FQ-PIE: Contributing to Open Standards by Contributing to FOSS

FQ-PIE is a Networking Active Queue Management algorithm, developed by a research team at NITK, Surathkal. It's main utility is to reduce latency and improve throughput for Internet traffic, which ends up passing through several, long buffers. There is an active effort to get this algorithm standardized and adopted by the community.

I got interested in trying to improve the support for FQ-PIE, as well as incorporate feedback from various interested communities. Having previously only been a consumer of FOSS, ended up going down a deep rabbit hole of contributing to FOSS! Since an Open Standard can be looked at as a specification, supporting its implementation can differ depending on the different consumers, layer of software abstraction, environments, etc. This provided a unique opportunity to:

• Discover different FOSS networking projects, and how the processes and contributing style can differ vastly between them.

• Collaborating with maintainers & community members, receiving criticizm and feedback, and looping this back into the Standards themselves.

This talk covers all of these, and also welcomes contributors to FQ-PIE, and FOSS in general.

• What is FQ-PIE, and what are Open Standards

• How I was able to contribute to making FQ-PIE better by contributing to FOSS

• The networking FOSS projects involved, the unique experience contributing to each of them, and learnings overall.

• How anyone can contribute to FOSS, and how it becomes even easier to do so when it contributes to a clearer overall goal, like improving Open Standards.