It'll soon be 25 years since I started collaborating via mailing lists in open source communities.

Here are the slides and recording of my "Distributed teams that _actually_ work" talk at Devoxx UK today.

I don't know about you but I've been having a hard time getting accepted for speaking at Devoxx conferences.

The below message is from 2000 but I think it still applies to open source collaboration in the 21st century. I wasn't part of the Apache Jakarta story myself but have heard of that a few times over the years...

I originally published this article on SD Times, republishing it to keep it around for posterity... If you’re looking at embracing open source today, you might be a bit late to the game. Using open-source software is mainstream now, and being involved in open-source projects is nothing to write home about either. Everybody does it, we know how it works, its value is proven.

> How would you feel if you had to regularly expense $1200 so you could “tell a few teammates something”. Think that would go over well? (Jason Fried)

Here’s a “survival guide” that we use at Adobe to help our colleagues make sense of our busy Open Development mailing lists.

French-speaking fortysomethings might remember the Shadoks, a two-minute TV comics show that aired on ORTF when I was a kid.