Being Successful with Open Source in Game Development

[Music] thank you day two of GDC rural tide it's great though thank you so much for joining us both here at bringing open source to game development or being successful with open source and game development I didn't manage to change the title on that slide uh important stuff um my name is Mark Mandel I Tech lead the developer relations team for Google Cloud for games no that is not stadia we run a whole bunch of computers that you can use for back-ends for games April I don't have a fancy mic because somebody stole one but my name is April Nasi and I work in the Google open source programs office so we have everything to do with all the fun open source stuff and I get to work with our cloud gaming open source sweet so yeah we both work primarily on the back end but uh work on open source

stuff for games um I think we've had some success in that area I think we've done okay um so we've sort of talked you through some of that and some of the patterns we've seen and some of the ways that it's going to be useful for you particularly from like a commercial point of view both from a company and personal perspective so we'll get stuck into that and we'll definitely have some time at the end for some questions um I also need to remember yes don't forget to fill out your evaluations at the end of the talk because I'll get in trouble with the GDC crew if I don't remember to say those things also now I know like how good I am at stuff and that's important okay because Mark needs a bigger ego that's really I need that yes yes follow us on Twitter because how else do I know like my worth as a human being except by my follow account etc etc this is going to be a silly talk okay first picture of a dog um before we get started uh love to learn a little bit about all of you and your experience with open source as well uh hands up if you feel like you're

familiar with open source in general more than I expected but awesome that's fantastic uh who here has like written some kind of Open Source software done a pull request anything in that sort of vein if you do who here considers themselves an open source maintainer do you feel over there all right we should check my standard okay cool who here gets paid to write open source software oh something there all right cool cool excellent all right so bit of a gamut that's all right that's good we're here to talk about all the open source things so why do I get stuck in all right so a lot of hands of people who are at least familiar with the concept of Open Source but we kind of always like to go back to the very beginning because when we say the word it sometimes means a different thing to different people and the full definition which is incredibly recursive is that free and open source

software is software that's pretty and open source so the question is like what does that actually mean when we say free we're talking about freely licensed to use it in any way you want change it build something on top of it there's no restrictions on what you can do with this code and when we're talking about open source it's the sources open for anyone to modify use build on top of Etc sometimes you'll see things that are open source but are licensed in a way that you are restricted and what you can do with the project or product and so that technically is not open source and that's a fun philosophical debate that we can totally have later if anyone really wants to the real definition though is like it's it's software that's being built collaboratively with ideally lots of people working towards the same goal and because it is freely licensed where

anybody can take it and build something on top of it make it part of their product and and have no restrictions it means you can basically change the world which is no small feat of course no small goal um but you're able to build on top of what someone else has done and create something even bigger and better collaborate where you can and also use these tools as a stepping stone for the next big thing and ultimately making industry standards which is a goal for a lot of Open Source you've probably heard of this thing called Linux also open source um even things like chromium postgres you know a lot of the tools that we're using that maybe don't have the big name like Linux are open source and they have become the backbone of what we know of as the web and we're using them every day maybe just not really aware of how

much of an ecosystem has been built around it and because that was open source second dog photo um we have this idea of course you know we're going to change the world we're going to all work together and be collaborative it's not actually this magic Utopia of tennis balls that are raining down and everything's perfect open source is about people and that gets messy sometimes um but it's very similar to how we've all been working over the past couple of years where you're working distributed across multiple time zones people you maybe haven't met ever but are now your new best friends um we have to kind of reevaluate how we are working with each other um it does make it tricky at times and that's some of the pushback we see a lot of times with game studios of you know wanting to have everything in-house and that reluctance to make things fully distributed but it's a process it can work but it is you know fully involving having everyone on

board and willing to work together now you awesome so both April and I um come from wider Tech before sort of working inside the games industry and particularly open source and wider Tech before coming into the games industry and so I just kind of wanted to highlight as well like the impact and the investment that exists in open source in wider Tech versus the games industry um and so the picture I have here is in the before uh well we seem to be back again meeting in lots of people but you know what I mean anyway so this is a picture of a conference called the cloud native compute Foundation sncf it's a portion under the Linux Foundation they run a conference about that runs for basically things things were running in the cloud this is 8 000 plus people all gathering for a single set of Open Source projects which is one of four of similar size

conferences that are just about these you know primarily probably it doesn't there's actually a lot understands yeah like primarily a dozen projects that run under here so that's how much people are willing to invest here we're also seeing you know investment from very large companies like ourselves Google Red Hat IBM Apple all working together spending a lot of money in open source here so in wider Tech open sources for lack of a better term kind of one we look at some fun statistics um we'll look at GitHub publishes the state of the optiverse every year or so talking about like what's been going on so in 2021 they added 73 million developers they added another 254 repositories uh if you're not familiar with open source a pull request is just sort of a contribution so 170 million pull requests were merged in 2021 so there's a lot of people out there working on open source for a variety of reasons commercial personal otherwise Etc there's just a huge amount of work that

is going into this space in wider Tech and software to build this this Foundation of Open Source that other people can utilize for a variety of really good reasons so I want to say something maybe possibly a little bit controversial games of software I know um like I know we we make amazing art and we tell Amazing Stories and we do amazing things with games but they are ultimately software um and so we should definitely I think look to other areas of software development to say like hey what are they doing over there and should we take some of the ideas maybe tweak them a little that's fine um and work them into our Pipeline and see what benefits that we can get from them as well so I think we can talk about open source because I think that's something that's very much permeated The Wider Tech Community and something we should you know sort of look at as well in games also I like it a lot okay so let's let's like let's actually like talk about sort of the commercial aspect

to agree or like the less altruistic idea of it all which is ultimately like what's in it for me why do I care what should I even bother am I just giving away my work for free like what's in it for me on a personal level so I think there are some really interesting stuff in like around just generally what motivates us as human beings um I'm sure you can all just take down that URL there's a great RSA anime talk that talks about like what motivates us human beings but there's three things that actually really resonate with me uh that I think align really well with open source so the first is autonomy right like being able to do the thing you want to do strangely enough if you're running in your own open source project you can do what you like that's awesome that makes me feel good about myself Mastery the ability to learn something new open source is a wonderful vehicle we'll talk about this more about how to educate yourself and learn things and do something interesting and new as well as purpose maybe there's a problem you want to solve something you specifically want to work on having a

sense of purpose is generally just a wonderful feeling as a human being to motivate us to do more okay so that gives us a bit of a sense of like some things that might possibly motivate us as human beings and make us feel good about ourselves and like help us grow and do all that sort of good stuff but let's let's really talk commercial so if I'm a company and you know I want to maybe you're in that company and they're like we want to do open source and we'll be like but why and usually at that point you can't just go because I like giving away things for free and your company goes no that seems like a bad idea so having a good reason why you want open source things is generally a good thing so I'm going to give you a whole bunch uh as a company um you can pick and choose the ones that may necessarily work for you and the project that you're looking at and we'll also dig into some of these reasons as well when we go through some of the projects we work on as well so you'll get a bit of a sense that way first things first wider talent pool

um it's great when you work inside a team and maybe you have I don't know pick a number 10 people inside your team that are working on a particular project open source is a wonderful opportunity not just to be like hey now we have a thousand people working on this project which happens in some of the projects we work on but also just having a variety or a wider variety of skill sets perspectives experience to come into your project and help drive it towards being the better or more ideal goal of whatever your project is so having access to that wider talent pool is really handy just to basically build a better product ultimately resulting in a better product for you to use but also a better product for everyone to use Rising tide lifts old boats it wouldn't be an open source talk if we didn't at least mention Rising title lifts or boats at least once it's one of those things you just have to do it another one this is the one actually one of the ones I actually like a lot is about setting the standard um hands up here somebody who's written a piece of software three times or more

right who really likes doing that nobody okay good I was worried for a second um open source and this is something that I feel like I've done in some places is um setting the standard so if you can get an open source project out into the world that's good usually a good start and yes you'll need to do some marketing and we'll talk a little bit about that too but if you can get adoption at the right rate for that open source project you can start to set the standard for how those things are done inside the industry this is both cool because it sets your company apart from other companies and you control that standard because it's coming from you at least generally in the outset um but it also therefore helps as well when you're like how do we onboard people how do we bring people into this company how do we know that when we hire people they're going to have the skills they need to work on the particular tools we have internally if you have a standard and you've set that standard through open source suddenly you can see like all the people that are using that tool it starts showing up on resumes you

can start saying oh they use this new Acme widget thing that we released they've had three years experience they're going to slot right into our team that's going to make that really easy so I really like the idea of setting the standard through open source that's a one that gives me warm and fuzzies open source is also just a really nice way of raising the visibility of your company uh we'll talk a little bit about hiring as well but in that aspect it's also kind of nice we definitely see that a lot of gaming companies out there have like engineering blogs for example and talk about some of the tech they use but I don't think you know like there's nothing that really replaces being able to actually see the code that comes out of a company and some of the people they work on as well as actually also seeing maybe For Better or Worse how that company interacts with people who also you know work on those engineering projects inside the team um I was going to talk about this before but uh one of my favorite companies that does open source work is Embark Studios you can literally go to embark.dev you can see all the projects they have right

there that they work on in open source which I think is just super cool um and they do some really amazing work both that they run in production they do research on um and I think it's just a really cool thing that differentiates them in the industry um just in terms of like what they do as well as how they do it I really like that okay hiring and I'm putting asterisk on this open source is an Avenue for hiring right you put an open source project you have people who come and contribute they may join whatever chat room you're in they join your community meetings you get a good sense of them as they interact with other human beings in the team as well as what their technical prowess is awesome that sounds great let's do all our hiring that way no please don't um yes it is a great opportunity to enhance your hiring pipeline but it is also worth noting that if we look at the people in our lives that have a lot of free time that they may not necessarily can you know sorry that they have a lot

of free time that they can put towards open source that does skew towards particular demographics um for example people who don't have families often not for example they not necessarily have that free time so I usually say yes put it in your hiring pipeline just don't make it the hiring pipeline also don't make it so that like you have to have a GitHub open source repository to be hired like some people don't have that opportunity but it is it is an Avenue that you can use as a hiring tool for your company uh that is you know really nice way to vet people before they come in so you talked a little bit commercially about um as a company let's talk also like we talked a bit about motivation as an individual but like let's talk probably a little bit more commercial or a little bit more also Less altruistically in some ways this is one of my favorite ones um who here is cut a corner so something you can go to production if you haven't put your hand up you're

lying um which is fine so I think open source is like one of those wonderful opportunities wherein you're like I really wish I had the time and the patience to sit down and do this the right way whatever that happens to be right traditionally like in open source you don't necessarily have customers um but you know you you build the thing that you need to build and it gets done right and you want to push it Forward especially if you're working with a different set of people um we're gonna talk a little bit about governance in a bit but like usually there's some kind of consensus that goes on and so like you're trying to get yourself to whatever that best point is in that system you will incur technical debt like you're never going to get away from that but I think it's just a better opportunity towards that ideal goal without some of the corporate pressures or top-down pressures you might otherwise get from um internal like internal pressures inside your corporation or shipping at a certain time it's not just that you can always get away with it but I think it's a it's a it is a way of sort of Escape

valving that a little bit web security so we also talked a little bit about setting the standard as a company um it's also a nice opportunity as an individual if you can be part of either making or participating or being a maintainer or just even using an open source piece of software that becomes a standard that's an easily transferable skill that you can take to other companies for example if you helped build the tool and you now know that 10 other companies are using it that's now 10 other companies that you can go apply to and be like hey I'm the one that built that thing you should hire me I'm worth money please give me money um so that is like that is a good thing um I forgot where I was gonna go with that anyway that's fine money good money just good um but yeah having that job security like that being able to transfer from place to place that is just a good thing in general um and again that also means that then

you can onboard into that company faster you get up to speed faster et cetera Etc um that's always a nice thing leading on into that exactly hiring opportunities like we said with a company right that's an opportunity for you to bring people in if you go and you go and look and you're like oh this company has open source projects maybe I'll go try out and see what it's like to basically work there I can interact with people in that team I can see how they respond how they communicate what sort of technical stuff they do it gives me an opportunity to learn about them at their company their culture Etc um in you know I have to put in some effort but it's a low risk way often the only way of doing that is usually by joining the company that's a little bit riskier and education open source is a wonderful way to learn stuff um there are areas of game development where the education is awful

which is unfortunate um I work like I work particularly in back-end Game Dev the education there is awful I will attest to that I'm trying to change that with the summit we run on Monday um but open source brings together a community and they are and open source is a community right I mean it's not just chat rooms and just pull requests and that kind of stuff but you get to know the people who are in the community you get to converse with them you get to share ideas you're all building designs together towards features so the opportunity exists there to participate in that community and then learn from each other we'll go into some of the examples here but there's just been some wonderful places where on some of the open source projects we work on that I'm not actually seen that many people with those particular skill sets be in the same place at the same time from that bigger diversity of companies and help share their knowledge and I just think that's an incredible opportunity that I just don't see any other way unfortunately back to puppies

[Laughter] Australian Shepherd lovers yes so we have a saying in open source that when we say it's free it's free as in a puppy um sure you can have it but you have to take care of it and feed it and train it and watch it like a hawk after it has surgery which is what I've been doing with mine for the past week so one of the things that we're you know really trying to teach folks is how to best bring open source into your company your practices and how you can do that in the best way to start off with contributions don't have to be code when we talk about contributions and pull requests like we give you all these great stats from GitHub we love GitHub um so you know it's great that we've got that but I want to be very clear that contributing to an open source project is not just limited to a pull request or an issue that someone can make on GitHub

as Mark mentioned you know there are the marketing needs of great you've created this brand new open source project it's going to revolutionize the industry who knows about it um you can't just throw it on GitHub and expect that the masses will come and develop it with you so if you are someone that maybe is you know involved in the other aspects of working at a studio or a company this is a great way to get involved remember that it's not just the developers you also need legal folks to help with licensing and compliance that's what the open source programs office does at Google to make sure that our lovely developers don't get too crazy when they give things away for free and then of course we have people like Mark and John and Emma who go and talk about these amazing projects and can you know spread the word and and talk to customers and other potential users of

the projects and explain how they work and then of course the big one that we really love the most is writing every open source project needs help with documentation literally was having the conversation earlier today about one of our projects if you're someone that loves to write boy do we have opportunities for you um particularly if you know you're someone who is maybe interested in getting involved in to the games industry maybe you're just peripheral and you're still here which is awesome um this is a great way to connect with you know some of the studios and and folks that are working in the space and build those relationships and I will promise you if you are any sort of tech writer every open source project will welcome you with open arms um and you know if you're someone who is primarily developer but maybe you want to try out some of these other roles like you know doing more of the speaking

or working on project management or Tech writing here's a great opportunity to do it you know if you can't do it in your day job come on over to open source we would love to have you work on any number of projects so let's say you're you know you're sold right you're like this is awesome thank you Mark and April for teaching me about the wonders of Open Source I'm ready to go get involved so first step is read the contributing guide and then actually follow it every project has a contributing guide it's usually a readme there's going to be like a governance dot MD something like that that's basically going to tell you okay great you're here you want to get involved here's how to do it governance is a scary word um but it doesn't need to be and I like to tell folks you know obviously as we'll cover later we're kind of partial to kubernetes um kubernetes is a great project with a whole lot of people that contribute and

its governance is very reflective of that for most projects when they're just starting out you do not need that level of oversight so if you're just starting a project in your own company the best step is to just document how you're making decisions today and then go from there you can always add to it think of it like the Constitution but it's way easier to edit but you want to have some Basic Ground rules for people in terms of how to get involved and how to connect with the community especially now that we're pretty much all remote and we're dealing with different time zones things like pinging someone on slack is not going to work so when you're talking with these big Global communities got to have some guidelines in place so definitely with any project if you're starting one make sure you outline that at the start and if you're joining one figure out what the community does get involved and then once you're in there for a while then you can propose some changes if you'd like

and be transparent this is not something that is second nature to the games industry so weird right um open source thrives on transparency there are no secrets um you know it's all out there for everyone to see the good and the bad and the reason for that is because that's the only way we can get anything done and gaming is of course one of those industries that we tend to keep things close because we're working on something cool we don't want anybody to know just yet it doesn't work with open source so it is a culture shift that does have to happen it is one of the most important values in open source behind that and people um the big thing is to think about how decisions are being made making sure that you're giving the opportunity for everybody to get involved and that you're explaining why a decision was made you know as Mark mentioned like when working on open source you get all these different perspectives in which is awesome but they've got to be able to

get in and give you their feedback and their use cases and you have to make it easy for everyone to do that did we mention documentation uh so the key for any open source project it could be the greatest idea in the world but if nobody knows how to use it it's not going to go anywhere so if transparency is the first thing your docs should definitely be second um think about the people that are checking out your project what do you want them to know what it is what you're trying to do and how to get involved put that somewhere make it easy there was a session earlier talking about your readme should not be like 20 pages long keep it short and to the point always you can you know add more as you go but keep it very simple for your new users and whenever you get someone new that's

working on the project they are inevitably going to hit blockers or friction points encourage them to keep a friction log to report errors and things that they have run into this is a easy contribution especially if you're someone looking to get involved in open source pick a project go through their documentation try to do the you know examples and the test cases and when you hit a bug which you probably will report it because we love that and then there's your first contribution congratulations you have contributed to open source start small there's a lot you know open source is a big area we're working on making it even bigger in gaming and it can be overwhelming and a lot of times when you're looking at a big project it's overwhelming in terms of where to get started just start small pick a project pretty much all of them have a mailing list a

Discord slack whichever jump in and just say hi um we're happy to have you we're thrilled um sometimes it just feels like shouting into the void so please come and say hi to us um find something that you want to work on and I think this is something that I know as the lead maintainer for one of our projects Mark is very passionate about of it like if you say you're gonna do it please do it um that's a huge part of just the follow through so if you join a project and volunteer to take something on you will be the best person in the world to get it across the finish line and get that knocked out for the project everyone will love you um don't be scared it is a lot there's a whole lot going on um I know we're going to jump into some of the examples of things that we've done just some projects that maybe if you want you know to contribute to you can and I also uh will put in a shout

out for I know Ruth is leading an igda uh Roundtable about open source game development here on Thursday um so definitely if you want to talk more with other people that are doing open source find more opportunities to get involved that is also a great place to do it I believe you're going to take over now well these are my babies okay so um what I'm going to do is take you through it's probably about four examples of some of the projects we work on at Google Cloud what they actually do for the sake of this talk doesn't actually matter um I'll give you a heads up what I want to focus on is I want to sort of highlight some of the ways these projects have done some of the things we were talking about previously and some of the interactions that we've had inside that community and and how like I think they've been successful I think they've been really good excuse me so first one is yeah the project that I one of which I founded

and continue to maintain on this project called agoniz it runs Game Servers on top of another project called kubernetes it's open source all the way down not important um the thing that I love about this project so much is that um we initially started it with Ubisoft it was one of the coolest things I've probably done in my career in that it was a melding of two I'm gonna say disparate like we both had knowledge in both areas but like expertises and like good expertises so like I came from Google Cloud we understood like the infrastructure side of things really well and obviously Ubisoft had a really good understanding of how like games work right and so it was a real just a fortuitous sort of coming together of those two things to create something that I I actually genuinely feel will is is growing to be the standard for how we do this sort of stuff um feel free to disagree that's fine well a lot of people like it it's great um and from there it's grown this is a

subset of some of the logos we have um on the website I have a bunch more but we've had oh I actually looked at this I think we've had over 120 contributors to the project so far I feel like it could be more I can't remember um from all kinds of game studios and each of them have bought different needs different wants um some of them are buildings certain types of multiplayer games other building very different types of multiplayer games and we've been able to just leverage that Community to build what I think is a really really really cool product um I'm super super proud of it but none of that would have been possible if it wasn't for the diversity of expertise and perspectives that came together to form this um it's just I wouldn't have been able to do it on my own even with the people inside Google um I think it's just it really was all of us coming together and that's probably not also from a technical perspective but also from like you were talking about like part of my job is to go out and like talk to people about this stuff and do

that external storytelling so I could able to do that while taking you know that wasn't on the game company itself it was all of us coming together and bringing all those bits together I was able to Leverage The Experience we have with external facing developer experience teams that we have inside Google Cloud you know and that kind of stuff so there was it really was a lot of really good stuff coming together and I think that's true actually for all the projects that we're going to talk about but I'm going to dig into some other aspects on some of those as well that I think that I think are super cool and just very exciting so this is another fun project um open Match it's an open source framework for matchmaking um it was built initially also a collaboration between unity and Google you'll see a pattern here um very much the same thing that we were talking about before um if you ever want to talk about it more my buddy John's sitting right there but the thing that I love about this probably the most is we have monthly Community meetings for open Match

um matchmaking is such a wonderfully Niche topic maybe not wonderfully maybe if you'd be a little bit again the education should be better I feel but there is so much knowledge in these kind of silos in all kinds of different spots and when you go to the community meetings for open Match and like I don't do anything with matchmaking but I love going to the community meetings because there's just this dearth of knowledge there of people and they're all comparing notes with each other about how certain features should work because this is how that tricking works at their company and this is how it happens at this company and these are the kind of features they need there and it's the sort of knowledge that quite honestly doesn't get shared that often um which is which is sad but also it is just a wonderful opportunity to get that sharing across and I've yeah I've never actually seen it like particularly for this project I've never actually seen it that much yeah we're also a fun group of people to hang out with I hope you believe that another fun project where's Emma she works on this excellent

very much similar story once again it's the it's the collaborative atmosphere of what's Happening Here so open saves is an opinionated Cloud native store for um data and storage for games um coordinated between Google cloud and 2K Games same thing again uh working on this type of problem again variety of different perspectives coming together to work on this kind of stuff enabled us to build something really neat I didn't really like it this is another one I worked on because apparently I have way too much free time um or don't like weekends I don't know it's fine but uh This Is An Open Source proxy for games um for UDP traffic been building this with inbox Studios some incredibly talented people over there um the thing I want to highlight on this one that I also particularly love um my expertise is not in like UDP Network sync and like UDP traffic for games that it's not something I'm particularly like super super strong with

um but I had some really good I had some ideas we had some ideas several of us had some ideas there was a few of us working on this for sure but I've been able to learn so much from the work with Embark that I particularly want to talk about like the education that I've been able to gain from that specifically I've got huge amounts of experience with infrastructure stuff but this was not so much but starting this open source project working on it with a bunch of people who are extremely talented um has been an incredible learning opportunity just for me specifically that I absolutely adore and we'll be ever thankful actually to Embark for for the work that we've done together okay so those are some of the things we work on and some of like the um the reasons why which I think they're particularly special projects and some of the benefits that we've got from that um I think overall we've got pretty much the goals that we've we've highlighted from many many things in there across those projects but that sort of stuff we work out um do you want to point you to some resources that we think are particularly useful

um there is some good stuff out there uh the top one could potentially be the most important contributor covenant.org if you're looking for a code of conduct and you want to use one that is used in a variety of places please have a code of conduct on all your projects please enforce it that is also really useful and important that is a great place to go and just grab one you can tweak it it's a great place to start if you just want to have one if you need to make changes after the fact also totally fine but contributive Covenant is used I feel like it's used on Linux am I correct on that it's used in a bunch of places it's probably been tweaked since then yeah um but yeah it's a good it's a good credit conduct um outside of that uh open source.org open source.guide open source.dev I can never remember which ones the GitHub one anyway out of those few each one of those is from a different group but they go through things like even just down to what's a pull a request how do I do open source let me talk about licensing um all that kind of stuff there's there's

all kinds of guides in through all those so if you just type opensource.tld of some kind you'll pretty much get to a good place but yeah if you're looking to dig deeper or you need more information that kind of stuff as well that's great you can also go to open source.google.com we have most uh internally available do you want to say that into the mic so that it gets recorded externally available so we walk the talk there with keeping it transparent and it's also probably needing some updating so let me know if you find anything but yeah that's literally a copy of what we use internally yep and that's not to say that you have to do it the way we do it but you can you can see what's going on there um finally the last one at the bottom um you touched on open source program office do you want to explain what that is really quickly I know I'm putting you on the spot no um

basically you know when you think of Open Source there are yes the code but there's the licensing agreements that have to go in place there's building an ecosystem around a project there's you know helping other projects uh with some of the things that they might need that a company like Google is happy to provide and so that's what the open source programs office at most companies were all kind of doing the same thing um and then specifically my role is working with our gaming and Cloud native projects looking for ways we can basically give back to the open source community and actually I'll highlight one other thing on that as well which is like um you track a lot of the metrics as well around what we do so like when you actually sit down as a company and say like why are we doing open source having an office and it again we say office it could be a spreadsheet in one person um but being able to track that you're actually doing the things you want to do that you say you want to do and get the benefits for that's always kind of useful So to that last point there is a

to-do group dot org which I refer to as like open source programs office in a box um it's a great place to start if you want to start that kind of program and see what sort of metrics you want to track and sort of all the guidance you need to have inside that as well cool um some highlight just some other really cool open source Game Dev projects that are out there I mean I'm sure many of us heard of Godot that's awesome um I think they're doing amazing work there's also on the engine front like stride 3D or 3d.org I'm particularly excited in some of the open source stuff that's been happening in the rust ecosystem for gaming with Bevy engine and a whole bunch of other stuff in there we talked about what embark.dev is doing they do a lot of rough stuff uh what am I missing there's so many cool things khaleesius is a language it's a framework for doing multiplayer games twinery is an open source tool for doing narrative we've all heard about blender I don't know why it's not on this list um okay yes yeah it's smaller that works

too um so yeah there's there's actually a huge amount of Open Source out there and available if it's something that you want to get involved with and you're like what's an area I want to grow myself possibly you can probably find an open source project that you can work with finally it's just like a call to action I know yeah it is our last dog actually um let's just talk about open source more um I would love to hear more about it at conferences and meetups on blogs if you're working with open source and you have an engineering blog or you're at a conference I'd love to hear people talk about it we talk about it a lot in the infrastructure side because that's what all our stuff is built on but I think there's probably room for so much more to be talked about about what open source is being used across the entire gamut um of gaming and game development let's just hear what you're creating what you're what cool things you're working on all that kind of fun stuff that we love and if you have questions

we are here to answer yes we also have stickers oh yeah um since you're here uh my business cards my April's business cards and a bunch of stickers from the projects we work on are down on the table at the front so feel free to grab some as well if you want to do that but yeah thank you very much for spending time with us we really appreciate you taking the time we know you're busy people at GDC but um otherwise yeah open to questions no questions can also harass us on Twitter that's true if you sorry good oh no I was just saying we have them all there we're this is literally what we do all the time so we will happily talk about open source over there do you have any uh support uh that you offer to like I'm a high school teacher of coding and I I'm a software writer myself never really done uh much outside of Moodle which is an open source project but I'm looking for ideas for a high school teacher to get students like into their first like open

source hello world I know Google does education like you did this partnership with Coursera but it's behind a paywall to Learn Python for it okay you know but I'm looking like if Google really wants more open source Engineers why not have like an open source uh course yeah you know I know that we recently just did an update of our open source website and that is one of the things that we are looking to do is kind of also bring some of attention to some of our different projects that do have things like that I would be surprised if there's not something on the devrel side that you guys have done before genuinely no idea you're supposed to know everything yeah I do just yeah I would also say I mean in terms of like you know trying to get to um you know get high school age interested um you know language-wise rust is what all the cool kids are

working on these days but I don't know if that's the easiest it doesn't matter yeah absolutely yeah feel free if you want to grab my card we can connect afterwards yeah awesome yeah hello and thank you for the talk yeah um I'm a student who's very interested in doing open source projects but I am concerned about the economics of pursuing those out of school so you briefly mentioned doing open source work for pay and I was wondering if you'd be willing to talk a little bit more about that ecosystem So when you say you're concerned about the economic aspect are you talking about like trying to make money from open source because Red Hat will tell you you can absolutely do it yes I'm primarily concerned with paying off my student loans those are just gonna go away right that's what I know um yeah I mean I think you know

a lot one of the things that I really like about open source is it is a great way to kind of test the waters before you commit to making something your career um I can speak from Google's perspective and you know Ruth from Red Hat is here they do they do a ton in open source so a lot of the big tech companies we're all hiring engineers and we are paying them to work on open source so there's a huge opportunity in that space and I think particularly you know we're trying to make it more synonymous in the game industry but I think you know we definitely are working with obviously some studios that see the value and you know by you wanting to get involved you're able to kind of use that as like a resume and show that I actually do know what I'm talking about I really can code and that can lead to you know great opportunity in terms of jobs and also making connections because you know aside from events like this it's really

hard to just kind of randomly bump into people that are working in gaming but like to Mark's Point some of the you know communities and relationships that we've built on some of these open source projects like that would not have happened otherwise and that is our favorite part of all of this and so I highly recommend for anybody who's just interested in the industry and exploring it to get involved with things like that oh yeah I've got some uh so the other side of that is probably also there's a wide variety of monetization models if that's something you're interested in in terms of like open source even down to like the individual person yeah so like before I joined Google I was a consultant and the reason I got Consulting gigs was because I I wrote and maintained a particularly popular open source project that a lot of people used so I sold support contracts and Contracting Services and that kind of stuff so like I could use that as a medium um GitHub now has I want to call it GitHub sponsors yep so like you can take direct payments that way you can do things like patreon there's all kinds of different monetization models that you can explore with open source as well

there's a lot of venture capital interest in open source right now sounds also a thing so yeah just throw that out there again and but it is depend some of that is dependent on being able to set the standard and become the popular thing yeah and that takes time effort um that's the thing but like just like anything else so there are a variety of opportunities out there awesome thank you hi hi I have a question in regards to licensing so um in regards to like obviously the game industry is very secretive and the way they do things so some licensing uh that in particular is designed to encourage a lot of contributions are the ones that they absolutely refuse to touch yep so how do you balance those kind of like uh you know licenses that encourages contributions versus licenses that doesn't so our let's clarify one very particular Point here you say encourages contributions what I assume you mean by that is something like a GPL or an lgpl so anyone not familiar that's a license that basically sells if you do any I'm

not a lawyer so let me make sure I say that up front always press yes and I'll make sure I get this as close as possible but basically they're saying if you make any modifications to this source code you need to give that source code back to where it came a lot of commercial up big commercial companies won't touch that because they are integrating with proprietary systems um there one could also argue when you say uh licenses that encourage collaboration contribution something like an Apache or MIT which is basically like do with it what you will right you could argue encourage contributions because there is a very more quote-unquote free license for whatever that means um the short answer yeah if you put out something as lgpl or or GPO license or anything that kind of nature most corporations probably won't touch it yeah and and the reason is a lot of it is just the sheer like the dependency tracking that has to happen you know from speaking in an open source programs office like if we're going to use something that has a license like that we now have to track and 20 different places that it's at have license

agreements and all of this it's not impossible but it can be done um the other element that you know I see a lot is it's someone out of Studio who wants to contribute to a project but you're having to sign a contributor license agreement which is usually you know you're you're giving the project you're licensing what you've written to the project to use and that is scary to a lot of companies um The Simple Solution for that is I let the lawyers talk to each other um and they usually work it out and then they're fine because a lot of times these are you know these Agreements are legal documents and they are designed to protect people and you know Google's is not the easiest we know it however ours is the only one that's been tested in the Supreme Court so um you know there's a reason it's complex um but when there are those kind of questions we're just able to kind of you know have that one-on-one and break down some of the barriers but yes absolutely a lot of times people look at stuff like that and are just like it's too hard I can't do

it was that helpful sure I was gonna say licensing is a really like there's a ton of complicated factors I would also say um the open source um site literally breaks down like the definition if you use XYZ license you are not technically an open source project and so it specifically calls it out and that's a good resource to look at for you know when we talk about open source and talk about what is and what isn't there literally is a definition that will tell you yes or no and yeah open source licensing could be a whole token and of itself and it is but yeah thanks so much for this amazing talk so I have a question about um some of the open source project that you know is already on the market right now so I I know they briefly mentioned the rust community and you know the Bevy engine and a lot of those uh projects are maintained by a single person and they're really having a hard time because they quit their job and they had to do this whole time and my question is

are there any opportunities or funds uh in Google or any other funds that you are aware of that will help those people to keep what they're doing and uh you know getting that to the college yeah I mean I'll give a quick plug for Google has um we have a we have a peer bonus program that is done you know we have it's a concept internally but we've turned it into external um so we have a open source peer bonus we do it twice a year and basically it's you know if you're doing amazing things in open source you get nominated the committee picks and you get money um there's also the season of docs program which is where we we are basically you know doing the program for people to contribute to projects and and it is I think there's a stipend but I forget exactly the extent and their summer of code which is similar but specifically focused on code um and then specifically for projects absolutely we can help with

you know cloud computing credits because we have a few of those servers laying around um and we can help with all sorts of different you know programs that we either have existing or can benefit you know we certainly are involved in a lot of the big open source foundations there's things we can do through that any project that is interested please reach out to me I actually have no I mean I literally I have a regular meeting with the person on Google's ospo that runs a lot of these programs and I have come to him with my list for this year of you know the big ones that we that I know of that need help but like you said the past couple of years have been so hard on everyone but especially on open source maintainers yeah yeah and so that is very much a big Focus for us is just the sustainability aspect and yes wherever we can help we are very happy to so um if my cards are gone just grab marks and harass him um he'll point you to me but yeah

absolutely yeah all right thank you so much that was really helpful yeah thank you hello there thank you for the great talk um I recently worked on a project where we ported quite an old game Eve online and we took it to work on Mac OS and it was always a Windows only game as part of that the developers actually gave quite a bit back to the open source Community because we actually use a lot of libraries that are open sources part of the game awesome and a lot of the conversations we've actually recently had at the companies about how can we actually open source parts of our game does it make sense for us to do this and one of the problems we've hit fairly early on is that a lot of our code base relies on proprietary software so for example a renderer relies on something called granny which is used for models and why use for audio so the source code on its own may not actually be that useful without the

propriety aspect of that should we still even examine open sourcing some of this or is that a showstopper at that point I have opinions um so I have I have opinions about like what makes a good open source project and we saw it actually kind of in a slide there um for me usually I look at things where I refer to like a good open source project is usually Plumbing right like if you look at somebody's house you don't like walking and be like wow those are some nice pipes like you you know you look at like what is the wall color and like what's the furniture look like but if the house doesn't have Plumbing that's a big problem actually I had that problem a little while ago it was great it was not good um so I really like foundational pieces right and I think those are also easy to open source because you're looking at you're like I'm not giving away what gives makes my game fun or what I'm not giving away what gives me a technical Advantage I'm giving away the foundational building blocks that everyone builds and everyone knows

anyway so let's just work on it together because it's great so when you ask like should we give away this particular bit I would almost say like isn't that particular bit Plumbing um and if it is and it is hooked into proprietary stuff is there a way you could turn that into something generic that we could all use and all work on together does that kind of answer your question yeah yeah definitely because I think a lot of the value of our game actually just comes from the database side and the interaction in the community and this is definitely something that we've been exploring but on the back of that just one other quick question and that is one of the concerns that people have raised internally is if we we examine this and it progressed a bit more um how do you feel about the costs of dealing with things like pull requests or when people want to add features because yes that from our initial discussions could actually work out quite expensive for us there is a cost question of maintainers that are burnt out um yeah I mean it's the age-old question you know the

every open source has the problem of there's a one maintainer who everything is in their head a lot of times and if they leave we're stuck um we're seeing a decline in contributions across open source because again the world um and that's one of the challenges that we're really trying to you know address what I tell teams within Google that want to open source is be very clear up front with what your level of Engagement is going to be it's not a you know you don't have to promise an SLA but if you're putting a project out there with the intent of hey it's here it's cool you can use it but I'm probably not going to look at any pull requests that's totally valid but say it up front it goes back to the transparency piece um because there's nothing that you know disappoints someone more than finding a really cool tool but finding out it

hasn't been touched in years and there's all these open issues but if you're clear up front with the expectation you not only will find that there's people that are willing to jump in and help out but you know you're not going to set the wrong impression with someone when they do come you know expecting the experience to be just like something they had in another open source project only to find out that you just can't um it is expensive it's a toll on people you know if you're a maintainer a lot of people that do this as a labor of love is a huge toll on them and that's where you know the big companies we try to help where we can even the ones that are being paid like Mark can tell you like it's still a toll I mean it's you know you're dealing with a lot of people in a lot of different competing interests and requests it's tough um definitely factor that in um there is you know I I deal with this a lot with like well we're just going to open source this and then like everybody's going to come and develop it right I'm like no that's not how this

works um but just be very clear up front with this is what we've done and this is the way we're able to respond and contribute and I feel like you are hopping because you want to say something all right yeah no I was waiting I was trying to wait patiently I'm like a puppy dog I apologize um that is Yo absolutely that's 100 like really really useful um I go back as well to like this is why it's also super important to understand why you're open sourcing it have metrics around it and track those metrics because if you're like we're going to start open sourcing things and like we're like this is taking up this person's time so much but if you're like but look at these numbers for like I don't know we're getting so many contributions and like you're making our products so much better and now we're able to do these seven other things we couldn't do before something like that cost is completely mentally Justified um it's only if you can't justify the cost that it actually becomes a problem so just make sure you have those things up front um and you know check in on them regularly and like if you know you're you've been doing it for a year and you're just not getting back to the return that you're looking for you can

always archive a project again it comes back to transparency and that kind of stuff it's really valuable somebody can pick it up and Fork it and you know continue on themselves if they like to so thank you very much I think we're at a hard stop Robin told us hard stop excellent well thank you again for joining us we will happily chat with chat with for sure thank you everyone very much [Applause] [Music] thank you