The Test Set by Posit Wes McKinney: Part 2 — The open source hustle and an insider view of Positron
Jul 29, 2025
In the latest discussion, Wes McKinney, an open source software developer and creator of pandas, delves into the intricacies of maintaining open source projects. He explains the essential role of corporate support and shares the origin story of Apache Arrow. The conversation highlights the development of Positron, a cutting-edge IDE, and the importance of interoperable tools across programming languages. Wes also touches on how modern IDEs should cater to both users and machine learning models, blending his coding insights with a passion for music.
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Apache Creates Neutral Governance
- The Apache Software Foundation provides a neutral governance home that builds trust between corporate contributors.
- Open, public decision-making and permissive licensing reduce fears about hidden agendas and IP risk.
Design Projects For Corporate Trust
- Use permissive, corporate-friendly licenses and a community-first culture to attract enterprise contributors.
- Enforce open processes, argue from first principles, and avoid centralized control to scale projects healthily.
Feather Born From Cross-Language Collaboration
- Wes and Hadley Wickham created the Feather file format to enable portable data frames across languages.
- That collaboration showed how sharing technology can bridge language divides in data science.