatory compliance needs of their software partners.

Victoria said they had. She added that this was a good question. Since open source projects needed to apply for CE marking, you could then use this to support commercial users who needed it for their products. This was an excellent strategy.

Niall O’Reilly, Tolerant Networks, noted that Victoria had referred to European funding sources, specifically the NLnet Foundation. He highlighted that while a European partner was required there, the funding also supported global collaboration too.

Maria Matejka, BIRD, confirmed that her experience had been similar. She noted that the premium features had alternative open source plugins included in the premium versions which had killed their premium features and also created code differences with merging. This was why from the beginning she had opposed premium features at BIRD.

Victoria said she took her point. They had hoped to see more community developed plug-ins, but in any case they hoped the whole premium debacle was now behind them and she had just wanted to share their experiences.

3. BIND 9 fast(er)

Ondřej Surý, ISC

The presentation is available at:
https://ripe90.ripe.net/archives/video/1650/

Ondřej provided insights into recent improvements to BIND 9, emphasising performance gains achieved through parallel programming techniques, custom synchronisation mechanisms, and using the Read-Copy-Update (RCU) approach. These optimisations dramatically improved query processing speeds and resource efficiency, supported by comprehensive data and benchmarks.

Farrokhi Babak, Quad9, said this was fascinating work and thanked Ondřej for his efforts. He asked if he had ever measured the impact of this work on power usage.

Ondřej said they didn’t have that measurement, but making things more effective would allow full CPU use when needed and lower usage when not fully loaded. As a guest lecturer on parallel programming, he often told students that not everything could be scaled by just spending more on cloud resources—and if you can make something a little faster, you always should. A millisecond for ten users was nothing, but for 10 million it was a lot of money, power, and environmental impact. Real-world impact should always be considered when coding.

Tamás Csillag, PCH, asked if back probes in BIND were a production feature intended to go into live production packages.

Ondřej said that it was enabled in Fedora but he hadn’t seen it active in Debian. He thought this needed to be fixed and he would speak with him after the session.

Gerhard Stein, Flexoptix, asked what his opinion was on more modern languages, like Rust for example.

Ondřej said that C was very dear to his heart and not everyone could upgrade to Rust. He thought that the whole open source and general software ecosystem could be improved by using modern C features so it would be a shared responsibility to push projects that might not have enough resources to do a complete redrive and improve the code quality by using the better C standards. He was a fan of Rust, but not of its evangelism.

4. Growing a team

Maria Matejka, CZ.NIC

The presentation is available at:
https://ripe90.ripe.net/archives/video/1653/

Maria shared her experience growing a team of developers, advocating for junior staff to be given time to learn and grow and not be given unrelated tasks that do not contribute towards this. It also meant becoming less hands-on and focusing more on leading, supervising, tutoring, reviewing, coordinating, consulting, hiring, and ensuring that the team was happy.

Ondřej Surý, ISC, offered a recommendation rather than a question: learn to let go and delegate, and accept that not everything has to be perfect.

Maria agreed that this was one of the hardest things to do.

Gerardo said he tried to tell everyone that technology was people because this was often forgotten. He asked if they had brought in developers from the support staff since this could be an enriching experience which helped in both cases.

Maria said it was hard to do because it was easier to hire a junior developer than an L2/L3 support. However, there was a bit of an overlap. Some juniors did tend to do more of the support work.

Marco d'Itri, speaking for himself, said the task was to ensure that there was an environment where everybody could be happy but she could not actually be responsible for everybody's happiness.

Maria agreed that it was more about creating the environment.

5. goSDN

Martin Stiemerling, da/net

The presentation is available at:
https://ripe90.ripe.net/archives/video/1654/

Martin introduced goSDN, a small-scale, model-driven SDN controller created to suit classroom, lab and modest operational settings where mainstream platforms were unwieldy. Released under an open source licence, it was already being used in a number of networking classes and research projects, offering a code base that newcomers could comprehend, modify and extend within the limited time typical of academic work.

There were no questions.

6. AOB

The presentation is available at:
https://ripe90.ripe.net/archives/video/1655/

Sasha reminded everyone to rate the talks, as the feedback helps both presenters. She added that if anyone had feedback or comments for the chairs, to share them on the working group mailing list or email the chairs directly.