In the 100th episode of the Open at Intel podcast, host Katherine Druckman and Arm’s Director of Software Communities Megan Knight discuss the challenges of managing project stakeholders, the evolving landscape of open source and its impact on policy and sustainability, and why corporate support for open source contributors is more important than ever. Enjoy this transcript of their conversation.
“Open source is open for a reason. Even if folks feel like their opinion might not be welcomed, I still encourage them to voice that because it could lead to discussion that we wouldn't have had if they didn't voice that opinion.”
—Megan Knight, PMP, Director of Software Communities, Arm
Katherine Druckman: Hey, Megan. Thank you for taking time out of your very busy KubeCon to join me in my fishbowl.
Megan Knight: Thank you, Katherine. Thank you for having me.
Katherine Druckman: This is pretty exciting. We've had so many conversations off the record. I'm really excited to have one after hitting record. This is great. Tell us who you are, what you do, and why you are at KubeCon?
Megan Knight: Sure. Well, my name is Megan Knight. I currently am the director of Software Communities at Arm. I am an open source enthusiast, community lover of all things, and I'm at KubeCon here to mostly connect with people and learn about what people care about.
Katherine Druckman: Awesome. That is half the battle, right?
Megan Knight: Yeah.
The Yocto Project: Building Custom Linux Distributions
Katherine Druckman: Learning what do you really care about? What matters? You don't want to spin your wheels on stuff that doesn't matter. Tell us about your involvement in a couple of things. One is the Yocto Project.
Megan Knight: Sure. Well, first, for those who might not be familiar, the Yocto Project is a set of tools that helps you build custom Linux distributions. It's a really powerful and versatile tool, and it's architecture and hardware-agnostic. It really is great for broad use cases and widely used across ecosystems. I currently am the advocacy chair for that project and have been in this position now for, I think, three years.
Katherine Druckman: Wow.
Megan Knight: I know. Time has really flown. My main focus is getting the word out about the project, making sure people know that we're here, that there's humans behind this project, and trying to build up our contributor base and our maintainer base.
Katherine Druckman: Awesome. Tell me about the humans. This is open source.
Megan Knight: Absolutely.
Katherine Druckman: It's very community driven, very distributed, a lot of people, a lot of opinions. How do you manage all of that?
Megan Knight: It's no easy task and I think your approach must change. This project in particular is over 10 years old, so it was actually the first collaborative project of the Linux Foundation. It's really unique in that the way that charter was written is not really a way that any charter has been written since. It also is based off another project OpenEmbedded, and they share technical resources and governance. It's complicated to balance the interests of members and developers and end users. I don't think there's one thing that I could point to. I think it's really listening to a lot of people and trying to find the center of that Venn diagram of where all those interests collide.
Managing Open Source Communities
Katherine Druckman: That's a good visual there. It's funny. I often say the human parts of open source software are actually the difficult parts. I'm not going to say anyone can write code. Certainly not anyone can write good code. I think we've all written a lot of bad code in our lives, and that is totally fine. But I find that it's the diplomacy, it's finding the common ground. You have a lot of competitors working together in the same space and the same communities.
Megan Knight: Absolutely.
Katherine Druckman: But we all have common goals in so many cases, and I think it's why the work that you do, and the work that I do, to an extent, I think it's a little bit more challenging.
Megan Knight: It can certainly be that way, and something that seems simple on the outside might end up being incredibly complicated once you get in the weeds. For example, when I came in, I realized that there was a lack of contributor recognition within the project.
And it was something that I wanted to try out to see, not only to make sure that the community knew that they're so appreciated, but also so that it maybe motivated other people to say, "Hey, maybe I'll throw my hat in the ring and start contributing."
They really care about the people that work on this project, and even trying to get in the weeds of how far back in the history of this project do we go to celebrate contributors? If you contributed back 10 years ago when the project was first formed, critical building blocks of the project, but are no longer active, are you receiving the same level of contribution as someone who just started contributing last year? And even that one topic ended up in spirals of debates. That's interesting. And I didn't think about that problem in that way until I took it to the group. I like working in this space because people are opinionated, they're passionate, and they're not afraid to use their voice even when they do have conflicting opinions. I think that's the exciting part for me.
Motivations and Challenges in Open Source Contributions
Katherine Druckman: What do you find motivates? You talk to a lot of contributors. I know. I've seen you do it. I've seen you talking to a lot of contributors at the same time. Is there a common thread, or are there things that surprise you that keep people motivated to keep participating and keep donating their time in many cases? What keeps people going?
Megan Knight: The most common denominator that I've found is it's truly an intrinsic motivation out of curiosity, out of passion, and true stubbornness. A lot of people develop these projects and tools, and there's this sense of pride and ownership that they've put something out in the world that people are using, and that's a really exciting and rewarding feeling for builders and tinkerers alike. I think that truly it's their own passion that drives them to keep going even when it gets frustrating or it gets really challenging. I think that that's the only way it really works because if you don't have the passion driving you, you'll hit a wall eventually.
Conflict Resolution in Open Source Projects
Katherine Druckman: Do you have a lot of experience in these communities, any community you've worked in, with conflict resolution? And I don't mean in the very serious and harmful way. I mean more in the, "I want the project to go in one direction and another group wants it to go in a different direction." How do you resolve those kind of issues?
Megan Knight: That can be really tricky. If it's full-on technical direction of the project, usually the TSC is really helpful in guiding those conversations to try and say, "Is this a 90-degree turn from where we're trying to end up or is this a slight pivot, or a variable we didn't consider?"
I think those conversations are important to have and important to document because we want to explore all options. Open source is open for a reason, so even if folks feel like their opinion might not be welcomed, I still encourage them to voice that because it could lead to discussion that we wouldn't have had if they didn't voice that opinion. It can be frustrating, especially when projects have competing goals. I'm currently involved in one right now that seems to be not necessarily going in two different directions, but has one really big goal, and half the members really care about that big goal, and the other half of the members don't really care about that goal.
Even conversations about how do we spend the budget? Where does the contractor funding go? What marketing efforts or events are important based on our goals? Is a challenging discussion to navigate because that group that really cares about that big problem that they're working towards sees any funding not going to that as taking away from their goal. Whereas the other group says, "Well, I don't really care about that, and we do care about advocating for the project as a whole." It is a very difficult and challenging situation to navigate, and I think giving people the space to really air their grievance is the first step in a respectful manner.
Unexpected Use Cases in Open Source
Katherine Druckman: True. One of my favorite things that I like to ask, for example, maintainers and other people involved in various projects is about unexpected use cases for their project. Usually any open source project was built for a specific purpose. Some person or some small group of people had a problem to solve. They wrote some software, it solved their problem, they decided to release it to a community. Maybe a lot of other people found great use out of it, and a community had suddenly built.
But inevitably, somebody else runs across this project and is like, "Oh, this is great, and I have a completely different use case, and it solves mine as well." And the original creators had never considered that this surprise use case existed. And as the ball gets rolling and the community snowballs, those competing interests do start to become more and more relevant. And I think that's very interesting. Have you come across any of that kind of experience in working with these projects where something just came seemingly out of the blue and you thought, "Wait, you're using it, how and why? And in an air-gapped environment?" I don't know. I'm just throwing that out there, but those are fun, right?
Megan Knight: Yeah, absolutely. And with the Yocto Project in particular, because it helps you build such a customized distribution, I'm still finding out about new use cases daily from satellites to routers to really interesting ones like new products like the digital train reader boards that they have. Actual train track brake regulators on the tracks itself. You think, "How can this one thing do all of these other things?" And now it's creeping into automotive spaces, and that's really interesting and exciting to see as well, how they're adapting something like that in an automotive space.
Katherine Druckman: I am glad you raised that point, because that's one of the most fun things to me about embedded systems. It's everywhere. You don't even necessarily realize it's yet another application of open source powering literally everything on the planet and many things off in space. Embedded systems, they really are. They're in your refrigerator and they're in your car.
Megan Knight: Exactly. Your coffee pots. The freestyle machines. It's so fascinating to find out. And I think that's the cool part about having a tool that's so versatile is you're like, "Wait a second. You're doing what with that? That is fun."
Katherine Druckman: It's satisfying knowing that the work you’re doing possibly touches every single person's household in the entire country, world. I don't know. It's pretty wild.
Megan Knight: It's really true. I think that is why my first passion was in IoT and embedded spaces, because you could physically see the outcome of your work running in some object and it was really satisfying.
Katherine Druckman: I used to be that person when the seatback entertainment crashed on the plane. I would take the picture and post it to Twitter. That was a long time ago. And it's so ubiquitous now that that's not even an exciting thing. It used to be exciting.
Megan Knight: It was. Oh, a reboot.
Katherine Druckman: There's Linux in here. Oh my God.
Megan Knight: How unique.
Sustainability and Training in Open Source
Katherine Druckman: I know. Of course there is. Why wouldn't there be? It's funny. You're involved in a lot of different open source projects. I'll let you talk about some of them. But what's interesting to me, especially I have this conversation in the community all the time lately about sustainability, training up the next group of contributors, and you work with projects that are in various stages of life, various maturity levels, various ages and all of that. And I wonder how can you compare those experiences and what's the biggest takeaway there?
Megan Knight: That's a great question. And it's a unique challenge, the lifecycle that a project is in is a really important thing to be aware of. It sets the advocacy strategy and the technical strategy of the project, and it helps you determine what the needs of the project are at that time. Right now, I'm working with a project, the UXL Foundation, that just celebrated its one-year birthday in September. Happy Birthday, UXL Foundation. And this project was started out of oneAPI, and we're slowly migrating components of that project out into the open and into the UXL Foundation, which is under the Linux Foundation.
The challenges that we have in this space are unifying the standards across all of these projects so that people have a unified experience across all of them. We're also focusing on diversifying our contributor base. When you're moving something from a single vendor environment to now opening it up to the public, that next step is, “how do we diversify our contributor base and how do we make sure that we are well balanced in the ecosystem and have voices from all parts of the ecosystem?” Whereas one of the other projects I mentioned, the Yocto Project is a 10-plus-year-old project. The challenges that we're experiencing in this project currently are some that many projects are experiencing, which is a lack of maintainership. We have many opportunities, but the on-ramp to being at the level where you could be a maintainer of one of these various tools is quite long. How do you elongate the contributor funnel? How do you onboard people to becoming contributors and help them move up the ladder to one day becoming a maintainer?
Katherine Druckman: Again, I've been around a while and more and more I see for some reason in the last several years, there is a generational shift and I see a lot of people posting about the process of stepping away from projects and other people that have been involved in certain projects. Maybe they're the project founder even, and they've been around for a very long time, and they have a user base, a contributor base, but life and projects must go on. You obviously can't depend on a single person or a single company. And that's an interesting thing to watch, and it's for perfectly reasonable reasons. People have families, people want to retire someday. You get to take a rest now and then. There are other issues. There are shifting priorities. And there is this sense and concern I think growing in various open source communities about how to fill those gaps and making sure there are enough people to keep all of this going that we all depend on. I keep making the joke about Linux in space or whatever, but it's real.
Megan Knight: It's completely real.
Katherine Druckman: It's absolutely real. These are real concerns.
Megan Knight: Absolutely. That's very valid. And something that we should be thinking about. How do we empower that next generation to take on more and how do we support people that are looking to maybe take a step back or take a break?
Katherine Druckman: And the process of doing that correctly, in my opinion, the process of taking a step back carefully and thoughtfully and empowering the people around you is an art. It's similar but different to sunsetting a project altogether. Sunsetting your participation is a very delicate thing just like sunsetting a project is. If a project decides it's no longer going to be supported, there is a right way to do that and a wrong way to do that I think. And I think that in and of itself needs its own support system.
Megan Knight: Absolutely. You don't want to leave that community behind either. And that can be really hard. There are projects that simply just can't go on for funding reasons or maintainership reasons but that have a huge user base. That is not always a balanced variable. And just taking a step back to what we were talking about, things that influence direction or change in projects, I think policy is a really big one that is currently affecting our landscape. These changes coming in are going to impact open source projects in general, new features needing to be added, new technology needing to be added. For example, like S-bomb generation, software build materials. And this is one of those things that Yocto Project was able to integrate SPDX 3.0 and be ahead of the Cybersecurity Act coming in out of Europe before that hits in '26. It's like, "We already have that in there. Don't worry. We have you covered."
Katherine Druckman: Awesome.
Megan Knight: And I think that trying to pay attention to policy and seeing where your project can be proactive in supporting the community is also a strategy.
Katherine Druckman: I also wonder, and this is something that I observe, I feel like people who are newer to open source software and open source projects in communities now that open source is ubiquitous, most software is comprised of open source components. Most of the lines of code are open source, all of that is true. And we've established that over and over. But I think as it has become something that is so commonplace, newer developers, I hesitate to say take it for granted, but I think it's a tool. Whereas in the earlier days of open source, it was an ideology. It was a rebellion.
Megan Knight: It was a movement.
Katherine Druckman: A movement. Exactly. And I wonder how that affects the contributor onramp. How does that impact getting people excited about contributing if it's not as much of a movement? If it's just something that you do as part of your job, how do you then kind of compensate for that and still get people excited to be a part of something that is a culture?
Megan Knight: That's an interesting perspective on that. I was thinking how do we work from the organizational level to encourage companies and organizations to support open source project contribution through their employees? There are a lot of people that still are tasked with, "Oh, use this tool," or, "Use this open source software, but contributions in your own time." And that's really hard to do when you have a demanding job in tech, and that's where you have to have that passion or that drive or that intrinsic motivation. And it can be really hard to do that after a ten-hour day. I think looking at it from both sides, how can employers empower employees to use their company time to contribute just as much as how do we motivate the younger generations to be excited about contributing to open source software?
Katherine Druckman: I think that investment is really important. And I'm glad you mentioned the corporate contribution because enabling your employees, it's not just an incentive. It is business critical.
Megan Knight: Absolutely.
Katherine Druckman: If you are a company that in any way produces software or even uses software, open source is critical. And having the seat at the table and having a voice in the community is so important.
Megan Knight: It's not a straight line to a new service or feature. But, as we know, if companies are completely dependent on open source software for a particular product in general, if something were to say happen to that open source project from a security vulnerability or some other thing, it could really negatively impact them, or a project disappearing altogether due to maintainer burnout, or something else. It's in an organization's best interest to empower employees to contribute.
The Future of Open Source in Automotive
Katherine Druckman: Absolutely. I don't want to take up the rest of your day, although I could. I would enjoy it. What are you most excited to work on for the next six months to a year?
Megan Knight: That's a fun question. I think, personally speaking, the automotive space is really exciting right now. Last year, we had the wave of software-defined vehicles, and now I think we're getting into the space of software criticality and safety. We are seeing a lot of activity in projects like the ELISA Project and Zephyr Project that are focusing on safety critical and automotive applications. And I think the space is going to be really exciting to watch. Even the idea of AI in cars. I'm not sure how we feel about that yet, but people are talking about it. The conversations are starting. I think for me, that area in general is really an interesting area. As far as the community goes, I find this fascinating because OEMs and car manufacturers and software people, it wasn't a combination 10 years ago, or 15 years ago, and now we all get to work together, and the timelines on automotive development are vastly different then timelines for software delivery. Really working with unique challenges like that and figuring out how to solve those problems with software is really fascinating to me.
Katherine Druckman: That's pretty exciting and safety critical, which helps. Please attract the smartest people in the field.
Megan Knight: Yes. Please, please.
Katherine Druckman: Cool. Well, thank you so much.
Megan Knight: Thank you so much for the time and the opportunity. This has been fun.
Katherine Druckman: Fabulous. Yes. Yay. Go open source.
Megan Knight: Yay. Thanks.
Katherine Druckman: You've been listening to Open at Intel. Be sure to check out more about Intel’s work in the open source community at Open.Intel, on X, or on LinkedIn. We hope you join us again next time to geek out about open source.
About the Guest
Megan Knight, PMP, Director of Software Communities, Arm
Megan is the director of Software Communities at Arm where she delightfully works with the upstream. She holds various positions on project boards including Yocto Project, UXL Foundation, Zephyr Project, and OpenSSF. Prior to Arm, she led the IoT and Automotive open source engagement portfolio at Amazon Web Services (AWS) and served as the Amazon representative on critical dependency open source project boards. She got her start in open source working at The Linux Foundation with the Linux Kernel and Linux Plumbers communities.
About the Host
Katherine Druckman, Open Source Security Evangelist, Intel
Katherine Druckman, an Intel open source security evangelist, hosts the podcasts Open at Intel, Reality 2.0, and FLOSS Weekly. A security and privacy advocate, software engineer, and former digital director of Linux Journal, she's a long-time champion of open source and open standards. She is a software engineer and content creator with over a decade of experience in engineering, content strategy, product management, user experience, and technology evangelism. Find her on LinkedIn.