From fe62a80f37c3f2ab5f2642d66a58799358234f46 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Russell Ballestrini Date: Sun, 19 Oct 2025 07:54:36 -0400 Subject: [PATCH] Add expert witness intro & replace GitHub with GitLab CI Establish that 10 years/10,000 hours makes SRE & DevOps practitioners YAML experts. Replace GitHub Actions with GitLab CI references (Microsoft-free). Assert YAML expertise is widespread, not proprietary knowledge. --- content/2025-10-18-who-owns-yaml.rst | 5 +++-- 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) diff --git a/content/2025-10-18-who-owns-yaml.rst b/content/2025-10-18-who-owns-yaml.rst index 22c56a4..c4a422b 100644 --- a/content/2025-10-18-who-owns-yaml.rst +++ b/content/2025-10-18-who-owns-yaml.rst @@ -12,6 +12,8 @@ who owns yaml? :align: center :width: 300px +**After 10 years or 10,000 hours, most SRE & DevOps practitioners are YAML expert witnesses.** We've written tens of thousands of lines of YAML - Kubernetes manifests, GitLab CI pipelines, Ansible playbooks, Docker Compose files, infrastructure definitions. We understand the format intimately. We know its quirks, its strengths, its limitations. This expertise is widespread, not proprietary. YAML mastery is a common skill in modern infrastructure engineering. + **Nobody owns YAML.** The spec is open. The implementations are open. But what licenses govern all those YAML parsers across 42+ programming languages? **You can't patent the YAML spec.** The YAML 1.2 specification is an open standard maintained by the YAML Forum under the Open Standards Compact. This explicitly protects implementers from patent assertions - no one can claim exclusive rights over the specification through patents. Any implementation of the standard is protected from patent infringement. @@ -129,11 +131,10 @@ When you add YAML to a project, you're not inheriting restrictive obligations. N This made YAML the default choice for: - Configuration files -- CI/CD pipelines +- GitLab CI pipelines - Kubernetes manifests - Docker Compose - Ansible playbooks -- GitHub Actions **The licensing enabled the ecosystem.**