My one and only superpower as an open source maintainer is the phrase “Sorry for the trouble!”
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Product includes devices like XBox, TiVo, and PalmPilot; apps like Firefox, MS Office, and Lotus 1-2-3; and services like Google, Facebook, and Wikipedia.
Components include libraries and frameworks: glibc, LLVM, Django, React, Docker, Arduino, etc.
Organizations involve some form of human governance, eg companies like Bell Labs, IBM, Microsoft, and ARM; non-profits like ICANN, the FSF, and the Linux and Apache foundations; and standards bodies like IETF, W3C, ECMA, and OASIS.
Standards are open via standards bodies, proprietary to individual companies, and de facto. Examples include networking protocols like TCP/IP, HTTP, and SMTP; file formats like HTML, JPEG, and WAV; character encodings like ASCII, ISO 8859-1, and Unicode; operating system interfaces like Win32, POSIX, and Cocoa; and hardware languages like Verilog, VHDL, CUDA, FPGAs, etc.
Computer science and electrical engineering are the academic fields that provide the direct foundations for software and hardware, respectively, and math and physics underneath them. Number theory and cryptography, information theory, combinatorics, Boolean logic, digital and analog circuit design, and arguably even materials science processes like EUV lithography all live here.
I’m far from the first to think along these lines. [Erik Samsoe on Twitter](
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