Lori Lorusso, Director of Outreach at the Rust Foundation, and David Wood, a Rust Project Director and engineer at ARM, join host Jay Faulkner to talk about what the Rust Foundation actually does behind the scenes — funding infrastructure, employing security engineers, and running a maintainer funding program for contributors who aren't backed by a sponsoring company.

The conversation covers Rust's path from a Mozilla research project to safety-critical infrastructure in operating systems, browsers, and even vehicles, plus a deep dive into why a single compiler feature (the standard library rebuild, or "build-std") took 11 years and a major communication breakdown within the project to finally ship. Lori and David also share two candid "gross moments": a non-technical presenter's conference talk gone sideways, and the long, frustrating road to getting a stalled feature back on track.

This episode is for developers, maintainers, and engineers who work with Rust (or are deciding whether to) and want to understand the people and politics behind the language, not just the syntax.

The Rust Foundation - https://rustfoundation.org/
Rust Project Goals - https://rust-lang.github.io/rust-project-goals/2026/build-std.html
ARM - https://www.arm.com/

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/GCSn4kjSRRo.

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

You can't fire a volunteer. So how do you lead one? Vicky Brasseur — author, OSS strategist, and "open source minister without portfolio" — joins Jay Faulkner on the GROSS Out Podcast to discuss wielding influence without authority: ethical manipulation, director-ready business cases, and the succession planning most projects ignore until it's too late. Plus, Vicky's unflinching take on how the LLM boom is damaging open source — flooding maintainers with low-quality PRs, gutting mentorship, and burning resources without accountability. No fluff. Just the long game.

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/CEp-I7st02A.

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

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.

Jay Faulkner sits down with Kevin Hannon (GitHub: kannon92), Kubernetes Contributor Award winner and maintainer of the JobSet project, to discuss the growing challenge of running AI and batch workloads on Kubernetes — a platform originally designed for web services and long-running applications.
Kevin shares his journey from G Research and the Armada project through to his current work improving Kubernetes upstream, including the multi-year effort to bring swap memory support to GA, the push to deprecate CGroups v1, and the emerging Workload Aware Scheduling initiative aimed at bringing gang scheduling into Kubernetes core.

The conversation covers the technical realities of running GPU workloads at scale, the human side of open source maintenance, and the often overlooked work of keeping CI infrastructure healthy across a massive distributed project.

Topics discussed include JobSets, CGroups v2, pressure stall information, topology aware scheduling, and the open source politics of shipping features in a large community-driven project.

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/7EQW57BlroA.

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

Special Guest: Kevin Hannon.

We sit down with Æva Black as she shares her journey from creating OpenStack Ironic to leading security policy at Microsoft and CISA. Discussion covers the economics of competing with hyperscalers, Europe's Cyber Resilience Act, managing software dependency complexity, AI's impact on security (including the rise of "vibe hackers"), and a powerful story about how a casual conference conversation led to influencing White House cybersecurity strategy.

OpenStack Ironic - https://ironicbaremetal.org/

Omnibor - https://omnibor.io

The cURL project - https://everything.curl.dev/project/index.html

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/Z6h-Sfle83g.

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

Special Guest: Æva Black.

In this episode of the G Research Open Source Software Outreach Podcast (GROSS OUT), host Jay Faulkner sits down with Dr. Dawn Foster, Director of Data Science at the CHAOSS Project and veteran open source consultant, to explore the hidden infrastructure that keeps open source communities thriving.

Dawn shares her 30-year journey through the open source world, from compiling dependencies as a sysadmin in the '90s to earning a PhD studying collaboration in the Linux kernel. The conversation dives deep into the metrics and governance structures that separate sustainable projects from those destined to fail—including the critical "lottery factor" (what happens when the most important person in your project disappears) and why you should build governance before you need it.

CHAOSS Project - https://chaoss.community/
Dawn Foster on the Linux Kernel - https://opensource.com/article/17/10/collaboration-linux-kernel

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

For a video version of this podcast, check out https://youtu.be/Znk5e4DfR50.

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

Special Guest: Dawn Foster.