For our two-year anniversary, Tabatha DiDomenico turns the mic around and puts GROSS Out Podcast founder Jay Faulkner in the hot seat.

Jay is a self-taught technologist who never wanted computers as a career — and ended up shaping infrastructure that runs the world as Ironic's project lead and a decade-long OpenStack contributor. In this conversation, he's honest about how that happened, what it actually looks like from the inside, and what he'd tell anyone trying to find their footing in open source.
In this episode:

• Why people skills matter more than code in open source communities
• How to give feedback people can actually trust — and why toxic positivity damages projects
• What maintainership really looks like versus open source leadership
• The moment he walked away from a job over an ethical line he wasn't willing to cross
• Why Gentoo might be the best learning environment for a young Linux developer right now
• The one piece of career advice almost nobody in tech actually follows

Links and references:

• Ironic Project: https://ironicbaremetal.org
• OpenStack: https://www.openstack.org
• Gentoo Linux: https://www.gentoo.org
• G-Research Open Source: https://www.gresearch.com/open-source

G-Research is hiring in Dallas, TX and London, UK! Apply at https://gresearch.com/vacancies.

For a video version of this podcast, check out https://youtu.be/H6OXeKyHJ-g.

The GR-OSS OUT Podcast is produced by Ben Wiley.

Special Guest: Jay Faulkner.

Nick Vidal, Community Manager at the Open Source Initiative (OSI), joins host Tabitha to discuss one of the hardest questions in open source right now: what does Open Source AI actually mean, and who gets to decide?

At the center of it all is the OSI's effort to build community consensus around a definition that satisfies both developers and data scientists — two groups who don't always see eye to eye. Nick also shares what more than 50 maintainer stories revealed about the state of open source health, including the rise of AI-generated noise flooding maintainer workflows, the pressure of legislation like the EU Cyber Resilience Act, and why one prominent maintainer published a piece titled "We Don't Owe You Anything."

Nick reflects on his journey from organizing Drupal communities across Latin America to working at the heart of open source policy, and why bringing diverse cultural perspectives into open source development is how the best ideas actually get discovered.

Topics include the Open Source AI Definition, maintainer burnout, the Maintainers book at maintainers.rs, the EU Cyber Resilience Act, software freedom, and the human side of open source sustainability.

G-Research is hiring in Dallas, TX and London, UK! Apply at https://gresearch.com/vacancies.

For a video version of this podcast, check out https://youtu.be/7irm9Wt7aEM.

The GR-OSS OUT Podcast is produced by Ben Wiley.

Special Guest: Nick Vidal.

Tabitha sits down with Andrew Block, Distinguished Architect at Red Hat
and maintainer of Helm — the package manager powering Kubernetes
deployments worldwide — to talk about what it really took to ship
Helm 4.

They cover the 12-month journey to a major release, what got left on
the cutting room floor, how the team nearly broke a huge chunk of the
community with one dependency change, and why Andy thinks open source
is one of the most powerful forces for bringing people together —
regardless of what's happening in the world.

They also get into the bigger questions: maintainer burnout, the role
AI is starting to play in open source workflows, and what it means to
build software that outlasts the hype cycle.

If you use Helm — or you care about the humans behind the tools you
depend on — this one's worth your time.

Find Helm on GitHub, or join the community on Kubernetes Slack in

12:30 ET.

G-Research is hiring in Dallas, TX and London, UK! Apply at https://gresearch.com/vacancies.

For a video version of this podcast, check out https://youtu.be/mVKrrWOpMYM.

The GR-OSS OUT Podcast is produced by Ben Wiley.

Special Guest: Andrew Block.