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2016-Request-for-Commits-Transcripts

+**Adam Stacoviak:** Alright everyone, welcome to this special episode of Request for Commits. We wanted to close up the first season with a look behind the scenes of the show. We've got the entire party here - myself, Adam Stacoviak, editor in chief of Changelog, Jerod Santo, managing editor of Changelog, and also the hosts, Nadia Eghbal and Mikeal Rogers. Everyone say hello...
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Hi!
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Hello!
+**Jerod Santo:** Hello!
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Request for Commits - this show was uniquely unified in terms of how we came about it. Nadia, we had you on the Changelog, January of this year, 2016, talking about sustainability in open source; we were huge fans of that topic, but we knew we couldn't do every single episode of The Changelog specifically on that, so when we were done with that show we were like, "Hey, we should do a show... You really should podcast about this." What were you thinking at that moment? Can you kind of go back to that early stages of it?
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I think I was definitely like... I think I was just like, "Hell, no!" \[laughs\] Because it was the first interview I'd done -- definitely the first interview I'd done on open source, and I was just not super comfortable with recording online, or whatever. So yeah, I put it at like the back of my mind; it was nice to think what would that be like in my head, and I think as I was continuing to meet people and talk to people, I kind of kept that in the back of my mind, like "Oh yeah, it would be kind of cool if it was just this conversation, but published..." So yeah, it definitely planted a seed in my head.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, I listened to that podcast actually, and it was funny because at the time that I was listening to the podcast, I hadn't met you yet but we had on the calendar that we were going to meet, I think like a week later, or something. And I remember listening to that podcast and being really frustrated, but like in a good way, because it was this really kind of high-level, broad thing, and every one of your answers, I was like "I wanna spend an hour talking about just THAT thing." Just... That two-minute segment, like every two minutes. \[laughter\] And then we met up and talked for like a couple hours, I think, about stuff like that.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Great.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** There's been some people, Mikeal, that had described your position on the show as like "stories from the battlefield", so to speak. Can you talk to that a little bit?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, I do think that the difference in our perspective is that I tend to talk about my experiences or just stories that I've heard from other people as well - you kind of take everybody's experiences and you learn from them... But Nadia was like this amazing researcher, and goes out and finds way more stories than I have just for my own kind of personal perspective.
+I tend to tell a lot of stories and come from that end, and then Nadia is much more analytical and tends to really keep things on track in terms of always focusing on sustainability and keeping a much more coherent narrative in the story that we're trying to do about sustainability.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Thanks, Mikeal.
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, I think we could definitely give props to Nadia on her note-taking. First of all, your paper for the Ford Foundation was an epic in the actual sense of the word... Very long. Real quick, I'm just looking at our show list and thinking, "Man, we just met in January of 2016, and here it is, December 2016 and have 11 awesome episodes of a show, that we all can be proud of." So I wanna congratulate you all on doing that, it's excellent.
+Nadia, tell us about these notes, because you all gotta see some of the Google Docs that Nadia can crank out...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[04:01\] They're theses, basically...
+**Jerod Santo:** I think the word is "thorough"...
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I think I should stop sending them to the speakers, because I worry I'm scaring them... \[laughter\]
+**Adam Stacoviak:** They might be like, "So we're gonna talk about all this stuff?"
+**Nadia Eghbal:** "All that...?!" Yeah, I might stop doing that.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think it helps them, because it refreshes their memory about, "Oh, I may have to talk about that."
+**Nadia Eghbal:** That's what I think.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** No, I think it's good. Things are going very well, don't change it up.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Okay, alright, alright... I'll keep doing crazy docs...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** In the worst case scenario, you'll keep them on their toes. It's like, "Wow, these people are serious... We're gonna podcast about this." And I think, to that note, one of my most favorite - not because it's the best one, but because I just love the way he came in with passion - was Brendan Eich. It was like the \[unintelligible 00:04:46.03\] just pulled it back and let it go, and then Brendan just told the story, the history of open source, the web, how it was funded... I think he'd have done that anyways, but maybe the notes... It was like, "Hey, this is serious... We're gonna talk about the history of the web here", and he was ready for it.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think it made him really excited too, because it made it clear that we were gonna talk about something different than most of his podcasts. Usually, he comes on and talks about either how he created JavaScript in like an hour, or whatever it was, or...
+**Jerod Santo:** Ten minutes, I think.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** ... or what does the next version of JavaScript look like. Those are the two styles of interviews that he really gets, and we were clearly gonna talk about other stuff. But for all the listeners out there that don't understand what we're talking about with these notes, because they haven't seen them... These aren't notes taken while we're talking, these are prepared notes before the interview, that are basically kind of broken into three sections, because we have the breaks in between.
+Nadia essentially just does a lot of research and has a lot of possible discussion points. We never hit all of them, but it's this amazing guide that we can continue to fall back to. We try to have a conversation and move naturally, but also one of the reasons why the show continues to move forward really easily is because we always have that guide to fall back to. The notes are amazing and super thorough.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Honestly, I'm terrified of talking off the cuff, which is why I do them... With live presentations or podcast stuff, I'm always afraid... I know Adam always says embrace the silence, but I'm just like...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Embrace it.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** ...I have to have something ready.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Can we talk about the design of the show a little bit then on that note? Since off the cuff is something you're scared of, we kind of come into the show a little differently than maybe other podcasts where they sort of say, "So, I guess, tell everybody who you are" and they ran for it ten minutes, and burn ten minutes of show time, whereas we come in and it's like you go right into the heart of the story.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** This is one of the things that I didn't really think about until Mikeal pointed this out, but that we get to bring people on the show to talk about, aside of themselves, what they don't always get asked about... So it's not always about what they've done from a technical perspective, but sort of like "Who are you as a person and what is your philosophy on things?" While we open up the show with an intro side, it's more tailored to the sustainability topic and not just, "Oh, you created JavaScript. Let's talk about that."
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I mean, there always is that first section where we do get into the person's background, but we always where we get into their background specific to what we wanna talk about later. We really just wanna provide the audience with their credentials and credibility around whatever side of sustainability we're gonna go at.
+We rarely talk about somebody's entire history, because it's usually not relevant. I mean, there are some exceptions... Heather Meeker has an amazing legal history, and I think all of it is probably relevant to her views on the legal side of open source. But for most people we don't do that at all, because so much of what they do isn't really relevant. And we almost never ask them about the project that they're working on right now, which is what most podcasts do, because usually they are on to talk about a project they are promoting but we're like, "No, no, no... This thing that you've been working on for ten years, that is sort of like an underpinning of open source sustainability - let's get into that."
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[08:11\] They're very - I wouldn't say "timeless", where you could just listen to them forever, but it's not like you can say, "Oh, that was recorded November 2016" or "That was in October, for sure." From the perspective of the show it's not really like a timestamp on it; it's almost timeless to a degree.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, and some are better than others for that. You know, Brendan is working on a lot of really relevant stuff right now, so I think that his one is probably a little bit more timestamped, especially the third section of that one. I think that discussion we had with Karl Fogel will basically...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** ...go down in history.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, that one... Well, I think his book is still relevant ten years later, so I think that conversation probably has some longevity of a few years at least.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And you even said -- I forget what you were working at at the time, but you were saying that that was like the bible that everyone put on their desks for open source and how to run governance, and how to do open source, basically.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, it was.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What's the book's name?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Producing Open Source Software.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** According to him, there's gonna be an inversion coming up, but we're still waiting on it.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And since we've been working with O'Reilly too, we've gotta give thanks because they did let him do some unique... I think the license is a Creative Commons license.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** There's like a website, ProducingOSS.com. That is the whole book, in its entirety.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We have to do better with our show notes. I'm going to our show notes now for both of these shows and the book is not linked up... Why!?
+**Jerod Santo:** What?!
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I don't know why the book is not linked up. I'm looking at it... I know I did this, so it's my fault.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Gotta fix it.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** This is my fault. We'll fix this. If you're listening to this, it's considered fixed, okay? \[laughter\] The links will be there. It's available online, you can read it online, and I believe it's creative commons. That's a unique thing for O'Reilly, because they obviously paid to get that book produced, but it was like, "This is so important, we should give it away."
+Let's talk about some favorite moments then from this season. I know that I've got a couple myself... We've kind of talked around a couple of them to some degree just now, but anyone wanna start off with a favorite moment from this season that they can share with the listeners?
+**Jerod Santo:** My favorite was episodes \#1 and \#2, what I would call the somewhat heated debate between Karl and Mikeal about many things. Mikeal, from your perspective, were you having a lot of fun during that conversation? Because I had a lot of fun listening to it.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It was great, it was great. I think there was actually one moment where both Nadia and I sort of landed on... We very much disagreed with Karl's perspective, or we had a different perspective, but it was just such a great conversation that we could disagree and not be angry. And we were really trying to understand his perspective and how he was coming at it. I think I learned a lot more from that than I would have from somebody who just agreed with it.
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah... What I really respected about Karl - and I have to go back and listen again because I think it was the first episodes that I listened to, probably back in August or maybe even July, so I don't remember the exact details... But there was a specific moment where you kind of changed his mind about something, and he even said it as he was debating. He's like, "Well, I'm kind of changing where I stand, as we talk...", which was really admirable and neat to see.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, yeah... I mean, we scheduled that one for a two-parter, because we knew that it would take so long. Me and Nadia both talked to Karl before, and had an understanding of how long that it could go. With most of these people, like we were saying, there is an aspect of their work that we wanna talk about, and so that's gonna be an hour, because it's not all of their work. But with Karl, he has views on every angle of open source sustainability and community, so it was gonna be huge.
+\[12:14\] I don't know if you felt like this, Nadia, but I felt like we didn't have enough time...
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Oh, yeah... I mean, he was the original inspiration for this show, and we were like "Oh, we should just do a podcast with Karl"; we could have done every episode on him. \[laughter\]
+**Adam Stacoviak:** This was actually the same day, too. I recall this. Didn't we do back-to-back, part I, part II with Karl?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, it was just a straight up, three-hour block, yeah.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, and I really wasn't exhausted afterwards. I was just like, "Alright, let's go again."
+**Jerod Santo:** Any chance to get him back on in season two?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Hopefully his book is done and we can bring him on and talk about it.
+**Jerod Santo:** That'd be cool.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Other favorite moments? Mikeal, what's a favorite moment from you?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I really liked having Max on, because... I mean, Max is one of my really good friends and I talk to him pretty often. We used to have a company together and kind of talk every day, and very few moments in that were things that me and Max had talked about before. It was all really new stuff, the kind of stuff that we would have only talked about in this kind of setting, with this podcast... And certain things that I just never thought that I'd know. Nadia knew all this stuff, but...
+**Nadia Eghbal:** But I didn't know the other stuff that was on there.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, but I had no idea. I did not know that grant funders love convenings, and that they're called convenings. I didn't even know that. \[laughter\]
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow. That's where you go and you network and shake hands and meet new people, and stuff like that...?
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, but it's never a networking event, it's always a convening.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Convening, okay. There you go. So that's episode \#6, that was Max Ogden talking about grant funding. Now, Nadia, when we had you on the Changelog, we talked a bit about grant funding, to some degree, around sustaining open source, and you had some pretty unique perspectives around VC and also grant funding in that show there. What thoughts can you share here, behind the scenes about that?
+**Nadia Eghbal:** About Max's episode, or...?
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, that episode there, about grant funding and that process.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I was super happy that we had an entire episode dedicated to that. I think that was what I've been excited about with this show in general - we organized season one with each episode focusing on a different topic, and just being able to go that deep on a topic was really fulfilling. I talked to Max a couple times before, but you know, when you're meeting someone you're talking about all sorts of things, you're trying to get a complete picture of someone... And to come back and be able to talk about a topic that we had both thought was important, but we knew that wasn't well understood by the rest of open source - that was just deeply satisfying.
+**Jerod Santo:** Real quick, can I talk about VC funding for a second? Because I feel like we've been a year from your first post back in January, and the conversation that we had on the Changelog, wherein you talked about the potential of VCs being interested in the funding of open source... Now you can look back at the year, you're at GitHub now, you've been in the trenches, having these conversations with developers... Have your thoughts on that congealed or changed since January?
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, a lot. I'm kind of curious to go back and listen to that episode, because I think a lot has changed. The thing I felt really solid on this whole year has been that there is a problem that should be talked about. Figuring out what to do about the problem is obviously the hardest part, and I think takes a long time. Over this -- I mean, doing this show too has been an excuse to think really in depth about some of these ideas. I don't know that venture is the right place to start, I'll put it that way.
+\[15:55\] When I was first thinking about this stuff it was like, "How do you just get money into the problem in the first place and coming straight from VC?", that was my first thought. But I'm thinking more about "How do we create a sustainable system of support?" and that's not gonna be the best-aligned place, in my opinion.
+**Jerod Santo:** So looking back at those deep conversations that you were able to have during season one, what are some highlights from your perspective, favorite moments or episodes?
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I think Heather was my favorite one, or at least one of my favorites. Heather is one of those people I'd had I think one conversation with before, and I remember coming away from that conversation and just scribbling down all these notes because I just didn't know all these things. She was so understated about it, and she's just like, "Oh yeah, you know...", sharing all this history and all this interesting legal stuff. So I knew that I wanted her on the show.
+And being able to go that deep on licenses - and not just licenses in the sense that... I think talking about licenses can get very politicized in open source, but with her I felt like it was more about history and it was more about understanding the broader landscape, and having that kind of conversation I think was great.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, that one surprised me more than any other episode. I definitely thought that we were gonna have one conversation, and then it turned into something much more.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** How do you mean?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I really thought that it would end up being more about the licensing side of things, and it ended up being really about sustainability at the end of the day, and how licensing plays into that and is an aspect of that. And I thought that we would end up talking more about free software licensing, just because she has such a history in that, but we actually ended up getting into a lot of really, really good other stuff.
+I think we ended up following that conversation a lot; more than most of them, we fell back to the notes a little bit less.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah. I remember one thing she said that stuck with me... It was about how licenses themselves are these reusable documents where instead of every project having to pay a whole bunch of legal fees to get their docs in order, you just had these documents you can essentially copy/paste into your projects and you know that you're legally covered. I hadn't really thought about how revolutionary that is, but coming from startups, for example, you have to hire a lawyer if you wanna...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Everybody's really giving the same thing every single time, because there's some unique experience for each and every company, and everybody ends up doing the same thing, just copy/paste the business name, to some degree. I mean, they'll probably even hire the same firms, same attorneys...
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** And in open source it's like anybody can just access the text, copy it, put it under your project, and you're done. That's pretty nuts.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That certainly speaks to the dry mentality of the software development world - not just software developers, but those that operate in open source, everyone from evangelists to those who help with documentation, to those who actually write core code... There's appreciation for "Don't repeat yourself if you don't have to."
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, I think the difference in perspective between developers and lawyers looks really interesting, too. Like, I've never heard somebody say, "What do you mean 'license proliferation'?" There is no standardization around any licensing in the proprietary world.
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, that was interesting. So you have the authorship side from the lawyer perspective or from the business perspective; if you have proprietary license, you have to hire somebody (a lawyer) to write that, and on the receiving side as well. So if you say "This is MIT", we have a preconceived understanding of what that means. But if every proprietary license is different, you have to actually have lawyers vet it on the receiving side, even if it is like Adam said, a copy/paste from a previous proprietary license; it doesn't matter. So you have costs on both sides, which I had never even considered.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[19:56\] I also appreciated - and this isn't exactly accurate, but something she said was pretty funny... "I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on Reddit." \[laughter\] Which is not true; I mean, she's a lawyer...
+**Jerod Santo:** She is a lawyer!
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I wasn't really sure why she said that, but I thought it was funny. We pulled that out as a pulled quote for that episode, as well.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I'm not sure, but I think we're talking about how everyone just has these really strong opinions about legal and licensing stuff in open source, because you kind of have to... But in the end you're not actually a lawyer, you're just sort of like taking your opinions and beating other people on the head with it.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So we zoom out a little bit and we look at all of season one, we're done with it. We've looked back at the beginnings of it, so to speak... There had to have been some sort of overarching message that the two of you were hoping to get across to the audience. What was that message, and did we achieve our goal of doing that?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** For me it actually just kind of crystallized two things that... Well, actually I shouldn't say "crystallized", because I hadn't really come to this until we started doing the podcast, and I don't know if it was just the podcast or also other conversations that I had with Nadia. But there's kind of two points.
+One is that just the notion of sustainability and sustainable practices needs to become part of the general developer mindset the way that testing became part of the general mindset. Open source developers did not write tests when I started doing open source. That wasn't a thing, and there was a conscious movement to get people to value testing, and for testing to become part of the process. And I think this notion of sustainable practices around how you manage a project needs to become a part of the same thing.
+The other one, which is somewhat related to what Nadia was talking about with venture is that we need companies to understand how dependent they are on open source, and to then develop a relationship to open source that is based on how much they are actually dependent on it for their business, rather than charity, which is where it is in most businesses right now.
+If they put money into open source, it's in this weird charity bucket, and it's disconnected from the actual business value.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Very much, yeah. I can agree with that.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** ... and that's not sustainable, and it doesn't connect properly, and it doesn't give the people who work there the right kind of flexibility they need in order to contribute and to be part of open source.
+A lot of people are gonna be mad for me to say this, because it's a lot of people's job and it's definitely been my job in the past, but I don't necessarily agree with having this one open source person or this group of people that work on open source that are detached from the product and detached from the rest of the engineering.
+If all of your product and all of your engineering is dependent on open source, all of your engineers for some portion of their time should be contributing to open source, should be involved. Because if you don't have a seat at the table and you don't get to direct where it's going, you eventually won't be able to use that technology anymore for your use cases. And it's harder to teach that... It's actually probably easier to walk into an organization and say, "You need to cut a check for this amount of money to this foundation, because they deserve it and you're dependent on them" - it's actually easier to do that than to get them to reassess the value of what they're using. I think in the long-term that's what we need to do.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, I think thematically Mikeal kind of stole my answer!
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, man... \[laughter\]
+**Nadia Eghbal:** But that's a good thing, it means we had the same message for this show. Again, Mikeal had said when we started this about how it'd be really interesting to talk to these people who are known and accomplished for certain aspects of their life and they don't get to talk or think about the other aspects... That was my goal with this show - bringing sustainability to the forefront of the conversation and showing that there are a lot of different facets to that as well. It's not just about, "How do I get paid for the work that I do?", but it's "How do you think about your community? How do you think about grants/business stuff, if that interests you?" There's a lot of different aspects to it, and being able to explore all that really deeply in a sense just helps legitimize that this is something you should be thinking about if you work in open source.
+\[24:08\] In the beginning of this year maybe that was less obvious, and now I feel like it's becoming more obvious. We've talked about how there's some people who think this stuff doesn't matter at all, so there's a lot of history that has to be overcome to say "This stuff actually matters. It's a really big part of the work that you do, and we should be talking about, we should be going in-depth about it", instead of just talking about the code or the technical side of your work.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** In light of that, who is the listener of this show? What types of people? Is it maintainers, is it people inside of companies, CTOs, executives? Who should be listening to this show? Who's our audience?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I mean, are you asking who we want the audience to be, or who seems to be listening to it?
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I think both... Who's this show designed for, in terms of the preparation and the admiration and the hope for this show, but then also who listens to it and who should listen to it?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** To me, the most important people who listen to it are those that are in some position of leadership inside a community. I wanna reach them first and foremost, and then from there reach more people.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I've been getting feedback from people from all over the place, but when I think about who I've mentally designed this show for, it's people that are some sort of community leader within open source in particular, who have some sort of responsibility to a project or to a set of people, and who are similarly craving that depth of conversation that we were when we started this.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We touched a little earlier on - to some degree - how this show was formed, but the question I'm sure a lot of people ask is why the two of you together. Mikeal, you mentioned you listened to the episode we did with Nadia back in January, you had a meeting with her later that week; you hadn't actually met yet, so... Take us back to why the two of you, why together, why do you both have a passion for this show on this topic?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, for me, I just wanted to be able to talk to Nadia all the time. \[laughter\]
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Likewise, yay!
+**Mikeal Rogers:** We don't really... I mean, even though we live in the same city, it's hard to schedule time to just be like, "Hey, let's sit and just chat for a while."
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So podcasting is a new way to meet. I like it.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Basically... Yeah, I mean, I remember thinking -- I had talked to so many people, and plenty of conversations resonated with different people, but I felt like with Mikeal it was someone I kept coming back to again and again. I think in our first conversation I realized he had seen so many different types of communities, types of situations that I could read about and try to understand, but that I hadn't experienced myself, so that was really interesting for me. And then reading some of his older writing, there was that same level of vision, or just wanting to zoom out and say, "What does it mean that we're doing all this?" Not just doing it, but kind of zooming out and asking the questions of "Why?" So whenever we would talk in person, I was just like, "Oh wow, he can get really deep into where is the world actually going, why is it going that direction, what can we do about it...?" and he became someone that was really formative for me in terms of how I think about sustainability, and I just wanted an excuse to keep going deeper on these topics.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I remember, Jerod, when we got that email from Nadia... Take us back, Jerod, if you can help me share these details... I recall Jerod and I having this perspective -- and it wasn't against Mikeal, we were just so pro-Nadia at that point. We were like, "I'm not sure we really wanna do a show that has a host along with Nadia..." We felt not that you couldn't do it on your own or you could do it on your own, it was just more like... We were just really pro Nadia, I think. What do you think, Jerod?
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, I was calling it "The Nadia Show"... \[laughter\]
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It's still The Nadia Show, by the way... \[laughter\]
+**Jerod Santo:** \[27:57\] ...and I was like, "No, Nadia's fine." But then Nadia's like, "Well, I really think Mikeal would add to it", and I was like "Wow, I mean... I'm willing to give that a shot, as well", and I actually think, Nadia, you were probably right and we were probably wrong. I think the show definitely is better for having you and Mikeal as a team. You guys are making a great team, I think. You guys bring the alternating perspectives, with the battle-hardened veteran of open source and the thorough journalist asking questions... Kind of from the inside and from the outside, so I think it's turned out great. But yeah, we were a little pro-Nadia at first... We needed to be convinced.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm gonna share - hopefully, Nadia, you're not worried about this, or get any anxiety about it - a little piece that was in the original email from Nadia back to us.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Oh, Jesus...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** This is 7th April.
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, no...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** This was all shared on the show already, so it's nothing new... She said, "I'm circling back because last week Mikeal and I were talking/joking about doing a podcast with Karl Fogel, and to nerd out about open source history and culture", and that was... It's so funny to look back in the past and see where we came from and see where we're at now, and all that to actually follow through with that - getting Karl on the show and having those Part I/Part II conversations which are shared with the world now, and deeper conversations between you two actually taking place. That's cool, I like that.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I was kind of nervous, I remember... Because I wasn't sure whether Mikeal is actually serious about wanting to do it, but I guess... \[laughter\] It was like, "We were kind of joking about, but...", but I think I got a DM like a week or two later being like, "So, are we doing this?" I was like, "Okay, cool! I wanna do it, too."
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And what about you, Mikeal? Were you excited about working with us, or what were your general thoughts on doing a podcast? Had you done one before? I know you've been on plenty, but have you actually produced a show before yourself or been a host?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I've produced a couple, and this inevitable thing happened where I get too backed up in order to put them out... So I record them because I wanna have that conversation, and then I would eventually lose track of actually publishing them.
+Then when Node first started, there was a podcast called NodeUp that I hosted for the first few years, and that was also produced by somebody else, so it actually made it out on time, because I wasn't responsible for it. So as I was looking at that and trying to do one again, it was really important that somebody else was responsible for getting them out, because I actually want them to be released. We recorded a bunch of these before we ever put them out, and then I remember getting a message from you all, really worried that you hadn't gotten them out yet. Like, are you guys \[unintelligible 00:30:39.07\] I think me and Nadia both had the same response, which was like "We would probably do these even if they weren't published." We were really enjoying having these conversations with people and digging into this stuff.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So did we mention the music at all by any chance? I mean, I know we -- is anybody a fan of the music that is the theme song for Request for Commits? Jerod, I know you are, so...
+**Jerod Santo:** So I don't get to say anything?
+**Adam Stacoviak:** No, you can say whatever you want, but...
+**Jerod Santo:** I'm a fan.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** ...we know you're a huge fan of that music, because we were a part of creating it. \[laughter\]
+**Jerod Santo:** True.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** ...which is a back-story no one else knows about, so maybe share that.
+**Jerod Santo:** So now we want Nadia and Mikeal to tell us how much THEY like the music.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, I love it, but I was already a Breakmaster Cylinder fan before you all played it, so...
+**Jerod Santo:** You were primed.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I didn't know who Breakmaster Cylinder was until this, but then I looked Breakmaster Cylinder up, and that was pretty cool. To Mikeal's point, by the way, about getting stuff out on time, and everything... Honestly, having you guys produce the show and keep the trains right on time is the huge part of why we're even doing this.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And the sound quality.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Yes!
+**Mikeal Rogers:** ...and the editing, and everything. I listed to a lot of podcasts, and it's noticeable how ones that don't sound as well or aren't as well put together, I will start listening to less, just because it takes more mental energy to listen to them. So yeah, that's just been phenomenal.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[32:07\] Awesome. Well, that's a big part of producing podcasts, we feel - quality content. There's so many facets to the idea of quality content. It's not only the content you're creating and making it engaging and informative, but also taking a positive stance towards good mics, good post-processing, good EQ, good mixing, and the awesome website we're launching on now... All the work behind all these things - there's so many moving parts... I never thought I would ever be part of producing a podcast. Jerod, my mind is blown by how far we have taken our desire for quality content. \[unintelligible 00:32:48.24\] But it's fun, though.
+So let's wrap up with the plan for season two. Unless there's anything else y'all wanna share about season one, let's move on to some plans on season two. Anything before we open that up yet?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Could we talk just a little bit about the reaction that we've gotten so far?
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, please. That's a good point.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I know that you all have seen a lot... I was at Offline Camp, and Max Ogden was there and he was doing sort of a passion talk version of what it takes to get grant funding for open source, which was great. When he finished, Gregor, who runs the event was like, "Oh, and if you're really interested in this, you have to listen to this podcast that Mikeal did" etc., and then two other people were like, "Yes, everybody should listen to this podcast", so I was like, "Oh, wow, this is awesome!" It was a great response from these people... But that's really kind of subjective, so... \[laughs\]
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What about you, Nadia? Any favorite moments from people you've met in the community that were like, "I love this show, it's so great! Keep doing it!"
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I'm just amazed that people are listening to it. \[laughs\] Because I didn't wanna be really annoying about promoting the show all the time. I talked about it when it came out, I think I've shared out a couple of episodes, but I wasn't being overly promotional, so it's always a delight when someone randomly reaches out or drops me a line that's saying they enjoy the show. It's just really nice. And it's nice to do something different from writing too, but still putting content out there. I've kind of been writing a lot less since starting to work full-time, but having this out there is a great way to keep sharing ideas out into the world.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Anybody reach out and give you a hug, Jerod, on this show? Did you mention this show at OSCON or different conferences you've been at recently?
+**Jerod Santo:** Absolutely. I think even our member's chat - The Changelog members, we have a lot of people who love RFC. I think Justin Dorfman is one of them who's constantly saying Request for Commits is his favorite Changelog show, which is a love/hate response for me. \[laughter\]
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, me too.
+**Jerod Santo:** As a co-host of The Changelog, you know... I love hearing that and I hate hearing that, but... It's been good, it's been good.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The response... There's been a lot of people when I was at Node.js Interactive recently - there's been several people who were similar, like "I love The Changelog, but man... That new show, Request for Commits - it's just... It's really good. Don't stop doing that." So that must be some pretty good motivation for the two of you, Nadia and Mikeal, to keep doing that.
+Let's talk about that, then, unless we have any more before we open up the expectation for season two for the listeners. Nothing else?
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Nope.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. So the plan, roughly, for season two is recording and producing in quarter one of next year, so January, Februaryish, and then working towards late March, Aprilish (quarter two) season two out there. What do you all think about that?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That seems doable. \[laughter\]
+**Jerod Santo:** We're gonna try hard.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We're gonna try hard. I think what's different too about this, and it's helped me see a different side of podcasting, because I've always been like "You gotta do it weekly for it to be successful", and I think something this show has helped me realize is a different side; this is to anybody out there who produces podcasts - maybe you don't always have to produce a weekly show. Maybe it can simply just be seasonal, maybe it can be 11 awesome episodes that stand on their own for several months, and they're timeless, and then you can come back a few months later and record some more...
+\[36:25\] As long as you set the expectation to the listening audience and do a good job of being top of mind at some point in the near future, like Nadia, the work that you do, Mikeal, the work that you do - you're both relevant in the community, so your personal relevance keeps the DNA of the show live because later on whenever we produce the new seasons, you all can share that it's out there again and anybody who's a fan of you will be a fan of the next season. I think it's helped me change my perspective on the cadence of a show.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I'm glad it's worked out that way, because I don't know that we could have done it weekly, but I love the idea of having these nice little bundles of information... Like with season one, we were thinking about a theme for each of those episodes, and they all kind of fit together into this one complete package. I'm always a fan of TV shows, like I cancel it after one or two seasons, because they end up becoming these cult favorites, and everyone just like dissects every single episode, so maybe I'll end up doing that.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. One of my favorites, on that note, is The Newsroom from HBO, and it's three seasons long; Aaron Sorkin wrote it, and the writing and the cinematography is phenomenal, and I'm upset that it's three seasons, but at the same time I'm glad it's over, because I don't know if I can handle seven years of Newsroom.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** It's perfect. \[laughter\]
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, too much Sorkin can be a bad thing. He's best in small quantities.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, that's true.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think also how we think about this show changes with this kind of seasonal mindset, because it's not just that it's hard to schedule us and that we travel a lot, it's also the kinds of guests that we're getting and how we wanna approach them. Some of them we talk about how to approach for months, actually... Like what angle do we take and what do we kind of stay away from, because there are certain topics that the person can and will talk about for 20 minutes, but if we start to touch on that, it's not really relevant and not really where we wanna go.
+There's one guest that we've been talking about for at least three months, and I keep thinking about how to approach this person, which angle to come at it from. We wouldn't be able to do that if it was a weekly show where every week we're like "Oh, who's doing something cool that we can schedule in and just kind of get him to talk about it?"
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, we're not just trying to fill a slot... Because our time is precious, everyone's time is precious on this show, and we're trying to really think through what does each episode say and what does it stand for.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Which I think is the exact thing I personally needed on the perspective of podcasts, because we feel like -- maybe it's more of a me thing (I don't know, Jerod, if you share this feeling or not), but we almost have this pressure in our position to create blockbuster podcasts... Good podcasts that get -- it's not even about listens, it's more about the popularity of it. And to not have simply the popularity to focus -- to laser focus on a single season, an overarching topic across that, the right kind of guest to share that message... To me it shows a depth and thoughtfulness that I hadn't -- not so much not considered, but hadn't considered mostly because the cadence of podcasts typically is like any podcast you listen to out there, 9 times out of 10 it's weekly. And to sort of be free of those shackles was very refreshing with this podcast.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[40:04\] Yeah, it's just different. I love both... I love Saturday Night Live, but they don't put together sketches because they're all the best sketches, they put it together because it's Saturday and it's midnight and they have to do a show.
+**Jerod Santo:** Exactly, yeah.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And there's something to that - they get to be much more topical and they get to be part of the culture of now, but also I still watch old episodes of the Chappelle Show in a way that I don't watch old episodes of SNL.
+**Jerod Santo:** Right. Yeah, the constraint requires them to be creative in certain senses, so that will squeeze out creativity where it otherwise would not have. At the same time, it also means that you're shipping a bunch of stuff that is half-baked, you know? So it's constraints...
+I'm just a fan of podcasts as a medium because there aren't any rules; we decide how this show is gonna run, and hopefully we can find ways, just like in software, of sustaining that or not, but it really is a bit of a playground or a place where you can experiment, and different shows can have different feels and different production schedules and all sorts of things.
+In light of all that, tell us what your thoughts are for season two. I know we have a bit of a working theme that we're trying to focus on, but give us some insights on what people can look forward to.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** We've been putting out this call - I know Nadia's been asking for people on Twitter and so have I... We're trying to get people to tell us about more unsung heroes, people that we wouldn't necessarily already know about that we can feature on the show, that have done really important work around sustainability. The previous show, we had a long list of people that we were considering and we kind of pulled the people that we thought were the best in that. But again, it's all people that we somehow know about or have somehow talked to before, or credited in some way. And so much of the feedback that I've got from the show is people are finding out about these people that they didn't know about... So then how many people do we not know about that are out there doing great work that we can talk to? So we've been soliciting that.
+That's not what the whole season will be about. There's a bunch of other great people that we're planning on having and that we'll continue to consider, that we actually do know about. But you know, continually soliciting these sorts of unsung heroes is a way to get at that research that we really can't do on our own.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, totally. I mean, again, selfishly, it's also an excuse to find new people that I just have never heard about who are doing interesting work and already from putting out a call for that I've been hearing about new people and that's been awesome. I think because I'm fairly new to this space, when I started - you start having these sort of go-to stories that you come back to, and the go-to people that you go back to... You can only keep so many people in your head at one time, like "These are all the people I know who know other things that are relevant", and when we planned season one out, it was a lot of people that we already knew, which made sense; being experimental, they were patient with us... But I'd really love to go forward and always continue to meet new people; I think it's important not to get overly comfortable in the same set of stories or the same groups of people or the same way of thinking. I think that's just a recipe for anything dying out, and I'm always looking for what is happening that I'm not thinking about, and how can I push my current thesis about how I think the world works through alternative stories and viewpoints. I think that's a big part of what we're trying to do for our next season.
+And then also the concept of unsung hero is not just people that we don't know, but also people doing the kinds of work on open source projects that might not always get attention. So when I put out a request about this, a couple of people were talking about conferences and events, and events being a really big part of any thriving open source community, whether you're launching your project in person or you're meeting other people... Developers are really big on in-person events, and that's something that people don't always think about; it's not that events in themselves always sustain your projects - although they do sometimes - but it's more just that there's all this other necessary work that isn't just about code that we kind of take for granted... So I think I would like to dive into some of those perspectives, as well.
+**Jerod Santo:** \[44:32\] How about a place or a way that people can contact and give the unsung heroes an opportunity to be on RFC season two? If you have somebody who you know is perfect for this, or they're doing something that they haven't gotten much spotlight, or respect, and they wanna reach out to either Nadia or Mikeal, how's the best way to submit those? Twitter?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Twitter's fine, yeah. Send it to us on Twitter. Also, don't hound us... We've had a couple people that are a little bit too persistent. There's a lot that we consider when we think about a guest.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** And it's not just, "Are you interesting or not?", it's the higher themes and things, so it's not personal...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So don't be offended if you don't make the cut, so to speak.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's a hard position to be into - to have to tell people no. But with 11 or 12 or so episodes in a season, you really have to weigh each decision wisely, to match what you're trying to get across.
+**Jerod Santo:** That's a good point. We get 52 shows a year, and you guys get a handful every season, so it's very selective.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We are Saturday Night Live, Jerod. We just... \[laughter\]
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, no!
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We need to ship a show every week because we got to.
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, no!
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, my...
+**Mikeal Rogers:** But you have a much broader topic base as well, so...
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, we do... \[laughter\]
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I was just jabbing you, Mikeal, because you said that. I was like, "Oh, that's pretty much us."
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I love Saturday Night Live.
+**Jerod Santo:** We're like the Dana Carvey, Mike Myers and then Will Ferrell era.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yes. The one you go back to listen to or watch.
+**Jerod Santo:** Or like the good SNL, right? \[laughter\]
+**Mikeal Rogers:** There's a space in between those two eras, by the way.
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, well I'm just picking the best parts and putting it all together.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, if that's it for this, we really wanted to just to a behind the scenes of season one and this show and the people behind it and what goes into it, so that you, the listener, can appreciate the quality which we attempt to bring with each new season, and kind of get a look at Mikeal and Nadia from maybe a perspective you haven't really gotten, or even Jerod and I, being producers of the show, behind the scenes with Mikeal and Nadia.
+I'm proud. I'm proud of the work for season one, I'm looking forward to season two, I'm really excited for it, so if you're listening to this, go to changelog.com/rfc, click Subscribe. Do not miss a show, season two is set for quarter two of 2017. We'll be recording in quarter one, so lots of fun happening there. If you're that die-hard, you might as well go to changelog.com/weekly, because that's where we share all of our announcement; when Request for Commits has updates, or a new show is out there, that's the best way to subscribe, other than obviously Overcast or iTunes or whatever else.
+Anything else y'all wanna share? If not, we'll say goodbye. What else have we got? Nothing?
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Nothing.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Nothing. Bye, thanks! We'll see you soon.
+**Jerod Santo:** Bye!
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Bye!
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Bye!

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+**Nadia Eghbal:** I'm Nadia Eghbal...
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And I'm Mikeal Rogers.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** On today's show Mikeal and I talked with Jan Lehnardt. Jan is a developer and business person from Berlin, co-creator of Hoodie, vice-president of Apache CouchDB and co-founder and CEO of Neighbourhoodie Software.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** With Jan we focused on building healthy communities. We talked about how he approaches community organizing, his evangelism of CouchDB, creating Hoodie and what it means to build sustainable open source.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** We also talked about drive-by contributions, contributor funnels and the differences between popular and healthy open source projects.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Hey Jan, how's it going?
+**Jan Lehnardt:** I'm fine, thanks. How are you?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Pretty good, pretty good. I've known you for a long time and really learned a lot from you. Why don't we get into... Maybe we can start out before I met you and maybe talk about some of the... Where did you start in open source and what did you learn there?
+**Jan Lehnardt:** I think my very first interaction with something that I would call an open source community was a small - at that point larger - German community that had a website that would explain how to do websites, which was kind of revolutionary at the time, because you barely have a medium that explains how the medium works; that totally blew my mind, it explained everything about how the web works. I've been a fan of the web ever since; it had a nice community attached, and everything.
+I quickly learned all the HTML and CSS that was around in '99, and then PHP came around and I wanted to check that out, and also found a community there. That's kind of how I got started.
+I've spent nearly ten years in the PHP community, from just learning and understanding how it all work, to eventually becoming a core contributor.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** How did you two meet?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** We met through Ted Leung He is sort of like a guy behind a guy for a lot of Apache stuff, and so I worked on this thing called Chandler Project at Open Source Applications foundation. That was fun, but T. J. was there, I believe he was a mentor to the Apache project, so he introduced me and Jan in the early CouchDB days.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Nice. I met Jan through a cold email. I think I stumbled upon Hoodie somewhere, and I was like "Oh my gosh, this is the most perfect project ever!" because there was like a whole section that was talking about all these different experiments they were doing for funding, and he was so friendly and splashy. I was just like, "This is the kind of project that I wish more projects looked like."
+**Jan Lehnardt:** That's very nice to hear, thank you very much.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Well, thank you, because that conversation... I just sort of like enthusiastically emailed you, like "Oh, can we like... I can understand better how Hoodie gets funded, and all this stuff." But I ended up understanding so much more about open source culture and community-based on that conversation... I thought we were just gonna talk about funding, but just hearing some of Jan's experiences...
+I remember Jan saying, when he was talking about CouchDB, that he didn't actually start CouchDB, but a lot of people associate him with it because he was the one who was talking about it all the time. So it was cool just to hear from someone who's had the experience... Like, it doesn't always matter who writes the original code, but also all these other different support functions that help projects grow. So yeah, it was super influential for me.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I remember when I was getting into CouchDB that the tone and - for lack of a better word - the personality of the project was very Jan, and attached to Jan.
+\[04:05\] I think I remember a blog post that Damian did about how popular it's been with basically no marketing, unless you count Jan, he said. \[laughs\]
+So I'm kind of curious, how did you get involved into CouchDB and how did you end up taking on that role, as an evangelist for it and a community organizer?
+**Jan Lehnardt:** It was a time nearly ten years ago when I was adrift... I was doing stuff, but I didn't know what I was really doing. I was starting university and had an RSS reader a million entries long; I just read everything I could find on the internet when that was still possible, and eventually found Damian's blog and learned about CouchDB. But at the time I did a bunch of experiments with other things as well, with native Mac app development; I have some friends in that community still, which is kind of nice, but it didn't turn out to be the thing that I really wanted to do.
+Then I eventually learned about CouchDB and the thing I was doing professionally at the time was PHP, MySQL work, specifically scaling MySQL. It was a fun topic ten years ago; it's kind of solved these days, but it was quite cutting edge then. And then when I read about the principles behind CouchDB I thought, "Well, I'd better get behind this, because then I'll be out of the job real soon if I don't get on board with this."
+I was kind of a little bit early... We now have this whole NoSQL movement and CouchDB kind of kickstarted all that. I had a kind of fear of missing out really early on, so I got involved. This topic specifically is really obscure. Damian, the inventor or CouchDB at the time had his development environment on Windows, and I had my development environment on everything but Windows, so I had to figure out how to get CouchDB going on my machines - on Mac, on Linux, on all the UNIX systems.
+I emailed, I said "Here's my plan for porting this, and supporting it", and he's like "Yeah, give it a try", and I gave it a try. That worked out, and I kind of stuck around since then. I wrote the How To Build CouchDB For Your Linux Distribution readme. That wasn't really a guide or documentation or wiki entry. And then started hanging out with Damian online and learning more and more about CouchDB and helping write the PHP library, example applications, trying to attract spam bots to a forum that I wrote to show how scalable CouchDB is, because all the spammers were using it. It was quite fun.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] That's funny. So in those really early days when you were first starting, the community is growing and you're trying to bring something to the community... What are the things from the PHP community that you wanted to be different or the same? What did you wanna imbue in the community as you were sort of fostering it?
+**Jan Lehnardt:** I've learned a lot of terrific things from the PHP community. Technically, some of the smartest people on this planet have taught me stuff that still helps me in my day-to-day job. Some of the folks running Facebook's infrastructure these days have 10-15 years ago spent a lot of free time teaching a 17-year-old kid from Germany a lot of stuff about computers, which was really nice. But there was also a distinct culture; not necessarily the PHP project itself, although it also had a specific culture, but also the surrounding communities, especially the German PHP community.
+Just as an example for one of the things of how then it was really, really terrible... You know how Perl scripts have the file ending .pl, and on IRC you can ban people based on the domain they're connecting from, so we just banned all Polish people just because they looked like Perl scripts, from our German IRC channel. For no reason. \[laughter\] So if you look at the German-Polish history, this was a really terrible idea. \[laughter\] But it's fun, because it was just a bunch of guys on IRC being funny. "Oh, it's so cool, no PL people. No Perl scripts. Ha-ha!"
+\[08:13\] Back then PHP was the new kid, kind of what you're seeing in NodeJS these days... And you have to pick a bunch of fights to prove yourself, so Perl was one of the fights that we picked early on. But this complete lack of empathy for anyone was throughout everything, including IRC etiquette. The person who did the bug triaging on the PHP issue tracker, a retired Finnish army guy, with a very drill sergeant tone, being really nasty to a lot of people, but being very effective at pruning popular open source project bug lists, but generally a lack of empathy. I've learned over the years that I'm a very emphatic person, and I kind of wanted to avoid the bad of this, like excluding people based on their domain name, for example, or other silly things.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Did you have a moment where you just became a nicer person? Or was it over time that you matured?
+**Jan Lehnardt:** That was a couple years later, maybe around 2010, when Twitter was starting to become really good at drive-by snark, like really hurtful cynicism, criticizing all the people... At some point I felt that when I was doing that I wasn't helping anyone, I wasn't adding anything useful. Other people will be snarkier than I, or faster at snark than I was, so it wasn't worth doing. So I decided to just be nice on Twitter, just not be not nice on Twitter, and I kind of adapted my whole online persona; it got me started there.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I have a really hard time picturing you being a not nice person.
+**Jan Lehnardt:** I can show you chat logs from 15 years ago, I was a terrible person.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** We need evidence! \[laughter\] And what specifically were you doing around CouchDB to grow the users and contributors and spread the word?
+**Jan Lehnardt:** A bunch of things came to mind right when you asked the question. I was very active on the users mailing list. Typically, open source projects back in the day had mailing lists where people could ask questions. I knew this from other communities as well, they were kind of hostile... There were very strict rules about "Oh, is this the right question to ask?" or the way you asked the question is not exactly answered in the Frequently Asked Questions, but it's actually in there if you just know where to look, but that's the point for beginners, they don't know where to look. Other communities I'd seen were like, "Read the freakin' manual!" I didn't want that. If somebody asked the same question for the 500th time, I would answer it and point to the documentation where to find it and explain the thought process behind it so they can find it the next time and everyone who reads it understands how that all fits together so maybe they can point to stuff later.
+One of the revelation moments were when I was on vacation or was gone for a while, like a week or so, and other people started replying in my voice - in the same tone, in the same kind of emphatic voice... And I was like, "Oh, I kind of created a culture here. That's kind of nice." So that's one of the things.
+I was fortunate enough to be relatively flexible with my life, and one of the challenges I set for myself - because again, I knew this from the PHP community... Germany had the first PHP conference, which I was at back in 2001 or 2002, really early on. I've since grown to love the PHP conference life, where a lot of people from all over the world come together and have a good time, and I wanted to be a part of this and not having to pay for it, basically... Because we'd usually be invited and paid for everything.
+\[12:09\] So I wanted to become a speaker. I asked a bunch of local user groups to give talks, and one of the talks I proposed was about CouchDB, the new thing that I'd found that year. And they said, "Oh, that was really good. I blogged about it", they blogged about it, then another user group in a different country asked me, "Hey, can you do this again but in English?", so I did that again, they paid for my train over there to Switzerland...
+Afterwards I said to them, "This was my first English talk, was it any good? Can I apply at conferences?" They said, "Yeah, sure." This was better than a bunch of the talks that you'd see at other conferences. And I don't wanna brag, I'm pretty sure my talk wasn't that good, but it was okay, they gave me enough confidence to apply at bigger conferences, international ones.
+In 2008 OSCon flew me over to Portland, I think, and that's where I met Mikeal, coincidentally. I gave my first US CouchDB talk there. And yeah, I just wouldn't shut up about CouchDB. I had conferences where my other nerd friends would hang out, and eventually... When you introduced me, it's like my claim to fame for CouchDB is less like any of the technical contributions that I've done - which I've done a lot, but none of them are standing out, really. But the thing I can credit myself with was that everyone who knows CouchDB, either I told them or they learned it from someone I told. Then there are a couple hundred people that read Damian's blog, but that is... I just spend a lot of my personal time being the face and voice of CouchDB.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And now you're one of the faces and voices of Hoodie, right? You've started this new project that's also going really well, we heard a little bit about it earlier. Similar to the previous question, what did you take from the CouchDB community and what did you wanna do differently when you started up Hoodie and you had kind of a green field and you could really be a founder and leader of that community.
+**Jan Lehnardt:** Yeah, green field is a really good word. I was really excited to not have... I learned a lot through being part of the CouchDB community, helping setting it up, and I learned a lot about other open source projects as well. The more popular one gets, the more you learn about others as well. Especially if you have a database project, you get to speak with all the language communities, so you learn a lot from these as well. I understand how the Ruby people work, and the Python people, and the PHP people and so on. That was kind of at the genesis of what's now the JavaScript community, which is also nice to know. So a lot of experience to draw from there.
+The way I would explain it - maybe I have to explain how Hoodie got started. We had a project in Couch called Couch Apps, which was this idea of running full HTML web apps inside a database. It was a neat idea, but kind of a dead end. We thought we'd revolutionize web development with it. One of the problems with it was that we only ever implemented 20% of the vision, and then one year at a conference the Hoodie co-inventor, Gregor Martin, showed me an app and was like "Hey, I build a Couch app. I noticed that there was 80% missing, I just filled that up with a bunch of coffee script and NodeJS. I think it works... Wanna check it out?" I checked it out and I was like, "Oh my god, this is what we want. This is the thing." But I realized very quickly that we have to break from CouchDB with its particular constraints to make this more mass appeal thing. From the failure of Couch Apps and the web community not adopting it, we rethought about how can we position the project that we wanna be as ubiquitous as jQuery, that is appealing to a lot of people, and that kind of informed the whole rest of the project, basically.
+We started thinking about community and contribution and ownership and funding before we wrote any code or before we had any of the technical demos that we had early on.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[15:57\] That was great. We're getting ready for a break now... When we come back, Jan's gonna talk a little bit about the relationship between healthy and popular open source projects.
+**Break:** \[16:08\]
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Okay, we're back from the break, and we're gonna hand it over to Nadia to get into some of the popular and healthy and sustainability topics that she's so passionate about.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, I'm kind of curious to have this be a little bit of an informal chat between us around some of the different topics that have come up around building healthy communities. I think I actually got this language from you, Mikeal, around popular versus healthy projects. Or at least the topic of healthy open source; you had written a post about that.
+One of the tensions that I see in building healthy communities is, well, what happens if a project is being used by tons of people but it's not healthy, whatever that definition is? Do they have any incentive to change? Is it necessary that a project is healthy in order to thrive? So maybe just starting by talking a little bit about what does it mean for a project to be popular, versus healthy. I'm curious whether we all have the same definition around it.
+For me, a popular project is one that's being used by a ton of people, or a ton of people depend on it, and a healthy project is one that has a lot of great processes and positive culture around good governance. People understand how to join, how to contribute, people feel valued for their contributions. Does anyone have similar or different definitions?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think if you're looking for a metric, you could probably define it as some kind of ratio between the number of people contributing to it in some meaningful way, and the number of people using it. If that gets too off balance and there's a lot of people depending on it and nobody working on it, it gets pretty problematic.
+Hoodie has an amazing number of people engaged in it and people are definitely using it, but I think it probably has the highest ratio of contributors to users that I know.
+**Jan Lehnardt:** At this point yeah.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I'm curious what you've done there... You're converting users into meaningful contributors at an astonishing rate, and I'd like to hear some of your thoughts about that and what you've done.
+**Jan Lehnardt:** Probably not actually converting users into contributors, but recruiting contributors specifically and then targeting first-time contributors or people who haven't coded, haven't been doing a lot of programming in the past, or haven't programmed in an open source context before. So when we're targetting those, and at this point we're kind of trying to convert them into users, but there's probably not the usual flow.
+\[19:36\] Hoodie is kind of close to 1.0 and has been for a while. The last major rewrite coincided with a complete restructuring of the project to make it more accessible for new contributors, because we realized we could build that 1.0 that we've all dreamed of, but it's gonna take us three years, and we'd rather have more people working on this and get there faster. So we spent the first of these years basically turning the project upside down and chopping it up into a lot of small pieces so that they're easier to understand. If someone finds an issue they wanna solve for us that we may have prepared they don't have to learn the whole architecture of Hoodie and all the little details, but only the one sub-project where that issue is filed, and everything that's beneath that. So that's one of the first things that we did, kind of like a hyper-modularity of the project itself.
+Then we started documenting it. We have a policy on GitHub, every subdirectory needs a readme. You have to explain, like "This is the test directory. This is what we use for testing libraries. Here's an example of how to do a test." Other subdirectories explain how the particular components of the software work, and are a little more in-depth than the top-level readme of the file. So making it approachable for people to get in, as well.
+Then the third thing we've done is specifically curating beginner issues; going out of our way to explain... A lot of open source projects on GitHub make use of the fact that a lot of open source developers understand how GitHub works, but a lot of people don't. Even if they're programmers, they're just not used to the pull request review process, and maybe they have a hard time about... Posting something online for others to review, this can be a very scary proposition for a lot of people.
+We make beginner issues that explain how to make a pull request as part of the issue; it's just linked into the common documentation from other nice people in the community. Then we make step-by-step guides for just how to fix a typo on the website. While that might sound like a bit of overkill, if you do that a bunch of times with enough people, there's more work that you get done through other people than doing all that work yourself. This is our way of scaling ourselves to get more contributors in.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, there's a lot of similar things to it that we've done in the reforms to the NodeJS project as well. If you just look at it from a number standpoint, there's not a lot of new full-time open source contributors that are coming into open source, but there's an insane amount of people coming in to be casual contributors and part-time contributors. These are people that tend to be on the more beginner end of the scale, maybe need a little bit more help, and there's all of these little barriers to entry, but cultural are technical are a really big deal to get them past. But if you target those people, that's how you see a lot of contributor growth. As they level up, you pertain them in the project; they then become the people that mentor the new people.
+You have this spectrum of contributors that really engage people to help out all of the newcomers that's all of the former newcomers, right?
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I'm really curious about this for the both of you - people talk about the contributor funnel, which is sort of like "How do you get someone who fixed a typo on the website to become a dedicated member of the team?" I think there's a lot of... I don't really fully understand it, and there's a lot of confusion around like "Are drive-by contributions valuable? How do you turn someone who makes casual contributions into a more regular contributor? Should you even do that at all?" I'm curious for both of you and your experiences what that funnel looks like, and is it okay if some people just hang out in different stages of the funnel?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think there's two ways to approach this, and one of them will surely fail, and that is like "I'm a full-time contributor to this project, I've been maintaining it for a while. How do I make more people like me, and how do I get people to where I am?" That never works, ever. It never has worked.
+What you have to do is you have to say, "Oh, there's all these people that I need to be contributors. How do I meet them where they are, and sort of bring them into the project?" And in terms of retention, I think that you do have to be okay with some of these people not sticking around, but enough of them will. And those people sticking around will encourage other people to stick around.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** \[24:02\] So do you think it's not really realistic or possible... I'll hear some maintainers talk about mentoring one person to bring them on and get them to be this serious contributor to the project, and bring them on the core team. And I've heard some frustrations in that when it doesn't work out, because you're devoting all of your energy into one person who might not love the project as much as you do. So is it realistic to ever expect anyone to do it? How does anyone join the team then? Is it just sort of like over time some of them will, but you don't optimize for that?
+**Jan Lehnardt:** There's this joke about the CFO asking the CEO, "What happens if we invest in our people and they leave?" and the CEO replies, "What if we don't and they stay?" \[laughter\] I think investing in people is always worth it. We have very tangible examples of this. We have people who have basically switched careers into programming, found Hoodie as their first community, we taught them a lot of programming, a lot of Hoodie, and they have since moved on. They talk about their journey... They do other things now, but every time they give a conference talk now, like "I started out with the Hoodie people." Like, every time. And this person gives a lot of talks, so every time they're on stage, we get an honorable mention. We're getting basically free PR for this.
+They're relating their experience, and other people also want to have that experience and also come here. They're like, "Hey, you did really nice things for that person. How can I be part of this?" And it's always worth it, even though sometimes that interest doesn't go anywhere. It's just something that you have to be okay with.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think 'mentorship' is a really loaded word, too. We're all very pro-mentorship, but I think there's two ways to do that. One is to have mentorship be kind of a core value, like you're always trying to help people level up. But often times I see a group of people that maintain a project have a process that they like that works for them, but isn't working for new people. So mentorship is like, I sit down with somebody and get them over all these barriers to entry once, and then they need to stick around. And that doesn't work, and it doesn't scale very well.
+All of these things that Jan talked about, like documenting all of this stuff, that doesn't help people that already know it, it helps people that don't know it. You have to prioritize that, right?
+**Jan Lehnardt:** Yeah. It was a radical transformation for Hoodie itself, as well as for the project - adopting these things and, like you said, meeting people where they are, as opposed to getting them to where we are.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I'm also interested, you mentioned that you broke things up into a lot of smaller components and that that really helped. We did this in NodeJS too, where we... You know, the website repository is where a lot of people get their feet wet, and it's so different from contributing to the core, but we actually see a fair amount of people move from that to core, even though it's a totally different skill set. They get through the cultural barriers, right? They get comfortable with the project and then they just learn the new technical skills, which is really cool.
+**Jan Lehnardt:** Yeah, that's exactly my history with PHP. I was studying English to German documentation translations, and I filled out missing bits in the English translations, then I built features that weren't documented... I started building features and documenting them, and got further and further in, because I got a hook on the very outskirts of the project. I think that's just how it works.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** What are some of those repositories that you see a lot of that happening in now in Hoodie, and in other projects that you're involved in?
+**Jan Lehnardt:** We have a dedicated editorial project for Hoodie, a separate repository. I've put out a job ad for an editorial team that would take care of our blog and Twitter, and schedule posts and collaborate on reviewing things and have an interview series. There are lots of stuff that you can do on the blog, really useful community-building stuff, and we found a bunch of people who were excited about doing this, and we have a bunch of writers, and like a librarian working on Hoodie. How cool is that? It was like nerds from areas that aren't necessarily tech, working on Hoodie. It was very, very cool.
+\[28:14\] We kind of modeled after NodeJS. They branched out into other areas, of education, design, we have dedicated teams that have their own culture of dealing with things. Then the code team is just another part of the project, as opposed to how it's usually - there's the code team of the project, and everyone else is kind of scattered around.
+For Couch we started experimenting with a marketing team a couple years ago, and it was a huge success as well. There were very similar obligations with what the Hoodie editorial team does, but it actually does also do proper marketing, speaking with industry analysts, doing phone calls with them, that kind of stuff, because care should be placed in that area. And the Apache Software Foundation behind it has support for this as well. This is really dedicated stuff that has nothing to do with code, where people are trying to push CouchDB forward in ways that are really unusual for open source projects.
+I can only recommend this. You get to meet a lot of fun people that are being very passionate about stuff.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I'm wondering about playing devil's advocate in a couple different situations... Do you think that having tons of casual contributors or drive-by contributors - if you had all that and people weren't really sticking around to become regular long-time contributors, would you call that project healthy, if stuff got done?
+**Jan Lehnardt:** It's tricky to say. When we mentioned the funnel, what it definitely suffers from... We have a lot of first-time contributor issues, but we don't have second-timer issues, or the third time. We don't have a very well-defined documented funnel for people to follow. It's something that we definitely wanna work on, but we haven't gotten around to just yet. But that's definitely another area of work that we're gonna go towards.
+I don't wanna nail people on a metric for being healthy or unhealthy. Every open source project has its own kind of... Depending on the scope and what it wants to do at some point maybe it's done, it needs to switch into maintenance mode, so it actually doesn't need a healthy community by the metrics of another project.
+There are other people running their own successful open source projects that are completely contrary to everything that we've been talking about, and they're still nice projects and nice people. I don't wanna say these are wrong because they use their own metrics, or something. I just wanna be careful and not stay that this is the only way.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I'll be a little bit more aggressive about that. \[laughter\]
+**Jan Lehnardt:** Alright, go!
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I do think that if people are showing up and wanna contribute in any way, and you're not accepting those or you don't have a policy to accept them, or you don't have the people, that is gonna burn out your community at some point in time, and things are gonna start to shift negatively towards the project.
+I do agree that I wouldn't hold to any particular metric, because there are a few projects that I can think of that have a ton of casual contributors coming, have a single maintainer who's really nice and really encourages the stuff, and is fine with the maintenance burden of actually doing all of that stuff. Lodash is probably a good example of this, or J.D.D. is just on top of every issue that comes in.
+**Jan Lehnardt:** He also is being paid to do this, which is maybe one of the angles of how... It's like, "Why can some people afford this and some not"
+**Mikeal Rogers:** He was doing it before he was paid to do it. And also I think his job pays him to do other stuff as well, it's not his only job. But he's also not complaining about drive-by contributors, he's not complaining about the maintenance overhead. If you're gonna complain about the maintenance overhead of casual contributors, then you need to do a better job of creating new maintainers. You don't get that. \[laughs\]
+**Nadia Eghbal:** \[31:58\] It makes me wonder why does this stuff matter to a project? Because Jan, you're certainly being careful to say not every project is like this, and that's okay. At the same time, I see Hoodie as like "Wow, this is a really strong example of why this stuff matters." But does it not matter in certain situations? Like, if you have a project that's... I've talked to a couple recently that were like this, where it's like they have a BDFL and the project is really heavily used. There is a company that sponsors the development, or it's perfectly sustainable and no one is stressed about maintenance, but they don't' see... Like, what incentive do they have to actually involve the community on a deeper level?
+**Jan Lehnardt:** It's probably based on what they want to achieve, and if they achieve all that they want, that's kind of great, but they're kind of closed to other ideas in the project.
+One of the success stories of Hoodie is turning someone who literally just fixed a typo on the website and then became basically our accessibility person, to make sure that all our websites and the example projects are accessible by default. They've since moved to other things in the project, but has brought into the project the perspective that accessibility is obviously one of the topics that are really important in that area. But the core group of people at Hoodie, we thought that was important but then it was like "We'll do this later, because we other things that are more important", and that person thought "No, this is really important, we should do this now." So that's kind of part of the culture now.
+If you don't have a project that has a regular influx of more people of more diverse backgrounds, you're kind of missing out on these new things where a project could be taken. Sometimes that's okay, but that's also an opportunity missed, and I kind of don't like those.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I would also say that if the project's usage is growing, you need to grow the contributors. If you have enough money to continue hiring, then that will work out. What I see really often is people get hired to maintain a project at a particular level of popularity, and when it doubles or triples, they don't have twice or three times as many contributors to handle all of the new demands on the project.
+There was a point in time where Joyent employing Ryan Dahl was enough for Node. We didn't really need any other full-time people, and that was fine. But the project grew so much... No company could keep up with hiring people to stay on the project, and we really needed to find a way to bring more contributors in.
+**Jan Lehnardt:** I've definitely seen this in Hoodie as well. Talking about the challenges of this... Scaling is really important. One of the downsides of all of this that we're having is that people like Hoodie a lot and like contributing a lot because we're acknowledging their work and their contributions a lot, and we're thankful for the work that they're doing. Then we're kind of guilt-tripping them into contributing more, and then they can't, and then they feel bad or they do and they burn out.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Interesting.
+**Jan Lehnardt:** That's a really tangible problem that we're seeing, especially since Hoodie is kind of focusing on more diverse contributors... We'll welcome everyone, but we're kind of trying to specifically reach out to under-represented groups in open source specifically. These people just have a harder time finding spare time to work on open source stuff. If you make a really nice place for them they really want to contribute, but if all they have is like a half hour every month, then either they... They can't follow the project chat, for example. That's all they do, and still miss stuff. We need to be able to, on the one hand, chop tasks into small enough pieces that these people can contribute, and on the other hand you have to make sure that they feel comfortable with that level of contribution being okay for them and not feeling bad about it, or going beyond their limits and burning out.
+This is something that we haven't solved yet. This is just an active, ongoing problem.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[35:58\] You do know quite a bit about that, though. I mean, you've been involved in JSConf EU and really did a lot of work to make JSConf EU one of the most diverse conferences in the whole conference space, in terms of people attending and people speaking, but especially people speaking and getting that kind of stuff in. I'm curious how you've adapted those learnings into a code project and not a conference, right?
+**Jan Lehnardt:** Yeah, interesting. We did a kind of connect very early on, before the Contributor Covenant was a big thing, and we kind of pioneered that for Apache as well at CouchDB. We started to recognize that open source is people coming together, and people coming together need guidelines that are very similar to those at events.
+I think the way we got there is - and I'm paraphrasing a good friend, Florian Gilcher, who's running a bunch of Ruby events in Berlin, or has in the past - whenever you do an event, the most important question to ask as an organizer is "Who's not here and why?" It was arguably also very important - if not the most important - for open source projects, "Who's currently not contributing and why aren't they contributing? What can we do to remove those barriers to contributorship?" If you make a habit and process of working on these things, you'll get to a point where you have a lot more people contributing that couldn't before.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Alright, we're about hitting our time for a break. When we come back we're gonna talk about a couple other challenges and edge cases around community building.
+**Break:** \[37:31\]
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Alright, we're back from the break. We're here with Jan and my co-host Mikeal. One thing that I was wondering about from our last conversation was... I mean, Hoodie is a great example of a project that baked in all these really great community values from the start, but what happens when you have a project that is older and maybe didn't do that in the beginning and is now having trouble with contributions?
+I know that Jan had written this post called Sustainable Open Source referencing a couple of projects that were making these public appeals for contributions. They were both very popular projects, but they were saying, "We didn't do the community side very well." So how you do that once... Is it too late when you've got a project that's heavily used but has virtually zero contributions?
+**Jan Lehnardt:** It's tricky. Even inside Hoodie, when we did the big revamping of the project last year, most everybody was on board with what we were gonna do, but it takes some... Communities have inertia, and you have to overcome that. The older the community is, the more inertia it has. Whereas in Hoodie, setting up a code of conduct took about an hour and a half, after having produced a draft, to agree that we should have that.
+In CouchDB it took a couple weeks to close to six months to actually have all of the community agree on it. We even had to forcibly eject one community who was violently against the code of conduct because, as it turns out, they were regularly showing behavior that would be in conflict with the code of conduct. That whole process is very long-winded and very tough for a project, especially for someone who has a project that has traditionally valued tech contributions over everything else, and then have a very prolific contributor that needs to be ejected from the project.
+\[40:14\] You need to have procedures for that, you need to have everyone understand what all the consequences are, and be on board with this. Arguably, for Couch this was kind of the worst case of what a project can go through; I'm thankful for the experience but I also don't ever wanna do this again. So I don't envy projects that don't readily have to convince the constituents, like "Okay, code of conduct is a really important thing", and then you have a three-month debate about this, instead of like, okay, everybody's kind of like "Yeah, thumbs up. This is a good idea."
+I guess that's a way of saying you need to talk to a lot of people, the bigger a community is, to understand their point of view and maybe bring them onto your point of view if they differ, if you have at all the chance to get there.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think you're touching on an interesting strategy though, that I think does work. These processes and the status quo work for the people that are in power, that have power; they're already there, they've already made it through all these barriers to entry. You're basically changing it and making it somewhat less convenient sometimes for them, in order to get new people that don't have power, that don't have a voice. But you and some other people from Hoodie, you had some success with this model that you could point to. It was a related community, you had credibility within the CouchDB project, and that kind of helped you do it. And also, you cared enough to stick around for six months and actually convince everybody, which is also very hard, right?
+I think when you look at other communities you can see something similar. Say if you wanted to change the way that Python Core worked, you could look towards communities in the Python community that have leaders that have had success with this and use that as a model and then advocate it. Those people care enough probably to stick around.
+When we reformed the NodeJS project, Rod Vagg had never really worked on Core; now he's like the TSC Chair. But at the time he never worked on Core because it was just not that interesting in terms of the contribution policies around it, but he had done a bunch of pioneering work in the Node ecosystem around better contribution policies and in the level of community and stuff like that. So a lot of what we did was adapt to those, and we were able to play on the success of that model that we already knew worked and it was coming from people that were respected within that community.
+**Jan Lehnardt:** Which I guess is why it's so important that we talk about these things, so people understand that these things are important, and talk about them and maybe steal from us as much as they want and then make up rules of their own for their own projects.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** How do you tell someone who is basically a single maintainer of a popular project, how do you get from zero to one with that, where they're sort of like "Oh my gosh, I've been doing all this work and I really love this idea of a community model, but where do I begin?"
+**Jan Lehnardt:** Yeah, "You want me to do even more work?" \[laughter\]
+**Mikeal Rogers:** What I've had some success with is first you crack open the process. So you say, "Look, it's not on you to design a process. You're talking about having a more open process. Why don't you use that process to create the process?" Create an empty governance.md doc and then let people send pull requests to it and encourage people to send pull requests to it, and have that conversation and get people engaged.
+**Jan Lehnardt:** That's what we did with the Hoodie editorial team. We just said, "We need an editorial team. Here's roughly the things that you need to be doing, that we'd like you to do." If anyone's interesting, your first job is to figure out how to do what you wanna do, and write down how you wanna do that. The genesis of the project is its own governance.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** That's a practice I really like about Hoodie. You would call out these specific types of contributions you were looking for and saying... Maybe that's where people started saying "Hey, I'm looking for this type of thing", and treating it almost like a job board.
+**Jan Lehnardt:** \[43:56\] And then maybe a little bit more tangible for that single maintainer person that we dreamed up here. I can spend ten hours to just fix ten bugs, or I can spend ten hours to write a failing test case and describe in an issue how that bug would be fixed. Then ten people can fix one bug and I only have to review their work. Within the first ten hours I have ten fixed bugs, and then the next ten bugs come. With the other one, I have fixed ten bugs and I have ten more contributors that potentially could fix ten more bugs, so all of a sudden I'm a 10x programmer. \[laughter\] Sorry for that very stupid joke. But the incentive is that you're creating more versions of yourself; they're in a sense lesser, because they have less understanding of the project and less vision of the project, but then that's gonna be your job - teach people the innards of the project, teach people the vision of the projects so that they in turn can internalize that and continue your work.
+It's radically different from like, "Okay, I'll sit down for an hour and do this release, because I love coding and I love fixing stuff in the code, and I can spend an hour and it's really enjoyable for me. Or I can sit down and write documentation...? Really?" But then if you do this a couple of times, then people bite and stick around. It's kind of addicting, too. We're trying to optimize for getting more people; this is how we got into the whole Hoodie contributors thing, cloning ourselves to become more efficient as individuals in this project.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** An interesting aspect of this too is that you have to distribute the ownership over this stuff along with asking people to contribute, right? At some point they need a decision maker who has authority over it. And if you have a big enough project where you can actually start breaking off components, you can distribute authority to those people really early, because it's a totally separate repository, or something else out of the main project.
+The most successful version of this that I know of is the work that we did in io.js to build out the localization effort, and literally we got 146 people in 27 languages in a day. Essentially we were like, "Tell us in this thread if you want to start a localization community, and I will create a repository and then add you to it." Then literally I would log at the first issues, and it says "Fill out the readme, fill out the description, get the Twitter account..." It's all these things that they own, that they're doing, that they're contributing, and it's very clear that they own this space, and then they would invite a ton of extra people, and it just blew up so fast. It was amazing.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** A couple theme I feel like I'm hearing from all these different suggestions, around opening up your process, transparency and making it easier to saying out loud what you're doing so that other people know what you're doing, and makes it easier for you to get involved. Then also that aspect of "Yeah, this isn't more work. This is actually making this process more efficient and more distributed, which means less work for you." I think too often it's associated with "Oh, I just wanna write code and I don't really wanna do other stuff", but it's really thinking of it as this is actually you doing less work by making the one-time investment that's reusable across a lot of other things.
+**Jan Lehnardt:** And it eventually frees up... If the hard programming challenges is what you really thrive on, it allows you to focus on ever more harder problems in your projects, because other people are taking care of the less hard problems.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Right, exactly. The other flipside I was wondering about was some people I've talked to have had bad experiences when they've opened up their process to other people, or let other people in. Somebody ended up taking over, or making decisions they didn't agree with, so it's scary for them to think about giving up control. I'm curious what your experience has been like around... Have you had bad experiences where you've handed off responsibilities to someone and they broke your trust in some way? How do you learn to be okay with that and take risk?
+**Jan Lehnardt:** \[48:04\] I don't think I've had a very bad example of this, but also both Couch and Hoodie, I'm very involved and there are no BDFLs in this projects, but I carry a lot of influence that I can usually turn the bad things around before they happen. The problem is when you really can't, and you're part of the side that doesn't want a particular change, but the majority of the people who can now make decisions do want it. How this all works in Couch is institutionalized by the Apache Software Foundation, and it's done through voting people into specific circles, and then they get more power to decide things.
+My measure of control at this point is I will only vote people into that higher circle of being able to make binding decisions that may be decisions that I disagree with, they're only people that I trust that much that even though I disagree, I know they have the best of the project at heart and they won't ruin the project and they really think it's the best for the project, and I'm wrong on this, so I have to be okay with this. But that's a very, very deep level of trust that can only be earned over years and years of collaboration. It's really hard to relinquish that, and I think it's part of the challenge that I still have to learn to go through to be able to do that. It's really easy to relinquish control of things that are... I'm not saying they are not important, but it's really hard to \[censored\] up documentation. Of course, it's easy to make bad documentation, but it's kind of straightforward how you would wanna do this, or the type of language you want in there. And there's other subprojects that are really hard to really screw up, aside from like how a really core feature works, or whether a feature is gonna be in a certain version of a project, or things like that. At that point it is down to probably a lot of discussion between people that are passionate about this, and they have to work it out. And whether there's a process for this or not doesn't really matter. They have to work it out within themselves, and sometimes it means some people leave the project, sometimes it means people are grudgy for a bit, and that's fine, and sometimes it means we have two projects now. Maybe that's also good for the community, like we've seen with io.js, for example.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think another strategy that calms people down is that you quantify the risk of somebody doing something wrong. Like, what is the cost of a mistake in the documentation? It gets fixed pretty quickly, it's up there for a few minutes - it's not a big deal. So if you can break that off into its own repository and relinquish control - great. Same thing with stuff like the website.
+Then in the core project - I think we even do this around the master branch a little bit - one, Git allows you to fix any mistakes. So if you're not Subversion, you're not in this horrible situation where "Oh my god, I have to redo everything!" Commits that go into master don't automatically land in a release. There's another review process, where they land in different branches based on how much they might break things or what the risk profile is. And there are people that just engage in that, and they know that the basic stuff is already done with a review; they're really just looking at, you know, "Can this land in LTS, or is it something that only lands in the new release line?" and that really allows us to liberalize the control around master and have many more people contributing and committing and reviewing in master.
+**Jan Lehnardt:** But then this meets what we talked about, the funnel - the funnel doesn't end with the contributor, There's the user, the first-timer, the contributor and there's also the maintainer type; that's what you want people to upgrade to eventually, and Node definitely has a lot more people in there than Hoodie has, for example.
+\[52:00\] If you wanna be in a position where you can afford to have that kind of infrastructure where it is easy to relinquish control, you also have to work on having more contributors really badly, because you can only do that if you have a lot of people. So this is all like self-evident coming around to you should focus on getting contributors more than anything else in the project. Anything bad that can come, you can solve with more contributors.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Right. Like, what are the things that you need to have happen, and if they're that important, people should show up to do them, as long as you make it easy enough for them to do it, right?
+I think that there was a lot of worry that "Well, who's gonna sit and review all these LTS patches and port them over. IBM really cares about long-term stability for their customer, so it turns out that they will hire people to do that, as long as we make it easy for them to do that.
+I think what you can't do is you can't say "We have project goals, and then we're going to make the community care about them." You have to optimize for people to show up and do what THEY care about. This is why we don't really have a roadmap for NodeJS. We have some basic stuff that we know we wanna do in the future, but it's really like, what you show up with is what goes in. The more that we try to define what the next release is going to look like, the more that we kind of deincentivize people to show up with working code and ideas.
+**Jan Lehnardt:** Yeah, that's what killed the original PHP 6, which was meant to be the Unicode release, and then because the project decided the next goal is Unicode, it turns out only two people cared about Unicode and everybody else was agreeing with Unicode but didn't care about that, so that didn't go anywhere. It was nixed eventually and we got a different PHP 6 now that has... I don't know whether it actually stands with Unicode support, but that was one of the examples of when a project sets a goal and tries to get people behind it, but like I said, that doesn't work. Like you said, you need to get around what people want instead of getting them around to what you want.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** It's tough. I'm curious just to zoom out and talk about what we think success looks like for an open source community and project. I know we talked a little bit about metrics and how those can be sort of... You don't wanna hold everyone to the same standard, but beyond just sort of a basic gut feel, how does somebody know if they're doing community right or not, if that's even a thing?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Are people happy? \[laughs\]
+**Jan Lehnardt:** Yeah, I was gonna go there. Like, if you throw a party, you kind of know when it's a good party and when it's not a good party. It's really the same thing - how do people feel? How do you see people strive doing their thing? Do you see people reaching the goals they said they wanna reach in the time that they said they wanna reach it? Do they flourish? Do people have a good time? That's probably it.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think looking at the party is probably a really good metric, right?
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, I like that.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** At the JavaScript conferences everybody is super happy and having a great time and doing karaoke, and some of these conferences that I go to that I won't name, it's just people getting drunk in an airport, or in some hotel ballroom... \[laughter\]
+**Nadia Eghbal:** If someone doesn't care whether other people are happy and they sort of just care about... I mean, more in a BDFL type of situation - is it just gonna suck for everybody else who loves that project that can't be involved?
+**Jan Lehnardt:** I think of benevolent dictators that benevolence isn't shown through understanding that people work best when they're happy is not benevolent, so they're not a BDFL by definition.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** They're just a DFL.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** There's a lot of DFLs out there. \[laughter\] I don't know, in my opinion the BDFL model has kind of run its course. I think that the demographics of contributors have changed enough that that's just not a sustainable model for the most part.
+**Jan Lehnardt:** \[55:56\] Yeah, and the few times it really worked is when the people who stepped up to be the BDFL were really exceptional people, and we kind of can't optimize a culture of open source for exceptional people, because they are the exception.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** So you kind of flip it on the other side... Like, we've talked a lot about what maintainers of projects can do to build healthy communities, but if you're a part of a community, how can you help advocate for yourself and for others back to the maintainers?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Point them to this podcast. \[laughs\]
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Great idea!
+**Jan Lehnardt:** We're coming back to... It's the same as with events - people need to feel safe to effect change. If you don't feel safe at the project, try to get that going; if you can't get that going, find another project. I think that kind of the baseline for this is a code of conduct for a project that defines what that safe place looks like and what happens if that safe place is violated. But there's a lot more that makes people feel safe at an event or an open source project... But that's kind of the baseline that you need, and then people feel comfortable. It's like, "Hey, I'm not sure if everyone agrees with this, but I'm feeling really strongly about this", and then the discussion is going. Then you're off to the races and you can see if you actually have a chance of changing the community in the ways that you're interested in, or if you shut down, or if your idea gets evolved to something that's even better than what you ever could imagine - which is usually what happens... Because that's the beauty of human collaboration. But yeah, get the ball rolling on feeling safe, and once you're there just try to have fun.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think some projects just aren't gonna change until they hit a point of crisis. You don't necessarily have to feel bad about leaving, or even leaving publicly; that is a good example, and when they do hit a crisis point, that will give them a reason to change, and some context. To some extent, there are a lot of projects out there that are nice that you can spend your time on. Don't burn out trying to change a project when there are so many good ones out there. And eventually, if enough people do that... Like, the project will hit a crisis point and they will be forced to change the way that they do things.
+Alright, I think that's a really good spot to end it on, it's a great little note. So you can head over to RFC.fm for more shows and to subscribe.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Thanks, Jan, for coming back.
+**Jan Lehnardt:** Thank you for inviting me, and if you ever want me back, I'd definitely be a guest again. I'm looking forward to the next episodes.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, we'll think of another topic to nerd out on real deep.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** There's many more. Alright, bye everyone.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Thanks, bye!
+**Jan Lehnardt:** Bye!

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+**Nadia Eghbal:** I’m Nadia Eghbal.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And I’m Mikeal Rogers.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** On today’s show, Mikeal and I talk with Eric Holscher, creator of Read the Docs, which hosts documentation for thousands of open source projects. Eric also created Write the Docs, a community for people to meet and talk about writing good documentation.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Our focus on today’s episode is documentation. We talked about Eric’s experience in the Python and Django worlds, where he learned to value documentation, and why he built a community around it.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** We also talked about why documentation matters, how to incentivize these types of contributions, how documentation changes as projects grow, and what managing Read the Docs looks like from the inside.
+So I’m kind of curious, before we talk about documentation, to talk about how you first got involved in Python, and then also Django. Because I know you lived in Kansas at some point, working on Django, and I think that’s where you built Read the Docs.
+**Eric Holscher:** Yeah, definitely. Do you want the medium or the long version of the story?
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I kind of want long.
+**Eric Holscher:** Okay, cool. So in high-school I started using Linux and Red Hat and all those kinds of stuff, and learned Perl as my first language. Then I went to university to get a computer science degree, but kind of realized that Perl wasn’t really what I wanted to be doing, so ended up doing a senior project in Python and Django, and so that’s really when I learned the Python-Django ecosystem, read blogs from a bunch of people like James Bennett, Jacob Kaplan-Moss and all these folks.
+Then when I was graduating, I was like, “I need to get a job!” In hindsight, there was this really fascinating moment where I went to school in Fredericksburg, Virginia, which, if you’re a Zope person, it's actually the headquarters of Zope.
+I had these two job offers coming out of university, one in the town I was living in. I had a really cool apartment, a bunch of friends... You know, it was in Virginia where my family is. Then this other one, in the middle of Kansas, working at a newspaper. But then I ended up actually – they flew me out to... Because they were like, “Nobody moves to Kansas without coming and seeing it first”, because it’s actually... Lawrence is a really, really cool small town. It’s in the liberal part of the red state, so I ended up landing in Lawrence, and just being blown away in the three days I spent there, with the amazing people, and being the home of Django, really just kind of seeing that iteration of Python technology.
+Zope definitely felt like the old school, and Django was the new school. So that’s how I ended up in Lawrence. And then, Read the Docs was actually a Django-Dash project. There was a 48-hour coding competition. I kind of ended up doing a lot of Python development in Django. Django has always focused super heavily on documentation, and that’s part of the culture of Python and Django communities. I had some source code that had some okay documentation, and it was really just scratching my own itch, right? I had a Cron job, running on the server every hour, just pulling down my git repo and then building documentation from that, and hosting it. We really have better tools, and better technology for this. It really just spawned a 48-hour like, “Let’s have a thing that listens to GitHub web hooks and auto-generates documentation whenever we commit, so it’s always up to date", and then we kind of layered the whole version control paradigm on top of that. So use tags and branches to track docs along with the source code, and then building on top of your development workflow that you’re already using for tagging and branching and all that stuff, so your docs stay up to date, but also you can host old versions of documentation, that kind of stuff. So that was the long answer to that one. \[laughter\]
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[04:24\] You mentioned that Django had amazing documentation from the start and that’s very true, it’s beautiful. Do you want to talk a little bit about what prompted them to have such great documentation, and some of the values there, where that came from?
+**Eric Holscher:** Well, I think one of the big ones is that it came out of a newspaper, right? And the people that created Django were journalists, and English majors, and really people that valued the written word, right? They really were good writers and they really valued that part of the world. I think coming out of a newspaper really does enforce that editorial power. I think really in many communities the values of the founders get set early and then they attract people who agree with those values, and then it just builds over time.
+Both Adrian and Jacob were two of the co-founders along with Simon Willison, and Wilson Miner, who did the admin, he was the designer. They all really cared about that set of values, so I think the community just picked it up and ran with it from there.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** So I saw when you first created Read the Docs, you got a hundred thousand views in that first month, and now obviously it’s grown to be so much more. I’m sure there people who are curious about how to grow a project - do you have a sense of how did you find those early users, and why did so many people start using Read the Docs?
+**Eric Holscher:** So I think one of the key things is that we noticed that Sphinx, the documentation generator, was really a de facto in the Python community, so we really were able to build on top of that. Read the Docs basically just hosts and builds Sphinx documentation automatically. Obviously, Sphinx at this point has grown – well, maybe not obviously, but it has grown much beyond the Python community, to be used by many different parts of the programming world. But we were able to just build on top of an existing toolset, so it was really, really easy for people to switch, right?
+If you’re already building, writing documentation, putting it in your repo, you basically just have to go to Read the Docs and click the Import Repository button, and we automatically build your documentation. We pull it down, we build it. Having the standard tooling underneath really allowed that to go forward and get momentum really quickly, whereas I tried to do this maybe one or two years prior with testing, basically what Travis CI is today, but in a much sillier and less useful form. But the Python world hadn’t standardized on any kind of testing. There was like noes, there was pie tests, there was unit tests, there was three or four different ways; there was no standard interface to starting or running... There’s no way to just be like, “I know how to run the tests when I get a repository”, so it was really hard to bootstrap any kind of standardized services on top, because there was no shared platform. Sphinx really enabled us to build on top of that, and then I would just... At that point I had given a couple talks at a Django-con, stuff that I was kind of somewhat known in the community. I actually started giving talks around testing, so people kind of knew me, they trusted me. I was hanging out in their IRC channel; they’d ping me on IRC and be like, “Hey, can you help me set this up?" when it took five minutes. Just like, “Put this repo here, and click the button”, and now you have matchable documentation on the internet.
+\[08:08\] I think the other really big thing is that it was really well-designed from the start. Read the Docs was created by myself, but also Charles Leifer and Bobby Grace. Bobby was our designer, and he actually went on to become the design lead at Trello, and he’s done a bunch of other really amazing stuff. Having him have a really good design aesthetic, and putting your docs on Read the Docs, and you've got this really pretty theme - I think it was another huge driver of adoption, where it was like, “Hey, my docs look really ugly when I build them locally, but when I put them on this web service they look really pretty.”
+**Nadia Eghbal:** That’s a really good point. I’m curious, when you were between two projects, two opportunities, and you showed up in Kansas and you checked it out, and you were like, “I can live here”, did you know that Django... Was Django’s background in coming from a newspaper and their interest in documentation and all these other aspects of a project - was that something that had appealed to you before you even moved there that you were aware of, or was it something that once you moved there, you just sort of fell into?
+**Eric Holscher:** I definitely think it grew on me while I was there. Kind of the origin story and the founder myth, right? Like, “I was drawn to the newspaper by wanting to build more open access in the world”, but really, no. I was drawn by the technology. And then actually working in a newspaper and working with journalists...
+And Lawrence, Kansas is this town of 100,000 people. Back in 2008 when I went there, it was like, they had a website that still trumped, or trumps any newspaper website in any major metropolitan area. They had a really amazing local events calendar, they had so much, so much amazing technology. I was really – the big reason I went there is I was drawn by the people. I’d been reading their blog posts, and there was this little group of people that I really respected, and getting to work with them was a huge part of it. I grew to really appreciate and understand the news industry while I worked there. The whole perfectionist with deadlines thing is very much a news-driven... It's like, "We have a huge room full of presses over there, they’re going to start printing at this time." It’s a very real production environment. There was just a lot of local coverage, and being able to have that credential when you would be talking to people and you’re like, “Oh, I work at the Journal-World”, they'd be like, "Ooh!" Feeling the power of a news organization within society first-hand is really, really cool.
+My story with documentation it’s very similar. When I started Read the Docs, it was scratching my own itch - I was a programmer, I just wanted to solve a problem. But then, especially when we started creating the conference and got into that, I really started to appreciate the importance and the value of it, once I really became entrenched in that world. I was definitely, from the outside, not the documentation crusader who was trying to fix the documentation world at the start, but it transformed into something – obviously not that, but more akin to that, once I really learn and understand the problem, and I’m really able to think about it and understand it more deeply than when I started. I'm getting into the things that I’m doing and then actually understanding why they’re important.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[11:52\] You mentioned really quickly Write the Docs, your conference. Could you tell us a little bit more about how that started, the early successes and what it’s turned into now?
+**Eric Holscher:** Sure. It was back in 2012 and I was at a local café with a few people. In Portland we do these weekly coder meet-ups that are more social than getting anything done, and I was talking with Troy Howard, who has done a few other conferences like Node PDX, JSConf in China, and a couple other things. I was just lamenting that Read the Docs didn’t have a community. It’s like, we have a bunch of users, we have a bunch of people who use our software, but we don’t have the sense of community where they’re getting together, they’re doing test practices. Really, there was this general – nobody knows how to write documentation. This was a huge pain point for developers and nobody’s really talking about it. He was like, “Alright...” I was just complaining, and his answer’s just like, “Just start a conference.” That’s his answer for everything. I was like, “Yeah, I mean... Okay, I guess.” I kind of left it at that and it disappeared from my mind. Then, two weeks later he sends me an email that was like, “Hey, I built a conference website for the conference we’re doing” and I was like, “Oh...” Because I had no interest in community organizing or conference/event organizing; I’d never done any of it. But I was like, “Alright, let’s see what happens...”
+We built the website, and I went up and wrote a blog post and put it on Twitter, and then it hit the front page of Hacker News. We were envisioning this little 75-person Portland regional event, maybe from Seattle and San Francisco, but just about 75 people in an office on a Saturday or Sunday, or something; a free venue for a really cheap, free conference, but it hit the internet and it exploded. I think we got like two or three hundred sign-ups to our mailing list the first day. Everybody on Hacker News was like, “Oh, this is something that should exist! Why did this not exist?" So it really got more momentum behind it than we really were expecting.
+The first year was a 200-person conference here in Portland, and we had people from all over the country, and a few from out of the country, who were in the States for other reasons, but swung by. That was four years ago, and then this past couple of weeks ago actually in Ma, we had our fourth year, which was 400 people. It was at the Crystal Ballroom here in Portland, which is a really, really amazing music venue, where The Grateful Dead, Willie Nelson, and a bunch of other people have played at. It’s always a trip to see your own little conference on the marquee.
+We now have a European version in Prague, it’s going to be about 250 this year. It’s really starting to build this more global community of people that care about documentation. It’s something we really wanted to think more about once it really started to expand beyond Read the Docs users. It’s expanding to just beyond developers.
+We had a bunch of people come first year who were tech writers, and it’s this whole community that I didn’t even know existed. From there, we're trying to keep it very cross-disciplinary, where there’s a lot of support-type people, that do support work. Now they have their own other set of conferences, very similar, like sub-conf and user-driven. There’s a couple of them, and it's in a very similar thing to Write the Docs, or doing support, where it’s like, “Hey, this is a part of the industry that’s not valued nearly as much as it should be, and we need to build this group of people, this community, this force that’s able to stand up and really make people think more deeply about this topic.
+\[15:51\] That’s really where I see the conference today - it’s the documentation arm of the software world, or the constituency of people who care about documentation. Some of that’s tech writers, some of that’s developers, some of that’s support staff. A lot of people this year actually were devrel, evangelism-type people, because they’re starting to really see the value in documentation as well. I think about it as raising the profile of documentation within the software industry as a whole.
+That’s really where we are now, just trying to build best practices, build out learning materials in an open source fashion, that’s free and on GitHub, that’s like, “Hey, you want to write documentation? That’s great! Here’s how to do it. Here’s where you could start. Here’s some good resources”, and really trying to help people along that path, because I think it’s something that a lot of people aren’t confident in. They don’t write documentation because they feel that they’re not good at it. I know I put off things that I’m not good at forever, right? “I’ll just do it tomorrow, because I’m not confident, I don’t know where to start.” We’re really trying to break down that barrier, where it’s like, “Hey, here’s how you start getting good documentation for your project, here’s how you maintain it, here’s how you develop the processes in your project, to make sure it stays up to date”, and that kind of stuff. That is the long answer to that question.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Take us back a little bit to the beginning, back in your day when you first got involved. What was the state of documentation like? What was it? How was it being culturally perceived? And then over the years, especially as you’ve been doing Write the Docs events, how has that been changing culturally?
+**Eric Holscher:** So much of it is really hard to know because, because I'm sure I have my own little filter bubble. "My Twitter feed cares a lot about documentation..." I do sense a general trend in the software industry of caring more about documentation. Probably a small part of that is the work that we’ve done with the conferences in the community, but it’s also just a general, collective, raising of empathy. One of the things I really think a lot about in terms of documentation is the onboarding into software, right? Where it’s like, “Hey, you just went to this three-month boot camp, and now you have basic coding skills, but now you want to start using projects on your own or building something for a job application, or just trying to get involved in open source. And documentation is the first thing that you run into, right? If there’s not good docs, it really does dissuade a large number of those people. I think, especially as more and more people are coming in from non–beating their head against software routes to programming... There’s actually more formal education, more schooling, more industry trying to push that, the people that are coming into the industry value documentation more and more.
+To answer the question, I think back in 2008, 2010, testing was undergoing this transformation. Maybe in 2005 testing was this thing that software - it might have, it might not, some people thought it was important, there was a lot of people talking about it, but it wasn’t this accepted best practice, and I think in 2016, pretty much every developer says, “Tests are good. We should be doing this, it’s an accepted best practice.”
+I think documentation is undergoing a similar transformation, but just a few years later. I think you’re starting to see every open source project that gets announced will have documentation. If they actually want people to use it, it’ll have a reasonable set of documentation, whereas 2008, 2010 you'd have so many projects that were just released with a marketing page and a source code link, or something.
+\[19:59\] I think that’s really my metric that I really think about, it's how many people look at documentation as one of the first one or two things to look at on a project to decide if they’ll use it or not. I think that's true for a number of people in the Python community - that has always been high, but I think also in the general programming world that number is growing. That’s one of the values that I think the Python community has had for a long time.
+But we weren’t actually on the testing train as early, right? When I look back in history I see Ruby as really, really testing-focused and Python is really doc-focused, and now we’re both starting to merge into the other and get excited about... They’re both important parts of software development.
+So I see more and more projects that care about documentation, of people talking about it, people actually writing it and caring about writing it. That’s really the metric, right? The number of projects with documentation that people are actually focusing on and putting time towards, and obviously that’s incredibly hard to determine at the Git Hub level, at least in my personal experience. When I click on a link in Hacker News, it's like, how prominent are the documentation links, and do they actually have more than two pages?
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Well, we’re hitting time for our first break. We really enjoyed hearing all of your background experiences. When we come back from the break, we’ll dive deeper into the nuts and bolts of documentation.
+**Break:** \[21:38\]
+**Nadia Eghbal:** We’re back from the break with Eric Holscher, who is the creator of Read the Docs. We’re just going to dive into the nuts and bolts of documentation. I thought we’d start just by making the case for anyone who might be listening to this and isn’t convinced that documentation is important, why does documentation matter? What are the practical benefits to a project maintainer and to the community?
+**Eric Holscher:** Totally. Almost every talk that I give, I do a little five minutes at the beginning, because I think giving people the words - even if they’re already convinced, but using the words to convince others... I think it’s really important to have these arguments actually thought out. One of my favorite ones is for actual programmers, which is like a selfish appeal, right? Which is, if you’re using your code six months from now, it’s going to be indistinguishable from code someone else wrote.
+I think about documentation as serializing your mental state into words, so that it can be loaded back in faster than reading source code. Reading source code is one way to put a program into your brain, but actually writing down your design decisions and code comments and doc strings allows you to basically reload what you did, what you were thinking, why you made these trade-offs in your brain in a faster way, and it allows other people to do that too, right? It’s useful for anyone who’s reading that code.
+\[23:53\] In terms of project maintainers, I think documentation is the best marketing, right? I know a lot of developers who hear marketing shudder... It’s like one of those words that “Thou shall not say", but really, if you want people to use your software, they have to know what it does, they have to know how to install it, they have to know what it’s good for, they have to understand what the other competitors are. If you build that into your docs and you’re just like, “Hey, my web crawler does these things, it supports these types of – ignoring URLs and it follows robot sub-text. You could use Siege or Wget or Curl. Here’s the landscape.” Just providing that context for your project and its reason for existence is how you get people to actually use the software, right? It does what I want. It's going to work for me, it’s maintained, people care about it. It’s a huge part of the adoption of software.
+That’s true for closed source code, as well as open source, especially if you’re in a larger company, right? You have six different divisions that are all basically writing the same software, and they’re not sharing anything, and you actually want to have other people use the software that you write, which is like one of the fundamental reasons that open source is so cool - having people use stuff that you’ve written, and within companies too, right? You have to document it so that it gets used, so people know that they need it, right? When you land on a GitHub page that has no readme, who uses that project?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Nobody uses that project.
+**Eric Holscher:** I would fire the developer who used that project. I don’t want to work with the guy that uses that project, or the gal.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** In fact, I’ve actually not put readme's on things as a sign to say please don’t use this yet. I’ll put readme on it when I want people to use it.
+**Eric Holscher:** That’s great. I think one of my favorite appeals to everyone in software is that writing words is 80% of the job of software development. You have emails, you have commit messages, you have GitHub issues, you have chat, you have Slack, you have IRC, you have Twitter, you have your marketing content, you have your documentation, code comments, all this stuff is the written word, communicating with other humans. Writing documentation and becoming a better writer is a fundamental part of being a good software developer. Knowing how to communicate about technical topics, how to write about them, how to use your documentation tooling – that is a tool of the trade that you need to know how to use just as well as Git, or something like that. Having those writing skills is really just a fundamental part of being a good engineer, and being able to communicate with your team to build software.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** That’s a great line.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think there’s something similar here with the test-driven development, which is that you write a test for something so you could see how people use it. But then we’ve created so many of these test frameworks that you get so obfuscated from how people actually use it, whereas documentation - you really are just saying, “This is how you use it.” You’re trying to describe it simply, with English. If it sounds too complicated, you can actually rethink how you’re implementing that and how you’re going about it.
+**Eric Holscher:** Right, and rethink without re-implementing. I get to re-architect the code without throwing away a bunch of work, right? That’s the beauty of test-driven development and the kind of readme-driven and documentation-driven development, it is really that thinking through the API that’s going to be public facing before you write the code. I love starting a project with a readme and having a code example that’s like, “These are the three most common public API calls that will be used in this library, and here’s what the interface looks like, and here’s how you import them", like really thinking through that public API. Because I find if I don’t do that, then the implementation leaks out into the public API, and really thinking about it top down, from what problems does it solve, what other solutions exits, how is this one different, and how do you use it, really informs the architecture of the code and allows you to write better code with better APIs, and it takes less time, right? You don’t have to go and refactor it once you’ve implemented it, because you realize that the public API takes some random object that nobody cares about. You can really think through the high-level usage of the system with documentation and testing with those code examples before actually writing any code.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** \[28:27\] I’m curious for people who are writing documentation for different types of projects, do you find that the needs for documentation are different for different types of projects, different communities, if it’s a big project or a small project? At what point should they be making that investment into documentation? And how much do they really need to write?
+**Eric Holscher:** That’s a lot of questions. \[laughs\]
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Sorry. Basic question is, is documentation different for different types of projects?
+**Eric Holscher:** Totally, totally. One of the themes in the writing world, in the conferences, is know your audience, right? That’s one of the things that’s always true about software and writing in general is who’s going to use it, right? The type of documentation that you write for a kernel module in C or C++is going to be very different than a Python library that has a command line interface. I think there’s definitely a point – we’re about to get into one of my favorite topics, it’s incredibly contentious. \[laughs\]
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Great.
+**Eric Holscher:** I agree that as projects grow, there are needs for documentation change, right? I know in the Node world particularly, there’s this small module philosophy (Unix philosophy) “Do one thing and do it well.” There are cultures that basically just write readme, right? As I’ve heard it expressed, and Mikeal could probably explain this better, but if you need more than a readme to explain this simple module, it’s probably too complex and it should be two modules. That’s one of the ways that I’ve heard that world view expressed, and in that world readmes are a great tool, in that development concept. But when you have something like Django or Rails, or these huge, multi-thousand line or multi-thousand file projects, you obviously need something much larger and much bigger.
+This is actually a trap that I think a lot of people fall into with documentation, is that they start off and they’re like, “All right, we just need three or four pages, right? We need a support page, install page, couple other pages”, right? And it really doesn’t make sense to invest in a lot of documentation tooling or infrastructure or anything, but then if your project is actually successful, you start to grow out and it gains more functionality, and it gets bigger and bigger until your tools start to break at the pieces. Some of the stuff that you need when you have 50 or 75 different pages are very different than when you have 5 or 7 different pages.
+When you just have a few pages on a website, Markdown is a wonderful tool and it works really well for that, but once you actually start to be documenting really large API references and a bunch of other inner-referenced code, that’s when something like AsciiDoc or reStructuredText or these more powerful languages combined with real documentation tooling like Sphinx or AsciiDoctor, start to make more sense. It’s a hard tradeoff, right? Because you don’t want to over-engineer it from the start, but you also don’t want to be having a tool that’s meant for seven pages once you have 700 pages, or whatever. I really do think just thinking about your goals for the project and what it’s going to look like over time, and making sure that your tool choices and the actual audiences that you’re writing for keep up with that.
+\[32:11\] I guess the other facet of that is really building out documentation for specific audiences, like writing API documentation for people who are using it as a library, while also having the tutorials for people who are just coming in and want to figure out which project’s right for them and get started, and then topical guides for explaining where your project fits into the world, and talking about competitors and just the high-level concepts.
+A lot of these are actually from Jacob KaplanMoss. He has this almost seminal work on documentation called "Writing Great Documentation" on his blog, and I think at this point it’s eight years old, but is still one of the de facto references, which shows you how fast documentation culture is moving in programming. A lot of his architecture and way of viewing documentation is what I was brought up in, and I learned how to document software in that style. Hopefully that answered your question.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, definitely.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, yeah. I think you hit on something really interesting there, which is that there are different types of learners, and they’re going to require different resources in order to learn. When you were mentioning the Node.js community – yes, there is this culture about, “Do one thing and do it well,” so every module that is really in use has a readme, and usually it’s a pretty good readme, but the documentation on how to put all those modules together is actually - it either doesn’t exist or is spread out in various blog posts and things like that.
+People tend to find them through googling, but this is a general problem. I think that’s why there’s so many meet-up talks and conference talks about putting these things together. The boot camps have a really good curriculum about putting together Node stuff as well, because it is a hole and there’s not a central place to fill it, right? There’s a lot of decisions to make when you decide which of these components to put together and nobody wants to officially endorse a way a lot of the time. Whereas Django - if you decide to use Django, you’re making a decision to use this whole stack. That’s a really good place to build a great guide around it.
+**Eric Holscher:** Totally. And there’s a recommended way this all fits together, and there are documented ways of using other tools, but no, everything else is now going to not integrate well. So there’s another interesting example there, which is Pyramid in the Python world which is... Django is like, “We’re going to build everything, and it’s going to be one big thing, and it’s going to integrate.” Pyramid is actually, “We’re going to take all of these best-of-class tools, combine them together and write some glue on top.”
+Those are two very different worldviews about how to build software, but they change and inform how your documentation has to work, right? When you’re writing Django documentation, you can assume people are using the ORM, and the model structure, and the template language, and all of that stuff. Having all those higher level integration guides doesn’t make sense for Django, right? It's all already integrated, but if you’re in the Node ecosystem or doing something like Pyramid, then actually being like, “Alright, here’s how you integrate all these together, here's how we recommend this best practice and that kind of stuff." That’s really tricky, especially in Node I would imagine, where you don’t have that place or that project to do that. I would imagine over time there’ll be different sets of people who have different worldviews on how to put things together, and then they’ll start to build a set of resources and documentation around how they recommend doing things.
+\[35:51\] In the Django world there’s a book called “Two Scoops of Django,” which is basically that as well, right? Even with this highly integrated ecosystem, there’s still a lot of different ways to do things, and that’s their best practice guide for how to put all this stuff together, and here’s the recommended way, and how that all works. That’s a really interesting documentation problem.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I’m curious, in light of there being different approaches and methodologies, how much you can automate? Because I think maybe in the greater good sense of there just needs to be clear documentation on how to use a project, and maybe some people care a lot about different methodologies or not. Can you just automate everything as much as possible, so that someone... I’m saying two things here, of teaching people that documentation matters and helping share best practices, but then how much of it can you automate for people who don’t care, but the world still needs to know how to use their project? Does that make sense? Am I just going off the rails here?
+**Eric Holscher:** No, no. One of the values behind why we created Read the Docs was this intuition that every decision that you have to make along the path of doing something - it’s like a marketing funnel or a sales funnel, right? Each step you lose people, right? So you have to be like, “I’m gonna sit down and write documentation. Alright, what tool am I going to use? Oh, alright, where am I going to – how am I going to write it? Alright, what am I going to write? Oh, alright, where am I going to host it? Oh but then I have to make an Amazon account and put it on S3." Each step adds complexity, right?
+That was the view of Read the Docs. It's like a well-paved path towards documentation, right? You use this tool set, you host it here, you build it in this format, here’s the guide... And the part that’s always been missing is the actual what to write, and how to write it, and the actual act. We’re really good as programmers with building these tools and these things around the real meat, but at the end of the day you still have to sit down and write the thing. I think that’s really the hard part, because it doesn’t matter how much you automate, you still have to convey the information. But I think you can really standardize on a set of tools and a set of processes that remove the distractions of tooling, and allow people to actually write, and know what they need to write.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. I mean, I think you are still definitely talking about writing documentation as an act of writing how to use the software, rather than the documentation being embedded in the code and auto-generated that way. I have a fairly low opinion of that kind of documentation. I don’t know what your thoughts are there.
+**Eric Holscher:** Yeah, I agree. The Javadoc world, right, where it’s just like, “Here’s a alphabetically listed set of classes in your software.” That’s great for a very specific use case. If I already know your code works, and I just want to know the arguments to this function, and for some reason I’m not looking at the source code... And proprietary code, that's super valuable, where you can’t see the source code, and you’re like, “Here’s the signature for this method.” I actually really needed that. For open source, it makes less sense.
+This is actually one of the things that I think Sphinx did really well, is it allows you to intersperse prose content with auto-generated content. You’ll see this in the Django documentation, you’ll see it in a bunch of other Python world things, where once you put the documentation in your repository - so you have a docs directory and a code directory - you’re able to magically pull that code in the doc strings and comments into your documentation. But it doesn’t have to be one big auto-generated alphabetic listing of classes. It actually allows you to basically say "In a reStructuredText file I’m going to write a bunch of words, and then I'm gonna pull in the auto-generated documentation for this method as part of that prose content." That allows you to contextualize and add value on top of just pure reference, but it also magically stays up to date with the source code.
+\[40:15\] So when the definition of the program or of the function changes, you don’t have to go back and update every piece of code that’s referencing that function. You can actually pull that in dynamically, and then you’re able to mix prose content with live source code content that is always up to date. I’ve seen a few different ways of doing this, and that’s the best that I’ve seen in terms of building a cohesive, reasonable narrative where you’re actually communicating with humans and also pulling stuff out of the source code so that it’s always up to date, and you’re still getting value out of your doc strings and your code comments.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think humans, in general, are the theme of this podcast, probably. Let’s talk about the people that are part of it.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Pro-human! \[laughter\]
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. I’m really interested – when we had Jan Lehnardt on, we talked a lot about contributor funnels, and getting people involved in a project and having kind of a ladder. We did talk a bit about documentation and working on docs as being a great first step to get involved in those projects. I’m wondering if there’s any kind of tension between that and this professionalization of documentation that you’ve been working on. A lot of what Write the Docs is doing is really establishing that this is a core skill that you can have and people can get very, very good at just this one thing. If you’re professionalizing it, while at the same time saying that it’s a good first contribution, how do you tease that apart?
+**Eric Holscher:** Interesting. Well, I mean, I think so many times when I hear about documentation as a contribution, it’s the whole beginner-mind argument, where it’s like, “Hey, new person. You’re able to explain stuff to me, the expert, that I’ve already forgotten about and integrate it into the abstractions that exist in my mind, right?” I think that’s one of the really big ways that onboarding people through documentation to contribution is like, “Hey, we value beginners. You have a different perspective. Yes, we have experts in writing code, but all of the people who are veterans of the project have a completely different worldview and understanding.” And like, “Oh, that guide that we wrote on why this project exists in this space makes no sense if you don’t know what the space is”, or things like that.
+I don’t know if Write the Docs is a hundred percent professionalizing it, it’s more just saying it’s valuable and it’s a skill that we all need to have. Yes, there’s people whose job it is to write, but every developer, their job is also to write. Regardless of if you’re doing open source work or something else, being able to contribute documentation to a project really does increase your skill as a developer; I think that’s another way.
+I always see documentation framed as a non-code contribution, which is just really weird, like othering of anything but code, it’s like NoSQL - we’re defining what we’re doing in the negative, right? Non-code contributions are not somehow lesser than code contributions. They’re contributions to the project, and the fact that we even have to call them that shows a broken culture. But I think that starting to value those – GitHub’s little activity tracker was only counting code comments, and they just updated it to include other things, but I think there’s much larger cultural things around not valuing contributions that aren't code nearly as much. I think that’s super hard to change, but it’s slowly starting to.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[44:13\] There’s an ongoing theme here of the things that you value in your community are the things that people show up to do. That’s how you get contributors to actually value those kinds of skill sets.
+**Eric Holscher:** Right.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** We’re starting to head into time for a break right now. We’ll return shortly with Eric Holscher and we’re going to get a little bit more deep on getting user feedback around the documentation.
+**Break:** \[44:39\]
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Alright, we’re back with Eric Holscher, creator of Read the Docs and Write the Docs. So Eric, we talked about valuing documentation and valuing documentation skill sets. Are there some really specific things that you do, or that you’ve seen work for signaling that you care about that documentation and building a community around it?
+**Eric Holscher:** Yeah, so I realize my background is really Python-influenced, but I think Django has done those the best of anywhere I’ve seen. They have multiple core contributors to the project who have come in through documentation contributions. One of the big things that they did is they basically require documentation, along with tests, for every piece of code that gets merged into the project.
+So you’re signaling that test and documentation are just as important as written code when we’re thinking about deploying features, right? If you put this in the codebase and nobody knows it’s there, because it’s not documented, it means that it’s not a complete pull request, it’s not a complete feature.
+One of the really other interesting things that Django does as well is they have a policy of, if something is not documented, then it’s not supported. So if you start using features and they’re not in the documentation, that’s kind of a implicit gesture, or a implicit acknowledgement that it’s not documented. They are actually treating documentation as the canonical source of release maintenance and supportability over time.
+So it has more influence than just being words about code, which is the canonical repository of the project, and the thing that really matters, right? The documentation is viewed as its own product, that has its own value independently, as a broader open source thing. Having tags in your issue tracker for documentation needed, or easy ways – saying it in your readme, like, “If you would like to contribute, here are some open issues that need fixing in the code, and here are some open issues in the tests and the docs that need to be improved on”, and really just providing that on ramp. And giving people commit access and core developer status for writing documentation.
+\[47:51\] Django has a design BDFL, they have a documentation lead, and a design lead. There’s code leads as well, but there’s actually management structure within the project that shows that they value these things. I think that’s really the thing - there’s so many implicit signals that come from caring about something, and it’s really easy... Like, "How big is the page in the design of the landing page of the site? Do the links actually go to documentation or do they go to blog posts from third parties? Or do they go to rendered Markdown files in a GitHub repo somewhere? Or are they actually branded with the real project branding on the site, integrated and kept up to date and all this kind of stuff?"
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, we did this in the Node .js project too, when we liberalized commit access. We started giving commitments for just solely documentation, and one of the really noticeable things is that retention was really high with a lot of those people. A lot of times when people show up to casually contribute to documentation it’s like, “Oh, I noticed this problem and then I fixed it", and then they kind of go away forever. But when we started actually onboarding them into becoming a committer, they stuck around quite a bit more. We tried to do that whole, “If it’s not documented it’s not supported” thing, but too many people started relying on undocumented features and when we broke them, they got very angry, so we had to back off of that.
+**Eric Holscher:** Yeah, it’s a cultural thing. You have to ease that in, right? Something else I’d be really, really curious about is the diversity of the people coming in through documentation contributions versus code my guess would be is higher.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, yeah, yeah. The first woman given a commitment in the project started with documentation. Actually, technically I think she started writing up the blog post for the evangelism working group, and then became a committer on the website, and then started working on documentation on the core and got a commit, and then now she is actually doing some code work in the core.
+**Eric Holscher:** Yeah, I think that’s so important. If you don’t want the same group of people working on the thing, you have to find new ways to bring them in. I think documentation, the Write the Docs in general is basically gender neutral; it’s 50/50... Every year we’ve had 50/50 speakers. The entire industry, as far as I can tell, is representative of national averages, in terms of gender. Of course, there’s other diversity things that we need to deal with, but I think so many people fell out of development into these auxiliary, support, writing, design, UX, and bringing those people in your communities is going to increase diversity just because of the structural issues in the industry, right?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Right, right. And also, I mean, giving them commitments and bringing them into leadership is really important as well, right?
+**Eric Holscher:** Totally.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, because you need those voices around. Especially, just generally, people who are thinking more about the end user experience of using it than having their head in the code implementation. They need to be enabled with the same kind of voting privileges and the direction of the project.
+**Eric Holscher:** Yeah. The emphatic love-bond that happens to me at the conference every year because technical writers are so much -- they’re real humans who communicate. They’re, I would say, way above average in the empathy scales, and not all developers necessarily are. It’s attracting a different type of skills and a different type of person, and I think it’s super interesting to see these other communities around software, and where a lot of the more diverse folks have landed because they felt excluded or just – getting into software is really hard. And there are structural issues, right? It’s not just hard.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I guess from that I’m curious how we incentivize documentation and other non-code contributions, and actually recruit that talent and reach out. Do you have to look outside the communities that are actively contributing right now?
+**Eric Holscher:** \[52:11\] Yeah, so that’s slightly tangential, but it's one of the things that I’m trying to do this year with the Write the Docs world, is to have a stable of speakers who are able to go to other events, because it felt – I’m worried that we’re getting a little echo chamber-y, where it’s like, “Hey we're just a bunch of people that like docs, talking about docs.” The goal here is to build a community and then push out, and that’s really my goal for the next few years - using this base and then starting to evangelize out.
+I really want to put together a set of speakers who, it’s like, “Hey, we want a documentation talk at our conference. I think PyCon last year, I gave them - for not having any documentation talks... It's like, “Hey, you’re PyCon, how is this not happening?” I'm really trying to be able to influence the conferences, because obviously my worldview sees the conferences as influential. I do conferences, it’s an obvious place to start, and that I have a set of speakers who are really good at talking about documentation. So yeah, just trying to get that out and then starting to cross-pollinate. If we have an open source project that wants contributors for documentation, it’s like, “Hey we have a list of people that are interested in open source and documentation.”
+I think one of the other big structural issues is that developers get value out of open source contributions that they do for free in hiring and career advancement, but I think other professions don’t have nearly the representative value, right? If I am a technical writer and I contribute to Django’s documentation or something, that’s not necessarily going to be a resume item in an interview question in nearly the same way that as a programmer I would have that.
+I think that’s one of the other things, is trying to figure out how we increase the value to non-programmers who are working too on open source projects, and that’s one I don’t know how to solve.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** The conference talks are a really good idea, actually. We’ve been doing that a little bit in the Node project around liberal contribution agreements and open governance, because we want that to persist out there. Essentially, what we’re really doing is just talking about, "Look at the level of success that we’ve had with these policies and connecting that to problems that all of these other projects have, like attracting more contributors and retaining people and stuff like that." Obviously, you’ve got a lot of success that you can talk about at conferences and have other people talk about it.
+**Eric Holscher:** Right, and I think viewing these open source communities as really crazy incubators of ideas, and once we discover something and find something out, we really have to go and share it. I think – we haven’t talked about this much, but Nadia’s work in open source sustainability is the same way. It’s like, “Hey, all these different people, you have Ruby together, and we’re doing some stuff with Read the Docs," and there’s a bunch of other different funding initiatives and different ways of viewing sustainability and it’s like, once you find something that works, people don’t automatically know about it, right? You have to really do that work to go and talk about it, and you really need to get out there and say, “Hey folks, we made money! We’re sustainable! This is how we did it, and you can do it too.”
+I think that’s the same way. It’s like, “Hey, we built this really popular open source project, the docs were amazing, and here’s the process that we followed. You can do that too! Here’s how we got more contributors.”
+\[55:36\] There’s so many different things. PyCon does this with its diversity outreach, where it’s like, “Hey everybody, We have 40% female speakers at a tech conference, and five years ago it was 3%, and here’s how we did it. You can do it, too.” Spreading those messages... I think that so much of the value of the community that we’re building is these experimental areas to play with stuff. We have to talk about it once we have success and really spread it out, make it bigger.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Totally, and you’re the epitome of this. I think you’ve experimented with more things than any other project I know. Just for people who aren’t familiar, off the top of my head, you went through a start-up accelerator, which is actually how I first met you. You got a grant from Mozilla, you have enterprise clients who pay for stuff, you’ve been monetizing through Write the Docs and conference, I assume, crowdfunding your life, and ad space on Read the Docs. You’ve tried literally everything, and I’ve literally appreciated how transparent you’ve been in documenting that stuff so that other people can learn about it. It was really nice, even for me, when people say, “What’s a project that’s tried whatever?”, I could be like, "Oh, Read the Docs has tried everything. Go look at what they did."
+**Eric Holscher:** I don’t know if it’s a compliment to have tried everything, because that means obviously nothing worked. \[laughter\]
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Maybe, maybe... Which is also a great question and something that I’ve wondered about. I know that you and I have talked a little bit about the project management side of things like this, and Read the Docs is maybe more unusual in the sense of, you’re a service and a platform. I’m very curious to hear Mikeal’s take on this, because I know we’ve also talked about this - there are types of contributions where you can incentivize people to casually contribute to as volunteers, to do that in their spare time. Stuff like project management requires deep familiarity with the project. You can’t just jump in and help manage Read the Docs, but it also doesn’t involve code, it doesn’t involve a salary, there’s no money in it, so it’s really hard to recruit a contributor for something like that.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, and it involves an enormous time commitment, right? And all of those benefits that you were talking about earlier, like employers wanting you and things like that - project managers don’t get recruited that way by looking at the open source projects.
+**Eric Holscher:** “Look at this issue that I wrote, it’s so good!” \[laughter\]
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, exactly. How do you incentivize that? Besides just giving people salaries.
+**Eric Holscher:** So this is what Django does, right? Django has - I’m not sure what they call it, but they have the one paid staff...
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Fellowship, yeah.
+**Eric Holscher:** ...that's like the project manager. And they were like, “This is not a volunteer thing, and every release we have a long tier who does it, and they burn themselves out doing it.” Because it is a lot of work. It’s like the release manager, project manager role - it’s incredibly stressful, it’s really hard, and it’s very thankless.
+That’s a really, really tricky one, and this is actually where we’ve settled with Read the Docs, as well. We are a service, people use us, it’s free on the internet. We are also open source. That last part is the least important for most people. They’re like, “You’re a website that I use. You host my documentation. My code has to be open source, but I don’t care about your code because you’re a web service.” We’ve actually had a really, really hard time getting contributions because one, it’s a substantial contribution. It’s a big website that has background processes, and the external dependencies, and it’s hard to set up, but also it’s a service, so people aren’t using it and they’re not scratching their own itch nearly the same way as building a library, or building a programming environment.
+There are things that people could do to add features, but in reality that almost never happens. We have a very, very low rate of actual contribution. In terms of sustainability, being open source is actually a detriment to the sustainability of the project, because it limits our commercial potential. Something like GitHub is incredibly valuable, but then they’re closed source, so people pay them for GitHub enterprise.
+\[01:00:11.26\] GitLab, doing some very, very interesting stuff here. I haven’t fully viewed how their business works, but it seems complicated and interesting. I think it’s a really frustrating thing where we have this open source thing, we’re supporting the open source community, but there’s no obvious way to sustain it. A lot of the previous models have failed or are not accessible, because we are open source. There’s very few open source services that exist that are sustainably funded that I can think of, right? There’s so many that are traditionally viewed as open source, like GitHub or BitBucket - these things that enable open source as a business model, but aren’t actually open source projects.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think you hit it. You can’t actually incentivize some of these contributions. If you can't and you need them and you have to pay for them, then how do you get the money to pay for them? How do you tie the money to the benefit that these roles actually fulfill?
+**Eric Holscher:** Yeah, I think that’s one of the big outstanding problems in open source, right? I think lots of people are trying to solve the problem with money, because it is... As you do more and more free work, eventually you realize, “Hey, maybe I should get paid for this.”
+Obviously, we don’t have the time to talk about all the different things that we’ve done, but so much of... The reason that Read the Docs still exists and it’s open source and running is because I’ve been on call for six years for free, basically. It’s something that I really truly care about, and it’s a true labor of love. We’re starting to make above poverty wages through the different schemes that we’re working on, for having the classic private hosting model, and then consulting, contracting conferences and all that stuff, but it’s a huge struggle. Making a market rate salary is really nowhere in sight at this point, while being used by basically every major corporation that’s based in San Francisco.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Right, right. Being that we don’t have time to get into all of them, let’s talk about some of the things that didn’t work. Let’s talk about one of them that didn’t work, and that everybody thought would work, it was obvious, but actually didn’t, for whatever reason. I’m very interested in why these didn’t pan out.
+**Eric Holscher:** I think the classic one in open source that is tried a million times and fails is the Red Hat model. It’s like, “Hey! Build this thing, and then open source it, and people will pay for support.” Basically, all we found is people ask for free support.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, yeah. There’s never going to be another Red Hat. That worked once, and it’s still working great, good for them; it’s not portable.
+**Eric Holscher:** When they’re doing databases and operating systems, right? Your internal documentation server is not something you’re going to pay Red Hat prices for. We have a few support contracts with different people, but that was not a scalable model. Most people, they just see it’s open source, install it locally, yell at us when it doesn’t work, and then we just have this stream of sadness in our GitHub issue tracker of like people trying to use our product for free, yelling at us when it doesn’t work, and not paying us for support... Which is probably I think what most projects experience, right? People getting paid to yell at you, or not supporting your free code.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It almost makes it worse, because then people think that you are getting paid by somebody or compensated in some way, so they don’t event have the empathy for people that are maintaining a project in their spare time.
+**Eric Holscher:** \[01:03:54.06\] My favorite is when at conferences people come up and are like, “Oh, we installed Read the Docs locally and it’s so good! We’re getting so much value out of it, what a great product.” And I’m like, “Oh cool. Have you ever contributed anything?” and they’re like, “Oh...” And I’m like, “Oh, do you want to contribute to us to support ongoing development?” and they’re like, “Oh, it already works, it pretty much does what we need it to do...”, and end of conversation. It is a fascinatingly frustrating thing.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Oh, man...
+**Eric Holscher:** Yeah, and that’s why we’re looking at advertising as the latest thing, because it's like, we’re a free large website on the internet and there’s exactly one business model that has been proven to work. What we’re trying to do is do advertising properly, in the style of the deck, where we don’t track users, we host everything, we don’t share data. We basically run newspaper advertising, right? We are building a newspaper advertising business on the internet, where it’s like "We’re going to put a thing on the page, and we think some people are going to look at it."
+Really, there’s so much ad tech that's been built to try and understand this incredibly complex data that then gets schooled and tricked and ad fraud and all this stuff... And it's like, "Hey, what if we just put an image on the page? We think most people are going to look at it, and then you just pay us money and then it’ll work fine." That worked for hundreds of years. We’ll see...
+We have a bunch of traffic, we have decent users... Rolling that out was really stressful because we were really worried about alienating people and making them upset, because people do really view their documentation as part of their product, but people have been really understanding about "Yes, you need to get paid. We value this service." So hopefully that’s kind of the latest thing, and hopefully we’ll find a way to make that work and be scalable.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Bringing it back to the Django roots I guess... Newspapers...
+**Eric Holscher:** Yeah, exactly.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, that seems like a great point to stop, actually. It’s been really great talking with you.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** We learned so much, thank you.
+**Eric Holscher:** Yeah, definitely. Let’s do this again in like six months and I’m sure I’ll have some other hair-brained scheme to talk about. \[laughter\]
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That would be great.
+**Eric Holscher:** Alright, cool, and thanks to you all for having me on the podcast. I think it should be an awesome one.

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+**Nadia Eghbal:** I'm Nadia Eghbal...
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And I'm Mikeal Rogers.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** On today's show, Mikeal and I talk with Charlotte Spencer, a software developer who's done a lot of notable work around making open source more approachable, and is a core member of the Hoodie project.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Charlotte is the creator of Your First PR, an organization that helps people make their first open source contribution, and helps projects attract new contributors.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** In our time with Charlotte we got inside the head of first-time contributors and talked about what projects can do to attract, retain and communicate with contributors.
+Charlotte, let's kick things off. What was your very first PR?
+**Charlotte Spencer:** I had to check before we had this conversation. If you're using firstpr.me, by the lovely Andrew, who I believe that you had on your podcast a couple of weeks ago...
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Oh, Andrew Nesbitt.
+**Charlotte Spencer:** Yeah. Apparently my first pull request was spelling changes. I found some spelling mistakes in some kind of Node.js Express tutorial and fixed those, about three years ago.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Was this part of the 24 Pull Requests?
+**Charlotte Spencer:** No, I've just grown up; I had the nickname spell checker, because I'm physically unable to do anything until I've corrected a spelling mistake... So I just saw it, and then discovered that I could press "Edit" on the page, and then did the thing.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Was it scary to make your first PR, or was it just sort of like "Oh, easy edit."
+**Charlotte Spencer:** Oh no, it was kind of scary because I wasn't even a programmer at this point. I just knew what GitHub was. This was done three years ago, and I've actually been a programmer for two years. So it was kind of a "I hope no one is mean to me and this is the right thing to do." But it went really well, and they said thank you. Always thank your contributors. It was relatively straightforward, though scary.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Given that you've also recently learned how to program, and at the same time were getting into open source - I'm curious how those experiences were similar or different.
+**Charlotte Spencer:** I'd say learning to do open source is obviously aided by being a developer, but I felt like the skill sets are very different. You can learn how to code, but you can do that in isolation, you can do that on your own. You can work on your own, you can be a contractor on your own in your little bedroom (where I am currently), but open source - you have to talk to people a lot, and it's way more tiring in my opinion than actually programming.
+You're a developer, and then you have to go, "Oh wow, there are all these people who have opinions and need my help." So there's a lot more social aspect that has to be learned with open source, which is quite difficult. People call them soft skills, but I think they're hard skills.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** It seems scarier somehow.
+**Charlotte Spencer:** Yeah, well there are people - particularly when you become a project maintainer... There are lots of people who expect something of you. Like, you need to always be on and you need to always be ready to answer a question, but like "I'm in bed. Leave me alone." \[laughs\] Which I haven't said to anybody yet.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Are there any projects that do a better job of onboarding into that social atmosphere?
+**Charlotte Spencer:** \[03:49\] Well, I guess a shameless plug for the open source project that I'm a member of - Hoodie. I know that you had Jan Lehnhardt on - who was the co-creator of that - a few weeks ago. I think that there's always things that we can improve on, but we do a pretty good job of onboarding people. For example, it's Hacktoberfest this month, which is DigitalOcean's month of making pull requests, and if you make four you get a T-shirt. So the activity is really busy at the moment, because there are a lot of people going "Hey, I wanna do my first pull request. This is amazing!", so we kind of onboard people before they even know they're being onboarded by providing them with issues, and we explain the step-by-step of everything that you need to do.
+We mentor the pull request and invite you to Slack channels etc. As soon as you've made your first pull request, we invite you to be a contributor of the team. It can be quite fast and overwhelming - it was overwhelming when I came into Hoodie for the first time, but I think we do a very good job, at least from the beginning, on how to onboard people and get people into the project.
+As Jan mentioned a few weeks ago, we're not very good yet at the "What next?" kind of things. We have a lot of people who contribute for the first time and then may not be able to do something after that. That's something that we need to talk about and work out how to keep people interested and keep people solving things and having a good time.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It's a good problem to have, though. I mean, you've done such a good job at getting people over the first step into the pipeline...
+**Charlotte Spencer:** Yeah, it's also the scariest part. At that point people don't seem to be as fearful of contributing to open source, but we kind of don't yet have enough to give them to keep them doing the thing. They overcome their first barrier, and then we're like, "Oh yeah, we should probably think about how you can..." A lot of people are kind of able to do it themselves and they'll pick up some issues, but if you're still nervous because that's your first contribution, it's still really overwhelming; you did your one PR, you feel amazing, but "Oh gosh, I have no idea what to do next." That's the part that we should probably start looking at once we've released Hoodie 1.0.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** And you're in that position yourself with Hoodie, right? Can you tell us and our listeners a little bit about how you went from your first contribution to Hoodie to becoming a member of the core team?
+**Charlotte Spencer:** Oh, that's not a particularly interesting story, because it happened by accident. As I already mentioned, I don't enjoy spelling mistakes. There's nothing wrong with doing them, but I like to correct them if people are willing for me to do that. I think I followed Jan for some time on Twitter, and I think he tweeted like "Hey, look at this website!" The website was Hoodie, and as most of the people in Hoodie don't have English as their first language, there's a little bit of a grammatical barrier there. So it wasn't so much spelling mistakes, but more "This would sound better if it was this, rather than what you had previously." By that time, I had been teaching myself programming for like six months, and I'd had an internship at that point, and I knew how to do PR. You have to use GitHub properly at this point, so I think over the course of a weekend I did like ten pull request for various parts of the website.
+Then I think it was Ola Gasidlo - who is awesome - who messaged me saying, "Hey, do you wanna be part of the GitHub group?" and I was like, "Yeah, cool." I started to focus a lot on accessibility and stuff... So, PR, PR, PR, but mainly focusing on the community and accessibility parts, and then I guess almost a year later I was told or suggested that I should be a core contributor. So it was quite fast from going from not being in the open source community at all and just barely being a programmer, to I'm now one of the big faces on the website. Which is awesome.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** It's kind of interesting, because it seems like there are skills that you also had to learn outside of the project itself. That project might not always have the resources to teach a new contributor before you're able to do other things.
+**Charlotte Spencer:** \[07:59\] Yeah. I think the best thing about the experience is that Hoodie were always around to answer questions. I'd sit in the Slack and I'd be like, "Oh, how do I do this? What's the best way to do this?" I wasn't ever doing it alone, and I think when you get large open source projects you're often maybe doing it alone because no one can hold your hand forever, but there was enough people at Hoodie to just be like, "Hey, we wanna see you succeed, so let's help you succeed." I think that's something that Hoodie does very well; you never really feel alone when you're contributing.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It sounds also like you're bringing a skillset that they were lacking a little bit, as well. The contribution is also really valued because it's not like they're just teaching how to do things that they were doing. You're actually bringing a lot of great skills to the table, as well.
+**Charlotte Spencer:** I like to think so. \[laughter\] I mentioned Hacktoberfest, and we've got a lot of really good issues out there. That issue template kind of was kickstarted by me, because Hoodie allowed me to create my own open source project, which is Your First PR. I couldn't proclaim that we should be writing good issues without the open source project that I work with having good issues, so I kickstarted that. And then it snowballed into its own thing, and Gregor in particular is doing a really good work with starter issues and stuff... So I brought that, and I like to think that I brought some life experiences that maybe other people on the team hadn't considered... For example, I'm not nonbinary, and stuff like that; I'm not from Germany... \[laughter\] We're quite German, which is awesome, but I feel like I contributed to some opinions that maybe hadn't been thought about before.
+The good thing about open source is that you can really get a lot of diverse opinions should you work hard at trying to get them and maintain them. And also, Hoodie didn't necessarily think too much about accessibility in the beginning, because it was more about "Let's help people to build awesome things", but I was more about "Let's help everyone to build awesome things." So a lot of my initial work was just making the website more accessible, our demo products more accessible, and then started to even take a step back from code and just think about how can we make the community more accessible.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Do you have any things that you did to make it more accessible that you wanna pull off the shelf and talk about? Just bite-sized stories maybe that were small adjustments that really made it more inviting for the community.
+**Charlotte Spencer:** I guess my big thing is language. I'm someone who doesn't use traditional she/her, he/him pronouns, so removing the concept of "guys" out of the dynamic. We're not all "guys", so why are you referring to me as such?
+Ableist language, like "crazy", "insane" and stuff like that... I also have mental health difficulties, and it's really important for me to cultivate an environment in which people are only saying nice things to each other or neutral things to each other. I don't have time for you to say, "Hey guys, check out this crazy React framework", because it's literal things that could be quite harmful. So I've kind of not started, but definitely doubled down on making sure that the language to be used within our communication was more welcoming.
+\[11:44\] It sounds potentially silly to some, but generally just having a nice attitude, which is something that hoodie had already, but I like to think I'm quite nice, and I like to think that my nice attitude rubs off on other people as well. Nothing particularly code related... I don't really talk about code a lot in my day-to-day; just being nice and thinking about the words that we use. As I already mentioned, our GitHub issues, and stuff like that.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Keeping it nice is actually hard. As you get really big, everybody has to be nice, especially people in leadership. It's hard to keep that many people to it, you know?
+**Charlotte Spencer:** I'm saying that I'm a nice person, and hopefully most people would agree, but it's a lot of work. To go back to the Hacktoberfest thing again, a lot of people are really excited about doing their first pull request, but so much so they're not really paying attention. We have 17 people ask to claim an issue after that issue has already been solved, so I have to calmly explain..
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Oh my gosh!
+**Charlotte Spencer:** Yeah, it's a thing. I have to calmly explain, "Hello, blah-blah-blah" - add in all the usernames so they get a notification... "This has already been solved. Always a good idea to check before you claim something, because I don't want other people to step on other people's toes", because it's quite disheartening for you for example if Nadia claimed an issue, and then an hour later saying "I'm working on this right now." It's like, "No, Charlotte, you can't work on this because Nadia's already working on this. Maybe you work at different speeds, but Nadia had it first, so at least let Nadia have the chance of doing it before you try and muscle in." I wouldn't say people are trying to steal continuations off each other, but people need to slow down a little bit, and it's difficult in those situations when you get it ten times a day not to bash your head repeatedly against the desk. But I am again lucky in that most of my conversations with open source communities are quite nice. At least on GitHub. It's only when we get to Twitter that I get frustrated, but yeah... It's difficult to be nice, but it feels good when you are.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That's great. We sort of breezed over your first PR there, but I'd actually like to dig in a little bit more about exactly what it is and how it came about. You said that it grew out of Hoodie a bit - can you tell me about that?
+**Charlotte Spencer:** It grew out of Hoodie in the sense that I felt that I had to save space in which to kind of bring out some of my own ideas. Your First PR is a Twitter account - a glorified Twitter account really, which when I have the time I post GitHub issues that I believe to be approachable for a beginner, whether they're a beginner to open source or perhaps a beginner to programming in its entirety.
+The story behind that is also underwhelming in that I was sitting in this very bedroom, I think I was in my pajamas - I believe that they were polar bear pajamas to be specific - and I got really annoyed because I'd been in open source for six months at this point and I found it really nice and easy to get into. And it's a strange thing to be annoyed about, but I knew that a lot of people weren't having those same experiences, because a lot of projects are quite difficult to get into because they kind of expect you to contribute or hope that you'll contribute, but they don't really show you how to. So I spent ten hours that day going through all the issues on GitHub - a day before my eyes started to bleed - and I found that a lot of the GitHub issues were either badly written or they were just a type tool with no body and things like that. The people put beginner labels on them, and stuff... I'm like, "How is this a beginner issue when you don't even explain what the problem is? And you just assume that I know..." If I came into Hoodie the first time and you said, "Okay, so we need to upgrade the package" or "We need to write an npm script to do this" and I'm like, "That's the title? I've never worked with this before, I've never worked with Hoodie before, but you put a beginner label on that? That's what...? It's a lie. That's not a beginner issue."
+\[16:09\] It's a beginner issue for me, who has been working on Hoodie for however many months (over a year now); it's easy for me, but you can't put a beginner issue on something for someone who's never encountered that project.
+So I got angry, and then I did a Twitter account and I started to post good issues. That kind of seemed to have a trickle-down effect, which maintainers in particular -- because although it is for new people to do their first pull request, it's actually a slight sub-tweet to project maintainers, saying "You could do better. Here are some people who are doing better. I will help you to be better if you take the time out, and here's a good place to get started." Yeah, so tweets and stuff is what that is.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That's great. It's a great site.
+**Charlotte Spencer:** Oh, it's a very badly designed website.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** But it has this link to this "first-timers only" article that I actually had never read before, from Kent Dodds. It's fantastic.
+**Charlotte Spencer:** Yeah, Kent does great stuff. We kind of started to do similar things like that at the same time, but not knowing of each other. We kind of know of each other now and we support each other's work a little bit. It's good. The more people are talking about this, the better.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Awesome. I think we're gonna go into a break now, but when we get right back we're gonna get into what it's like to be a maintainer. Stick around.
+**Break:** \[17:37\]
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Charlotte, one of the complaints that I get, even when we... You know, we just did this great thing Code and Learn at Node Interactive where we have 20 people submit their first PR, and a few of the contributors woke up and were a little bit grumpy because they woke up to 20 new PRs that they needed to review... \[laughter\]
+**Charlotte Spencer:** Oh, yeah...
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And generally, one of the problems that we get into is that there's too few maintainers, and increasing the funnel actually puts a lot of new load on them to get at these PRs. What are the conversations like with project like that that have fewer maintainers that you're trying to get to be more welcoming and to bring in more newcomers?
+**Charlotte Spencer:** I'd say firstly it's actually okay for those maintainers to be grumpy about something. It's how they deal with it after the fact... I don't mind if you wake up and you're like, "Oh, I don't wanna review these pull requests", because sometimes it takes me a notoriously long time to review something, particularly for the Your First PR website. But it's kind of how you deal with the pull request... If you're like, "Oh, I don't have time to review this" and "Please, only contribute to things that I've asked you to contribute to" - that's just a bad attitude, and shame on you. But it's okay to be grumpy about something. As I already mentioned about the numerous people not paying attention to the status of an issue, for example, it's frustrating. Be more productive with that frustration, I suppose, but it's okay to not want to review something. You don't have to review something, because as a maintainer, you don't actually owe people anything. Yes, you're the head of a project, but you're the head of a project in which you work for free in your spare time, and contributors shouldn't expect too much from a maintainer.
+\[20:06\] But at the same time you are an open source project, and you are calling for contributions, so I don't know... You can be grumpy, that's okay, but... If someone's doing their first ever pull request, you need to remember how terrified they probably are, and how in their head they're doing a good thing for you, and they probably are doing a good thing for you, so it's okay to take a little bit of time to not review that pull request - maybe a week or a month. Again, you don't owe anybody anything, but just conduct yourself as nice as possible when you actually engage with that person, because like I said, they're doing their first pull request, they think they're doing you a favor and they're just really excited about potentially contributing code to something major like Node.js for the first time.
+I feel like if we spent more time remembering what it was like to be a first-time contributor, we'd all be a little bit nicer to people.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, it's fine if you wanna complain in the backchannel, just don't take it out on the person sending the pull request.
+**Charlotte Spencer:** Yeah. I complain all the time. I have a private Twitter account where I just complain about everything, and I complain in private Slack channels and the communities I admin, and stuff. Everyone who knows I'm nice also knows that I am one of the biggest complainers in the world. A lot of people won't see that directly because it doesn't help anybody for me to do that.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** What do you think people forget about what it's like being a new contributor? What is that person thinking about and what are they hoping to get out of the experience.
+**Charlotte Spencer:** I've been doing programming for two years, which isn't a long time, and I still wake up most days anxious about the program that I'm gonna do... Or I'm trying to do some pull requests for Hacktober, I'm like "Oh gosh, what if they don't like it? What if I got it wrong?" and I even do this when I'm reviewing other people's pull requests for Hoodie. It's like, "Oh, what if I missed something? What if I did this...?" Maybe it helps that I have anxiety issues, I guess, so I'm always kind of in that anxious state. Just wonder what it feels like whenever you do something new for the first time. Like, you have a first date, or something; or you drive a car for the first time. It is nerve wracking.
+Even if you have to write it down on a post-it note somewhere - new contributors feel anxious, scared, worried that they've done something wrong. If you can remember that going into when you review a pull request; even if you're reviewing a pull request for someone who's done 6,000 pull requests, just remember that things can be scary forever, so just treat it with a little bit of... You know, give someone a hug, or something, because it's a scary thing. We just need to remember that everything is actually quite difficult.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Here's what I found interesting about... In fact, they've both recently learned how to code, and also dove into the world of open source because they think they are really separate things, too. I've met people who are very experienced with software development, but have never made an open source contribution or don't even know what GitHub is. A lot of people don't use it. I think it sometimes it gets equated that a first-time contributor doesn't know anything about software either, and it's not... It's like the social aspect itself can be scary enough on its own, it's not even about code or anything.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I loved that first date analogy because it captures how awkward it is. \[laughter\]
+**Charlotte Spencer:** Oh, yeah.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** You just don't feel comfortable in the position that you're in.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** And you could have gotten on other dates and been really comfortable with other people, but this date is awkward.
+**Charlotte Spencer:** Yeah, I mean, I just submitted a pull request but it hasn't been reviewed in three days, so should I call them, or should I wait for them to call me? It's difficult. \[laughter\]
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Wow, we could really take this analogy pretty far, I think.
+**Charlotte Spencer:** \[24:08\] I could write a book about it. \[laughter\]
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That's be great. I hope that you put together some kind of comic strip with that, it would be brilliant.
+**Charlotte Spencer:** That would be great.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** That's the awkward part of it too, right? A maintainer shouldn't feel pressured to respond to anything immediately, but when there is an early response, it also really increases engagement apparently. So maybe even just like saying, "Hey, I see this. I'll get to it later" is useful, so people don't feel like they're not getting anything from the other side.
+**Charlotte Spencer:** Yeah. I had this lovely person... I opened an issue like a year ago and I wanted to turn the Your First PR website into a -- set it up with Jekyll so that it could take blog posts, and this really lovely person spent a long time doing that for me, and it took me like three months to review it, to the point where they closed their pull request because I just didn't... I had a few times said, "This is really good. As soon as I get a moment I'll get to it", but life finds a way to ruin everything, so it got longer and longer before I could review this pull request. And he closed it, and then ten minutes later I was like, "This is really good work. Can you re-open your pull request and I'll merge immediately?" And I did, and I obviously apologized profusely, so much so that they actually did some more work for me, and I have the tab open. If you're listening, friend, I will merge it as soon as I get off this interview. \[laughter\]
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I like that. It's kind of just like having open channels of communication so that people understand that everyone is trying. I feel that way about even just like email and everything in general; meeting with people... We're all trying our best with the time that we have.
+**Charlotte Spencer:** Yeah. I'm actually merging the pull request right now. Yaay!!
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Live merge! Nice!
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That's great!
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Kind of shifting gears a little bit, I feel like a lot of times that people talk about contributions, they talk about contributing code, and the conversation we've had even now - there are plenty other contributions you could make that aren't code related; what are some categories of contributions that you think maintainers forget to ask about?
+**Charlotte Spencer:** Everything that isn't code... I do this talk called Open Open Source, which is about 20 minutes in which we basically have a conversation much like we're having here about how to improve the experience and what the experience is like. And 15 minutes in, I'm like "You'll have noticed that I haven't talked about programming or any code at all" and then I flash a big slide saying that code isn't important, because... You know, let's say Node.js, for example - and I use that as an example because Mikeal is on the call - you know, someone could have written Node.js, and it was a thing, and it was perfect from the beginning. But imagine if nobody knew about Node.js; how do people find out about Node.js? Well, there are people doing tweets, and there are people writing articles, and there are people that are moderating the community and the GitHub issues and the pull requests, making sure that they were good and that they were reviewed... There are people who you never hear from who sat in their room thinking about how you can take Node.js to the next level... All work that we did behind the scenes at Hoodie as well - there's a lot of behind the scenes work of just thinking, which I think that is underrated when it comes to open source. The code doesn't just happen, the pull requests don't just get merged. There's loads of discussion and there's loads of sitting quietly in your room thinking about what the next step is. But then again, you can't write an issue to someone saying, "Can't you do some thinking for me?"
+\[28:10\] A concrete example is does somebody wanna write a blog post about Node Interactive? Does someone wanna write a blog post about the event that Hoodie just spoke at? Can somebody help us design a new logo, and things like that? There are millions of things that I can't think of right now that people can do that can be way more important than the code that you're writing.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And some of them are just fun and community building. I remember in the io.js days, some sectors logged an issue that was like, "Hey, let's talk about fun logos", and it blew up to like 500 comments.
+**Charlotte Spencer:** Yeah, I remember that.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, and it's just people posting, like -- some of them serious brand treatments and some of them hilarious, these quickly photoshopped things, and it was really fun. A lot of the way that people found out about io.js and got interested in it was this crazy logo thread.
+**Charlotte Spencer:** That's pretty much how I remember io.js being a thing, that logo thread. I did a very small version of that for Your First PR when I was like - a couple of days after I started the thing - "Can someone make me a logo?" There were ten people who I had never heard of it before, I never had a conversation with before... Obviously, of varying quality, but I merged them all because I was like, "Oh, now I have ten logos, so I can do whatever I want." But it was just nice that people were trying... And people saying like, "I'm not a programmer, but you helped me to do a pull request for the first time, of something that I'm really passionate about, which is art." People don't spend enough time thinking about art when it comes to programming really.
+I consider programming an art. I am an artist, I just happen to do art by the medium of code. So those are just awesome contributions that make me happy. Sometimes even more happy than "Oh, I've built a thing, an app!" or "I turned your website into a blog." If someone's like, "Oh, I spent ten minutes in Paint doing a logo", I'm like "Oh, that's amazing!"
+**Nadia Eghbal:** \[laughs\] This all sounds really great for big community projects. Hoodie has a very active contributor community, and Node obviously has a very large community... Do you think this is also true for a small project that has just a couple of maintainers, where they feel like they're doing the bulk of work? If they put something out there, will people respond?
+**Charlotte Spencer:** I think it very much depends... It's much harder for two people who don't have followers on Twitter, for example. Just two cool people, doing a cool thing - it's much harder to get your project out there, which is also another tertiary reason I guess for Your First PR, because I wanted to highlight project doing really awesome things but didn't have 5,000 stars on GitHub and didn't have their own newsletter and things like that; there are so many people doing awesome things, but they don't often get the help that they need because they're not big and awesome like Rails, or RSpec, or Node...
+Even a little bit to Your First PR - although it's not really a code-based thing, there are a lot of people contributing their projects and issues and things like that. So if you're tiny it's much harder, and there's a lot of work that needs to be put in there.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think some of these things are even more important for small projects, like being nice and really welcoming... Because at the end of the day you do have less people coming because you're a smaller project. You need to work even harder to try and retain them and make their experience pleasant.
+**Charlotte Spencer:** \[31:54\] I imagine it must be quite stressful, because you have to get everything right. I would expect someone to have a code of conduct, have a readme me that I can actually understand, and things like that. That's a lot of work, and if you're just one person who wrote a 500-line module about how to ride a unicorn, but you really want contributors but no one knows about you - if I come into your project, I do unfortunately have this expectation that you've got a few things right already, like having a code of conduct and things like that.
+I have quite high standards for any GitHub project because I believe that we can do good things and we can have good projects. Small projects is on my list of things to think about on how we can actually help them to get help. I have written a blog post about things that you can do to make your project more accessible, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything if you're not able to attract people to your project to help. I need to think about that.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Can you talk about that a little bit? I think that when people think about strategies for getting new contributors sometimes it's like "Make sure your documentation is really good and you have all these nice things written out." That's also like, you have to go out to meetups and talk about your project...
+**Charlotte Spencer:** Yeah, it's exhausting.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Very different things, right?
+**Charlotte Spencer:** Yes.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** And having to balance out... It almost seems like some of the inbound stuff is like must-have. Once you can actually get somebody looking at your project, you've gotta make sure they stick around by giving them clear things to do, but no one will ever find it if you don't ever put yourself out there.
+**Charlotte Spencer:** Yeah, and I think that... Oh, I'm too tired to go to meetups, and the only events I go to now - and it sounds a little bit arrogant, but the only events I really go to are either really niche ones where it's a couple of friends talking about something, or something that I'm speaking at. Because attending meetups is extremely exhausting. It doesn't help if you have social anxiety, like I do.
+There's a lot of expectations on small projects to be like, "You have to be awesome at everything, and you need to tell me exactly what you need from me, and you need to sit there with me and help me, because you're really tiny and you want my help, so you have to do everything for me." It's like, "Actually, no. I just wanna play Playstation and hack on my kids, but at the same time I want this, this, this to succeed." So you have to put that extra effort in, because you are just one person with an awesome thing to say, and it's a lot of physical and emotional labor.
+I guess I'd recommend two things. One, have a code of conduct; I think that is the most important part of a project going forward. You need to set out your intentions immediately. And have a really good readme. A really good readme can go a long way. I guess it's like a pitch - I have opinions about that, but you're pitching yourself to people who both want to use you and help you. Like, "This is Node.js. This is Hoodie. We do this thing. We are made up of blah, blah and blah, and we'd really like your help on blah. Here's how to get started" etc.
+If you can do a really good pitch in the readme, a pitch that's nicely worded and is friendly, liberal use of emoji and just a nice attitude, you're probably more likely to get someone going, "Oh, these people sound cool. I think I'll give them a hand." So I guess it's just about that nice thing again.
+And probably have some kind of social media presence on Twitter and tell me what your project is, so I can spam it out to people or retweet it on Your First PR Twitter account.
+\[35:48\] It's sad, but you still to some extent have to know people... And I don't necessarily mean famous people, because I have no time for tech celebrities, and the concept of such, even though I know that I may be considered some form of name in the open source community -- well, I mean, I've been invited on this podcast, I guess... But know people who have the time to help you with things, and can share the project with friends. If you know that somebody has a specific problem, and you can be like, "Well, I solved this problem, so if this works for you, can you share it with people that you work or in your Slack channel?" So you don't need to... I don't know what I'm saying, but it's a lot of hard work.
+If you start with a good readme, maybe you have a couple of beginner issues that you can... Or even you just ask people to kind of collaborate with you and have a nice attitude, I think that can go a long way.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think that the readme thing is so important. This is probably one of the biggest and positive shifts from GitHub - how important and upfront GitHub made the readmes.
+**Charlotte Spencer:** Yes!
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It really does set all of the expectations for your project, good and bad. I have some projects where the readme literally says, "Don't use this. Don't try to contribute to it. This is not in a state where you should mess with it yet." and then a lot of other readmes that say the exact opposite.
+**Charlotte Spencer:** It's about intention, and if you can make your intention immediately clear, you can either save someone a lot of time, so they know not to hack on Mikeal.js, because it's not ready for human consumption. Or you outline a few things you're looking to ship. Intention is key, and I can probably do an entire interview topic about intention alone. Make yourself clear, don't confuse people, and you can go a long way.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I think about documenting everything also. Not just documenting how your products works, but it's also documenting processes, documenting the time that you do or don't have available... All that stuff.
+**Charlotte Spencer:** Yeah, which is a lot of what we do in the Hoodie editorial team. It's like, "How do I do this thing? Why are we doing this thing? What is our goal and how are we gonna get there?"
+**Nadia Eghbal:** For projects that have beginner-friendly issues, how do they decide what counts as a first-timers only type issue? Because that seems like an imbalance that you even felt from your first PR where people tagged things as "first timers only" and they're very clearly not. But it's hard to remember sometimes, right?
+**Charlotte Spencer:** It's super difficult, and I think that there's issues for a beginner to a project that assumes that you have some form of experience, and then there are the issues where anybody who's never used, or potentially hasn't even programmed before, could do it. In a lot of the "first-timers only" issues that we have in our Hoodie project, we will outline every single step that you need to do to make the pull request, from the commit messages that you should use, how to fork and make a pull request, the line-by-line changes that you could do in the HTML to make this thing work, how to test and what it should look like. But I guess the other is "Give me enough information so that I can google the problem, find a solution, and if that doesn't work, at least I made a good go of it."
+It's a sliding scale, and I don't think anybody who says... I don't know if there is a true beginner issue, but as long as people are around to help the people who might get stuck on the beginner issue, then it's okay. But there's not such thing as easy, and this is something that I say a lot as well. Easy is never easy or simple, because someone will inevitably struggle with the thing that you think is easy. \[39:54\] Some people use "easy" as a label for their pull requests, and it's just a fallacy. "Beginner" is better; it's a little bit of a vague one, but it's better than the alternative, I guess.
+With Hoodie, we always have someone around that will be able to guide someone if they're not doing so well on an issue. So even if it's a hard beginner issue, we'll help you get there in the end. And if you can't get there in the end that's okay, but you made it some of the way. As long as you learn something, then we're happy.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It sounds like the most important thing is to build the support system, and then the support system can improve on itself by improving the criteria for first-timer issues and stuff like that. But as long as you have that support system there, you're gonna be able to help people out anyway, right?
+**Charlotte Spencer:** Yeah, I mean building a support system is extremely difficult. I'm an admin for a relatively new JavaScript Slack called WeAllJS.org, which was started by Kat Marchán, and I can tell you that 50% of the conversation and the messages sent in that Slack group is the admins in the private channel going "How can we be better? How can we be more supportive?" and there is no instant answer to that. I think you just make mistakes and then you build upon them. We certainly did make a couple of mistakes in the beginning of building that community, but they informed the rest of our work into making that community supportive. I guess you can never get it perfect, but trying is nine-tenths of the problem, I suppose.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I think it's a good time to take a break. When we come back, we'll talk about how to get new contributors coming back.
+**Break:** \[41:46\]
+**Nadia Eghbal:** In the beginning of this podcast we were talking a little bit about the need to keep first-time contributors going in some way, and figure out how to give them medium-level opportunities to continue being involved. Can we come back to that a little bit and talk about how to retain first-time contributors?
+**Charlotte Spencer:** Well, the first thought that came into my head was actually transparency. If you let people know what's happening in the project, then they're more likely to be able to keep up with you, and they'll also have an idea of where they can kind of contribute. A lot of programming languages and frameworks are doing This Week In... So you have This Week In Rust, This Week In React, and it lets you know what things were merged, who did their first contributions, what the goal for the next few months is. If you can just be a little bit transparent about what's going on, I think that there's a danger of -- and this happened in Hoodie when I first joined, and I had to say "Can you cut it out?" because there'd be a lot of conversations in backchannels that I wasn't a part of, so I wouldn't know where to go from those initial contributions.
+\[44:08\] I didn't know what was happening half of the time. Someone would be, "Oh yeah, we've talked about that the other day", and I was like, "Well, you know, I wasn't there for that conversation and you didn't document it anywhere, so how am I supposed to know where to go next?" So a little bit of transparency, releases where you actually explain the things that happened during that release, This Week In Rust, newsletters and such... If everybody is as informed as you, they feel more comfortable and confident in being able to follow on the journey, I guess.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** When I first thought about it, I was thinking "what are the next issues you can throw at a contributor to keep them going?", but what you were talking about is more about getting someone involved in the community and making it fun, and having them feel an emotional connection to the project, right?
+**Charlotte Spencer:** Yeah. Seeing everybody as equals, rather than maintainers and contributors is a big thing. If you can keep people involved in the conversations... This is something that I believe just in the general day-to-day. I feel like having a junior in your team is extremely valuable because they question everything that you do. And having new contributors that you actually go, "I'd like to hear your opinion" can be massively valuable for your project. It makes them feel more included, and also informs them about what's coming up next.
+If I said to them, "Okay, we're gonna rebuild everything in React", which obviously would never happen, because Hoodie is a framework, but for example... "We're gonna build everything in React", so maybe for the next couple of weeks your contributions could be learning React and being able to help us build these certain things, and helping people who don't know React to learn React, and things like that. You don't have to be committing work and making pull requests to contribute. A lot of it has to do with conversations and knowing the right words and things like that.
+Having mid-level GitHub issues is a great thing; it's something that we at Hoodie aren't necessarily doing a good job of at the moment, but I do know that we keep potential contributors and users informed of what we do on a day-to-day. I think that's very valuable.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think there's this interesting contradiction that you eventually get into at scale between transparency and communication. Transparency is like table stakes, right? People can't get involved if they can't see it happening, so it has to be transparent. But eventually so many things are happening that nobody can reasonably actually figure out what's going on; there's just too much. And we're definitely way beyond that with Node now, where there's just so many things happening and so many different groups all the time that it's really hard to figure out the top-level overview of what's going on.
+We're continuing to just try to figure out ways that we can inform people. We actually have Jenn Turner who does the Hoodie newsletter...
+**Charlotte Spencer:** Oh, I love Jenn.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** She's working on the newsletter for Node.js now, so that we can try to keep people more up to date...
+**Charlotte Spencer:** That's awesome. Jenn does great work when it comes to communicating, stuff like that.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, she's fantastic. Really fantastic. And I think also we've even had some contributors show up that are saying, "You know what? You all documented these policies a while back, but actually when I watch you operating, you're operating a little bit differently. We need to get the policy updated." When everything is out there in public, eventually people just kind of show up to start contributing to it if you value it and if you make them feel welcomed and everything.
+**Charlotte Spencer:** \[47:48\] I actually have contributed something to Node such that my name pops up every so often when you do a new release, and I updated your code of conduct, because I knew where to go and I knew that that's how the community worked. But yeah, I think about Node.js largely when it comes to kind of... Because Hoodie isn't as big as Node.js, but hopefully one day will be, so when I'm thinking about "Okay, what's next?", I think about "How does Node do it?" and sometimes, "How can we do it better than Node are doing it?" Because I imagine that you must have -- it is difficult to run something that is the largest anything in open source right now.
+So it's good for me to look at maybe how things don't necessarily go the way that you planned, and for me to go "Okay, well how can I learn from that, do it better and then feed it back, so that they can do it better as well?" Because for a short time I was on the Node.js Inclusivity Working Group for example, and it's... Node is huge, and kind of overwhelming.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yes, yes, that's definitely true. For us, in a year and a half we went from 70 to now over 90 committers. It also happened really quickly, and while that was really scary to go through, it also had this kind of side benefit of us not really being able to cargo cult any process. The process had to change really quickly.
+Looking at the Hoodie project and Your First PR, I think it's all coming from the same culture of openness and inclusion, and the kind of open open source liberal contribution agreements where you're getting people to commit rightfully quickly, and stuff like that.
+With the Node project, we've just been constantly iterating on all of the processes. The processes are not set in stone. The processes are immutable, they need to change all of the time, and everybody needs to get comfortable with changing them. That then allows us to change and scale as we go forward.
+I think that one of the worst things that I've seen projects do, especially huge projects, is that they find a process that works at the scale that they're at, and then when they double in size, it doesn't work anymore and they don't feel enabled to change it. They feel like, you know, this is the only process that enables their values, rather than going back to the values to create new processes.
+**Charlotte Spencer:** Yeah. One of the first things I say when I give my Open Open Source talk is "Although the word is in the name, open source is actually incredibly closed", because there definitely is that cargo culting. I'm subject to that as well, because once I'm comfortable with something, I don't like things to change. But when I work in open source, I have to be prepared for things to change, even on a daily basis, which is not necessarily something that happens in Hoodie right now, but I imagine it probably does happen in Node quite a lot, because you have all of these different experiences and opinions, and sometimes you just get it wrong. I think the main thing for open source maintainers is to realize that 1) they're not a benevolent dictator; that just doesn't work in today's open source at all, and 2) to admit when you do it wrong. A lot of the stuff that we talk about in WeAllJS is we have to be immediately prepared to realize when we have done something wrong so we can make it better in the future for everybody.
+Be open to change, that's literally what open source is about, right? It's open, and if we cannot be open, then we really do need to change that name.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] Exactly.
+**Charlotte Spencer:** Like "door slightly open between the hours of five to ten PM" source, you know? \[laughter\] Working title.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I like these jokes.
+**Charlotte Spencer:** I'm hilarious, right?
+**Nadia Eghbal:** You are hilarious. \[laughter\]
+**Charlotte Spencer:** Yay! Validated!
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Shifting gears a little bit, something else you had mentioned in the beginning of this podcast was Hacktoberfest, which is happening this month. For people who don't know what it is, it's an online event to get new contributors to projects, and if you make four pull requests on a project, then you get a T-shirt.
+\[52:00\] So for events that are focused on getting new contributors to projects, I think there's a lot of good will among events and initiatives that want to increase contributions, but then having to balance on the other side, of not upsetting maintainers who might not be expecting a barrage of PRs, who might not actually be looking for contributions, do you have any sense around best practices for contribution-type events to run these in ways that are actually mutually beneficial for both sides?
+**Charlotte Spencer:** Probably not, but I'll give it a go. Which part do we wanna talk about first - how to do an event, or how to try to ensure those kind of low quality, spammy type PRs that I've seen happen recently, like how to stop those? Because my first thing is if you wanna do an initiative, then particularly if it's like a small project or something that kind of isn't used to have been barraged by pull requests - talk to the maintainer first. I know that might sound really obvious, but...
+**Nadia Eghbal:** It's not, apparently.
+**Charlotte Spencer:** It's open source, but people don't like talking to other people. This is the most I've spoken to anybody in like a week. Communication is really difficult, but if I walk up and say "Hey, I'm gonna do an event for Hoodie (imagine that I'm not a Hoodie contributor at this point) and I'm gonna get a hundred people in a room and we're all gonna do our first pull request through Hoodie by the end of the day"... Like, now putting my maintainer hat back on for Hoodie, I would be happy, but also terrified and wondering what on Earth is going on because I just get barraged by these things and I was hoping to have a quiet night at home, and now suddenly I've got a hundred pull requests to deal with...
+That initial communication of like "Hey, I'd really like to do this thing. Do you have the capacity to deal with me doing this thing?" Because at the end of the day y'all are doing the contributions, but I'm the one at the end of the day who's sitting there and ticking all the boxes off and merging those PRs or not merging those PRs, and explaining why those PRs can't be merged... So before you even do the even or even start to organize the event, talk to people first: "Is this a good idea? Will anybody actually be interested, and can the projects support these kinds of contributions right now?"
+If the answers are yes, then I guess we get started with our first event, which is awesome. Before I was a developer I was an events organizer for the tech community, and it's an extremely hard job, but I don't think... For these kinds of things you need to be super professional, you need a comfy chair, some water, some snacks, depending on the length of the event, and just a nice, warm atmosphere. I think that covers 99% of the things that you need to do.
+I am doing exactly that right now at home. I'm in a comfortable chair, I'm wearing my hoodie because it's freezing in here, I have some water, and I'm contributing to this podcast. Maybe I'm extremely low maintenance, but if you tick off those basic human needs and people are very comfortable and are starting to do these contributions... You don't have to have sponsors or a fancy venue, or whatever. You can rent out the basement of a pub for three hours and put on my Spotify playlist and then we can just do some contributions.
+The main thing is that people have support, which is probably the hardest part. Node Together, for example is teaching people Node.js, and you spend six hours in a room with, obviously, regular breaks; you have a bathroom, you have some food and drink, and then you just support each other. It doesn't have to be fancy.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** \[55:56\] How much hands-on support do you think organizers should expect to give to people that haven't contributed before for an in-person event? Because I was surprised by this.
+**Charlotte Spencer:** You should probably assess the skill levels of the people. Hoodie had done events where it's your first ever contribution, but they've also done events where "Hey, it's just some friends who are quite confident in their abilities hacking together" and a shared goal. So know the comfort level of the people who are coming to the event first, and be specific about what kind of event it is going to be as well. If it is an event for beginners, then organizers should be prepared to be spending a lot of time helping people. But if it's just a casual hackathon thing where at the end of the day you might have made a pull request, but it's also just kind of a bit of a get-together, then it would definitely be less hands-on.
+Again, we go back to intention. What is your intention? Know that from the beginning; communicate with the project, and then it just comes down to admin, which is difficult... But once you know the intention, it's easier to do.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Also, a pro tip: if you're targeting new people, be prepared to spend the first hour at least just setting up their environment.
+**Charlotte Spencer:** Oh, yeah.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That's what new means. New does not mean, "I am here with your entire source code, repository checked out and the build system working." That's not what that means.
+**Charlotte Spencer:** Yeah...
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Very good point.
+**Charlotte Spencer:** The first hour of Node together is like "We're now gonna get set up and we're not gonna move on until people have installed Node. Then we're not gonna move on until people have installed this npm package", because if we let people race ahead, then people get left behind. Things like Rails Girls (London) they do an evening setup before the actual event, so we can be like "We're gonna have some drinks and some olives, or whatever snack food people eat (olives are gross - you heard it here); let's spend three hours casually getting set up so that we can do Rails in the morning."
+Obviously, if you can't make the setup event, then there'll probably be some extra preamble at the beginning of the event trying to help people again. But be prepared to be taking people through a setup. There's absolutely no way that people are gonna be fully prepared.
+I used to do JavaScript workshops, and it was more than a handful of times that people turned up without a laptop. So maybe even having spare laptops where people can just run a repl or something, you know? Disaster planning is something that you learn very quickly when you're an events organizer. Assume that everything is going to go wrong, and then how are we gonna fix that?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** And then on the maintainers side, it's natural I assume that some people are just gonna try to game the system, submit things that are not great for the sake of saying they contributed. Are there things at events that the event organizers themselves can do to reduce from happening?
+**Charlotte Spencer:** Well, if the event organizers are actually maintainers of the project, you can be like "Well, I'm not accepting this pull request, and here are the reasons why - because all you did was add some spacing in one commit and then take away some spacing in the second commit. That's not a pull request. Congratulations on making a pull request, but that is not the goal of this event."
+If you're not a project maintainer, hopefully you'll feel comfortable enough to be like, "Look, we are not expecting you to do something amazing, but we do expect you to do something where the positives outweigh the negatives. Bear in mind that someone has to sit there and review this pull request. And if they've got 500 pull requests where 250 of them are you committing some white space and then uncommitting it, like... Don't do that, because you're gonna make people sad, and the goal of open source is not to make people sad."
+\[59:59\] That should be the tagline of open source - "We're not here to make people be sad, we are here to contribute and be a community." The only time I really see spammy PRs is when we have events like Hacktoberfest and 24 Pull Requests. I know that a few project maintainers are struggling... To some degree I am with Hoodie at the moment, where people are spamming like "I wanna do this, I wanna do this" or just committing to one known project with the spammiest pull requests to get a T-shirt. I guess that's just kind of acting in bad faith. I don't ever wanna tell somebody that their contribution is not valuable. You do the really spammy pull request, but hey, at least you managed to do a pull request for potentially the first time.
+Maintaining a project is a lot of emotional labor, so I have to be the person to be like, "Look, this is not something that I would consider to be something that I can put into this project. I'd appreciate it if you didn't do such pull requests."
+They're obviously just doing it for a T-shirt, but it's really difficult... You have to be that person who weighs the values of other people's work, and that's really dangerous territory. We had this conversation with Andrew Nesbitt's project 24 Pull Requests a year or a year and a half ago, being like "There are lots of people who are doing spammy pull requests, so somebody who's got 300 pull requests by the end of the first day because they just committed some white space to each of their projects - how do you deal with that?" I wasn't comfortable taking people off a project or removing them from the contribution list because they still did something, and the moment we start to discuss who's more valuable than other people, we get into some really dangerous territory.
+So I think in the end people removed pull request counts from all profiles or something like that, and made it so that everybody's contributions were valuable. Because it is not for me to reasons - unless it's obviously spamming - what is and what isn't valuable in general to a project.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** So looking ahead, beyond Your First Pull Request and beyond becoming a full-time regular contributor, what happens when people's personal circumstances change and open source projects are not something they can spend a lot of time on? How can those projects navigate the flux from contributors who, you know, if you had a couple that were contributing a lot at one point and are now kind of pulling back, how does that affect the project and how can they avoid losing steam?
+**Charlotte Spencer:** It can be pretty daunting if you're a small project. When the Hoodie editorial team started, it started over the Christmas period, which was a terrible mistake, because obviously people went "Yeah, this is awesome" and then disappeared for like three weeks; that's going to happen, but we need... There's an amazing person who does most of our TGIF, Friday link posts for Hoodie. And they are to go away for three weeks, or they're on holiday, or they're getting married or having a baby, or they're just tired, or they're sick, or something, so that person can disappear without any notice, and that is annoying... But you are not paying that person to do any work, so you have to be prepared to have those people jumping in and out at all times.
+The best thing to do is have someone who can take over from that work, so if this person goes off sick, then Gregor or Jenn step up to write the newsletter for that Friday, or something like that. And I'll make sure to make some time to review whatever comes out of that if the regular person's not there, and things like that.
+\[01:03:51.10\] It's kind of like a tag team, no one's ever gonna be available at all times, so you need -- and this is just a general rule for projects, and even in the workplace... Don't pigeonhole anybody, because if only one person can do the thing -- I think it's called "the bus factor", like "What would happen if that person got hit by a bus?", which... Tech has this horrible way of being really quite violent in the terminology it uses. But if that person got hit by a bus, could anybody continue? And you need to think about that in open source, because no one's gonna be around forever, because people enjoy taking naps, and not doing open source.
+In fact, I'd encourage people to spend less time working on open source at points in their life, because it can turn into a second job and it can be very exhausting. But yeah, as a project maintainer, be prepared that people could go away at any point. So if you have abandonment issues, then that's something obviously one needs to work on. You just need to either take on the work yourself, or have three other people that know how to do exactly the same thing.
+Easier with larger projects like Node.js, probably. We've got it quite down well in the editorial team, but there have been times in Hoodie where the only work that's being done is a greenkeeper doing an automatic pull request to update a Node version or something. Lulls are fine. Hopefully, lulls mean that people are just taking a holiday. But yeah, we can't expect anything from anybody. You're gonna have to deal with it, unfortunately. There's no magic solution to that, it just happens. Expect it.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And people should take naps, people who take care of each other; in and of themselves, for sure. \[laughs\]
+**Charlotte Spencer:** Oh, yeah. I'm about to stop giving my open source talk because it's being done now, but my next talk is about self-care, and naps, and stuff. Everytime I give my open source talk, the most quotes phrase on Twitter is "Take more naps", because 1) they're great, and 2) you're probably overworking yourself. If you'd spend more time taking naps, your contributions will probably end up being more valuable, because you're more rested and you're less stressed. Open source will be here forever. If it's not you doing it, somebody else will do it, so just go to sleep for a bit. No one's gonna hate you, and if somebody does hate you, then send them to me and we'll have some words.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That's a great note to leave it on, until we have you come back to talk about self-care for another 90 minutes.
+**Charlotte Spencer:** Oh yeah, I'd love to.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It will be awesome! Great, thank you so much for coming, this was great!
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Thanks, Charlotte.
+**Charlotte Spencer:** So we're actually ending on me threatening people, that's how we're ending this podcast... \[laughter\]
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Sounds about right!
+**Charlotte Spencer:** I love everybody and I am a very non-violent person. Disclaimer.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Thanks for coming, it was great!

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+**Nadia Eghbal:** I'm Nadia Eghbal...
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And I'm Mikeal Rogers.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** On today's show, Mikeal and I talk with Brendan Eich, who founded Brave, an open source web browser based on Chromium. He's also the creator of JavaScript and co-founder of Mozilla.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** We talked with Brendan about how the web has been founded, including a look back on the early browser wars and emerging monetization models.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** We also talked about why big problems are hard to solve for the internet, and the tradeoffs between centralization and distribution.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Brendan, you've been in the browser game since they invented browsers, so why don't you give us just a quick background on the browsers that you've worked on and how the browser landscape has changed over the last 20 years?
+**Brendan Eich:** Sure. Actually, Tim Berners-Lee keeps moving the date when he started browsers back, so I don't know if it was '89 or '90. I became aware of them in '93 and started using Mosaic around then. I think I then used Netscape when it came out in the fall of '94. That was super hot and took over the browser market. I joined Netscape in early April 1995. That's when I did JavaScript, notoriously in ten days in May, and I worked the rest of the summer getting it embedded and having a sort of primitive DOM so we could interact with the page elements, and shipping in Netscape 2.0.
+Those were the days, right? Browsers were big, we were doing secure socket layer, so-called HTTPS, now TLS (Transport Layer Security) so you could have your credit card number flying around to various sites without worrying about snoopers stealing it.
+JavaScript was kind of a toy then, but it was also in the browsers, right there on the page; you could write it, integrate it with your HTML... You could do very sweet, single-page application tricks even in 1995; without bugs and without XHR, you could do a lot.
+So the promise was there... Java was supposed to be the big thing, but eventually it was just a plugin, I think. It always was inside this rectangle, it always was a complex language for people to learn if you weren't a professional programmer, so the whole Java, JavaScript, Netscape+Java takes down Windows - they didn't really happen.
+\[02:58\] I got Microsoft's attention and they did IE. Bill Gates did his famous Internet Tidal Wave speech, because he had a bunch of people he had to whip into shape who thought they were just gonna take down AOL or Compuserve or something, and they were building a proprietary dial-up content system, and I'm sure it would have sucked. Instead, they pivoted and bought Spyglass, built up IE, embraced Netscape-pioneered standards like JavaScript and extended them. We worked together, standardized JavaScript, and eventually Netscape got extinguished - that's the 30 after embracing Extend.
+I founded Mozilla, because I was done standardizing JavaScript; it was 1997 toward the end of the year... I remember going to the Paris sales office of Netscape and I realized, well, [Jim] Barksdale has been telling us Microsoft is taking the price of the browser to zero, because at that time Netscape actually sold the browser for money to enterprises. It was free for students and family, for home use, but it was still making money. Microsoft not only made Internet Explorer free, they bundled it with Windows 98, which was a monopoly operating system. So they did stuff that just was guaranteed to kill Netscape's business.
+Netscape had also gone public in '95, well before being profitable, but it was a super hot startup. The stock zoomed up on the first day, and that kicked off the dotcom era of crazy startups. And it gave Netscape a war chest to buy companies, which hardly ever works. Mergers and acquisitions rarely work. In this case, they bought a bunch of startups which were all not really taking over the world as Netscape had, and they tried to bet the farm on them or build up a server-side business that never really took... They bought a sort of groupware Windows client company called Collabra, and because the original Netscape browser team was kind of fried and because of this ambition to take on Lotus Notes, they gave that company the sort of keys to the browser kingdom, and that just made things worse. Netscape 4 was late, and initially only on Windows, and buggy as all get out.
+Jamie Zawinski's got some old articles about this, if you wanna read about that era. It was not fun to go through that, but the only things that I remember being positive were getting JavaScript standardized, and then founding Mozilla. Mozilla was meant to be an escape pod, right? In Star Wars episode 4, A New Hope, this escape pod gets out from the rebel ship that's been tractor-beamed and docked by the Star Destroyer crew. And the Star Destroyer crew, slackers that they are, don't just blow it up for target practice, they let it land, and of course the droids are in it. \[laughter\] Microsoft must have been like those sloppy imperial gunners, because they didn't think anything was gonna happen... Who knew?!
+\[05:59\] It took four years to actually get the code in decent shape, which was many more years than some of my friends, the principle engineers who were working on it told their management at Netscape, so Netscape kept missing the mark with things like Netscape 6, which was a terrible release... Black-and-blue colored user interface with circular buttons; it was very buggy. Mitchell Baker and I told Netscape management, "Don't do it...", everybody in the rank and file engineering staff said "Don't do it", but the executives who sold themselves to AOL as able to turn Netscape around in some sense said, "No, we've gotta do it for morale." \[laughs\] So they forced it out - that was in 2001 or 2002, I can't remember. It was terrible, and it bombed, and I think some of those executives got their heads handed to them and replaces.
+By 2002, Mozilla code was actually getting good. We were doing builds initially... Jamie Zawinski said, "Don't do builds... You have to be a developer, you have to have a compiler, you have to know what C is. Do your own builds!" and it limited testing and limited reach, so we started doing QA builds of Mozilla, which were like Netscape without all the AOL, ICQ, AIM buttons that people didn't want anyway. Those things were like AOL Instant Messenger, and ICQ was another instant messenger.
+So Mozilla builds were cleaner, and they actually got fairly popular. I think at some point they were actually more popular than Netscape. But after we did Mozilla 1.0 in 2002, we said "Now the code's good enough we can build something." We already had a pirate ship called initially Mozilla/browser, then Phoenix, then Firebird, and ultimately Firefox going. That was a small group of people inside Netscape initially, lead by Dave Hyatt who was senior and Blake Ross who was junior - he'd been a high-school student intern at Netscape. They'd created this lightweight -- just a browser off of the Mozilla code, where Mozilla was still doing a suite, because you did suites in the '90s; you were trying to take on Lotus Notes, or you wanted to have Outlook-like mail, so you did a suite.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Oh, yeah!
+**Brendan Eich:** As Blake joked about this, "Yes, I want to use my suite so I can look in my address book for my friend and open a new email Compose window, tell them about the George Foreman grill that I saw while browsing the web, and then send them an AIM link so they can AIM or ICQ back to me." Nobody did that, right? It was this bloated mess. So by doing just Phoenix - I'll call it that, for the 2002 era - we started getting traction. Even though it was a pirate ship, it was a small open source project, people got excited about what could a browser be.
+So in 2003, Dave Hyatt who had already quit Netscape and gone on to Apple to help Safari actually reach the big time... Dave was a huge win for Apple, because when he left, he had lots of expertise on web compatibility and CSS rendering and everything. I think the WebKit team, as strong as they were, lacked that skillset.
+\[08:59\] So Hyatt was a huge recruit to Apple. But even at Apple, he kept working on Phoenix. Got in a little trouble sometimes for blogging about it a little too openly; he would blog about what he'd learned about implementing tabbed browsing multiple times in Phoenix and Chimera (which then became Camino) and other practice tab implementations he'd done. He'd studied OmniWeb and iCab and other browsers, NetCaptor that had some kind of tabs, upper-head windows like MDI tabs.
+Anyway, Hyatt was a huge force for Mozilla code, and even after he went to Apple he was helping Phoenix, Firebird and Firefox. In 2003 Hyatt and I wrote a Roadmap update. Roadmap was the Mozilla document that I wrote and updated every year, trying to get people all moving in the same direction without having to tell them what to do, just align everybody for the same goals and common architecture, and important requirements and anti-requirements. Like, it's important to say what you're not doing, as well as what you are doing, to make exclusions and forswear things, because you can't be all things to all people.
+What Hyatt and I did double down on that by saying, "Let's do just a browser. Let's get rid of this suite (the Mozilla suite)." It became Seamonkey, volunteers tended it. "Let's do a browser. Firebird." I think it was probably in 2003. "Let's do just a mail app. Thunderbird. Let's do extensions for them. Let's take out a lot of the complexity that the Netscape-AOL designers and others had festooned the preferences with, and let's put a lot of that complexity into extensions that can be downloaded." We called them add-ons. They were written in the same sort of XML, JavaScript, CSS language that Firebird and Thunderbird were written in.
+They were lightweight enough that you could have people build them without having to become experts on the code. They had fairly stable APIs for integrating, and they could integrate with a lot of the user interface. They could change the toolbars, they could inject content or context menu items, things like that.
+So that was a big Roadmap update in 2003 that Hyatt and I did. I don't think Apple got mad at him for putting his name on it. That really just aimed the rocket that became Firefox toward release in November 2004.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** In a way I think that up 'till that point -- now you have essentially tab browsing, now you have kind of the beginnings of Safari, and then that leads into Chrome, eventually. But by this point, the cost of all browsers has gone to zero, right? The last browser that people paid for was probably Netscape 6, right?
+**Brendan Eich:** No, even that was, I believe, free. Netscape went free in the '90s because of Microsoft taking the price -- I would say the price went to zero; the cost all-in was still like a billion dollars over multiple years. Estimates from the U.S. v. Microsoft antitrust case and things you hear about the cost of Chrome - even though they used WebKit - or the cost to Apple of Safari and WebKit come in around a billion, but sometimes it's puffed up with marketing spend...
+\[12:04\] It's still an awful lot of non-recurring engineering. And the good thing is Mozilla taught everybody the benefits of open source, so you have now three open source engines in full Chromium/Blink WebKit and Mozilla originally. And WebKit reabsorbed KHTML from which it sprang. Hyatt had to make it web-compatible and the KHTML people didn't think that was necessary, but eventually they lost. And now you even have ChakraCore, that Microsoft Edge and IE JavaScript engine open sourced on GitHub.
+So the good news is that these huge sunk costs and ongoing costs are being developed in the open, so in some ways you could say the cost is zero to -- like, my company Brave... \[laughter\] Nothing's ever free, but thanks to all this open source and open standards - and they go together - we have significant web engines, all in the open.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** There's still a cost though that you're incurring to develop on top of it.
+**Brendan Eich:** Absolutely.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** But before we get into Brave's model, how are these other browsers funding their browsers? Especially with some of them taking on billion-dollar costs and then later maybe a little bit less, like Chrome... What are the incentive structures there and how do they actually end up making money?
+**Brendan Eich:** I think it's easy. Let's start in historical order - IE was to avoid "Netscape + Java kills Windows." I think Gates did think that was scary. Andreas was going around waving his arms, saying "Too much!" and a bunch of us were like "Shut up! Can you all get their attention?" and I heard that a board member of Microsoft sent him an email at the end of '95 saying, "Well, you've waved the cape in the bull's face. Now you're gonna get the horns."
+So Microsoft did IE, and they did a good job eventually with IE 4 on Windows. It was better than Netscape, which had been sort of trashed by that groupware company, and the founders kind of being burned down, mostly not working on it. But IE was actually pretty good, and Microsoft needed it, I think, to keep up with the Joneses - not just Netscape, but at that point Apple was coming back, heading toward... I think it went through that near-death experience with the Wired cover that says "Pray"; then Jobs came back and started doing "i" - iMacs ("i" was for internet). This is in that movie that they made recently; in the third act of that movie.
+So the internet mattered, and even though Microsoft hadn't given up on Windows lock-in, and still had hopes going into the noughties that they would bring back Windows Vista, or make the web kind of fade away again. The web was their estate, so Microsoft needed a browser, and he needed to own the category.
+Safari - same thing. Jobs was doing the hot new Macs in 2001-2002, he launched the iPod around then (2002, I think) - he needed a browser. And it was a secret at first; Safari became public I think in 2003, and it was important to have something that kept up with the Joneses and was shiny in that Steve Jobs sense. It was one of the brushed metal apps originally, it looked special...
+\[15:10\] But unfortunately - and this is what lead to WebKit - it got kind of checklisted as "Done" and then Jobs didn't really invest in it. He put it in the same sort of organisation chart where you have ten people working on AppKit, ten people working on WebKit, ten people working on Cocoa - whatever. And it wasn't funded well enough because it's hard to do a browser, and Apple didn't have an advertising business or a search business subsidize it. They had a search deal with Google that was quite lucrative. That was one of the things we knew about before we did our search deal with Google in 2004, and we knew it was possible to get good money out of search if you had browser users and they were high-value users.
+The same story sort of repeats. As companies like Microsoft and Apple check off the browser box in their list of to-do's, they kind of neglect it, because it's not their main business. Opera did have for a long time the browser as their main business, and while they certainly (under Jon von Tetzchner, who's doing Vivaldi now) went towards advanced users and added a lot of extra features, some of which we were factoring into add-ons on Firefox. They cared about the browser, and Mozilla cared about the browser, and you could tell you could get some users; your quality is just a little better... You're in it for the browser, you're not in it for operating system monopoly or shiny device growth, or search, or whatever ad revenue. You're doing the browser for its own good. That always matters, and people can tell on the market. Your league users tend to gravitate.
+Safari was not going to take back a whole lot of market share just from the MacBooks - or whatever they were; the iBooks of the time, the iMacs. It really took Firefox, which got up to 27% share at its peak - it just kept growing, because IE still wasn't good, Microsoft still hadn't quite put their A-team on it. Eventually, we did that search deal with Google in 2004. We had Google engineers helping in late 2004, through 2005, into 2006, and then they all disappeared, and we knew from private communications - we didn't talk about it because of NDAs - they were doing Chrome.
+I think Jobs knew, too. Jobs hated this. He was like, "You can't use WebKit. That's my open source." \[laughter\] He threw a chair against the wall because of Android, which he viewed as stealing his design. But with WebKit it was more like, "That's my source!" But WebKit itself was a fork of KHTML, this very sort of elite European project, part of the KDE Linux desktop that started late in '98, around the time that Mozilla started to rewrite the codebase (my first Roadmap in October '98). So KHTML was high quality, but it wasn't web-compatible. It was very, sort of by-the-book standards. It didn't do what's called "residual style" error correction on CSS. When you have a bold and an italic open tag, and then you close the bold first and then the italic, it's not a tree-structure DOM and it didn't do the right thing.
+\[18:08\] And there were lots of other crazy things you could in HTML which Hixie [Ian Hickson] and others wrote up as HTML5 in the WHATWG and now we know that is a living standard. But KHTML didn't do that, and Dave Hyatt at Apple, having jumped from Netscape, had to do that. He's like, "I've gotta do it." So he was patch bombing KHTML every six months with these giant change sets. Generally good changes, but the elite Euro hackers - I think a lot of them at that point might have been at Trolltech (I'm not sure if it existed then, but they ended up joining the Qt Company - Trolltech in Oslo). They said, "No, we don't need this. In Europe we balance our tags properly. You Americans... Go work on your HTML markup balance, and stop polluting our perfect code with your ugly error corrections." So it became a fight.
+Hyatt, meanwhile - I've told this story in a few places - was being recruited around early 2005 by us, by Google, and another company I'm forgetting. He was kind of on the market because he was fed up because Steve at Apple had indeed checklisted the browser; it wasn't getting enough funding. It was just another ex-kit team - WebKit, AppKit... And by the way, the AppKit team wasn't that sharp compared to the WebKit team. There were really good hackers on WebKit, but they needed more help, and they weren't getting it.
+So Hyatt gets fed up; Flock was being spun up by Bart Decrem alone, from Mozilla, because he wanted to do a dotcom for Firefox in late 2004. It was already non-profit; the answer from the board was no, so Bart said "Okay, I'm gonna do Flock", and what he called it when he first went to get VC funding was "Round Two." It's like, "Thanks, Bart. We were round one, you're round two." I guess we didn't have to fight to go the distance.
+Eventually, Flock failed, but while he was getting funding and recruiting for it, he started recruiting his old buddy, Maciej Stachowiak, whom he knew from Nautilus, where Andry Hertzfeld also had been, which is sort of a more app-ly Linux desktop file manager thing. And Maciej was a force at WebKit, one of the founders, along with Darin Adler, and he got Hyatt's number somehow, and Hyatt said "Yeah, this Bart guy keeps calling me. I had to bust out Mean Dave on him", \[laughs\] because Hyatt's usually nice and soft spoken, very thoughtful, but Bart kept bugging him, saying "Come to Flock. I'll give you lots of options, we'll take down Firefox. It will be much better than your Apple job." But Hyatt was upset because Apple wasn't investing enough, so he was looking around.
+I don't think there's any way he would have come to Mozilla, but he did interview at Google, which he hated; they gave him puzzles. I think his name probably redacted in the discovery materials for the so-called Techtopus case. Do you guys know about that? It's a straight up Sherman Clayton antitrust violation. Google, Apple, Adobe, Intel were collaborating to not poach each other's -- or even hire each other's top talent.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[21:05\] Oh, right, right.
+**Brendan Eich:** ...which was suppressing salaries...
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, yeah.
+**Brendan Eich:** The worst -- really nauseating to me was Eric Schmidt sort of cravenly apologizing to Steve Jobs for even daring to talk to some engineers in France who might have been from Next and may have had some Apple relationship; they weren't even necessarily being hired by Apple, but Steve was outraged that they might be recruited by Google and he made Eric sort of balance scrape.
+I was having dinner with Sergey and Larry, and Mitchell Baker in early 2005. Sergey comes in late and he says, "Sorry, I just got off the phone with Steve Jobs. He was just screaming, cussing at me. He said 'Don't touch Hyatt'!" So there was this definite restraint of employing a tech talent trade going on there.
+Hyatt didn't go anywhere, he stayed at Apple. One of the prices for Maciej and Hyatt to stay at Apple - I'm not sure how seriously they were ever gonna leave, because Apple's pretty good to its engineers; they're birds in gilded cages. They work very hard, they're very smart, they work on shiny devices and they get well comped, but they seem to be loose enough that they had some leverage and they said - this is what I heard - , "If we stay, let's do honest open source. Let's not patch bomb KHTML every six months. Let's make webkit.org. Let's learn from Mozilla. We'll make our own mini Mozilla and we'll do proper open source there." And they did. That was in 2005.
+I think that was a good thing, and it helped give that gift of WebKit to Google, which they secretly started using for Chrome in 2006.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] That's great. So it sounds like for the most part all the costs are deferred to create these things by some massive company that has a bunch of other interests.
+**Brendan Eich:** That's right.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And eventually they get bored with it, because they don't have direct sustainability. Mozilla does have direct sustainability kind of baked in, right? it does generate revenue from the browser to fund the browser, correct?
+**Brendan Eich:** Well, you could say that about Google too, because it's all search revenue and for Google, Chrome is just a lower traffic acquisition cost device. Right now I think to get search fields in other browsers from Google is very hard. Bing is still competitive in the U.S., it has 20-something percent, depending on who you ask. Vivaldi has Bing as their default search partner and they get a revenue share.
+Google was sharing revenue with Firefox in the original deal we did at such a clip that we got alarmed and we thought, "Oh no, we're gonna have trouble taking this as a non-profit; we're gonna have too much money. We're gonna look like a giant billion-dollar hole in Eric Schmidt's balance sheet by January 2006." So we actually - I think this was a mistake - took a much lower revenue share above a certain absolute amount. The blended cost of Firefox traffic was very low; we were the best traffic acquisition deal Google ever had, and it still didn't prevent Chrome. It just kicked the can a few years down the road. But as you say, they have a big business - search, ads... They need to make sure that people are searching...
+\[24:01\] Google got very worried in the mid-2000s about Microsoft coming back with IE. They'd done IE 7 in response to Firefox. It still wasn't that great, but they started distributing it again; it was still the default browser. They'd gotten in trouble in Europe with the European Commission, so they had to make a browser choice panel, which allowed people to pick Firefox as their default, but they still had a lot of Internet Explorer traction.
+Google had started selling Google Desktop and Google Toolbar, and getting some Windows presence through that. Sundar Pichai did a lot of that work, which I think in the view of Schmidt and Sergey and Larry saved the day. If Microsoft in 2008 or so, with Bing being a new thing, has suddenly said "Hey, we're setting search back to Bing on all the browsers - especially all the Internet Explorer browsers that we control - through Windows update, bye-bye Google!" Google would have been in trouble. So they had this Google Desktop Search, they had Google Toolbar footprint, they had OEM deals to distribute those, and thanks to Sandor they had some ability to fight back and make sure that the search default didn't get set away from Google. Because Google was obviously still the best. Bing was even worse then; it's gotten better. It's hard to tell... I've heard people say if you label the Bing results with Google's brand, people say "Hey, that's the best!" In the long tail of four or five keyword searches, Google's still the best, in my opinion.
+This was just to show, like you said, that you need a big company with another business that can bear the cost, and actually find the cost preferable to paying for outside sources of search traffic for instance, or to - in Microsoft's case - have a browser and fend off Netscape or compete with Apple; or, in Apple's case, have a browser to compete with Microsoft. And that competition still goes on. Safari is denying Chrome 95% market share that Windows IE reached in 2003-2004. If you look in Wikipedia, I think just before Firefox took it back, IE topped around 95%. Chrome will not get to 95%, and I'm talking across mobile and desktop... And it's because iOS's Safari. To a lesser extent it's because of Safari on Mac; it's because of Firefox, which is losing share, still. Chrome is the only browser growing, according to some of my friends at very big companies who would know (very big, web-facing companies). It's growing slowly, but it will not get to 95%.
+This dynamic keeps things still somewhat balanced in the standards bodies, so everyone worries - if Google gets too powerful, will they start overreaching and waste time on stuff? And they already did, right? They did native client, they did Dart - that stuff wasted a lot of time. But they also invested in the web, and here we are...
+The sunk cost problem is not just a one-time thing, it's an ongoing thing. Browsers cost. And you mentioned Mozilla... I can't really comment on their economics because Verizon bought Yahoo! and I have no insight, and even the Yahoo! deal was after I left. But just from the outside, looking at the balance sheets and the marked-to-market of Yahoo!, if you subtract Alibaba and the SoftBank \[unintelligible 00:27:02.21\] even in 2014, it doesn't look good.
+\[27:07\] It's tricky doing a browser, especially if you don't have a lot of users, or if you have a declining user base, and Chrome is starting to become the -- I wouldn't say the monopoly, but the senior duopoly partner. It's tricky making a case for another browser being funded only by search revenue, for instance.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Given all that, I find it interesting that what you decided to do was build another browser. We've gotta take a quick break before we dive right into that, so we'll be back in just a few moments with Brendan Eich.
+**Break:** \[27:39\]
+**Nadia Eghbal:** In our last segment we were talking a little bit about sustainability models for browsers. Could you talk about how Brave makes money?
+**Brendan Eich:** We're a startup, we're burning right now, so...
+**Nadia Eghbal:** How Brave plans to make money - let's put it that way.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Venture capital! \[laughter\]
+**Brendan Eich:** You know, you can still get, as I say, search revenue. We actually have search partners already. DuckDuckGo is a search partner, and we're making lunch money from them... Which is good. And we help build that up, because people who skew toward Brave do like DuckDuckGO. That's an up-and-coming search engine that emphasizes privacy, so it's in many ways aligned with us. It's just not our default search engine because Google's still the people's choice, as far as we can tell. And as they say, on the long tail of multiple keyword queries, it's still the best.
+\[30:02\] If we didn't make Google the default, we suspect a lot of our users would reset from our default DuckDuckGo to Google, and then we would be stuck, because ethically and in the market we wouldn't wanna override their choice. We could never get them back on a default that might be a better search engine down the road.
+This actually happened to Firefox - it's public information, people studied this identity-solving search engine log. If you look at what happened with the Yahoo! search deal, in December 2014 they made Yahoo! the default search for Firefox, and we'd had Google since Phoenix, since forever. We had a good commercial deal since 2004. That Yahoo! default didn't stick. A lot of users rest to Google over time. Yahoo! was probably paying - I don't know, but I'm guessing they were paying a lot, possibly even a guarantee payment, for a declining traffic.
+We don't wanna do that in Brave, but we will make some search revenue from people who choose DuckDuckGo. And as the game theories would suggest, all the non-Google search engines generally are willing to pay for non-default traffic; that is for those users who choose to switch to DuckDuckGo or Bing. They'll pay better if you make them the default, and Bing is still trying to grow, so they'll do deals like I mentioned, Vivaldi, as far as I know they're still using Bing as the default, but... We can get some money out of search, it's just not gonna be huge and we don't wanna count on it exclusively.
+Another idea we have is the microdonations we're already supporting with the Brave payments beta. If you use Brave right now, since 0.12 one or two, you can actually get money into your user wallet and have it sort of deterministically anonymously and with low transaction costs distributed among your top sites. You can turn off the sites you don't wanna support. You have 30 days of ongoing personal chartbeat in your own browser - this is on-device only, no tracking. And at the end of that 30-day period, which is a personal period, there's reconciliation. Anything you excluded or decided at the last minute you didn't wanna fund gets left out. The other sites get what are essentially votes in sort of a zero knowledge proof voting system based on some cool academic work called Anonize and that gets sent through a VPN connection to our infrastructure, so we don't even see your IP address. Then we mix it all together and we count the votes and we count the funds - a lot of people are putting $5/month in this system - and we distribute it to publishers; we're starting to do that now, just this week. I think our publishers pays will be up very soon.
+\[32:47\] That means we get some small fee-based revenue off of that, but we have to cover our infrastructure costs. I'm not sure that will make us a lot of money either, but that's another way we'll make some money. I think if everybody who used Brave donated $5/month, they'd be essentially replacing their average cost or median cost in terms of lost ad revenue. That would be cool. I don't think everyone's gonna do it. Also, we need to get a million users, ten million users, a hundred million users. But if all those ifs came true, everybody did $5/month, and we have a hundred million users, we'd be making $3/user/year - that's $300 million. That's enough to run a browser like Firefox. That's what Firefox often ran on in the old days.
+I think it would be nice for that to happen, but I don't think that will happen. I think the donor cohort will decline as a fraction of our user base. NPR gets like 30% listeners donating, but they do pledge drives, they're a nonprofit. We are getting early adopters skewing toward donating. We have like 11,000 wallets and we're only in beta; the average balance in the wallet is over $5, so people are doing this, but it's voluntary, so we can't count on it either. But we'd like to build it up and see how big it can get.
+We think it's a good deal for publishers too, because they don't have to worry about the lost ad revenue if they're getting these donations trickled back to them through the Brave payments.
+I mentioned Brave payments as an auto micro-donation system, but there's general ecommerce we could do with Brave payments. If it's just on the Bitcoin blockchain, it could not involve us, there's no need for an intermediary (that's one of the beauties of Bitcoin) and we wouldn't make anything. But we'd like to enable that. We think that there's upside there.
+Generally, there's too much friction buying things on the web, still. Obviously, if you have an iTunes or Amazon credit card relationship, it's one click and away you go. But you don't wanna do that with every ecommerce site you might wanna buy something from. It's kind of scary to give over your credit card to another site, with all the breaches. People sometimes use Paypal, but Paypal has its issues and it's not universal.
+We'd like to make frictionless small payments a thing, a web standard, if you will. And there's nothing proprietary about it, we'd like to have Brave just be a pioneer, just like pop-up blocking or tab browsing was known before Firefox or Phoenix, but we popularized it. We'd like to make future payments that are frictionless - no intermediary, no interchange charge... We'd like to make that a thing.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Sort of baked into the model there is that by default you're blocking a lot of ads, and tracking stuff like that. You have a view of the user and the privacy that I don't think a lot of other browsers go on quite as far. Could you detail a little bit the degree to which you bring that stuff out of the user experience, and what you replace it with?
+**Brendan Eich:** \[35:47\] Yeah, so that's the really radical idea, and it's not fully implemented. Brave, with the right opt-in - we wouldn't wanna surprise users with this, but Brave should be your personal Google; it should be your personal data set and machine learning, which adds value to the data.
+You know how people say "Facebook sells your data"? They don't, because if they did, it would all get quickly arbitraged to a low price, and it's seasonal enough, there's enough repeated behavior among users that it wouldn't be necessary for them to keep selling it. It would be extracted and in bulk. Facebook doesn't sell all your data. What they do is they say "Come onto our platform and do ads", or "Come onto our platform and transact in a very limited way with the data." That's what Google does with the web. Google is a really brilliant, once-in-a-generation business. They started with search ads - very clean, because when you're searching, you have strong intent, you're looking for something, you're willing to see a promotion, especially if it's algorithmically well-placed. It could be better than the organic results that Altavista would have found in '98. That's why Google started rising fast then, and they did search ads even then; they were making enough money they got the famous angel investment from Andreas Bechtolsheim. He asked them, "How do you make money?" and Sergey said "Placed results, search ads." Andreas said, "I'm using Altavista, but they get tricked by pages that put a little dictionary in the HTML comment, and suddenly that page is authoritative for every word in that dictionary, and they get undue search rank in Altavista. What do you do about that?" Larry Page said, "Oh, we take care of that because we count incoming links to do reputation, pagerank." Then Andreas said, "How much are you making?" This was like '98, when Sergey and Larry were still I think on Stanford campus. They said, "A hundred thousand a month and growing", and Andreas said, "Let me go to my car and get my checkbook", and he wrote a famous angel investment check which paid off very well.
+That search ad business is still strong for Google, but search is kind of flattening out. The smartphone is less of a searchy device, it's more of a social and bespoke search, or custom app experience. Voice is rising, AI is changing things... Search is flattening. It's gonna be a challenge for Google to keep satisfying Wall-Street's needs as a public company.
+Google also did something clever - in 2008 they bought DoubleClick, because they saw if you didn't convert all those search ads on the search engine result page, those quality texty result up top that were clearly identified at ads, but sometimes could be better than the organic results -- if you didn't click on those, you went off into the organic results, and you visited publisher sites and ecommerce sites... You kind of got distracted and surfed a bit for fun, celebrity-stalked somebody a bit... Then you came back to your major purchase, but maybe you did it through an ecommerce site and Google had no piece of that action. So they bought DoubleClick, because DoubleClick had a display ad business. They were all over publisher sites, they were on a lot of ecommerce sites. And they had cookies, they could be audience profiles by tracking people across sites.
+\[38:59\] That gave Google a more complete model of the user, from search, through browsing to various sites that DoubleClick had cookies on or other footprint on, and Google's been integrating things ever since - YouTube's gotten big... In some way they're the web, eating their own ecosystem, but they're also getting a more complete user model.
+I think you may have seen, even Chrome will now be mixing your history into the advertising model if you don't opt out, I believe. Powerful business, but it's got some downsides. Increasingly, Google and Facebook own 90 cents of every marginal ad dollar spent. Every extra ad dollar being spent this year above last year, 90 cents out of it goes to Google and Facebook. And that's not a stable setting, even if you don't mind those two being the new duopoly on search and ads, or social and ads, because Facebook's coming after Google, and Google's search business is flat. So there's a problem there.
+Also, there's a huge privacy problem. People just don't like being tracked that way. They get retargeted by bad ads, they get creepy ads, ads that make your eyes bleed, parasite pictures, belly fat reducers, wrinkle reducers... And they get malware now. Malware is actually being placed, and has been for a few years. This is kind of an under-reported story, because a lot of it works by being ransomware - it holds your PC hostage, encrypts the disk and says, "Here's how buy Bitcoin and send Bitcoin", and it charges not too much. So grandma paid $600 or $1,200 to get her pictures back of her grandchildren, and she's too embarrassed to admit it.
+There was a hospital in Southern California where all the systems in the hospital were thrown by ransomware. That gets you more on the FBI and Interpol radar, but these are criminal gangs hiding in nation-states that don't necessarily prosecute them. They're using very sophisticated exploit kits; that's the payload that downloads and tries a bunch of vulnerabilities.
+The ones we know about from the last year and a half, Angler in particular, used Flash and Silverlight and Java plugin vulnerabilities. Brave turns off plugins by default. The plugins should die, Steve Jobs was right. Thoughts on music - he was right about DRM; thoughts on Flash - he was right about Flash. God bless Steve Jobs. \[laughter\]
+I'm not gonna endorse everything he ever did, but he did two solid things there for the web and for security. These exploit kits now are trying browser vulnerabilities. I'm pretty sure Neutrino is the one that superseded Angler and it's trying browser vulnerabilities, because every sophisticated endpoint software is endlessly vulnerable, and you have to keep patching it. That's what Chrome does, that's what Firefox does, that's what Microsoft does now... It was one of the lessons of the last 15 years in browsers, that you have to release all the time to keep ahead of the exploits. You have to fuzz-test your codebase with travesty JavaScript-generated JavaScript that finds all the safety bugs.
+\[42:01\] These exploit kits are out there, and they're coming in through ad exchanges. How do they do it? They actually create fake ad agencies. These are fake businesses, with fake CEOs and CMOs, fake people pictures, bios, and they go and buy ads... They put custom creative ads into ad exchanges. They pay the fees to get into the exchange, and then in real-time bidding processes automated ad exchanges place these ads on publisher pages, sometimes even gateway to other exchanges. They get onto a Chrome ad exchange at a low price, but they can claim to guarantee some conversion or some performance to the publisher who wants to sell the ad space for the ad. And the publishers fall for this every time, because they wanna fill out every space they can with ads, even at the bottom of the page, where the parasite pictures are. And they generally don't directly sell that to brands or agencies; it's not good space, so they say "Oh sure, programmatic ad partner. Come on in and own my space and put whatever you want in there." Programmatic means automated, if it means anything. So he goes and says "Okay, let's use this ad exchange..." It's AOL, or OpenEx or Yahoo!...
+Pretty soon, you don't know where those ads are coming from. They're coming from Russia, but they look like legitimate ads. And here's the crazy thing - sometimes if you scan their JavaScript, they all come with JavaScript, for tracking pixels to confirm that the ad was viewed, things like that. You don't see anything overtly bad; you might see some funny little image, a processing loop that maybe is commented innocuously look like it's doing something to do gamma correction on the image. What it's actually is taking a graphic decoding of an exploit kit loader from image pixel perturbations. In other words, it's taken out of the hiding, some kind of signal, a covert message in an image or a picture is being done to hide the guilty code that's gonna load the Angler exploit kit.
+This leads to the New York Times, BBC, AOL and other top sites in late March having ransomware malvertising on their properties. If you think about it, this is actually an outrage, right? Why should world-class online publishers tolerate this? Why should they not control the quality of the ads. Why shouldn't they have only direct, trusted relationships? Well, as I say, the bottom of the fold, and even the middle of the fold (middle of the page) ad spaces just aren't as valuable as the top, and even big publishers that have direct sales forces and their own tech teams and do beautiful, custom sponsorship ads...
+\[44:48\] My favorite example, Louis Vuitton handbags on Elle.com. That takes up the bottom half of the frontpage, it looks nice, it's a trustworthy ad as far as I know - there's very little third party about it; there's some tracking... It's a custom video ad from Questra or somebody, but it's pretty legit. That's not the problem. It's the stuff below that that all the publishers want to fill their space and make a little bit of money. Otherwise, if they leave the space dead, they're just leaving money on the table. And that leads to malware coming on the pages.
+To get back to Brave, we saw this coming. We said ad blocking - even in 2015 when we started - was rising. We started May 2015. We didn't know that iOS, thanks to Tim Cook, would start making ad blocking easy to use with Safari. They make it an app install model, instead of a browser extension model. They make it content blocking, and it rose quickly to the top of the app store last fall and it became very popular until it saturated short-term demand, and it changed the whole conversation. It made people across the ecosystem - from the marketers who spend on advertising, to the publishers who rely on whatever of that spend is left after all the middle players and the parasites have taken their skim - it made everybody say "Oh no, ad blocking is not going away. It's not just AdBlock Plus or uBlock Origin. Now it's iOS. It's Apple. And Apple had walked away from advertising as a business I think twice. But it wasn't just because ads are annoying or unaesthetic; that's a very shallow way to characterize it. Ads are actually dangerous, because they're over delegated through these ad exchanges, and there's no contractual relationship.
+Doug Crockford knew this. If you remember Doug's work at Yahoo! with AdSafe, which was a static verifier for JavaScript and was kind of like before Google Caja, which became Secure EcmaScript, AdSafe was Doug's very picky way of trying to get Yahoo! ads not to contain malware. This has been a longstanding problem, and as I said, it's under-reported because ransomware - the price the criminals extract is low enough people are embarrassed and they can pay it, get their system back... It's very hard to track these criminals down. But even ignoring the ransomware threat, just the privacy problem that your data profile is constantly being sucked out of your machine and you're not benefitting from it, you're actually suffering from increasingly worse ads, even ignoring the malware; just annoying ads. Retargeting, which is when you get hammered by an ad you've already seen... Because it sometimes nags you into buying something you wouldn't, or in the best case reminds you of something you forgot you do wanna buy. It has a little bit of lift, like a fraction of a percent, and that means that it's gonna get done; it's not gonna be left on the table. That money is not gonna be left on the table.
+So advertising has become this toxic parasite system, in my opinion. It's over delegated, there's too much principal versus agent conflict of interest, there are layers of that, and along with that, there are layers of confirmation bias in the data that's extracted in the model.
+\[47:54\] They say they have great data, all these ad tech companies; they wanna go public or they wanna get bought by Oracle, and they say they have magnificent data which will increase yield. But if you look year to year, the actual performance of advertising, the so-called yield, doesn't really go up. Money just goes from one pocket to a different pocket. Publishers are still suffering, and there are long-term negative externalities, like secular trends that are bad for everybody, like the rise of ad blocking and the rise of malvertising.
+Brave is trying to address this, but not just - I'm being very negative here - we're not just gonna cure something that's bad; we wanna make things actively better. We wanna make this anti-Google, personal Google. We want you to be in charge of your data, and that means not only should you not have bad ads or annoying ads or dangerous ads, you should have a piece of the action. You should get revenue, you should be able to control the terms of the economics. And if you don't want ads, you can donate, and then you can block guilt-free.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** There's a lot of nuance in here... You talked a little bit about misperception - the problem with advertising is more than it's just a visual distraction, but it's actually harmful. Do you think that nuance transfers to potential users of Brave? Because in some ways you are becoming that publishing platform, right? Or the publisher. Do you think that users will understand that your version of advertising is different from the type of advertising that they're currently exposed to?
+**Brendan Eich:** We don't know. That's a great question. I think among the early adopters, lead users, yes they get it. A lot of them are outraged by the malvertising stories that broke this spring. And it was really great for us, because we had the late March malware on the front page of New York Times, then we had on 7th April... I woke up and there's a letter from The Newspaper Association of America, counsels us to cease and desist, but we haven't anything yet to actually cease and desist; those words don't occur in the body, but it's full of threats and crazy legal theories, including that these Newspaper Association of America members own the copyright on those ads that we would be blocking. How could they own that, because it's malware from Russia, or whatever? They don't own the copyright; those ads are injected by JavaScript in your browser, running on your page, communicating with third party sites with ad exchanges. Nothing to do with New York Times. There's no creative work, ensemble work that has the ads.
+I think the lawyers - it's generally the associate GCs that join these trade groups, like Newspaper Association of America, now called The News Media Association... Newspapers have been in decades long of decline, but they view the ads as ink on paper. It's like we're sneaking up to grandma's porch and we're facing the ads that they printed on the Sunday New York Times and we're pasting up our own ads to trick grandma into transacting with our advertisers and us getting a piece of that action.
+First of all, we didn't do any such thing. We only talked about how it can be better if we did something like that. Second of all, there's no ink on page ad the New York Times owns. The ads are third party, they're placed with JavaScript. Another one of my guilty legacies with JavaScript is how it's used for third party ads.
+\[51:02\] There's really a deep topic here. Will people appreciate it? I think mainly people appreciate speed in browsers, they appreciate safety, and we're leading with those. Safety is a broad term, but I include privacy. People say, "Oh, you can't market privacy", but you can. Snapchat built up a good cohort doing disappearing messages. People care about things like secure communications. WhatsApp's doing end-to-end encryption.
+People care after a crisis. Snowden changed things for a lot of people. I think as things evolve, we'll have more concern about privacy. It's often driven by crises and revelations. People just didn't know they had a problem until they had one. So we don't need to get too detailed on the economics, but I wanted to paint a picture because there is a lot of money exchanging hands here, a lot of middle players taking big cuts, very little for the publisher.
+Brave cares about users first, and we think user attention is not fairly priced. We care about publishers, too. If you can't keep a website a going concern, the web's in trouble, so we'd like to see publishers get paid better. That's where we think, if we get the right experiments done with user opt-in and publisher opt-in, we could build a better (I almost wanna call it) promotion system. The idea with advertising online now -- Joe Marchese, founder of TrueX (I think Fox owns it now) said this: "You're shotgunning people's attention across ten thousand pages." That means you're wasting a lot of money, because first of all a lot of people guessed wrong, they didn't go to that site. Then you're retargeting them, which bugs them. You cross the line and they get an ad blocker. They're lost to you. What if you could just get the right information at the right time, in the right place, to the person who's likely to actually benefit from it and be happy with that marketing information? That's the ideal model for advertising.
+It solves what's called "Wanamaker's dilemma." There's this guy Jude Wanamaker who had a chain of department stores in Philly a hundred years ago, and he is alleged to have said - at least if I can get the quote right; it's not clear if he actually said this - "My problem with advertising is half my advertising budget is wasted, I just don't know which half." Even then, he was shotgunning newspapers or catalog ads, and some of them missed the target.
+Theoretically, with a very private system like Brave where your data is kept on device - we don't see it on our servers, we use zero-knowledge proofs to transact things like payments for donations or ad impression counts in aggregate; theoretically, you could keep that data secure; you could keep your own Facebook, your own Google, you could do your own ad business. It would be a very personal ad business; it would be a "right information at the right time" business. It would not be replacing one-for-one all those indirect ads that we block. It might even be using a different channel, like a full-screen video channel or a set-aside personal mall; some people might prefer to get an email once a week with promotions. These would be really well targeted, they wouldn't annoy you, they would give you a deep discount, because the marketing side wouldn't have to spend for those 10,000 ads, half of which or more (maybe 90% or more) miss the target.
+\[54:03\] That's the big idea with Brave. It goes to search too, because when you search with Google and Google does that great result - they're better than Bing, as I said; they'll probably always be better. They have the oldest data set, they have the oldest machine learning that's co-evolved with it. But what about your keywords that you type in? That's your data. Again, Brave's point of view is you own your own data. Not just your browsing history, what's visible, how you open the tab from another, where you are scrolling, but also your keyword queries to search engines. And that's a very hot data set that you should benefit from and we should protect on your device. So we're looking at the whole picture. And when I say anti-Google, I don't mean that in a hostile way, I mean somebody needs to build this. In a coming world where AI is everywhere, do you really need the cloud superpowers owning all your data? From your house, your cat, your own body monitors... I think there are scale advantages to the cloud and to clustering AI calculations there, but a lot of it is personal, a lot of it could be done in your home server, or even on your phone. So there should be tiers of AI and machine learning and tiers of data, where some of that data doesn't even leave your device. Maybe only abstracted summaries or anonymised summaries leave your device. That's the really big vision here, and I think people will build this. I see more signs startups are doing this. Instead of building some surveillance device based on cookies or search or everything in the cloud, they're doing local computation and doing things that can be defensively secured in your pocket or in your house. That's where Brave gets in.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That's a really good point to stop for our next break. When we come back, we'll dig in a bit deeper into how we can fund the web.
+**Break:** \[55:47\]
+**Nadia Eghbal:** One of the things I found really interesting about sustainability issues around developing and using browsers is that a lot of these challenges are really similar to funding and sustaining open source, and a lot of your work also dovetails with figuring out ways to support content creators and publishers. There's these trends across all these different kinds of really big, important institutions on the web, or really important ideas, but they're all clearly valued by society, but they're also really hard to finish and sustain. Why do you think it's so hard for us to find good answers to these problems.
+**Brendan Eich:** The story of my life. I was a Unix kernel hacker at Silicon Graphics before I ended up at Netscape, and I always worked on platform code... I think you see - it's pretty explicit now - open fintech through the Symphony Foundation and other things... You see a lot of companies realize that open source is better for quality assurance, recruiting, lots of things that traditionally they would have to pay for themselves, so they can share the cost of platform code, or what Georgios Kontaxis calls evolutionary kernel code. This is the sort of stable code that's conserved like the best DNA in a population. It's like the TCP/IP or JavaScript - once you stabilize it, everybody can build huge systems above, and sometimes even below it. You can have multiple link layers and go from Ethernet being 10 Mbps on copper, all the way up to fiber (metropolitan Ethernet or whatever ATM cells) and still have this TCP/IP in the middle, and sure, IPv6, but it's not really taking over, and it's all evolutionary. JavaScript ES6, here we go again!
+The platform code, the evolutionary kernel code that's sort of "the commons" in the best sense of the word, is a cost center. When I was at Silicon Graphics, as I developed hot, killer graphics, workstations and then high-end multi-processors and low-end desktop graphics workstation machines, eventually to be killed by the PC and the GPU in the '90s, the kernel group that I worked in and the network software group got kicked around. It was a cost center, it was an albatross, or else it was a source of talent for building out something important for the multiprocessor business. So they got kicked from the "hot product" group to the "not hot product" group and back. I think it even got divisionalized a little bit, not fully forked. HP did the same thing.
+I see a pattern here, where open source is serving the commons, it's not serving the differentiated, risky or for-profit innovation, that for better or worse some of that stuff stays proprietary. But anything that starts to become a platform, starts to become a cost center and needs to have its costs shared if it's of interest to many other players. And how do you fund that? I wouldn't say it's exactly like publishers, because publishers often are for-profit. But not always - Dow Jones was a long-time family-owned and subsidized... In some ways we need Carlos Slim and Jeff Bezos to prop up the nation's number one and two papers of record, right?
+\[01:00:22.27\] Newspapers have been in a decades-long decline, and they always relied on advertising and subscriptions, and subscriptions never paid for the whole thing; they were always a minority of the revenue needed to run a newspaper business, even back in the heyday, the golden age of newspapers. Because people would subscribe, and there was some revenue you made there, but advertising paid the bulk of it, and that's still true.
+The way I look at this is not to say "We must have advertising. Advertising is always good." There was a TV executive I heard about in the '50s who said, "It's inconceivable that television will ever be other than free and advertising-supported", and of course we have Netflix now, so never say never. Maybe the Brave donation model, in some future frictionless micro-donation, micro-payment, micro-royalty world will suffice. We still have free television with ads for sure, even with Netflix. But if you look at how costs are covered, you have to look at what's happening today. If 70 billion is spent on ads in the U.S. (I think this year, or maybe it was last year), and Facebook and Google are taking a lot of it (they're taking 80%) and the increment in spending from last year - maybe it went from 60 to 70 - of that 10 billion increment they're 90%, that's not leaving a lot for the publishers. And if you look at how the publishers do their ad businesses, they have to pay if they sell direct ad space. If they do indirect, they're at the mercy of malware, like I said, but they're also getting far less, because there's so many people in the middle, cutting out from the pie; by the time the pie gets from the marketing side to the publisher, there's very little left - 35-40% or less.
+Still, that's a lot of money. That's billions of dollars a year, and these companies need to get it, so how would you go about replacing that? Assume for a moment things need to be replaced as is, that we won't get a better model, we won't find fusion energy, like Sam Altman thinks would make electricity free - I kind of doubt that - but ceteris paribus (all else equal), how would you replace that 70 billion? I think about that a lot. First of all, I think a lot of it is wasted on ads that never are viewed. This is the big scandal that's been breaking for the last year or so, thanks to my friends at White Ops Security; there was another group whose acronym I'm forgetting - ANA I think, that did a study that showed there was a lot of fraud and kickback nonsense going on...
+\[01:02:56.04\] A lot of ads aren't being viewed. Facebook recently announced that its video ad metrics were off, way high from what they actually were. And they were charging accordingly, so people are kind of mad about this. But we have computers, we have smartphones; we could theoretically do a very private platform that measures what you're interested in without giving away your data profile or your privacy, and matches valuable opportunities to you and give you a cut. That makes me think there's a way to fund the web even if it's not a commons. But certainly, for things like a publisher site that is more of a commons - obviously, Wikipedia is an example, but there are others - or all the open source software that everybody wants to share the cost of, because it is a cost centre, it is even an evolutionary kernel in some sense, and it has to be sustained by everybody who's chipping in. I think there are ways to fund it, it's just we haven't found the ways to do it. That's why Brave's doing Bitcoin under the hood. It's not because we love Bitcoin; we don't want everyone to learn about Bitcoin. We do not intend people to have to become Bitcoin gurus. We haven't announced yet, we're doing a deal where you can easily just trust us with your credit card to do a recurring small charge to get Bitcoins; you don't have to think about it at all. Currently, the way you fund your Brave wallet while we're doing this Brave payments, beta is with Coinbase (we've partnered with Coinbase), but you still have to think a little bit about Bitcoin. And the publisher side, they're getting Bitcoin out; we're gonna make that easy to get fiat [currency] out.
+We'd like to use something like Bitcoin though because we think there's a future where you have a frictionless system - no interchange charge, none of the hidden charges that are associated with the credit cards where fraud sticks the merchant with the overhead or the cost of having funds clawed back to the bank. The interchange charge is like 2,15% or something (it varies), but the hidden cost of fraud is high, and a lot of merchants have to eat it. It's not a good deal for them, especially the small businesses.
+\[01:04:57.10\] So I think there's something coming to the web in terms of frictionless payments, whether it's Bitcoin, or Ethereum classic, or son of daughter of redhead's stepchild of both... There's something coming there, and the important properties are the permissionless property, no intermediary, frictionless property... Ideally, it would be anonymous and capable of doing micro transactions with Bitcoin as not currently. But that's why Brave has this Brave payment solution - we solve that ahead of some next-generation solution that is coming to Bitcoin. And we want to, again, make it just work with your native fiat currency. If that happens, then I think it will be easier to micro-tip, micro-donate, have micro royalties.
+Think about the Ted Nelson's project Xanadu vision, and now think about VR if it ever takes off, or AR, because it really should be in our sunglasses. In ten years it probably will be, then all the great stuff creative people build for the augmented or virtual world - you can't really DRM it. It's a shared world, there's too many eyeballs to ray trace and path trace to. You can't say, "These are encrypted pixels and you cannot touch them, or we'll put you in jail under the DMCA."
+All your models and your texture art - they're gonna be out there, just like they were in Second Life. How do you protect that stuff? Well, you can watermark it; that's a traditional method, it goes back to real-world paintings and documents. That is more of an identification system for prosecuting gross copyright violations after the fact. What if you could just have automatic micro royalties, like
+Ted Nelson envisioned? People are looking at or using, or borrowing, or creative-commons-ing, meshing up some bit of art - there's a micro royalty associated to the artist. That can be automated too, and that's another thing that I think you can do with cryptocurrencies if you do them right. That should be part of the web standard, future AR web. I'll pause there because I've said a lot, but you can see that there's a big vision here, and I hope it's exciting to everybody because it goes way beyond just browsers.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Totally.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I like that the way that you're talking about it too is that Brave is just a pioneer in this space, and not necessarily the only place that's going to do this. It's actually similar to how we got a lot of things in other browsers; there was always one browser that kind of lead the way, for some reason, and then everybody else followed suit.
+**Brendan Eich:** Yes, absolutely. And it took Firefox to restart that, because IE was on skeleton crew and Microsoft was tired of the web and wanted to go back to Windows lock-in. Yes, absolutely, it takes some innovation.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I think it's bold that you are experimenting with a couple of different revenue models with Brave, where you have something that's a little bit more experimental, like the micropayments, and you acknowledge it's experimental. Then you're also looking at what is working right now, where does money come from now, and can we just kind of like work with that in the advertising world?
+\[01:07:51.24\] I feel like we see that tension a lot in open source, where some really useful tools in open source - that shall not be named - are not necessarily open source themselves, because they've recognized the need to have centralized, big solutions, but then sometimes it's really okay to democratize stuff or to try smaller, experimental things.
+**Brendan Eich:** Definitely. We have to experiment, but as a business we also have to figure something out, because we can't just keep raising venture capital, as Mikeal was joking earlier. And I think it should be possible to have a going concern... You mentioned where the money goes today, and it goes to ads, and ads are kind of compromised by this indirection through third parties you can't trust, and that's a problem. So anything we did that was replacing that means of getting funds to publishers would have to be less delegated, more secure by design, and that's what we're working on. It's still kind of a two-edged sword, because people hear ads and they just think "Yuck!" or "Doesn't that put you in conflict with your users?"
+That's why we say the user should get the same revenue share we get - 50/50 between us and the user as far as the amount. It's not like we're trying to say "Only to us." We could even give it all to the user at first. At some point we have to sustain ourselves, so I'm not sure what the balance would be. We're starting with 50/50 because we wanna align the user's interest with ours. And if we do a good job defending the data, then I think many things are possible. But ads are the thin edge of the wedge. So much is misspent on them today that it's attractive to try to bend the system or form it a bit, and that's why anything we do would be privately matched -- I haven't talked about this, but we wouldn't do any cookies or signals for Brave users. It would be all based on device matching. It's like you get a catalog of available ad URL with two or three keywords associated with each. Then, based on your local machine learning, you evolve a set of two or three keywords that might be good to promote, and you'd match those against the catalog. That can be done with no signals out; you just download the same catalog everyone downloads once a week, or whenever the campaigns roll out.
+That's just one idea. We have the zero knowledge proof protocol, Anonize-based protocol for confirming the ads were viewed. Because at the end of the day, all that the marketers care about is that there were millions of authentic impressions; they don't wanna identify each of those people by name. Some people do - the middle players who build data profiles do. They're the ones we want to actually go away. I'm sorry, but somebody's gotta lose. Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch. I'm friends with some of them... But there's too many of them, they're taking too much money out of the system, they're running away with your data and privacy, and they're letting malware in. When I tell a story, I like to not make it sound like everybody wins. Not everybody wins.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** One thing that I'd like to get to before we close out - you've made the decision to do this all open source; there's probably a lot of market reasons to continue to do all this open source. But a lot of the work that you're doing funnels into open standards and open source work. it ends up becoming this diffused benefit over time to a bunch of other competitors to your business. So what is the justification and what is the internal logic that you have as a business, and how do you put this to your investors where "It is this clear benefit for us to do it this way"?
+**Brendan Eich:** \[01:11:15.03\] It's pretty easy. First of all, we're an ad-blocking browser, and browsers see all your browsing data in history. People wouldn't trust us if we were closed source. They'd think, "If you're talking about anything, even if it's opt-in at first (like ads), you could be spyware, you could be this class of scummy toolbars that does ad injection." Very dirty business, we don't wanna go near it.
+Being open source lets us be auditable, both in terms of the code being all readable and auditable, and we can have audits... We're having least authority audit our payments system right now. We hope to have the Tor folks audit us, we also can have verified builds, at least on Debian. It's hard to get verified builds... They might come to Windows and Mac through the toolchains from the OS vendors. Verified builds means you know the bits don't contain a backdoor, because you can prove that they came from a certain vintage of all open source.
+Open source is pretty darn important just for optics and trust, and I think it should be. I think people should audit us, and we welcome it. We just launched our HackerOne security Bug Bounty Program too, and open source makes that just a lot easier and better, even though you can... You can do black box bug bounties, but it's just a pain.
+Proprietary code doesn't really work for us. What I think matters beyond trust and, as you say, eventual standardization, is our brand is really tied to our users. It's not like we're gonna have a partner who keeps us going. It's really our users growing to tens of millions and maybe beyond, and that brand value is sticky. I think if they trust us and our code is auditable and we do a good job in our ultimate suite of micro-donations and ad-blocking, tracking protection, anti-fingerprinting, maybe even optional ads that share revenue with you that are matched privately and confirmed anonymously - all that stuff happens. We'll have a huge, good kind of lock-in just from the user trust. Other browsers could implement what we've done. It could become web standards - I don't care, they'll be late to the party and they'll be competing with us on a footing that users will benefit from, which is "Are they trustworthy? Did I get a good revenue share? Am I getting my micro-donations through to my publishers with a low fee?", things like that.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That's great. It's a great way to close it. Thanks for coming on, Brendan. This was fantastic.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, thanks Brendan.
+**Brendan Eich:** No problem. It was fun to talk about the old days, too. \[laughs\]
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, always.
+**Brendan Eich:** Alright, thanks. See ya!

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+**Nadia Eghbal:** I’m Nadia Eghbal.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And I’m Mikeal Rogers.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** On today’s show, Mikeal and I talk with Max Ogden, creator of Dat, an open source decentralized tool for distributing data sets. Max has also done a lot of work in the Node.js ecosystem, including helping start NodeSchool and publishing hundreds of modules to npm. He was also one of the first Code for America fellows.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Our focus on today’s episode with Max is around grant funding. We talked about how he figured out grants were right for developing Dat, and how he managed to find his first funders.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** We also got into the mechanics of grant funding. Max shared what it’s like to work with grant funders, and how to build those early relationships if you’re looking for grants yourself.
+So Max, you have an interesting story in terms of how you ended up at Code for America. Can you tell us a little bit about how you ended up there?
+**Max Ogden:** Yeah, actually, it was fortuitous, or random, at least to me at the time. Maybe it was all planned out, I have no idea. I was attending an event around OSCON, which used to be in Portland every year, and they moved it down to Austin this year. OSCON was cool; I could never afford to go, but it was interesting because it would bring all these open source people into Portland. One year, there was a CivicApps competition here in Portland that I was participating in. The city was trying to get people to use their open data. I was at an award ceremony for that, and received an award for some CivicApp that I had made.
+I had a thing called a PDX API that took the datasets from the city of Portland, and made them accessible to developers. In the audience was Tim O’Reilly, who owns O’Reilly Books and runs OSCON. He came up to me afterwards and he goes, “Hey, we’re starting this new thing called Code for America. Here’s my card. You should definitely apply to be a fellow.” This was about nine months before the first Code for America fellowship term started. I was like, “Holy cow, this is crazy!” I had started talking with the Code for America folks and I applied for the fellowship, and got the fellowship. I had to quit my job and then move to California. It was a big… It was a very quick succession of events that I didn’t see coming that totally changed my life, definitely, in many ways. So it was this one… It seemed random to me at the time, but I was in the right place at the right time.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I actually met you when you got the award, I was at the same thing. That was the first time I met you; you were actually 19 or 20 at the time, but you still had that giant beard. \[laughter\]
+**Max Ogden:** Nice. I didn’t realize that you were there. That’s crazy. I never knew that.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, yeah. We were there with J. Chris and talked about CouchDB stuff, and the upcoming event… The upcoming Couch camp thing that we were going to do. Max is actually the first person to buy a ticket to the first event that I ever ran, in 2009.
+**Max Ogden:** \[laughs\]
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Wow! Way to go, Max.
+**Max Ogden:** Yeah, I remember when I first went to Oakland, right after I moved down to the Bay area. Or maybe I visited the Bay area ahead of time, but basically the first person I met up with was Mikeal. He had biked to a really cool coffee shop, and I was like, “Whoa, Oakland is awesome!” I ended up living there for four years. A lot of transformative things happened for me in 2010. \[laughter\]
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Can you talk about that a little bit? Just how… I think you had a startup before you were at Code for America. It sounds like Code for America helped you think about different applications of code in ways you hadn’t necessarily done before for work.
+**Max Ogden:** \[04:03\] Yeah, before that I was working at a great team at a company, but the product wasn’t anything that I was passionate about. It was qualitative market research. It was boring; I didn’t feel strongly about helping companies target their products. But I got super lucky because the team was super supportive, and it was a really good place for me as a college dropout to learn all the things that I needed to learn to be a functioning, contributing programmer to society. I really feel like I got… Nowadays, I feel like I was ahead of the curve. This was like the mid-2000s, late-2000s, I was a junior programmer, and the dream of a junior programmer is to get on a team where you’re supported and mentored, and given challenges, and not expected to work weekends. Portland is pretty cool, because the culture here is very family and personal-oriented, and not about “working for your company at all costs.” I feel like I was ahead of the curve then, because now I talk to junior programmers, and they’re like, “Ah, I wish I could get any job where I’m supported and mentored, but there’s no jobs available for that.” There’s this huge influx of people coming in, and I don’t think a lot of companies know how to mentor people, so I’m just incredibly grateful that I had an awesome mentor early on. So shout out to Dan Herrera, if he’s listening.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Whoo! Dan Herrera!
+**Max Ogden:** He taught me everything that I know.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** That’s a really lucky opportunity.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, that’s awesome. When you did PDX API, one of the premises of it was, “Don’t try to provide data to developers in something that they can't understand. Just give me the data, and I’ll make it accessible to developers.” \[laughs\] Which was interesting, because you didn’t have a lot of inroads with the people publishing the data at the time. But when you went in to Code for America, there you were paired with a municipality, and you were working with the government to produce something. Can you tell me a little bit about what that transition was like? Rather than just pushing something to developers that you get over a wall, but actually working with specific governments.
+**Max Ogden:** Yeah. The human side of code that I learned through that process was… Previously, I think you nailed it in the question, actually. Previously, I was an outsider. I was a volunteer and I didn’t feel like I could actually influence the things the people that were working for the government could do, technically. I just assumed their process was set in stone, and they weren’t interested in me, as some random person who wasn’t official and wasn’t paid to help them. I just did what I could; I took their data, and tried to make useful on the outside.
+I think the stroke of genius in the model of Code for America… I mean, they copied Teach for America, it’s very overtly modeled on that. I think the Teach for America model is you embed people. The Code for America model is about embedding. One of the really cool things about the Code for America program was you show up, and the first week is about understanding government culture, and how you can be an agent of change to show them alternative ways of doing things with technology. But an emphasis that it’s not technical, it’s a human problem. It’s a lot of social problems, and it's a lot of incentive problems. We actually had a negotiation workshop, which was really, really useful. I still use the principles that I learned in that, every day. I had thought negotiation was about — if somebody is trying to detonate a bomb, you have to talk them down off of a ledge. It turns out that negotiation is if you’re talking to anyone, in your day-to-day life, and you’re trying to be nice to them, that’s what negotiation is about. It’s about having respect for people’s point of views, coming to a positive outcome.
+\[08:02\] So the fact that Code for America didn’t have us do a bunch of technical things on our first week, but instead they had us talk about being change agents, being effective negotiators, I think speaks a lot to us about how they knew that it was essentially about embedding us inside of government, and having us inspire people with new ideas, and have an influx of crazy ideas that came out of it.
+Going into it, I thought it was a technical thing. I thought I was going to be like, “Okay, I’ll go make a bunch of cool APIs, or build a bunch of cool apps.” By the end of it I realized that people inside of governments aren’t exposed to ideas like open source as much, because the hiring and procurement systems are essentially broken. They don’t have any way to compete with talent, for people that go and work at Google.
+The Code for America model is you literally get people to quit their jobs at Google for a year, or go on a sabbatical, and then you get them to become government employees. I didn’t come from Google, I came from this smaller company, but the general idea is practicing people from the tech industry get to go and do a year of public service. What was cool about it was I actually became a government employee; I went through the ethics training at the City of Boston, I had a “@cityofboston.gov” email address, I mean, it was the whole shebang. I was an official employee in the Mayor’s office.
+That was really empowering for me, because now I was on the other side of the wall, so to speak. When I was in Portland, I was just this random person that was volunteering; I didn’t feel like I had any power to actually change anything. Now suddenly I was a City of Boston employee, and I felt my opinions were valid on things, and I could set up meetings with CIOs, and talk to them about, “Hey, why are you procuring this horrible software, why aren’t you procuring open source software, for example?” That was super cool, I feel like it was a hack.
+The Code for America hacked two things at once; they gave me a lot of confidence that my opinions did matter, because it made me feel like I was the expert coming in, and trying to help people understand they don’t have to buy horrible software, and hire people with horrible credentials; they can actually do things in a more progressive and modern, open source way. To them, it was exciting; they had somebody coming in and had a lot of excitement and enthusiasm. I definitely had a lot of people telling me they were surprised that they didn’t make me shave to work at Boston City Hall; I had a giant beard walking down Boston City Hall. It was definitely a bit of a culture change thing on purpose.
+The point of it was you go into a city for a year, and you try to make some cool things. By the end of the year, you don’t just leave and the things go away. The idea is that by the end of it, you’ve given the city a different lens to view the process for developing software.
+Actually, the hardest thing about it was that we had to come up with a way of contracting for support for the open source apps that we did, because they were deployed on Heroku and they didn’t know how to maintain Heroku services. It turned out that the biggest outcome of the entire thing was we had to draft a new procurement policy for the City of Boston that let them support open source software, have a support contract with an open source vendor. That was a totally new, groundbreaking thing for them because usually the support contracts are built into these huge multimillion-dollar contracts, but the idea that they could have a $5,000-open source support contract just so that if the app went down, they had somebody that they could call to help them. It was those small wins that were the long-lasting effects, whereas going into it, I didn’t know procurement was going to be the focus of all our efforts.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** \[12:06\] That’s an awesome story. That was 2011, right? You started Dat a couple years later, right?
+**Max Ogden:** Yeah.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I’m assuming some of those experiences ended up feeding into the kind of work you ended up doing/living for?
+**Max Ogden:** The last couple months when I was working at the City of Boston, I ended up working on a bunch of different little prototype applications. We were working with the public school system, so we ended up… Another big thing we didn’t see was how much time we spent talking to lawyers about student data, and learned a lot of things about what we can and can’t use in terms of datasets to build applications, because of privacy issues. For a yearlong fellowship, near the end, I started working on the kind of things that I had been working on in Portland, which was a better way to disseminate the data that the city already had, and make it available to people to build things, like data platforms. My motivating factor was data is read-only, usually. When the city has data that they collect, they collect it for their own purposes, and if they have an open-data policy, they make it available to people. But they don’t make it available in a GitHub way, they make it available in a “download our CSV” way. People, if they used the data and found errors in the data or wanted to clean up the dataset… Say that I’m building the application, and I have users that are contributing data that the city might want to know about. For example, if I have a jogging application, and I have a better dataset than the city has of where the ‘joggable’ paths are inside of parks, wouldn’t the city want to have higher quality data about where pathways are versus their potentially out-of-date dataset? The idea of having a dataset be read-write was a motivating factor for me. But there was basically no version control tool for datasets that was out there, so I started going down that rabbit hole a little bit. I was like, “Oh, this is a huge project; this is going to take a lot of time.” I didn’t work on it after the fellowship, for about a year or maybe a year-and-a-half, and then I was like, “Oh, nobody is doing this still, I should probably do it.” Then I started pursuing the idea of Dat more as like a full-time thing.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So it sounds like the genesis of it was around government data, but the project now is mainly focused on scientific data, and science. How did that transition get made?
+**Max Ogden:** It was also this fortuitous meeting. I had gone to the Mozilla festival, which is an awesome festival. It’s basically nine conferences at once in this big building in London. And it’s all these different open knowledge, open culture, open science, open source, open journalism, open data... It’s all these different, awesome, overlapping communities. I went to this thing, and I had a prototype of Dat that I had developed. I think I gave a lightning talk on it, and this grant officer from a foundation came up to me, who was at the conference, and he said, “Hey I saw that you’re doing stuff around dataset sharing, and better tools for syncing datasets, and you’re working on government. Have you ever thought about scientific users?”
+And I was like, “Well, I think science is really cool, but I’m a college dropout; I have no credentials, I don’t really know…”
+\[15:58\] He actually said, “I think what you’re doing is exactly what a lot of scientists need right now, but you don’t know it yet.” \[laughs\]
+I was like, “Whoa, okay. That’s interesting.” I think he ended up being totally right. So the funder actually approached me, and convinced me to work on their social issue, so to speak. I thought that was really interesting; just getting a prototype out there, and going to the right conference where you have this interdisciplinary crowd, and declaring to the world, “Hey, I’m working on this thing. Here’s a prototype.” For me, it worked out, because somebody said, “Oh, I totally need that, but it’s in this area that you don’t know that you should be working on yet.” It helps that they were also a person that could write grants. That was another moment that totally changed the course of... My last four years was this one chance meeting at the Mozilla festival; I think it was 2013.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Awesome. We’re about to head into our break, but when we return, we’ll dive into the grant process, and some of the more organizational aspects.
+**Break:** \[17:10\]
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Alright, we’re back with Max Ogden of the Dat project, and we’re talking about grant funding. So I’m curious, Max, when you started doing this, it sounds like you fell into this fortuitous meeting with a grant funder, but how did you know that grant funding was right for you with this project? Why didn’t you just build Dat in your spare time?
+**Max Ogden:** I would give a lot of credit to the Knight Foundation. They have been doing a lot of work to try to make grant funding less scary. One of the things that they’ve done, which… I think I was the first person to get one of these, just because I was a right-place-right-time thing. It was called the Knight Prototype Fund. Usually, their grants are multiyear commitment, and they take a lot more work upfront, because you’re planning waterfall-style for this multi-year period. That’s the traditional grant structure, you’re doing these bigger projects. And Knight said, “If it takes three years to evaluate if something worked or not, that’s kind of a long turnaround time”, so instead they came up with the prototype. Originally it was $50,000 for six months, for one person to make a prototype of something and test an idea out, and they revised it, so now it’s $30,000. It’s full-time or part-time; if you don’t have the time to quit your job, or if you don’t want to make a huge risk doing a multi-year thing on something you’re not sure about yet... They even want you to take the prototype and develop it into a full grant, that’s how they see the pathway going.
+I think progressive-thinking around smaller funding is really interesting. The only reason I got into this was because I could start small. I didn’t know enough to write a huge grant at the beginning. ‘Huge’ meaning more than one person for six months.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** \[19:51\] Yeah, definitely I want to explicitly plug the Knight prototype thing, because I’ve heard really good experiences around it. We’ll get into it later, but why grants are so scary to people. I think part of it is because you have these enormous amounts of money, or you have these multi-year commitments. I really like that that one’s much shorter, and with smaller amounts of money.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So let’s get into that a bit, and deconstruct this. What is grant writing? How does this even work? \[laughs\]
+**Max Ogden:** I probably have a different answer than a lot of people. The word ‘grant’ could mean government grants, it could mean EU grants... I have someone that I work with that’s in Denmark, they don’t have this phenomenon of eccentric billionaires, either alive or dead, that give away all their money away through a trust, because they’re trying to evade taxes, so they setup a giant, shareable trust. Like Howard Hughes - I think he’s the third largest endowment in the world. That was started so Howard Hughes could hide his tax money from the US Government. When he died, there was all this money, and they were like, “Oh, we could start a medical institute, and make grants with it.” They actually run an entire neuroscience facility off of the income, the accrued interest, on the original endowment, because there’s so much money in that.
+So that’s an American thing, the philanthropic private foundations that are like these eccentric, mostly white male, rich billionaire people. All of our grants have been dead rich-billionaires, however there are also alive rich-billionaires, such as Bill Gates.
+I didn’t realize that was an American phenomenon. In Europe, they have a functioning government that makes grants. Most of the grants… Say you’re Danish, and you want to go get a grant. Because everybody pays so much taxes, and they don’t have as much private philanthropy, you end up getting your grants from the government, but they have way more developed government grant programs. In the US, when you get a grant it’s usually really big, and you have to be a pretty big institution. So those are actually pretty intimidating.
+I don’t think I’ll ever get a US government grant. I think I could get an EU grant if I was an EU citizen, doing what I do now, because they’re targeted at smaller things a lot of the time. The EU grants also get a lot bigger, so it depends on where you’re at. So that’s the first thing - don’t expect… If you’ve heard one person’s grant experience, there’s probably way different levels of grants, so just learning how to navigate which grants you actually want to go for is the first step.
+To me, it’s not about the grant writing. The grant writing happens once you’ve developed a relationship with the person that you’re writing the grant for. If you don’t take anything away from this entire interview, I would say if you want to go down the path of getting grant money for open source, you have to start building the relationships now, and it takes years of time to develop those relationships. That’s the biggest disappointment when I talk to people about…
+Because people are like, “Okay, I can go get VC and start a company that does this open source thing” and they figure out ways to make money out of it. What’s really cool about VCs is you get money really quickly, but you have to, down the road, make these compromising decisions, where you have to weigh your values against the shareholder income returns, and stuff like that.
+With grants, you don’t get money quickly, you get money slowly, but then you never have to make…
+Yeah, sometimes very slowly. But, the cool thing about it is you never have to make those judgment calls. You’re always working on what you want to be working on, because you had to go through this process that you’ve… The grant process to me is finding somebody that trusts you, and then writing…
+\[23:49\] The grant itself is the contract between you and the funder. It’ like, “Here’s the mission that I’m working on", and they’re never going to be like… I haven’t had any experiences like this, at least; I think that some people have had this happen to them, but I guess I’ve been lucky. I’ve never had a funder come to me and say, “Hey, change what you’re working on. You have to do this now.” I, at least, don’t feel like they have influence over my day-to-day direction. I’ve already, upfront, established what it is that the mission is, and they basically just give you money and a time window so that you can pursue that mission. All they want at the end of it is to know what happened, and what went wrong; they want a report.
+You end up doing a grant write-up at the beginning, that’s the pitch. “Here’s what I want to work on, can we agree?” And then you do a report at the middle, and at the end. That all actually comes after you spend a lot of time finding the right foundation, in the US for example. Finding the right foundation, and building the relationships. Ideally you want the funder to approach you and say, “Hey it would be really cool if you apply to us with this idea.”
+So that process is… People have different ways of doing it. For me, I worked at Code for America, which was found by I think six foundations. Code for America was pretty well funded in the private foundation space, and because also I was working at Code for America - that was the year I got to start doing open source full-time, because Code for America encourages all the fellows to do open source for everything, so that it can be reusable. So because I was doing open source full-time, I started getting more involved in open source communities, and I started going to more community events, meeting more people, and networking. The combination of working for a non-profit that was grant-funded and going to events in that ecosystem meant that I met funders face-to-face. I can’t stress how important that is.
+If you take one thing away from this entire thing, don’t go… I love JS Comp, for example, and I love NodeConf, but you’re not going to meet people from the Knight Foundation at a JavaScript conference. You meet them at a… I used to go to this conference called the Civic Media conference, MIT would host it. I was living in the City of Boston for the Code for America fellowship, and when you go to a conference that’s about… It could still be a technically-focused conference, or a technology conference, but when it’s focused on a specific issue… The Civic Media conference is about the way that information is used in society; it’s this high-level idea, but at least it’s a particular social direction. When you go to those kinds of conferences, you immediately start meeting other people that are funded by grants, or you meet the people that make the grants, like the foundation people. I think the key to grant funding is not looking at it through a technical lens, but looking at it through a holistic lens, like, “What am I actually going to do with the technology?” and then finding out the events for that, going to the events, and meeting the people. Once you have the relationships, the rest of it — the actual grant processing starts. I think if you start writing grants without those relationships, nine times out of ten grants won’t get approved.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I would echo that, like a thousand percent. \[laughs\] Even hearing you talk about it, it reminds me a lot of venture capital. The advice is really similar, which is build real relationships with investors. Ideally, you want them to come to you, saying, “This is a really great fit for us,” versus cold applying to an email address, and hoping that someone will get back to you. You did a great job deconstructing how some of that could be less scary than you think. But yeah, meet them where they’re at, and go to events where they are, or find…
+\[27:54\] The way I got my Ford funding was through a mutual connection. I wasn’t even looking for funding, but I explained what I was doing, and that person was like, “Oh, I know who you should be talking to.”
+I think there’s this running theme, even in this conversation, around intersectionality, and going out of your own sector to get inspiration from different sectors, which is both creatively stimulating, but also allows you to meet people outside of your technical network. I think that’s really important.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. You've mentioned… You’ve gotten a lot grants, and they seem to be stepping up in terms of the amount of money that you’re getting over time. I’m wondering if you could just walk us through the grants that you’ve gotten, and any changes that may have happened to the project, or changes in direction you may have gone down in order to get those grants, in order to work with those… You said that you’re not changing mid-course, but it does seem like if you’re now going from a $500,000-grant to a $3-million-grant, lining up with their goals in the beginning might shift some of the project direction a little bit.
+**Max Ogden:** So I’ve got four grants to date and working on a fifth, but I can’t really… That one’s not done, so I can’t really talk about that one. \[laughs\] I want to be transparent as much as I can, but the grant people like to wait until it’s announced, so that there can be a PR thing, so I can’t really announce that one…
+**Mikeal Rogers:** You want to be open, but you also want to get that money, right?
+**Max Ogden:** Exactly. I want to be clear though, I am very pro-transparency. If anybody listening has questions that I didn’t cover, feel free to email me or DM me on Twitter, and I can send you my budget, and everything like that. So the four grants that I’ve got, the first one was for the prototype, and that was $50,000. It was for me to work for six months on the prototype of Dat. The Knight Foundation said, “Hey you were working on this stuff for Code for America, you never really continued working on it. We have this new thing, the prototype grant. We were wondering if you were interested in building a prototype of that stuff that you never got a chance to finish working on for Code for America, and just see what happens.”
+I was like, “Okay, awesome. $50,000 to work on an open source project is pretty cool.” So I did that, and it was just me. That was in the summer of 2013, I think. Then I went to MozFest that winter, and it was at the tail end, so I’m like, “Okay, I’m about to figure out what I’m going to do next” but then I met this funder from the Sloan Foundation, whose name is Josh Greenberg. Josh basically is the person who came up to me and said, “Hey, have you thought about working on scientific stuff?”
+So far, I’m two-for-two. I had the foundations come to me, find me, and say, “Do you want to work on this stuff?" At that point, I had invested years of unpaid open source work into the ecosystem. At Code for America, I actually took a pay cut to move to San Francisco. So it doesn’t really make a lot of sense financially until this point. I want to be clear, I could make twice as much —I’m not being arrogant— I could make twice, or three times as much working at a start-up than I do now. But relative to non-profits, I think I make more than average. I think $50K for six months was about the same burn rate that I have now. Actually, everybody on my team makes $96,000 a year, because that’s $8,000 a month, which makes the grant forecasting really easy. So all full-time employees right now, we all make $96,000 a year. If you talk to tech people, that’s really low, but if you talk to nonprofit people, it’s above average. It’s like we tried to strike a balance between not making tech people not want to have the jobs, but at the same time, supporting people.
+\[31:51\] So the first grant was six months. The second grant — I think it was $260,000 for a year. That was because I basically said, “Hey, I don’t want to work on this alone. I need a team.” Then I was able to hire two people. That was a huge moment for me, going from… I remember I had discussions with my partner, Jessica, at the time. I was like, “Well, I’m working on this thing alone, and it kind of sucks, because I don’t have any co-workers, and I’ve been doing it for a while. It would be awesome if I had people, like teammates.”
+When I got that first Sloan grant, it was huge, because now I could start building the team up. The project went to three people after a year. We got the Sloan grant, and Josh said, “I want to pay you so that you prioritize scientific use cases. Because if we don’t pay you…” He basically justified the grant, like if he doesn’t pay us, we’re going to find funding from some other sources to focus on other problems. He wanted us to prioritize to work on his issue, which was scientific reproducibility. So, I haven’t really said anything about that yet, but the TL;DR on that is when scientists publish their work online, it’s important that other scientists are able to access the paper that they wrote, and also all the underlying data and code that they used to produce the papers so that an actual collaborative process can occur, or a fact-checking, peer review process can occur. Essentially, all of the public money that gets poured into public research, it’s important that all of those research outputs are saved forever, so that science can still happen in the future.
+What happens today is that the data never gets shared. If it does get shared the link breaks, and nobody can find the dataset, or the researcher moves to another university, and it’s on a hard drive that nobody knows where it is anymore, because the person’s not working there anymore. There’s just a lack of good solutions in this space around ensuring that the data that underlies research is still available, or available at all in the first place. So that’s the mission of the Sloan Foundation, among other things. You may have heard their slogan, if you’ve listened to other podcasts. Let me try to channel it.
+It’s like, “The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, supporting the furthering of science and technology in the modern world,” or whatever. They’re very science-focused. \[laughing\]
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Now we’re a proper NPR podcast.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Right? \[laughter\]
+**Max Ogden:** Exactly! Maybe they’ll come do this podcast now, because they’ll be like, “Hey, you said the thing! Now we’ll give you money.” \[laughter\]
+They’re very science-focused. They’re very clear about saying, “We want to prioritize you to work on science.” I actually thought that was cool, because I think science is cool. What happened was, we had this first one-year grant that established the team. What we had to do was make a commitment to working with scientists, but it was basically like an R&D project. Nobody knew what the solutions were. Basically, they only knew what the problems were. The problem was that no data was getting shared. They didn't know what the solution was, though. So we were in a unique position where we had to figure out what we were building, and the only way I knew how to do that was by getting embedded into the problem. So the way that we wrote that first grant was, “Let’s partner…”
+Grant people always want you to have metrics, so that they can measure if you’re slacking off, or not. At the end of it, they can evaluate… Because they write a lot of grants, and they want to be able to evaluate grants using high-level metrics. Our metrics were, "Let’s partner with a certain number of labs." That was our main requirement. We made a commitment... They’re going to pay us, we’re going to get people to work directly with a certain amount of scientific labs, and really try to understand their process. And at the end of it, we’ll try to produce some software that is usable by these people in order to change their workflows, or encourage better data-sharing workflows.
+\[35:59\] It was actually really fun, because in the grant it was like, “Okay, we’ll do four really in-depth partnerships with labs.” We got to work with astrophysicists, with DNA researchers, with social scientists... It was super fun, because I got to learn a lot, and I got to really challenge my notion of what data sharing was. I had stuff that worked for city governments, but then when we went to work with scientists, they were like, “Yeah, well my data is literally a million times bigger than that.” Or, “I’m using this file format that no one else has ever heard of, except the 19 people that use this.” It was a lot of really good challenges. For me, that was why the grant existed. Nobody was working on these problems, because in science, you’re not paid to write software, and that’s one of the big issues.
+I mentioned incentives earlier... I think grants are a great way to create new incentives because you just pay people, and that’s a pretty good incentive. In public institutions, like science and government, there is often not great incentives to do things. For example, it doesn’t further your career in science; you’re not going to get a faculty position by writing open source. You get a faculty position by getting published in a prestigious journal. By writing open source… There’s no prestigious journal that publishes open source, so that doesn’t help you. As a result, they never do it, because it doesn’t help them.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Right, right. But there is a fair amount of prestige for developers to take on really hard problems. I like that aspect where he was saying, “I want to pay you to do this, so that..." Good people are focusing on hard problems.
+I think a lot of people are probably thinking, “Well, if you only have $96,000 a year, you’re not going to get great people.” But actually, you have some severely hard problems that you’ve been working on, and you’ve gotten some really amazing people to work on them. I don’t think that people really appreciate the scope of some of the technical problems like that. But you were able to get Mathias Buus, who’s one of the most prolific programmers in the world.
+You’ve essentially implemented a custom Merkle Tree. Basically, for the audience that doesn’t know what that is, you basically reimplemented Git, and then you backed it by a BitTorrent network for efficient sharing, and stuff like that. This is not simple work, and you have a small team of really amazing people. You were able to get really amazing people. How did you go about getting all of those people, and getting such great people to work for less than San Francisco market rate, but a fair amount of money?
+**Max Ogden:** That’s a good question. Mathias was the obvious choice for me. I had never met him actually, but I published a lot of Node.js modules. I was aware of him, because he was also publishing a lot of modules to npm. I felt the npm community was really cool because there were a lot of people trying to produce reusable software, and also produce efficient streaming software for writing data infrastructure. Mathias had a file-sharing startup that we joke now that he was basically doing everything that we were doing now, except doing it in like a centralized way. He’s just been working on the same user experience, sharing a bunch of files in a browser, but now we’re doing it in a way that’s decentralized. I just knew he was awesome, and I actually just DMed him on Twitter, and was like, “Hey, I don’t know if you have a job right now, but I just got this grant, and I can hire people to work on these problems. Are you interested?”
+He still had a job, but he was in Denmark, so even though it was a full-time job, it’s a Denmark full-time job, so it’s like a part-time job in America. \[laughter\]
+\[39:49\] So he just said, “Yeah, cool, I’ll work part-time.” He eventually quit his job, and has been working full-time for a year-and-a-half, or two years now. Clarissa is the next person that we hired, and she’s awesome. She was working at a startup that got bought; they were trying to build a GitHub for data, but then they got bought, and it got turned into an enterprise thing that she didn’t want to work on anymore. She just found our project because we were out there and we were at open source conferences. That’s the way I found Mathias; I was involved in open source, I was involved in the community. I’ve been going to open source conferences since I was 19, so I just had a lot of time invested in the community.
+If I was going to underscore one thing, if you’re a coder that wants to go down the path of supporting yourself through grants, it’s really important that you go to as many community events as possible, both to meet funders, but to meet coworkers, and expose yourself to different ideas. And the intersectional thing that Nadia mentioned - I think that’s huge. Having an interdisciplinary view of… You should be able to tell people what communities your software affects. Not just in a utopic way, but in a concrete way. For us, because we spent so many years figuring it out, our key focus area is science, journalism, and government. We think those are three really cool areas and there’s actually a lot of funding to invest in better solutions.
+Everybody knows journalism is trying to reinvent itself, because nobody’s buying papers anymore. The government has had a lot of innovation lately because of Code for America and healthcare.gov being such a disaster, and there’s this US digital service now. And science is what we’ve been working on, mostly. So I think that science, journalism, and government are three really interesting areas that if you’re a programmer, there’s tons of exciting and challenging problems. They’re also the foundations of our society that we should all support anyway.
+Going to work at a startup, getting people to engage with advertising more doesn’t have the same moral imperative as fixing the way people are informed about what's happening in their community, or fixing local government, or making scientific results more available in the long-term, things like that.
+We do definitely play a little bit. It’s not coercive, but the reason my team… We don’t have that many people, by the way. We just went from three to five, and we have a couple part-time contractors. So we’re not a huge team, but I think the reason that we’re able to get… I think everybody on our team is super world-class, and the reason we’re able to get world-class people is because we give people a huge degree of freedom. People are basically their own bosses, if they want to be, but I also try to support them as much as I can. Everything you get to do is open source, and there’s a direct impact of your work, because we’re essentially working directly for a specific community. In our case, it’s been mostly scientists, so it’s meaningful. It’s not just like you show up to work, and you get stock options and compensation, and you work on a backlog of issues.
+I feel everybody on our team is more like… I encourage people to have their own projects that they’re passionate about, that they can be the owners of, which also helps in a remote working context, because if you have your own projects that you’re the owner of, then you don’t have to sync up with other people to work on it. Then we also have team-level projects that we all try to collaborate on. I think that we basically use the grant money to hire a bunch of really smart people, and… Well, not smart, but passionate, and invested people into the problem, and then just pay them... Almost Bell Labs-style - incentivize them to work on a set of problems that are pretty high-level, and contribute to the ecosystem.
+\[44:16\] I view it as we’re just a bunch of people really getting paid to try to explore the future of how scientific data is shared. If we were running ourselves like a startup, we would try to have everything be branded under our name, and have everything be productized, or strategically open source things, and strategically closed source things, but for us I feel everybody on our team is acting like an individual, and sometimes we work together on bigger projects. But really, we just try to get the best people working in this space, because otherwise they won’t be incentivized to work on these problems. They’ll go and get funding from elsewhere, a.k.a. get a job and go to work on some other problem that’s not supporting the scientists.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Some of those solutions to those problems are going to end up being better as their own thing, not attached to Dat, right? It’s about what’s best for the project, and for the solution to the problem, not necessarily tying everything and making it ‘on-brand’, the way that you would in a startup, right?
+**Max Ogden:** Right, totally. Yeah, yeah.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Alright, I think we’re coming up for a break pretty soon. In a few minutes we’re going to deep-dive into what’s it’s like to get paid to work on your passion. We’ll be right back.
+**Break:** \[45:34\]
+**Mikeal Rogers:** We're back with Max Ogden. Alright, Max, we’re going to get into the whole paying people to work on open source thing. Especially a lot of the stuff you said about giving people a lot of autonomy, and letting them deal with whatever... Because I’ve seen that go bad as well as good. I think the classic example is that Tim O’Reilly paid Larry Wall to work on Perl, and that was when Perl stopped really caring about its users, and went down this Perl 6 thing for like a decade.
+So when you change the incentive structures around open source, and you’re just paying people to work on whatever, does it end up getting mismatched with the actual audience for that, and the rest of the community around that? How do you make sure you’re staying on track, and staying really on mission for your organization?
+**Max Ogden:** I think the way my coworker Clarissa likes to put it is, “We can write code really efficiently because we’re all professionals. So we can go a thousand miles, but if we go a thousand miles in the wrong direction, we’re actually hurting ourselves.” So having the direction is the hardest part, and scoping everything. What we try to do is always have deadlines for ourselves. We sign up for talks, because if you have to give a talk… We encourage everybody on the team to always have a personal deadline; they commit to giving a presentation on something, and they end up getting it finished because they have a presentation. If you never…
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Whoa, alright, hold on... Are you saying that your organization uses conference-driven development as a development strategy? Like, institutionally?
+**Max Ogden:** Oh, yeah.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] That is amazing!
+**Max Ogden:** \[47:52\] This is key, definitely. Yeah, I definitely endorse it. Because for me, for example, if you go to the Dat project GitHub, you won’t see that many projects. It’s mostly administrative repositories. To find all of our projects, you go to all of our individual team members’ pages. So I think it’s really important that people have the credit for the work that they’re doing, because they’re not going to work for the Dat project forever. They’re going to have their own career that goes into other places afterwards. I hope that they start their own grants. My ultimate long-term goal is that we’re not a giant nonprofit of 25 people, but instead we’re five projects of five people that all are in the same ecosystem as each other, supporting each other, but everybody can find their own niche and their mission, and have their own funding. I think it’s really important that all the work that people are doing that I’m paying them for, goes on their own GitHub account.
+Similarly, I think it’s important that they personally are speaking on behalf of the community. We don’t have a developer evangelist that does that full-time. I just encourage everybody to be the evangelism for themselves. I also don’t want people to give Dat talks, I want them to talk about whatever they’re passionate about. That’s how we’re different from a startup.
+Basically, the only contract that I have with people on the team is, “I give you money, and you just try to come up with creative ways to contribute to the ecosystem and solve the problem in some way.” But at the same time, we can’t just be willy-nilly, giving people infinite amounts of time to work on stuff. Another super important thing is getting physically together. This is just like remote team stuff, but we are a remote team. You don’t have to be a remote team, but I think it’s valuable for us, because if we were geographically constrained, it would make it harder to attract the talent that we do. By being remote, we can be more flexible. I also have a lot of experience doing remote stuff.
+I worked at coffee shops for the last four years.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Welcome to the club.
+**Max Ogden:** Yeah, the Coffee Shop Team! So there’s too many things… You can spend hours talking about it. I was going to say, a really important thing for us is we have a travel budget in our grants that allows us to convene, and we end up convening fairly regularly. I would say every two months, or three months, we see each other face-to-face. Not the entire team, but at least one person travels to other person’s city every other month. I was just in Copenhagen visiting Mathias two weeks ago, and he just decided to come out here in two weeks. We’re doing all these new projects because of this new grant we just got, and he’s like, “Oh, I don’t want to be on a different time zone, I’m really excited to work on this stuff”, so he’s going to come out. It’s also summer in the US, so it’s a good time to visit. We’ve done a lot of renting cool cabins in the woods in Oregon, and going to hack for three days, and then people fly back home.
+We spend that three-day period getting really excited and doing project planning and coordination, coming up with what our prototype that we’re trying to build is, what the alpha release of something looks like. Then we can go back to our day-to-day lives, be independent, and work on it. That’s the two-phase thing. We have an intensive project-planning phase, and once we scope out a road map for a couple of months for every individual, then we can go back and work in parallel. We still ping each other with questions every day, but we don’t have a daily, centralized planning process. We try to decentralize and asynchronize as much as possible.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Budget-wise, that’s probably still cheaper than an office, right?
+**Max Ogden:** \[51:53\] Yeah. Oh, yeah. Now that we have more people, I’m not sure how the economics are going to work out for travel budget, but grant funders are generally open to convenience. They…
+**Nadia Eghbal:** They love it.
+**Max Ogden:** Yeah, they love convenience. Once you have a relationship with a funder, you can be like, “Hey I wanted to get 20 people that are the leaders in this open source community together with a bunch of scientists. Can you pay for us to all fly out to some place?”, and they’re like, “Okay.”
+**Nadia Eghbal:** That’s all it’s called, a convening?
+**Max Ogden:** Yeah. But $50,000 to fly a bunch of people for a weekend conference? $50,000 to them is totally… As long as you pitched them on a thing that’s like, “We’ll definitely write a report for you afterwards.” \[laughs\]
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Yes! \[laugh\]
+**Max Ogden:** They actually like that. We’re going to try to do that soon because I’m starting to build a consortium or alliance —we don’t know the word yet— with a bunch of other project-based open source teams… I’m sorry, grant-based open source teams. We’re trying to write a manifesto for what it means to be on a project like this. Our team is really weird, we don’t really fit in a traditional category. We’re not in academia, but we work with academics. We’re a non-profit, except we write pretty much all software. I don’t know a lot of non-profits that are just software-focused. We’re also not a startup, although people think we’re a start-up because we have a logo and a name, so they just assume we’re a startup. We’re just kind of weird. We’re an open source project but we have a budget, and people are paid to work on it, so that’s also weird.
+We’re trying to figure out what’s a name that we can call ourselves that people will understand. Also, all the stuff that I’m sharing here, it would be cool if we had it written up in an accessible way so people can start down that path.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Zooming out a little bit, I don’t know how much you paid attention to the past year or so, but there have been a bunch of grant programs, grant means coming from a bunch of different organizations like Mozilla, Linux, Stripe, and I’m curious to hear your take on what role do you think grants could or should be playing in funding open source work. Because in your case, it was for funding a new project, right? In other cases, it’s for funding an existing project. Where is the sweet spot, in terms of, where should that money be deployed most effectively?
+**Max Ogden:** I think it’s interesting that, for example, Stripe has an open source program. I don’t know what percentage of their budget goes to that. The reason I like private philanthropies is that… The people working at the Gates Foundation — we’re not a Gates Foundation grantee, but the people working there… Obviously, Bill Gates is a computer programmer, so most people that are working there are focused on the humanitarian side, or the social impact side, and they’re not technologists, so you have to learn to speak their language. But once you do, you’re locking in an agreement with them to addressing their societal problem using technology. So I think it’s really important to have that yin and that yang. You’re going to use technology as one tool, but the end goal isn’t building some technology, the end goal is to affect some change in the area. I’m curious with Stripe, what their… I don’t know if I would consider making payment infrastructure more robust to be like effecting positive change in society.
+\[55:34\] Just like I said earlier, there’s a bunch of different ways to define the word grant. For me what that has meant is forcing myself to learn how to pitch my project in a way that affects some community, or has some social impact. That’s where the non-profit side comes in. People assume that if you’re a non-profit, you have some social mission. I think that’s super important for open source people, to be able to link their project to a social mission. I think that’s really important, and I’m not really sure if you have for-profit companies who are giving the grants out… I think grants can be a really simple way to fund infrastructure. Otherwise, you would have to go work at that company and be an employee to get paid. Grants are a way for people… They can basically say, “Hey, there’s this person that doesn’t work for us, but is super qualified. Let’s just give them a grant.” I don’t know what the long-term goal of that is.
+For example, this grant process has forced me to learn how to become not just a programmer, but also a project leader, and a grant writer, and learning how to run an organization. If I got a Stripe grant to work on OpenSSL, I don’t think I would learn any of those other things. I think that I would just get paid to work on OpenSSL for a bit, make OpenSSL better, but then run out of money, and have to go get a job anyway.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It sounds like what it really separates into… I think non-profit and for-profit is the wrong way to look at this. It’s more of, is the impact of the grant improving technology, or is it to improve a social outcome, right? Because you have plenty of non-profits and for-profits that depend on and will subsidize or put money into a technology because they’re dependent on it in some way. But when you look at the social good of something, the only way to fund it is going to be with a grant. If you’re primary outcome... That’s the only way to any money for it.
+**Max Ogden:** Yeah, economically there’s the term ‘the public good’ which are things that by definition… Like, lighthouses are a typical example where nobody want to build a lighthouse, because there’s no ROI on a lighthouse; it’s a public infrastructure. But if you don’t have it, then everyone dies, so you need somebody to build it. If you’re building a lighthouse, grants are good.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, that’s partially why I’ve been interested in exploring, or thinking of open source software as public software, to make that link between a public good and... And when I describe open source software to people who don’t use it, it’s like, “This is a thing that exists in the public domain that you can use for whatever purpose you want to use.” But it’s a new concept for people to think about software that way if they’re not familiar with software. Anyone outside of open source thinks of software as like Silicon Valley and tech. Well, there’s also a lot that’s being created in the commons and being used… And how do you end up supporting that stuff?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It’s important to draw this distinction, though, between what you’re doing. The Node.js Foundation is a non-profit, but at the end of the day it’s there to make sure that that technology succeeds, and there is social good outcomes built on top of the technology, but the mission of the foundation is to make sure the technology is there. It’s not necessarily to focus on those social outcomes. It enables Dat, but Dat is not part of the social mission there. A lot of the modules that you built could be used by a company to do some awesome big data research, but your mission and what you’re focused on is building things for a particular social outcome, right?
+**Max Ogden:** Yeah, definitely. The Linux Foundation, for example, is a lot lower level in the stack because… That’s one of the trade-offs you have to make - how detached from the issues do you want to be? I think the more attached to social issues that you are, the easier you’ll find it to get grants, because that’s all grant people care about, is you being able to contextualize your technology in their existing mission. That’s the whole art form, if you can say, “Hey, my projects helps scientists.” Then they'll be like, “Oh, we fund science, so we’ll write you a grant.” That was the thing that three years ago I wouldn’t have been able to say, because I didn’t know scientists had these problems until somebody approached me and convinced me to work on it. If you’re detached from the social issues, then you have to find other ways of supporting it. But the Linux Foundation found a way to support it, because all these companies use it, and they can help support the overall project.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** \[01:00:24.04\] Where do you think there are gaps in knowledge between grant makers and open source communities? What do you wish that more funders knew about open source, or vice-versa?
+**Max Ogden:** So the biggest issue that I have is the way you have to write the grants upfront with all the budget, and all the plans. It’s the same kind of distinction as waterfall versus agile.
+For example, this grant that we just got. The money arrives — we don’t have to go through the mechanics of how you receive money from grants, but we had access to the grant money in essentially June; it was like two weeks ago. I wrote the grant with Clarissa in October of last year. That’s a pretty long amount of time, I think it's almost like nine months. So we had an idea, we wrote the grant, and nine months later we get the money. I would say that’s on the longer side for a philanthropic grant, but it’s not uncommon.
+If I had to tell you what I was going to work on in nine months from now, I wouldn’t be able to tell you, but that’s another art form of grant writing, being able to write a grant that’s vague enough that you can still… Once you start getting the money, you can still use the money to work on the thing you said you were going to work on nine months ago. One thing that I wish that foundations would understand is timelines and agility. Basically, what I would much rather have - and I understand that it’s difficult; you have to have a high level of trust to do something like this, but my preferred situation would be... I had a relationship with a funder, I convinced them that we’re the right people to work on the right issues. So we get the people and the issues locked down, or the causes. Then I can basically go back to them, and say, “Okay, now I need a budget for the next three months to do this.” That can be a lightweight process once I got in the door with them.
+But right now, the way it works is you do everything in one big proposal (including the budget), and then you’re locked into that for the entire duration of the grant budget. It means that you have to plan ahead a lot, and you’re constrained by the budget as you’re doing the project. For example, say Nadia, you wanted to come work on my team; I couldn’t hire you today because I don’t have any extra budget. What I could do is, “Let’s write a grant together,” and then in nine months maybe we'll have a budget to hire you. \[laughs\]
+It’s annoying, because most startups have these slush funds that they can draw from as they need to, which is the initial investment. But the way grants work, your budget is not a big slush fund, it’s paid out in increments, burn rate; they like to be constant. I can’t hire people on a day-to-day basis, and can’t readjust the budget as the thing is in flight. That’s annoying.
+There’s definitely some cultural differences in the way that they actually fund. I think if you ask most non-profits, they don’t think about open source, and most funders probably aren’t thinking about open source, but I think that is changing. There’s this perception that there’s not any funding out there for open source stuff.
+I think that if you ask most open source developers to write a grant, they’ll write a grant that’s super technical and has no social impact linkage, like what I’ve been talking about. They’ll think, “Oh, I wrote a grant to write a new encryption scheme for this thing, or a new database.” There’s probably not a lot of places that will just fund you to work on random technology, but if you make your grant about fixing an actual problem in society, then I think grant people will be like, “Oh, you want to fix this problem, and you’re going to do it as open source?” That’s actually a competitive advantage over other…
+\[01:04:17.15\] A lot of grant people have been funding technology over the last 10-15 years, and they’re starting to understand how funding technology works, which is things like they have a lot of technical debt, they have a lot of projects that have horrible project management, or they have… People will say in the grant, “Oh yeah, we’re going to make awesome, reusable software,” and then they make software that’s very difficult to reuse. These are all just inherent to software in general. Anybody that works on software will tell you that it’s really easy to have a lot of technical debt and make a giant app that is really inflexible.
+You still have to make your pitch be about a social cause, but if you can say, “By the way, we’re doing it as open source and we actually want to invest in building up this ecosystem around this problem”, that’s actually an advantage to you. I don’t think open source is the reason you get the grant, it’s just a thing that helps. The reason you get the grant is you’re committing to a cause they care about.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And just like you were saying earlier, grants want to be tied to the social cause, right?
+**Max Ogden:** Yeah.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It’s what they want. It’s not that programmers don’t care about social causes. If they didn’t, you wouldn’t be able to get such great people working on them. It’s just that getting them to speak in that language, and getting them to be on the same page as the grant writers, right?
+**Max Ogden:** Yeah, definitely.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** In an ideal world, how do you picture that people would be able to work on open source? Because right now there are so many different grants that are… I think there’s a lot of ad-hoc opportunities, but if you were to think about this on an institutional level, how could that actually be supported and funded?
+**Max Ogden:** That is an awesome question! One way that I would answer it is procurement reform in government, which is the most boring phrase that you could possibly say.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** \[laughs\] Yes.
+**Max Ogden:** Think about the amount of money that is spent on software in government. Well, most people probably don’t know, but there’s an average project in the federal government for like… Actually, this isn’t the federal government, this is the City of New York. They spent $600 million, two-thirds of an Instagram, on a time-tracking app...
+**Nadia Eghbal:** What?!
+**Max Ogden:** ...for New York City employees, and it never shipped!
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Right, right. And one of the reasons… How much does it cost to apply to get that money, right?
+**Max Ogden:** Yeah, because you have to have invested dozens of years into the nepotistic system of existing government procurement. It’s not a technical problem to fix procurement, but if somebody fixes procurement — and by the way, it is being worked on now, because like I mentioned this earlier, healthcare.gov was so bad that the silver lining around that — that’s actually pretty exciting — is that there’s two new organizations in the federal government that are hiring remote, and they’re hiring technologists, and they’re paying people to work on open source inside of government. One is called the US Digital Service, and the other is called 18F, or one-eight-F. They’re a brother-sister organization; one is inside the executive branch, and they’re the technology advocates. They’re almost like the role that the EFF plays. They have people come up with policies, and they get the different agencies to adopt policies. I have a friend that works there; he gets to go in the VA, or the Social Security office, and they’re like, “Hey, check out this new hundred-million-dollar database that we contracted. What do you think?” He used to build data centers at Twitter, and he’s like, “If I was building this, I could have done it for $5 million, and saved you $95 million. Why did you bill this for $100 million?”
+And they’re like, “That’s what the vendor told us.” “Oracle said this was a great deal!”
+\[01:08:08.12\] So that is a really important cause right now that has a fair amount of momentum. 18F is where you go to work if you actually want to build the solutions. They’re like an actual contractor that is government employees that like hires people to work on the actual projects. USDS is where you go to set the policy.
+For instance, they are doing a lot of stuff around making all federal websites have mandatory SSL so that the NSA can’t snoop on what you’re browsing. There’s a lot of cool momentum in fixing that system.
+So if I was going to place a bet on where all the grants are going to be in the future, it’s around delivering government services in more efficient way, and actually competing for government grants because that landscape is about to get a lot more accessible to open source stuff because of all the work that’s happening at the federal level.
+Another way I would answer this question is… Procurement reform is one thing, and that’s happening, so keep an eye on that space. The other thing is, like I mentioned, we don’t know how to describe our project in terms of are we a non-profit, are we an academic project? We don’t know what our label is, and we’re trying to figure out with some other groups a model for supporting projects in this ecosystem. A great example to look at — I think they’re doing some great work — is if you look up this thing call the Substance Consortium, there’s this awesome text editor. It’s like a JavaScript, a rich text editor and editing environment called Substance. It’s really beautifully designed, and it’s all open source.
+They had been working for this open access scientific journal, writing a journal article viewer and editor. They had all these other organizations… They were basically being contracted by this one journal called eLife, and they built this thing called eLife Lens, which is a really beautiful way to read papers. Because most people read papers on PDF, but trying to read a paper on your phone on a PDF, it has really wide columns and it’s like, “Why can’t I just have this be a web page?” They’re trying to fix some of these problems, but they had all these other organizations in this space, and they were like, “Well, we also want to invest together in better editing tools for science, or just editing tools for the web in general.” So they set up this thing called the Substance Consortium. There’s four stakeholders that all help pay for the development of Substance, but they’re not hiring exclusively the Substance team to work as employees on their projects. What’s really cool about it is Substance itself can still be its standalone project that can make reusable open source tools, but it has an open governance structure so any of the member organizations can help influence the project direction in a positive way, and work together to support the project without controlling the project. Their whole thing is cooperation without control. That work is being facilitated by a group called the Collaborative Knowledge Foundation, which is one of the stakeholders, or one of the people paying the Substance team.
+Substance is just the editor components, but the Substance team doesn’t have a… They’re just two people, they don’t have the linkage to the social issue, they don’t have the grant-writing capability at this point. They want to get to that point, but they need incubating, and they need support for their project.
+\[01:11:45.01\] Collaborative Knowledge Foundation is a couple of folks that started it that are really focused on fixing the scientific publishing ecosystem. They want every journal to be using open source publishing tools. So they have the social mission, that’s a huge social mission. Access to research is a really big cause right now. What’s cool is the Collaborative Knowledge Foundation has got some grants to work on fixing scientific publishing, and instead of hiring the Substance people as employees, they’re like, “Let’s support everyone in this ecosystem together, and have Substance still be standalone.” Because they think it would be toxic if they actually exclusively hired the Substance people that worked on their one thing. They would rather have Substance flourish and have a whole ecosystem, because…
+That’s where open source works really well, when you have a bunch of interests that are supporting a factored-out, common infrastructure. I think the Substance Consortium model is really exciting; we’re trying to figure out how to… We need to come up with a cool name for that way of doing things. Ideally, the Dat project, since we are a distributive file system, it’s a pretty low-level component, and there’s a bunch of different interests... It would be awesome if we could get a similar thing for Dat, so we'd have a Dat Consortium. We would have the Dat project itself just be the technology, but then we would have all the different organizations that have a specific cause be able to support our work. Maybe we split up into two teams, like one of us is the science cause, and all the low-level people go and work on just the infrastructure stuff.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on here and talking to us about grant funding.
+**Max Ogden:** Yeah, anytime. Definitely, if you’re listening to this and you want to learn more, feel free to reach out to me, and I can send you some concrete examples of grants that I wrote, and stuff like that.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Great. Thanks, Max.

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+**Nadia Eghbal:** Welcome to Request for Commits, a podcast that explores different perspectives in open source sustainability. On this show, we talk to people about the human side of code; we cover everything from community and governance to businesses and licensing. If you've ever wondered how open source projects get started, survive, die or flourish, then you are gonna love this show. I am Nadia Eghbal.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And I'm Mikeal Rogers.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** On today's show Mikeal and I talk with Rod Vagg, Chief Node Officer at NodeSource. Rod has worked across the Node.js ecosystem, including in the database community and creating several key NodeSchool workshops. He serves as a Technical Steering Committee Chair for Node.js as well as on the Node.js Foundation Board.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Our focus on today's episode with Rod was around liberal contribution policies. We talked about Rod's early experiments with liberalized common access, the underlying mechanics of liberal contribution management and how to level-up casual contributors.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** We also talked about how projects transition into a liberal contribution mindset and whether there is a place for BDFLs in the future of project governance.
+So Rod, you once said that the history of open source is divided into eras based on the different tools you've used, which I think is a great way to start this episode. All three of us have written and spoken about how there's this new era of open source where there are a lot more casual contributions, kind of like this GitHub era. So I'm curious, to start out, what that transition was like for you, as you've been involved in open source? How did you observe that sort of transition happening?
+**Rod Vagg:** I guess I observed that simply by my involvement, because while I’ve been doing the software thing for a while now, my involvement hasn’t really been significant until this new era of GitHub and Git.
+The friction involved in some of the earlier eras really prevented me from embracing it properly. I can't tell you when it was that I really started to jump in headfirst into open source or why that change happened, but I think it was much more when open source became easier to be involved in the community.
+I don't live in a large city, I don’t have a community of nerds around me that I can just go out and hang out with, I don't have local Meetups, so for me the online community is my nerd community, it's where my people are. For me, when that became easy, that's when I really threw myself out there into open source. So while I have contributions going back a fair way, particularly in the kinds of things that people would always do, like submitting bug reports - I was doing that for a long time, but if you were to do a commit graph of my involvement in open source, it really started to properly pick up during this recent era that we are in with GitHub and Git.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Did you ever get to a point where you realized that was different from maybe open source projects in the past, or that not all projects were like the ones you were involved in?
+**Rod Vagg:** No. It’s not until really recently when I’ve started to speak about these things and actually think more about open source governance, that I’ve really had to think about the difference there.
+\[03:46\] I wasn’t early on with the GitHub thing; I don’t know if the IDEs are easy to find on Google, I think they are through the API, but my IDE is not particularly low. I didn't jump in early and see this thing was this radical new thing that we're getting involved in. I didn’t recognize that at the time, and so I was a slow adopter. It wasn’t until recently that I've looked back and seen it as something that really demarcates this new open source versus the old. But the dividing line, it's really quite stark when you think about what it means for open source, and so it’s surprising that it crept up on all of us, it just sort of happened. But I think for people that have been deeply involved, particularly people who have been involved in Apache projects, it’s probably been more obvious because it’s been a little bit more painful to have this new thing to come along that is really replacing the old and presenting challenges, because people don’t want to get involved if it's not on GitHub; they don’t want to have to use SVN or whatever other old tools people wanna use. So it’s been a bit more painful for them, a bit more obvious, but for those of us who have sorta lurked and only become more involved recently, it’s not as obvious.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I find this really interesting, because usually this just complete lack of wanting to jump through hoops to contribute is associated with people that have not as low level of a technical background. But you actually have a very low-level background and have written some very low-level stuff in the Node community, like the native abstraction layer and stuff like that. But I’ve seen you not get involved even in GitHub projects, where it was just too annoying to try to contribute. Do you associate that with anything? Have you really thought about it and tried to identify what it really is?
+**Rod Vagg:** I think there's a soft confidence thing there. So even though you might identify me as somebody that's comfortable with low-level things, my own personal soft confidence with my technical abilities took a long time to grow. Part of that was because I wasn’t involved as heavily in communities online and didn’t have large peer groups, so I wasn’t able to properly measure my technical abilities. That’s one of the nice things about communities - even though measuring your skills against others might sound uncomfortable, it’s actually a confidence boosting measure when you are able to clearly identify where you fit in that hierarchy, because that gives you the ability to find an entry point to something. But if you don't know that, if you don’t know where you fit and what you have to offer, then it's gonna provide much more uncertainty about how you can even get involved, or if you should get involved.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I think that the biggest confidence boost isn't the first contribution or the first bug report or even the first push. It's the first time you help somebody else get their commit in or you get to give somebody else advice and improve their work. It’s this huge confidence boost to go, "I’m at a point where I can help other people, I’m not just a person being helped."
+**Rod Vagg:** Yeah and that’s true, that’s very true. Along with that, the confidence boost can come with just releasing your own code. Sometimes that can be scary to people who are doing open source for the first time and aren’t already involved in interesting projects. Releasing your own code and saying, "Here I am, here's what I have to offer the world. Judge me by it" is really scary, but doing that and finding out that the sky doesn't fall, people are not gonna come and yell at you or laugh at you or anything like that, and they might actually find value in your project. That can be the confidence booster people need.
+\[07:53\] Those of us that have been involved in open source now for a while - I guess I’m addressing this to people who are rough around the edges now and are considering getting involved – we’re used to seeing this spectrum of quality from pretty raw to very mature and high level... I guess you just accept that there is this level and some projects will need a little bit of a hand to level up, and other projects already have that because of the technical abilities of the people involved. And that doesn’t mean that you reject things that are on that lower end of the spectrum, it just means those things need a little bit of a hand. Even if you really don’t have that big technical skill, you’re not gonna get laughed at or judged. That happens occasionally, but it’s actually really rare.
+It's really rare that somebody’s project gets pointed out and laughed at; it might happen occasionally on Hacker News, but most of the time people release their stuff and it collects a community of some kind, whether that be people of similar interest and skill level, or other people trying to just get involved and make something useful out of it. It's actually not as scary to do that first step as you often think it is before you get involved in open source.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Can you tell us a little bit about getting involved with LevelDB and then how some of these learning got fed into your experiments with liberal contribution Policies there?
+**Rod Vagg:** Okay, LevelDB - this was one of my first explicit experiments with much more liberal contribution agreements or governance. So to be honest, the LevelDB stuff, I started getting involved there simply because I was looking for a new project to do that would let me do some interesting work on the Node add-on area, so C++ add-ons. I wanted to dive into that and learn a bit about that area and was looking for something to do. That just seemed like an interesting area to play with.
+There was an existing project that did this, and like a good open source person, I thought there's really no reason not to reinvent the wheel, so I reinvented the wheel and dove in and wrote this thing. Early on in that process of exploration, I was trying to make something that felt a lot more Node-like than what already existed for LevelDB; so I wanted to make something that was much more natural and when you used it felt like a Node thing.
+While I think I started off in the right way there, I actually had some of the best ideas come from outside. I opened it up pretty early and I started throwing around these ideas on GitHub and in IRC as well, and managed to pick up some ideas from some people who were able to really make it feel much more Node-like. One of those people actually was Max Ogden; most people around the Node ecosystem probably know Max. Mikeal, you know him particularly well.
+He actually gave me some really good ideas around - I think it was some streaming stuff that I was tinkering with, but he gave me a couple of suggestions that really clicked and I thought, "Yeah, that’s a great idea, that really feels Node-like" and went with a couple of those suggestions that he had.
+\[11:51\] And that process of getting other people involved in the design stage and then the very early contribution stage where there were some people who were interested in making a tool here that felt much more Node-like... That process of actually saying, "These people actually have really valuable opinions from the get-go, from actually building this thing. They wanna get involved, but also they are already involved and they already own a lot of the ideas here. What right do I have to claim full ownership of this stuff? A lot of the code and a lot of the ideas are not even mine." It was a small project, pretty small API surface area, and not all of it came out of my head. I just didn’t feel I had the right to fully own this thing and so the idea of liberal contribution, liberal governance -- sorry, what was it called at that stage?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Open open source?
+**Rod Vagg:** Yeah, open open source. This idea that I shouldn’t claim sole ownership of this thing, and when you give contributions, you are actually giving them to me to claim ownership of; that just didn’t fit, so I decided to go ahead and make this open open source thing around LevelDB at the time. The LevelUP project, that’s split up into two projects and then this ecosystem appeared around those projects, and they all pretty much adopted the same contribution style, where the idea is that if you are showing up with something to add -- and that’s not a trivial thing, so don’t just give me a typo fix; give me something material -- if you are showing up with something meaningful to add, then you should have a seat at the table, because this thing is obviously valuable to you and you're putting some time and effort, which is valuable, into this thing, so you can share ownership in that.
+That style, the open open source style that has evolved in the LevelUP ecosystem, it's very much about equal sharing. You get ownership of the project, the whole project. You get to have an equal vote as the original person that started it. You get your name on the overall copyright thing; it says "This is copyrighted and owned by the contributors who are listed." You basically become an equal with the other people and that has persisted, it's worked really well and it’s something that I generally adopt now for all my open source projects, because the people that show up, that wanna contribute and do the work obviously have a vested interest in the project, it’s meaningful for them. There’s no good reason to hold it tightly, most of the time.
+There might be some, there’s obviously some situations where that does make sense, but a lot of the time you are putting it out there anyway, you are finding a community of people that it has value to, so why shouldn’t you share that?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So beyond just these initial principles, what were some of the early iterations you did to that policy? I can’t imagine that it was super fleshed out right away, there had to have been some additions or changes you made along the way.
+**Rod Vagg:** Look, to be honest, what you find... If you go to the LevelUP repo and look at the contributing file, that hasn’t actually changed very much since the original version, and it’s not because it’s perfect, it’s simply because no one has thought to update it, or no one has actually -- like, I haven’t gone back, or anyone hasn't gone back and said, "Well, these things don’t make that much sense." But if you look at it, there’s a bunch of things in there that actually don't make as much sense now that we've iterated on this idea, and I'll quickly just go through...
+\[16:10\] We've got these five rules: the first rule is no false pushes or modifying the Git history in any way. In practice, that idea suggests that you shouldn’t write over people’s stuff and you shouldn’t mess with the Git history; it’s just a good idea. But in practice, false pushing is sometimes necessary, but the idea there is simply that you don’t have the right to mess with other people’s history. You only do that if the tools make it necessary because you are doing some weird rebasing or whatever.
+So that rule in practice is quite soft, and people will do what needs to be done with the tools, as these needs come up. So I’m not sure I’d codify that the some way these days.
+Second rule is non-master branches ought to be used for ongoing work. Again, this is just like, whatever works for the project and the people involved. The idea behind it was that the master branch was supposed to represent the pinnacle of the active work, the stuff that has really been accepted. And in practice that’s at least how it works, but how that plays out, how you get to that, is really a matter for the people involved.
+Sometimes people are quite comfortable doing a fork and submitting from their own fork. I had this idea originally that you wouldn’t need to fork the projects, because you actually have full rights to the project; you don’t need to make a fork and then pull request from your own fork. In fact early on, I actually started encouraging people, "You don’t need to do that. Come and make a branch in this project."
+And while I still like that idea, in practice it really depends on the individual and the mechanics of the project. So in the Node project, for example, we don’t do very much in the main project at all; we tend to do it from our own forks, so that’s again a bit soft in practice.
+The third one is external API changes and significant modifications ought to be subject to an internal pull request to solicit feedback from other contributors. In practice, the way that I think it actually should be done - and that rule should actually be changed - is that every change should be done by a pull request.
+Early on it was like, okay, if your fixing grammar or some minor little thing, then sure just commit it, but for the sake of visibility, I would change that and say that everything should be done via pull request.
+The fourth one is similar - internal pull requests solicit feedbacks are encouraged for very non-trivial contributions, but it's left to the discretion of the contributor - that's pretty much the same thing.
+And the last one is contributors should adhere to the prevailing code style of the project. I don’t know if that actually needs to be said; that's just how we do open source. The reason I put that there was because I sometimes adopt some quirky code style things, and the last thing I want is people showing up and saying "We should change this and put semicolons or change the spacing." Just get over it and accept whatever the code style is in the project you are contributing to. I don’t know if that needs to be said in these rules.
+Mostly, these rules have sort of become really flexible and there's just a more of a general idea of openness and a mechanics to contributing that make that openness work well.
+\[19:49\] In terms of iterations, I actually haven’t had enough time to go back and really pin down the best mechanics that work for the different kinds of projects. Mostly, they just evolve within those little communities and it just works as it works,
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That makes a lot of sense. So we are gonna take a quick short break, and then when we come back we're gonna really dig into the meat of liberal contribution policies and what this does for casual contributions.
+**Break:** \[00:20:18:08\] to \[\\00:21:13:00\]
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And we are back with Rod Vagg. So Rod, take me through some of these mechanics of liberal contribution policies. You talked a little bit about what went into the LevelDB specific policies. What would say is the overarching philosophy of how these are constructed and how that differs from the more traditional approach to contribution policies and governance?
+**Rod Vagg:** There's a couple of things to look at. The first one is the mechanics of collaboration; how do you do this in a way that involves the whole group of people that have the ability to make decisions, so all of your contributors are these equals that seat at the table?
+GitHub presents the obvious answer to that, which is pull requests. So pull requests for everything, and that means that every time you want to make a change, you do it as a pull request, which is the invitation for discussion.
+If something doesn't garner a discussion, then you take it as an implicit okay. If nobody steps up and says "I don’t like this" or "Hang on, let's talk about these things", then you’ve got the go-ahead. You don’t need to necessarily chase sign up from other people. In practice, people do, and in some of the more formal settings that’s actually written in, like in the Node project that's written in, but most of the time in these small projects where you have only a small number of people that actively concentrate on the project at each point in time, a pull request that doesn’t go into discussion has an implicit yes.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** See, that's a really big departure from traditional policies. Traditionally, in open source if I send a change to a project, it's my responsibility to convince them that it should go in, not the other way around, right?
+**Rod Vagg:** Right, this is where the initial gating process comes in. So if you send a pull request to one of these liberal projects and you are not one of the core contributors to it, then you have to go through the process of convincing that the change is good, and that can mean a whole lot of things. That actually is the onboarding process most of the time.
+\[23:40\] That can be things like going through looking at your code style, "Hang on, you're not actually conforming to the code style of the project. Just do the basic here!" There’s always these hurdles that you go through, which are quite normal in open source projects. You get this thing right, fit into the project, make sure the API makes sense - all of the things that you normally go through with a pull request is actually treated as the onboarding process, and if you manage to get over that first hump, then you're in. You've done the initial work and you can be at the table now, doing that process with other people. ;
+And what's more, you can actually be involved in changing some of those things that you had to go through. So if you really hate the code style, like if there is something wrong with it, then you're perfectly within your rights to propose that it be changed; you've just got to convince the other people that may stand up and say, "No, I don't think we should change that."
+So getting through that initial gate is the important bit, but once you're through, then you've proven yourself as somebody that places enough value in this thing and is willing to give your valuable time and effort, too. So you have rights to change it as you think it needs to be changed. But in practice, people know that radical changes are difficult, and will likely raise a discussion or significant objections.
+So every change, if it doesn’t get a discussion, it usually means it’s pretty trivial and no one cares enough about it, so just go ahead. You do need to leave time for a discussion. If I were to rewrite the policy in general for open source, I would definitely build in something about that time period, because you do need to take into account, for a start, the global nature of open source. You can’t assume that everyone's within your time zone.
+Also, the different ways that people do open source; some people do it in their work time because it’s a part of their work, and they are using projects for their work; other people do it on the weekends. So you do need to make sure that you leave enough time for these pull requests so that all of the people involved in the project have a chance to jump in if they're going to. This becomes part of the culture; it's not fair to create a pull request and merge the same day, or even the next day, usually.
+It's not fair on the other people in the project, and it's usually frowned upon. So they do need to be left open for enough time to get going on a discussion. And then when discussion does happen, consensus-seeking really is at the heart of the process, and that does really need to be written into any liberal contribution policy. Consensus seeking is what happens to get to agreement, and consensus seeking doesn't necessarily mean that you have to reach consensus; it just means you have to address enough of the concerns that you don't have anyone saying "No, this can’t go in."
+So you don't have to reach consensus as something that is good, but you have to reach enough consensus that nobody is gonna put their foot down. So the gating for something getting in is really that somebody is willing to strongly enough assert that this thing shouldn’t get in. If somebody gives it a no, then that's a no, and that could just be one person amongst the group.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, there's a big difference between pure consensus and consensus seeking; with consensus seeking, the goal is that everybody agrees that this should go in, but if one person objects, in pure consensus they would basically get a veto. In consensus seeking, they have to convince everybody else that it shouldn't go in. Inevitably, you can go to a vote if you need to, but in practice you never end up using votes because if somebody objects, but they don't wanna take the time to convince everybody else, they just give up the objection.
+**Rod Vagg:** Yeah, and that depends on how strongly they feel. And that's actually an interesting thing, because the strength of somebody's feelings about technical changes actually reflects more than just feelings. It's a technical opinion and it usually carries along with it some technical merit, so that’s why these things are important to pay attention to, even if people don't express them very well, because nerds are often not that great at expressing themselves beyond pure technical things, and sometimes not even with technical things.
+\[28:10\] So just that process of allowing people to say no is important. What it means is you 'to have to drop into a discussion mode, which can be uncomfortable for people, and can actually be intimidating for outsiders, as well. That’s something in practice that we've found, that it becomes occasionally discussion-heavy, and while that is part of community and it's actually one of the valuable parts I think of the existing communities that develop, it can be intimating for people coming from the outside. So that's just something to keep on top of. So that's the contribution thing with pull requests, that's the important part of that.
+The other thing to note is that the way I often describe these things is we try to make open source more like a Wiki, so we think more like a Wikipedia. Trying to turn open source projects into their own little mini Wikipedia is the goal here; everyone has these valuable contributions, and they may be tiny or they may be significant. There's no good reason to really be so protective about these things, because we often pretend that every change involves some huge technical - it needs to go through these technical hurdles, when often it really doesn't. If someone is trying to fix something small, it's as simple as that, they are trying to fix something small. It's not that they are trying to mess or change the architecture of something.
+If you look across pull requests across almost any open source project - the kinds of things that people from the outside are waiting to get in, they're these small things that will make a huge difference to them and very little difference to other people who haven't even encountered the same problem, or haven’t wanted the same kind of functionality from the project. And it's not usually going to make a radical difference to the project itself. So that’s how Wikipedia evolved, that's how articles on Wikipedia evolved.
+Usually, most of the changes are not these big architectural changes, they are minor. So moving open source projects closer to a Wiki is one of the goals here, but the challenge that code presents that you don’t get in the same way with Wiki articles is that you want to occasionally make releases, and these releases have to represent a conception of quality at a point in time. So while we go to a Wikipedia page and we accept that it might contain errors because somebody edited it five minutes ago and they have made some trolling comment in there that's really funny - you don't want that in your code releases. You don’t want to make a release of a library and it's got somebody's little trolling comment in there or it's got a silly API that's somebody is messing with, just because they had the ability to do so.
+So we do still need this process of being able to make releases that we agree are of quality and that represent the project at that point in time, so we can’t quite act just like Wikipedia. We do have to have a process that allows us to assert quality at these snapshot points.
+That’s where the idea of having a master branch, or a branch that is sacred is important. This branch represents a place where we only put things that we all agree are good, and then having some way of making releases off that, and often that will involve an individual or a group of individuals that are a subset of the project, that go through that process. So there is a difference in release mechanics over just contribution mechanics, which is worth thinking about when you dive into this thing. But at the same time, you shouldn't let that hold you up from being more liberal with accepting contributions, because there's releases and then there's what's in your Git repository; what's in your Git repository is rarely used by users in production or even in development.
+\[32:21\] What they use is your releases, so try not to get too hung up in what’s in your repository; it's the releases that matter to end users, so try and separate those two things a bit. That's my thoughts on mechanics for now.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Let's get a little bit into the casual contributions that you touched upon. I think there is a perception that casual contributions are really small things, nothing really substantial and we can't really rely on them for anything useful. What types of contributions do you see coming from casual contributors versus more regular contributors, and where do you think they can fill in a strong role?
+**Rod Vagg:** I don't make as much differentiation between casual contributors and whatever the opposite of that is, because I don't think you can actually know when somebody is a casual contributor and when they are not. Something might be small to start with, but that might be somebody testing the waters. So they might be trying to just change a tiny thing that’s annoying for them, but if you give them the right signals that "Everything is okay, we're not going to jump down your throat every time you try and make a tiny change, we are actually going to embrace you", you can actually turn those people very readily into more than casual contributors.
+So I don't think that distinction is actually that helpful, unless you are able to measure it over time. So if you look back in the history of a project, look over the past six months, then you might actually be able to actually see who were the casual contributors. But at the time that it's happening, I'm not sure you can say who the people are that you could label casual, because very often, those people, when given the right signals, can turn into something a lot more.
+I've seen people come and show up with documentation fixes, even minor ones, and you give them the right signals that, "We're open for business, we're open for contributions" and they level up really quickly. In fact, one of the most interesting things about this kind of contribution policy is that you can actually take people with a low level of technical skill and you can level up their skill through the process.
+So I’ve seen people come in, saying things like "I don't really understand C++ or this fancy stuff you are doing in here, so just contributing to the documentation is good enough for me." But they may contribute enough documentation to get over that initial hurdle of non-trivial changes, and they may become of the core contributors of it, even though they are asserting they don't have the technical skill, but the fact that they recognize that is important, and when you put them at the same level as everyone else, it actually encourages them to level up.
+I’ve seen people go from saying that they don't have the technical skill to be a primary maintainer of a project that is very technical, just by giving them the permission and that blessing to say, "You're one of the team, you're equals with us and you have the responsibility to help foster this community and this project" and just simply giving that responsibility means people level up.
+\[\\00:35:44.27\] It's really surprising how that works in practice when you give them the responsibility. It's the responsibility that does it; when you give people responsibility over a project, then it creates in them something that makes them step up to the plate, and they are not just somebody from the outside tinkering and throwing little changes at you; they are actually somebody that takes it on board personally and that does really surprising things.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I really like this outlook of, "Well, you don't know if they are casual or not." Do you ever experience a tension between people that are already working on the project a lot and the kinds of policies that are gonna help them out and favor them, versus what’s gonna be more applicable to people that first show up?
+**Rod Vagg:** I think the tension comes mostly in terms of culture, and that's something that you do have to be very tuned into. How do you treat people coming in from the outside? It is helpful the fact that everyone who is part of that core group has already gone through that process, so usually they are tuned into that. Actually, it really makes people receptive to outsiders because they know they were once in that same place and they were helped out by the same community and they have become another helper.
+So most of the time, it’s actually really positive, but you do have to be careful that culture does not start to turn inward too much and start to become snobbish to people with different opinions. Because the fact about open source projects is that if they don't evolve with the people that use them, then people will stop using them. If they are not meaningful to people over the long run, then they become irrelevant.
+I don't even need to give examples here, because this is the history of open source, and people move on as well, and people show up; those new people often bring new ideas and new preferences, and if you don't allow a project to start to accept some of those new things, then you can become just as stale as a classic open source project. So being attuned to that policy, that culture of openness, and making sure that not just the mechanics, but the actual culture, the way that people work together remains open, I think is really important. And it's hard to do, as well. It's not something that you can as easily build into as something that goes over the long run.
+I've seen this in a couple of projects where it’s a small group, and you end up with a bit of an echo chamber about how something should be, and other people coming from outside with new ideas/alternative views and they have a hard time really getting into that echo chamber.
+I think that’s still the same problem that open source has had for a long time. It can be solved, but it's a matter of actually being attuned to it and watching for it, and making sure that you keep on reminding each other that "Hey, new people value this as much as we do."
+In fact, a lot of the time new people may value it more than we do because we might be moving onto new things, and we might be hanging around here because it’s a great community, but in terms of use of the project, other people out there may be using it more than we are and may actually place more value in the project, so allowing them to come in and shape it is not only worthwhile, but is vital for the future of the project.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** You said something interesting, which is that it's about culture; when everybody has gone through the process, you naturally have a culture that is really welcoming and open to newcomers if they started on that kind of long tail of contributions... But what about projects that have an established culture and an established policy? I mean, you and I were both involved in the reforming of the Node.js project, which very much had a very old style contribution policy, and there were not just one person, but several people that were very skeptical of liberalized contribution agreements.
+\[39:59\] So I was wondering if you could speak to some of the standardized arguments against liberal contribution policies, and what your response is and what other people's response should be if they are trying to move a project in a new direction or establish a newer culture.
+**Rod Vagg:** I think that these standard arguments are actually very familiar even outside of open source and software. My wife is a teacher, and during the rise of Wikipedia I got to hear all of the arguments that came from typically librarians, actually, but also educators that were used to having walled gardens around knowledge. Not that my wife had problems with Wikipedia or anything, but I got to hear it, being attached to that sort of community of educators. So those exact same arguments that arose during the rise of Wikipedia, and that still go on today ... You go to a school and find the librarian and you ask them about Wikipedia, there's a good chance you will get the same arguments. Those same arguments apply here.
+It's simply a fear of openness, it's a fear of the masses and the crowds. Some of it is legitimate, because it's a fear of chaos, and chaos is scary, for good reasons. But in practice, things are not chaotic; it's actually this wisdom of the crowds, this collective process where people get together and they get to collaborate, which is actually quite magical and it’s not chaotic, even though it might look chaotic from the outside, or it might sound - usually it just sounds chaotic, and not just looks chaotic. It sounds chaotic to people.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I'll give you one of these very specific things that we had to deal with, because I really want to know what your response is to this very simple one, because I hear it over and over again in other projects; they have a project with a bunch of open pull requests, and what they're really falling under is that they have a couple of maintainers and they are too stressed and they have too many pull requests coming in. So liberalizing contributions is just gonna make more requests come in and they're afraid of that maintenance overhead. What is the liberal contribution policy answer to that problem?
+**Rod Vagg:** Well, for a start, how good a problem is that to have, that you have people lining up to contribute to your project? That's a great problem to have, so get over yourself. But the best answer to that I think is if you look in practice at how this actually works. When you have a project that has those kinds of bottlenecks, particularly in the administrative areas, because the maintainers have their head in code or other areas where they think is more important, actually bringing on new people and giving them that sense of ownership and the sense of responsibility can actually take away a lot of those burdens. So in practice, when you - this happens almost universally - take on somebody new to a project and you say, " You own this thing; this is yours as much as it's mine and were are gonna work on this together, and you have permission to go and do all the things that a maintainer does as long as you do it in a collaborative way", one of the first things that most people do is go through the issues list and the pull requests lists and start doing some pruning or some maintaining of those things.
+That's an obvious place where a lot of people can help in open source, and they know they can help because they're doing it already often in their own projects. They can go and actually help with that interface with the community.
+So very often I'll have a project that I might be the only person doing it, and I say -- it might be something trivial, but I have this contribution policy where if you show up with something non-trivial, then I'll give you ownership of it; somebody might show up and I give them ownership... Almost immediately they’ll go through the issues list and start closing things or responding to things, just cleaning it up because they have this thing about what the project looks and feels like, so giving them that ownership is actually great for offloading some of that administrative burden.
+\[44:22\] In terms of getting a flood of people contributing, as I said, I think that's a great problem for open source project to have, and that was not something to be afraid of with Node. That was something we wanted to embrace, because that meant that Node was healthy and if we couldn't unblock that, then it was going to be unhealthy.
+But there is a fear there of the outsider coming in with different ideas to what you already have. As somebody who starts an open source project particularly, you have these ideas in your head about what this thing could be, where it's going, and very often you'll hold to those ideas pretty tightly. It’s a rare open source project that comes to life and has the idea that it's finished and it's ready to go. Mostly, these things come to life and we have these ideas about where it could go; it could evolve into this particular space and solve this particular problem set, and it would be this magical thing.
+If you are unable to let go of that internalized vision, or if you are unable to actually communicate that in a way that people are actually able to get on board with, then it can be really scary, because you’re saying, "These other people that don’t share my inner monologue about this project, these other people are gonna come in and they're gonna bring their own ideas about where this thing can go."
+That was one of the things I think we faced with Node, and it’s probably gonna be a challenge for a lot of existing projects. They have this idea, that this project is on a path towards this point in time and certain people, particularly people that are just interested in technical problem solving, the people who are thinking more architecturally and organizationally have this idea about what the steps to get there looks like and where it needs to go. Bringing in people from the outside that don’t have that is really scary, because it means that the project is probably not gonna go in that same place, unless you can do some pretty heavy communication and convincing work.
+I think that’s the problem we faced with Node and I can see that same problem with some other projects that are considering, but not quite at the stage of accepting this kind of model.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Good stuff. We're gonna take a short break and then when we get back we'll talk about reconciling liberal contribution with the BDFL's model of the past and what things might look like in the future.
+**Break:** \[47:05\]
+**Nadia Eghbal:** We're back with Rod Vagg and we are talking about liberal contribution agreements. I would like to hear about at what point do you think a project is "ready to take on" a liberal contribution policy? A lot of projects now start with a BDFL model and then they might transition later, but that’s how a lot of projects start. Do you think this is something that projects should have from the beginning? Is it something you think they should save for when they are a little bit more mature?
+**Rod Vagg:** My ideas here are very much formed by my own involvement in community groups outside of technology, and watching community groups that are held too tightly by a core group really fail to get traction and thrive. And this idea that you can run a group for your own personal interest -- that's a pretty raw way of saying it, but often I think that’s the way the groups are run, that they are run for the sake of the people running them. When you are trying to do community, that’s just not gonna work and it’s kind of terrible.
+If you have a community, then that community needs to exist for itself. It needs to be self-referential, it needs to be self-governing, it needs to be self-owning. And when you're running a community group and you’re not letting the people inside it have that sense of ownership or the actual ownership, then you're in for a lot of trouble. So applying that to open source I think just makes perfect sense.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So earlier you were talking about how one of the big fears is that other people coming in are going to change the vision of the project, and what you were just talking about there kind of backs it up. There's gonna be this tension between the personal interest that I have and the shared interest of other people, and I think especially when you have a popular project that you've been the BDFL of for a while, all the people coming in asking for things just seem kind of crazy in that scope, and the fear is that "When I open this up to more shared interests, there is gonna be this big scope creep." What has been your experience actually opening up that sense of ownership, though? Has the scope kind of gotten out of control or has it actually contracted?
+**Rod Vagg:** Right, okay. So I guess that back us to the previous section about the objections, and one of the big things is scope creep. And that’s acute for us in the Node area, because we have this idea of small core, and a lot of us, particularly that have been around Node for a while, have this very much internalized.
+We appreciate the core of Node being small, so that was a particular problem for the Node core project, but we also apply that all across the ecosystem. We like having our modules small, we like having the scopes small, so that we can have lots of these modules pieced together and not have these modules balloon out into these monoliths that do everything. We wanna have them to be really small and self-contained, and just be able to describe them nicely in an idea, rather than having to have these huge sets of documentation that describe all these magical things you can do with it. It's just gonna be... A readme is enough, and if you need more than a readme, then perhaps you are doing too much.
+So there is a fear of scope creep there. If I open up to people coming in from the outside, then they are gonna add all this crazy stuff because they want this thing to do more than it really should do. In practice, that comes down to culture again, and also this whole consensus seeking process.
+\[51:44\] You can actually see how this works by looking at governments, in general. The more people you add to a committee, the more people you add to a government, the harder it is to make decisions, and so that process of - it's like an intentional gridlock that actually is built into this liberal contribution process, where it’s not easy to make radical changes. In fact, sometimes it's impossible. I embrace that and actually like that as one of the features here; it’s very difficult to make radical changes. Incremental changes usually are okay, but making radical changes is very difficult; even adding huge features is very difficult. Particularly a departure from the core idea of the project can be difficult, because you are having to deal with people that have already internalized what the project is about - so that’s that onboarding process again. You're showing up with your changes and they may be a big departure from the project, and you are having to present them to the people that have already internalized what this project is about. If it doesn’t match, then you are gonna be gently rejected.
+We see this all the time, particularly with Node core now, because we have people showing up all the time wanting to add features because they think... They have this idea that something belongs in core because they are bringing their preconceptions about what a standard library should be from other languages, be it Python or Java. Then they bring these arguments usually, "I can do this when I write a Java program, why can't I do it when I just run Node? Why do I have to install this thing from npm"? But you are bumping up against a very established culture of small core and small standard library, so you have to go through that process of accepting that that's just the way things are before you can even get into that group.
+Yeah, I guess that's a roundabout way of saying a couple of things there, which is that the model itself is not very well suited to big revolutionary changes; it's much more suitable to evolutionary changes, which is actually in the interest of users, because software projects that do revolutionary changes that might change radically between versions one and two rarely survive that transition. And I’ve done that myself, I’ve taken a project that was going really well and I thought "Okay, well I don’t like the way it is internally. I'm gonna rewrite it all, and make a version two that is so much better", to find out that no one cares about your version two and it doesn't suit their needs, and it was all in your head.
+That happens all the time with open source and that’s the nature of revolutionary change. You have users out there that value the thing as it is and if you are not evolving it in contact with those users, then you are gonna be in trouble. So the process itself really lends itself much more to evolutionary change, and also that onboarding, the process of getting into that core group; there’s an implicit onboarding there, it's not even explicit. There's not a thing where you have to go through an onboarding, you are going through an onboarding when you get through those hoops, and that is part of an enculturation thing that is really taking on board the ideas of the project. Perhaps the project itself actually has the idea that it wants to be expansive; that would be found out pretty quickly as part of that process.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I wonder if that makes the argument then that... I mean, if you want to say arguably the most "innovative stage" of a project might be earlier on when everything is still really new, and you're trying to lay the foundation, find your voice, find the culture and the kind of angle you wanna take, it makes more sense to have a BDFL style model early on, when changes can be made more radically and more quickly by, say by one person, and the liberal contribution working better in like this maturity stage of evolving things, but a little more slowly? Is that consistent with what you've seen?
+**Rod Vagg:** I don't think so. So BDFL, for a start, I really don't like the idea of BDFL. To me this idea that you can take full ownership and be dictatorial on a project that is valued by other people often very deeply, I find it really repulsive. And so just in general I just hate that model, and often what happens in BDFL projects, pre-BDFL run projects and small-group run projects that are closed is that you'll end up with the people that are running the project spending more time on the project than actually using it. That creates for an interesting effect, which is that they become more detached from their users. And they might hear from their users via issues and pull requests, but if they spend more time as a maintainer than as a user, then you've got a problem there.
+We still have that in Node, because many of us that work on Node Core, we do that as a job. We spend a lot of time in there, rather than being users of the project. So that’s where the value of constantly having this intake of people who value the project enough that they are willing to put in time and effort to contribute to it - those are the people that are the users, they are the people that this thing matters to.
+And it might matter to you simply because you have some history with it, or you've become emotionally attached to it, but if it doesn’t matter to you as a user of the project, then you are in a bit of trouble.
+\[57:47\] So back to the original question, which is how early should you start this thing... I don’t have a great answer for that, because I’ve seen it work in different ways; mostly, new projects don’t have a lot of buzz anyway. When you start a new project, you might pick up a few interested people in your ideas, but you're hardly gonna start off with something that suddenly you have an influx of people wanting to contribute to your thing, until you have something that is meaningful.
+I'm not sure that it makes sense to say, "This thing should be BDFL until it's ready", because until it's ready, you're probably not gonna have enough users that want to jump into it anyway, and if you have this idea of what is ready, if that’s obvious, then contributors are probably gonna be onboard with that anyway. I saw that with the LevelUP and the LevelDB ecosystem, that's exactly what happened. It was obvious to people what this thing needed to add in order to be what it was going to be what, and that was a very small group initially, and a very passionate group, because they had a need and they saw where this thing was gonna fit. So they contributed from an early stage, it was open from early on, and they contributed around that idea, and they really created that culture and they created the idea of where it should end up.
+It might make sense for you to just hold something as closed sourced while you get it ready to be open sourced, so you're not always throwing out projects that are not gonna be finished, and maybe you wanna set something up that's obvious where it’s going. That might be an important thing to do, but I don't buy the argument that something should be BDFL because it’s still getting ready, because getting ready is a special process in itself that people will attach to.
+We're in a very distinct phase with Node, which is we've gone past the phase of defining what this beast is. That happened - I think it happened all the way up to I think Node 0.10. That was very much an evolving process of trying to figure out what the boundaries of this application, this platform were.
+We've gone through that process; we have a very clear understanding of that now, so we're very much in the phase of minor evolutionary incremental changes to improve things for the life of users. We're filing off the rough edges, and we are basically in this maintenance mode, but it's still extremely active maintenance mode, where we have a lot of contributions, a lot of work going on every single day. It's all around this sort of perfecting this thing that is already defined.
+That's a very distinct phase for Node, but I think Node still could have been developed early on from being much more open than it was, and it may have even gotten to a better place, but I don’t know. I doubt it would have gotten to a worse place than it is now by being more open.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Sounds like even if effectively there aren't that many people contributing early on, that’s different from codifying the idea of BDFL, does that make sense? It sounds like you're suggesting that liberal contribution works from the very beginning and just realistically you're not gonna have as many people contributing when a project is super young, and you'll just sort of transition over time; that's different from saying, "I am BDFL" early on.
+**Rod Vagg:** That's just right, and that brings up an important point, which I haven’t touched on at all which is the importance of leadership. It's nice to have this idea that you’re gonna have people show up, you're gonna have this emergent property of leadership, it's just gonna emerge out of the mass of people doing things. That's a nice idea and sometimes it works, but very often you still need leadership, and that leadership may be in the form of people putting in more effort than others.
+\[01:02:01.17\] That’s what happens early on in a project - you've either got one person or a few people who are passionate enough about making this thing work, that they are willing to put in that much time to get it there; rarely do you have a lot of people doing that. Usually, there is only a small group or only one person, so that’s what leadership looks like initially.
+As the project evolves you need somebody or some people to serve in that role of facilitating the community, and that comes down to the fact that not everyone is a leader and we ought to be fine with that, that not everyone wants to be a leader and not everyone has those natural skills to be a leader, and when you accept that then you see that there is a place for individuals to step up and just start being the grease in the wheels. And that can play out in really interesting ways; it can play out just by the fact that somebody is stepping up. Very often, other people will be looking for that person, and they'll be waiting for it, and they step up and they might start to assert things, and other people involved in the project might say "Phew, finally somebody is here to take that burden." And we can disagree with them, "Great, at least we've got someone to disagree with now. We don’t just have this mess of people that are too timid to really assert thing", so having somebody stand up and start asserting can be a really valuable thing and people look forward to it.
+The other way that it can manifest is simply in the respect that people get over time, and that’s how leadership can evolve in these projects. It evolves in open source in general; you build up this capital of respect by your contributions and by what you know and what people know that you know, and you see that in complex projects like Node. Node has a lot of different areas that are all very distinct and there are different levels of expertise in different areas that are required to understand them and nobody -- there's zero people in the Node Core project, amongst that group of people, that understand it all and that are experts in it all. Everybody is an expert in one area or a few areas, and nobody is an expert in it all.
+And the way this kind of leadership evolves in that setting is that people build up the respect and the technical capital from other people that they know this area and that they are somebody to be listened to. One of the most obvious ways this plays out at Node is when you think about Crypto; it’s a really hard area for people to get across, very few people really understand it enough. We have a few people that are really well respected in that area, and we will generally defer to them, and often for even the most trivial things; we'll say we need sign off from these people, or they need to be involved in this discussion in order for it to move forward, and then when those people in that small group - or it might be just one person even - they start proposing changes in their little area of expertise, they almost get a free pass because everyone looks at them as the leader in that area.
+So that plays out really interestingly when you've got a complex enough project, but it also plays out in smaller projects when you’ve got simply somebody who has got obvious depth of technical knowledge and understanding about a project; they are generally recognized and they get to play that leadership role, as well.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[01:06:08.21\] I think that there’s a really interesting distinction here between entitlement and respect. The BDFL model is about entitlement, like you are entitled to run this project indefinitely, and to some extent when you have a small group that’s closed off too, like "I'm entitled to be the area owner of this, and it’s not anymore about just other people respecting my expertise here." And one of the interesting effects there is that you're only ever going to get one person that's gonna be the expert on that if you're allowing this entitlement to be there rather than respect; like, at one point in its history Node did only have one Crypto expert, and now there are two and they are both equally respected. I don't think there ever would have been two or would have gotten two if there was an area owner, or an area dictator of that particular area.
+**Rod Vagg:** Right, that’s exactly right, and also that dynamic also impacts on people's willingness to be involved. If you have a process that says, "You have to respect this individual and their opinions", simply because they are that person, they are their BDFL, you're actually less likely to get people to engage, because a lot of people are not going to submit to this idea that authority is granted rather than earned, and particularly in the technical community, especially amongst engineers.
+If you’ve ever done any work with personality typing, you find that there are people that will accept authority simply because it exists or because it’s being granted or because somebody just says so. You have a monarch, and they've always been that way and they should be respected - that's great - and then you have other people, who are like "No, you have to earn my respect, you have to earn that place in authority before I’m willing to submit to that authority, and I'm willing to give you that respect."
+In software engineering and engineering in general, we're much more heavily weighted towards those kinds of personalities where you need to earn the respect, you need to earn your place in authority, otherwise you just not going to get it automatically. People are not gonna come down and automatically accept what you say. And you can see that every day if you go to Hacker News, you'll see this same sort of dynamic happening, where everyone is an expert and there's only a few people that really have earned enough trust of enough of enough of our community to be able to say things and get a free pass for saying them without getting everything picked apart.
+And that happens all the time in open source and if you have a BDFL that says this individual is the person that decides what goes and what's good enough, and they haven’t earned that respect or they aren't continually earning that respect, then you're gonna have a huge breakdown in people’s willingness to be involved. To use it as well - if people don’t respect the people running the project, why would you use it?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** The continual part there is the big distinction, I think, and this is also what I think a lot of people's problem with meritocracy is. It's that Meritocracy isn’t about continued investment and respect for that continued investment, it’s really just about setting a bar and then saying, "Everyone who gets over this bar has a particular set of entitlement now." Once you're in the club, you're in the club forever. That's what meritocracy has become to mean, in a lot of ways.
+**Rod Vagg:** To be honest, that's something we're still struggling with, and you know this Mikeal. We have this process of onboarding people to these projects, but we don’t have a good process for off-boarding, and that’s still something we need to explore. We need to have a way to say "Okay, your time has passed. You’re no longer actively involved, so maybe you don’t deserve a seat at the table anymore."
+\[01:10:01.17\] This is a real challenge, because we have even now situations where people are making decisions in Node -- Node is the obvious place because it's been around for a long time and it has these people that have earned their position, but have sorta moved on. But even now, you will have people showing up and asserting themselves or even being involved in the decision-making process that are not actively involved in the day-to-day. And there's a disconnect between that and this process of 'those that do the work, get to make the decisions' - that's what really underlies open contribution governance. Those that show up, those that put in time and effort are the ones that should be making the decisions about the project, because those are the ones to whom the project is most valuable.
+And so if you have people that you haven't effectively off boarded, but are still effectively hanging around asserting themselves - and that may be the original person, the original BDFL... Even in some of my own projects I've struggled with this, because I have these ideas internalized about the project and I haven’t even used it for a long time, and then to watch people, having its own community of collaborators evolve it in ways that I'm not comfortable with, it's very difficult not to step in and say, "No, that's just not in line with what this project should be". Having a way to off board people from that I think is really important, and I don’t think we've quite figured that out yet. But we will get there, because it's an important step.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** In that vein, I’d like to hear a little bit on about what you might think some potential -- not necessarily downsides, but challenges of liberal contributions might be, that are new or specific to liberal contributions?
+**Rod Vagg:** Well, one thing I've touched upon earlier on is this discussion-heavy culture. This is something I think about regularly, because I personally enjoy it. I like to engage in vigorous discussion, I like discussion to be almost argumentative; argument for argument's sake is a bad thing, but a discussion that is vigorous and is actually trying to find better outcomes I find extremely invigorating, because it means you are working with other very capable people to perfect something that one individual could not do on their own, and to me that’s one of the greatest things about having a community of equals. You can present something that you may think is great, and then it goes through the process of working with other people and it becomes even greater because you've go that extra input.
+That's a great thing, but it makes this process really discussion-heavy, and that, unfortunately, is a barrier to a lot of people, because a lot of people don't appreciate that, and for good reason. Sometimes it’s just a personality thing; they don't want to have to engage in too much discussion, but often it’s simply a soft confidence / maturity thing. You show up and you put up your ideas, gently put up your suggestions and suddenly you've got these people piling on, going through the process they go through every other change to perfect something, and you've just put up something that you feel very deeply about, or you might feel it’s a reflection of your own abilities or your own self in some day, and you've suddenly got people showing up, telling you ways that it could be made better or changed or fixed, or ways that it’s no good, and that can be extremely intimidating and it can be very off-putting.
+\[01:13:45.26\] One of the challenges I think we have is in making sure we do this in a way that is welcoming even to those people. That's a challenge, because it’s not something that’s easily codified into rules, and it’s certainly not something that emerges out of the process, because what emerges naturally out of the process is it raises up those individuals and those processes that encourage discussion, and the grinding away of the ideas until they become their best selves.
+That’s a really interesting challenge that I don't have great answers for, but I think we will be seeing a lot more thought put into as time goes on, because it's a real one and we don't want to marginalize people that don't fit into this natural mode that this thing is really well-suited for.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think there's also just a time commitment aspect to that. You are valuing people's input that can assert themselves continually for quite a long time, whereas people that are more casual or just don't want to put in all the work to read this giant thread, they no longer can participate because of how this is going.
+**Rod Vagg:** Right, and I often say that these models are the best way so far in connecting project governance with the users that value it the most. With open source, we don’t have the ability to go out and survey all our users, because we don't know who they are. It's not like a product from a company where you might have contact with every one of your users and you can actually go there and ask them questions.
+We can't involve our users that way directly with our open source projects, but what we can do is say, "If you're showing up and you have a change to me, could be a bug fix or an enhancement, then this thing is obviously important to you", so in my opinion it’s the best way we have so far to connect a project with the people that value it the most.
+Unfortunately, a lot of those people that do value the project, don’t have the time, as you said, to go through the process itself. It may be extremely valuable to them and there may be something about it that needs fixing, they may have a bug or a way that they are using the project that is unique enough that no one else has picked up on the problem, and they may present a solution, but perhaps they are using it to run a business and they don't have time to engage in this process. But their changes actually have merit, it's just that it’s not experienced by many other people, so that they have to be the champion of that change. When you are in that position, that can suck, really.
+I'd like us to find a way to make sure that we recognize that input from outsiders that don’t have the ability to engage in that same way, but it’s very difficult to find a way that. I guess you wanna make sure that the project is still run by those that value it the most; you don’t want to open up avenues for it to be run by people who just wanna show up with their ideas and turn it into something they think it should be, simply because it’s their preference. You want it to be run by people who actually use it, who actually value it. Finding a way to make it inclusive enough I guess is the challenge.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** That's a good stopping point for us. Thanks, Rod, for talking to us about liberal contributions.
+**Rod Vagg:** Thank you very much.

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+**Nadia Eghbal:** I'm Nadia Eghbal...
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And I'm Mikeal Rogers.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** On today's show, Mikeal and I talked with Andrew Nesbitt, creator of Libraries.io, and Arfon Smith, who heads up open source data at GitHub. Andrew's project, Libraries.io helps people discover and track open source libraries, which was informed by his work on GitHub Explore. Arfon works to make GitHub data more accessible to the public. Previously, he worked on science initiatives at GitHub and elsewhere, including a popular citizen science platform called Zooniverse.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Our focus on today's episode with Andrew and Arfon was around open source metrics and how to interpret data around dependencies and usage. We talked about what we currently can and cannot measure in today's open source ecosystem.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** We also got into individual project metrics. We talked with Andrew and Arfon about how we can measure success, what maintainers should be paying attention to and whether stars really matter.
+Andrew, I'll start with you. What made you wanna build Libraries.io? How was that informed by your GitHub Explore experiences, if at all?
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** I got a little bit frustrated working at GitHub on the Explore stuff. It was me kind of deprioritized whilst I was there, and my approach of libraries, rather than just build the same thing again outside of GitHub, was to use a different data source, which started at the package management level, and it turns out that's actually a really good source of metric data, especially when you start looking into dependencies. If I had taken the approach of, "Let me look at GitHub repositories", I would have gone down a very different path, I think.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Right. So tell me a little bit about that. So you pull out the whole dependency graph data - do you go into the kind of deep dependencies, or do you sort of stay at more of a top layer of first-order dependency data?
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** So for each project, it only pulls out the direct dependency. But as it picks up every project, because every time it finds anything that depends on anything else, it will go investigate that as well. It ends up having the full dependency tree, but right now I don't have it stored in a way that makes it very easy to query in a transitive way, if that makes sense. I've been looking into putting the whole dataset into Neo4j - a graph database - to be able to do that easy transitive query, and to be able to give you the whole picture of any one library's dependencies and their transitive dependencies, but it's not quite at that point. But I do have all the data to be able to do it.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Interesting. Okay. So you said that this is a much more interesting way to go about this in the GitHub data. What's something that you found when you started working with the dependency data that you never had in GitHub Explore, or just to the GitHub data?
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** GitHub stars don't really give you a good indication of actual usage, and GitHub download data is only really accessible if you are a maintainer of a project, rather than just someone who's looking at the project from a regular browser's perspective. If you actually look at the dependency data and not just other libraries that depend on that particular library, but if you look at the whole ecosystem and how many, say, GitHub projects depend upon this particular package, it gives you a fairly good idea of how many people are still using that, still need that thing to be around so that code continues to work. And if there was a security vulnerability, you can see exactly how many projects may be affected. So actually end up connecting the dots between... And I've only looked at GitHub data so far; I haven't got around to doing Bitbucket or arbitrary Git repositories.
+\[04:21\] But you can actually use package management data to connect the dots between GitHub repositories as well. You can say, "Oh, well given this GitHub repository, how many other GitHub repositories depend on it through npm or through RubyGems.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It's good to hear that stars are useless, because I've also thought that. \[laughs\] That's been my assessment, as well.
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** Yeah, I've \[unintelligible 00:04:46.03\] over how you shouldn't judge a project by its GitHub stars. There's one particular project that's a great example of that, it's called Volkswagen. It is essentially a monkey patch for your CI to make sure it always passes. I think it's got something like 5,000 GitHub stars, and it's maybe downloaded 50 times on npm; it has zero usage.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, that's by Thomas Watson. It was a joke when VW had that scandal where they were just passing all their tests, so he wrote a module called Volkswagen that just made all your tests pass, no matter what. \[laughs\] It's brilliant... But yeah, utterly useless in terms of actual usage.
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** Yeah, and if you actually look at the stars... Of course, people have contributed to it, but even looking at contributed data doesn't give you a good indication of actually is this a useful thing, a real thing, and should I care about it? I always look at GitHub stars as a way of... It's kind of like a Hacker News upvote or a Reddit upvote, or a Facebook like. It just means like, "Oh, that's neat!", rather than "I'm actually using this" or "I used to use this five years ago." No one ever un-stars anything either, whereas if people stop using a dependency, you actually see the amount of people that depend on a thing go down.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think stars are an indication of attention at some point in time, and that is all we can say about them. So if you look at stars versus pageviews on a given repo, they correlate very well. So in defense of stars, we shouldn't use them as "This is what people are using", but they're a good measure of some popularity, some metric. And I think that's exactly what you just said, Andrew. Consider it like a Facebook like, or something like that. It's got very little to do with how many people are actually using something at any point in time.
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** Yeah. I saw someone actually build a package manager; I think it was only a prototype, but I really hope it never actually became a thing, where it would pick the right GitHub repository if you just gave it the name rather than the owner and the name, by the thing that had the most stars, which sounded like a terrible idea at the time and completely gameable.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, that doesn't sound like a good idea. You mentioned something interesting, which was you can understand how people use it in terms of just it being depended on. Recently GitHub did this new BigQuery thing, and one of the results is that you can do - RegEx has done the actual file content of a lot of this stuff, so you can start to look at which methods of a module people might use or how they might use it. Could you get into that a little bit?
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** Yeah, so just to refresh the data that we put into BigQuery, it's basically not only the event data that comes out of the GitHub API, which is just "Something happened on this public repo" - and that's what the GitHub archive has been collecting for a long time - this is actually in addition to that, the contents of the files and all the paths of the files for about 2.8 million repos, so anything with an open source license on GitHub basically that's in a public repo.
+\[08:15\] So that allows you to do things like if there's a particularly - maybe a method call in your public API that you wanna try and measure the use of, then you can now actually go and look for people using that explicitly. So currently really complex kind of RegEx stuff on GitHub searches is pretty hard; in fact, I'm not sure you can do a RegEx query on GitHub search, so that's one of the strengths of BigQuery, that you can actually construct these really complex, expensive queries, but then of course that gets distributed across the BigQuery framework, so it comes back in a reasonable amount of time.
+For me I think the exciting thing about that... I think that's really complementary to things like libraries that go and look at package managers - that's incredibly useful, but I think not every language has a strong convention for the package management that they use, unfortunately, some of us forget that; I think we're very fortunate in Ruby and JavaScript land, that there's really good conventions there, which are really useful, so using dependencies is great. But for those cases where that isn't an option, you can now actually go and look for telltale signs of your library being used, and maybe that's because of an import statement or an actual method call.
+**Arfon Smith:** Yeah, for languages like C, that's pretty much the only way to do it. There's just no convention there, other than the language itself. And then for some other package managers, you actually have to execute a file to be able to work out the things that it depends upon, which I avoid doing because I don't really wanna run other people's code just arbitrarily.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, in the NodeJS project we've been trying forever to really figure out how are people using some of these methods, because if we wanna, say, deprecate something, we'd really like to know how many people are using that in the wild and to which level is it depended on. But we've had several projects where we tried to pull all of the actual sources out of npm and create some kind of parse graph and then figure out how that gets used... It's just such a big undertaking that it hasn't really happened. When this BigQuery stuff got released we were like, "Oh my god, how far can we get with the RegEx to figure out some of the stuff that's used?" because that'd be really useful.
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** Yeah, it kind of makes me sad that we've made everyone write crazy RegExes, but sorry about that. Hopefully, that will be useful. \[laughs\] Hopefully a bunch of good stuff can be done; people are gonna have to level up their RegEx skills, I think.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Just for people who are newer to metrics world, why should they care to be blunt about this dataset being open and being on BigQuery? What are some things that you expect the world to be able to do with this data? Even outside of people like Mikeal with Node, but policy makers or researchers or anyone else.
+**Arfon Smith:** One of the things I think is incredibly difficult right now for some people is to measure how much people are using their stuff. For a maintainer of an open source project maybe that's not a huge problem, because you can go and look at things like libraries and see how many people are including your library as a dependency, or maybe you can just see how many forks and stars you've got of your project on GitHub, but I think there are some producers of software where actually reporting these numbers is incredibly important, and Nadia, you mentioned researchers. If I get money as an academic researcher from a federal agency like the National Science Foundation or the National Institute of Health, one of the really important things about getting money from these funders is you need to be able to report the impact of your work.
+\[12:26\] It's currently kind of hard to do that if you have your software only on GitHub and you don't have any other way of measuring when people use the library. You don't have any direct ways of doing that, other than just looking at the graphs that you have as the owner of the software on GitHub. So I'm excited about the possibility of people being able to just construct queries to go and look... Of course, only open source, public stuff is in this BigQuery dataset, but I think it offers at least a place where people can go and try and get some further insight into usage.
+I think it's actually a hard problem to solve, but I know there are some environments - I'm trying to think of some large institutional compute facilities, big HPC centers... People have done some work, doing some reporting on when something's being installed or run, and actually Homebrew I think have started doing that recently as well, starting to capture these metrics. Because it's really tough to know; not everything that people produce is open source, so it's not even clear that everything's out there and measurable and available. It's really tough if you need good numbers to actually say, "Who's using my stuff? Where are they?", and there's lots of very legitimate privacy concerns for collecting all of that data. So yeah, it's a hard problem.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** So for you coming from the academia world, have you gotten requests from people from the scientific community around using this type of data? Did those experiences help inform the genesis of this project at all?
+**Arfon Smith:** Yeah, a little bit. Very early on when I joined GitHub I got some enquiries from people saying, "We'd love to get really, really rich metrics on how much stuff is being downloaded, where people are downloading from..." - all this stuff that you needed if you had to report and you wanted really rich metrics. Some of those data we just can't serve in a responsible fashion. There's no way we can tell you the username of every GitHub user of your software, that would be a gross violation of users' privacy on our part. So there are things that we just can't do.
+The other things is - and I think this is a kind of a pretty sane standpoint for us to take - we take very seriously user support, so if somebody comes to me with a data request, it may be ethically possible for me to service that, and it might be technically possible for me to service that. But if it takes two weeks of my time to pull that data, then we're not gonna help them with that problem, and that's because we kind of believe that everybody... We should be able to service a thousand requests that are coming like that; we should be able to give uniformly the same level of quality support service to people, so we generally try and avoid doing special favors, if that makes sense, in terms of pulling data. So this is why making it a self-service thing, getting more data out in the community, making it possible for people to answer their own questions is a much more scalable approach to this problem.
+\[15:58\] I think the next step for me personally with this data being published is to start to kind of show some examples of how it can be used to answer common support questions that we see. I think that's kind of the obvious next step from my standpoint.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And Andrew, you're in a position where you're actually taking a bunch of public data that's out there in all these different public ecosystems and then kind of mashing it together, so you're like your own customer for this data. What are some of the interesting things that you've been looking at? What are some of the most interesting questions that you've been able to answer?
+**Arfon Smith:** Unfortunately I didn't have access to the BigQuery earlier, so I've been collecting it manually via the GitHub API for the past year and a bit, which takes a lot longer, but it also picks up all of the repositories that don't have a license, which I guess often it's probably best not to pull people's code out if they have not given permission to do that.
+Some of the things that I've been able to pull out and have been quite interesting is looking at not only the usage of package managers across different repositories, but the amount of repositories that use more than one package manager, or that use Bower and npm, or RubyGems and npm, and then looking at the total counts of those usages, as well as the number of lockfiles, which I found really interesting.
+Coming from a time working with Rails before Bundler, it was incredibly painful sharing projects or coming back to projects and trying to reinstall the set of dependencies that all worked, given the transitive dependencies that move around all the time with new versions. And it looks like the Ruby community is pretty much... For every gemfile there was a gemfile.lock, whereas for the Node community, there's maybe kind of five, ten thousand shrinkwrap files that I've found on GitHub on public projects, compared to the nine hundred thousand package.jsons, which in the short term won't be a problem, but could potentially cause Node projects to be very hard to bring back to life if they've not been used in over a year. Because trying to rebuild that transitive dependency graph may be impossible - or it may be really easy, it's hard to know. But it's quite interesting to look at how different communities take how their "How reproducible can I make my software?"
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I think we're heading into the break right now... When we come back we'll talk about the open source ecosystem.
+**Break:** \[18:49\]
+**Nadia Eghbal:** \[19:38\] We're back with Andrew from Libraries.io and Arfon from GitHub. In this segment I wanna talk about the broader open source ecosystem and the types of metrics that are and aren't available to people, because I've heard a lot of confusion about "Well, why can't we measure what is being measured right now?" and I think both of you together probably have a good handle on that. I want to start with talking about GitHub data, since that was mentioned earlier, around download data and stars and things like that. Are there any sort of myths that you wanna address around the types of things that GitHub actually does measure or doesn't measure?
+**Arfon Smith:** I don't think so. I mean, I don't know what myths there might be. I would love to hear things that you've heard that you would love to know if they're true. I don't know of any kind of whisperings of what GitHub might be doing, so I'm happy to respond to questions.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I hear a lot around just download data, and whether GitHub actually has the data and isn't sharing enough of it, why not use download data in addition to stars as something that people can see...
+**Arfon Smith:** Sure... Yeah, okay. So there is a difference between what you as a project owner can see about a GitHub project and you as a potential user of that software. So there are graphs with things like number of clones of the software, which is I think a good metric, there are graphs for showing how many pageviews your project got actually, like a mini Google Analytics. So anybody who owns a GitHub repository can see those graphs. They're not exposed to the general public, and I would like them to be; I think they're useful. I think we were kind of cautious initially when rolling those out, thinking that was the kind of information that is something maybe that's only relevant or appropriate for the repository owner to see... I don't know, I think that data is generally useful for people to be able to see if... Andrew, you've mentioned before just the idea there's a package manager that tries to suggest the correct GitHub repository based on just a name, and it does that based on stars - that's not great, but at the same time when you are looking for a piece of software to use, if it has a bunch of forks and a bunch of stars and a bunch of contributors, then that helps you inform your decision about what to use, even if you haven't even looked at the code yet, right? Personally, I use that information to help inform my decision.
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** I seem to remember the metrics weren't exposed because of some of the referrer data potentially leaking people's internal CI systems.
+**Arfon Smith:** Yeah, that might be possible. I'm not hugely familiar with exactly why the data isn't exposed right now. I think it's important to remember that we take user privacy very seriously, so the thing here is you wanna be on the right side of people's expectations of privacy. There are things that GitHub could do that would surprise people - and not in a good way - and we don't want that to happen. So you're always gonna see us on the side of reducing the scope of who could see a particular thing. That said, I think consumption metrics, fork events - we used to expose downloads. I think one reason we don't expose downloads anymore is we actually just changed the way that we capture that metric, and it's not captured in a way that is designed to be served through like a production service. It's in our analytics pipeline, but it's not in a place where we could build an API around it, it's just not performant enough to build those kind of endpoints.
+\[23:47\] So yeah, we capture more information than we expose, but that's just a routine part of running a web application and having a good engineering culture around measuring lots of things. The decision about what to further expose to the broad open source community or the public at large is largely one based on making sure that we're in line with people's expectations of privacy, but also just based on user feedback. So if the stuff that you would like to see presented more clearly, you should definitely get in touch with us about that, because we are responsive to things that come up as common feature requests. That's a good way of giving us feedback.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think also any metric has to be qualified, right? A lot of this talk about stars is that stars is not an indication of quality, it's an indication of popularity at a point in time, like you said, but people take it as that because it's the only data that they have.
+An example is in NodeJS we have metrics for which operating system people are using, so we always put out two data points. One is the operating systems that have pulled downloads of Node, either the tarballs or the installers of some kind, and then we also have the actual market share for the NodeJS website, visitors to the website. And those are two ends of a very large spectrum in terms of machines that are running Node and people that are using Node.
+One metric that is huge on the people end is Windows, and incredibly small on the actual computer end is Windows. But we do a lot to qualify those before we put them out, to set people's expectations about them.
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** Yeah, and there's another thing... I think the Python package index has a similar - like a badge you can put on your profile. And you see this, people will put it, the number of downloads last month from the Python package index, and it's exactly the same problem. For a fast-moving project where they're doing lots of CI builds it might be 50,000 downloads last month, or something, and you're like, "Whoa, that's crazy!" and then actually there's not that many users, it's actually the CI tools that are responsible for most of those.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, the problem with download metrics on packages too is that you also get into the dependency graph stuff, right? Downloads are really good at looking at the difference in popularity between something like Lodash and Request. They're both very popular, but the difference in downloads gives you some kind of indication of the difference. But there's also a dependency of requests that's only depended on by three other packages, that has amazing download numbers because it's depended on by Request, right?
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** Yeah, I have one of those, [base62](https://github.com/andrew/base62.js). I don't think there are many projects that use it, but it gets like one and a half million downloads a month because React transitively depends upon it, so it's downloaded by everyone all the time. But it never changes, it's never really used. Lots of people reimplement it themselves.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That's funny. There's a lot of packages like that. The whole Leftpad debacle was people did not know that this was used by a thing that used a thing that used a thing. It wasn't that popular of like a first-order dependency, it just happened to be in the graph of a couple really popular things.
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** That's one reason why I haven't started pull download stats for libraries, because you can't compare across different package managers either, because the client may cache really aggressively. RubyGems really aggressively caches every package, whereas if people are kind of blasting away their Node modules folder whenever they want to reinstall things, then the numbers - you can't even try to compare them across different package managers. If you're looking for "I wanna find the best library to work with Redis, then download counts just muddy the waters, really.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[28:01\] I think a lot of the metrics fall into that, though. When you start looking at them across ecosystems, they really don't match up. The one that I think of comparing a lot is Go and npm. GoDoc is actually like a documentation resource, it's not really a package manager, but people essentially use the index of it as an indication of the count of total packages. But that's really like about four times what the actual unique packages are, which is an interesting way to go, and it's one things that just doesn't map up with the way that npm or PIP do it. Not that it's invalid, it's just measuring something different.
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** Yeah, the Go package manager is slightly strange because it's so distributed. It's just, give it a URL and that is the package that it will install, so basically every nested filed inside that package could be considered to be a separate thing, because it's just a URL that points to a file of the internet, as opposed to something that has been explicitly published as a package manager to a repository somewhere.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I'd like to get into the human side of this, too. You've mentioned this a little bit earlier when you were talking about the difference between npm and Ruby in terms of locking down your dependencies. That's not enforced by the package manager, it's just now a cultural norm to use Bundler and not npm. Are there some other people differences that you see between Go and npm because of those huge differences? Or any other packet manager, for that matter.
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** I've tried not to look too much into the people yet, partly because I didn't wanna end up pulling a lot of data that could be used by recruiters, and make libraries a source of kind of horrible data that would abuse people's privacy.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I didn't mean like individuals, I meant like culturally. I didn't mean like, "Be creepy." \[laughs\]
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** \[inaudible 00:29:55.07\] all kinds of horrible things. Nothing springs to mind... I guess you can look at the average number of packages that a developer in a particular language or package manager would potentially publish more, or the size of different packages. Node obviously tends towards smaller things, or a lot more smaller things. There are still some big projects as well, but it's a bit more spread around, whereas something like Java tends to have really large packages that would do a lot of things.
+I haven't done too much in comparing the different package managers from that perspective, because it felt like... As you said, you don't get much mileage from going like "What this thing compared to this thing?" It's much better to look at what packages can we highlight as interesting or important within a particular package manager and see if we can do something to support those and the people behind them; so looking at who are the key people inside the community, and then "Are they well supported? What can we do to encourage or to help them out more?" as opposed to trying to compare people across different languages.
+You definitely see a certain amount of people who live in more than one language as well. It's not often that there's people that are just only doing one particular language.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I'm curious whether there's - I don't know a whole lot about this, but if there's any way to standardize how package managers work across languages, or just standardize behavior somehow. Because I just sort of think for people that are coming for this from outside of open source, but are really curious of, for example, what are the most depended on libraries that we should be looking at and trying to support those people. It seems like it's just really hard to count... Every language is different, every package manager is different.
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** \[32:14\] Yeah. I've standardized as much as possible with Libraries. The only way I could possibly collect so many things is to kind of go, "Let's treat every package manager as basically the same, and if they don't have a particular feature then that's just 'no' for that particular package manager." If you ignore the clients and the way the clients install things and just look at the central repositories that are storing essentially names of tarballs and versions, then it's fairly easy to compare across them as when there is a central repository. Things like Bower and Go are a little bit more tricky because they don't have that... You end up going like "Well, we'll assume the GitHub repo is the central repository for this package manager", which for Bower it is, but for Go it's kind of spread all over the internet; it's mostly GitHub, but there is things all over the place.
+But you can then kind of go, "Okay, within a given package manager, show me the things that are highly depended on but only have one contributor, or have no license", which is easy to pull out in Go, but then "Order by the number of people that depend on it or the number of releases that it's had" to try and find the potential problems or the superstars inside of that particular community.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Right. I can see you kind of standardizing the data and some of the people work, but the actual technology - or even the encapsulation - you eventually hit the barrier of the actual module system itself, right? One of the reasons why Node is really good at this is because npm was built and the Node module system was essentially rewritten in order to work better for npm and better for packaging. So a lot of the enablement of the small modules is that two modules can depend on two conflicting versions of the same module, which you can't do if you have a global namespace around the module system, which is the problem in Python, for instance.
+So there's a general trend I think towards everything getting smaller and packages are getting smaller, but some module systems actually don't support that very well, and you're hitting kind of a bottleneck there.
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** Yeah, I don't think there are many other package managers other than npm that allow you to run multiple versions of a package at the same time, and partly because of the danger of doing that, that you introduce potentially really subtle bugs in the process. But most of the package managers in the languages that at least I have an experience with will load the thing into a global namespace, or the resolver will make sure that it either resolves correctly to only have one particular version of a thing, or it will just throw its hands up and go "I can't resolve this dependency tree."
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, it's important to note that's not part of npm, it's part of Node. Node's resolution semantics enable you to do that; it's not actually in npm. npm is just the vehicle by which these things get published and put together.
+I think there's been valiant efforts to make an installer and an npm-like thing in Python, and they eventually hit this problem where you actually need to change the module system a bit.
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** Yeah, I made a shim for RubyGems once that essentially did that and it made a module of the name and the version, and then kind of hijacked the require in Ruby. It was a fun little experiment, but ends up being... You're just fighting against everything else that already exists in the community. So you kind of wanna get in early before the community really gets going and starts building things, because once all that code is there it's really hard to change.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[36:00\] In that vein, have you seen any changes across these module systems as they've gone along? Have any really spiked in popularity or fallen? Are there changes that actually happen in these ecosystems once they get established?
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** Not so much. Elixir is making a few small changes, but it's more around how they lock down their dependencies. Usually once there's a few hundred packages - and often it's because I guess there's just not many maintainers that are actually working directly on the package managers; often they're completely overwhelmed anyway to be able to keep up and be forward-thinking with a lot of this stuff. And I get the feeling that a lot of people are building their package manager for the first time and kind of don't really learn the lessons of previous package managers. CPAN and Perl solved almost every problem a long time ago...
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It's true...
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** ...and these package managers go round and eventually run into the same problems and solve the same things over again.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Related to that - I'm curious for both Andrew and Arfon - when we talked about looking at stars versus looking at downloads, and looking at projects that are trending or popular versus ones that are actually being used, for someone who's trying to look through available projects and fair out which ones they should be using, how should they balance those two ideas? Because it sounds like once an ecosystem gets established then nothing really changes a whole lot, so you could make the argument that just because a lot of people are using a certain project doesn't mean that you should also be using it. It could also encourage a different kind of behavior, whereas if you're telling people only to look at the popular ones, then that encourages a behavior of doing, "I don't know, maybe it's not the best project." So how do you balance - should we be looking at which one is trending or new or flashy, versus something that is older but everybody is using?
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** Yes, tricky one. I've been kind of intentionally avoiding highlighting the new, shiny things in package managers for the moment, and kind of not doing any newsletters of "Here are the latest and greatest things that have been published." I think this mirrors my approach to software at the moment, which is to focus on actually shipping useful things to solve a problem, as opposed to following whatever the latest technology is.
+But that's just my point of view. There are lots of people who are looking for employment and want to be able to keep on top of whatever is currently the most likely to get them a job, which is a very different view of "What should I look at? What should I use?"
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Something I really struggle with software in general, you often hear people saying, "Oh, this project should just die, because it's not following modern development practices, or it's just kind of hopeless and we should just focus on whatever is new." I think it's because it's comparatively easier to do that with software infrastructure than it is with physical infrastructure; they can kind of just throw something away. But there's a part of me that's also like, "Well, maybe we should reinvest in things that are older but that everybody is still using."
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** Yeah, and sometimes it's a case of people very loudly saying, "I'm not gonna use this anymore", whereas there are a number of people that are just using it and not telling anyone, just getting on with what they're doing. They still require that stuff. Often you see companies will have their own private fork, or they'll just keep their internal changes and improvements and never contribute them back, because they're just solving their own particular problem.
+**Arfon Smith:** \[39:54\] Right. I actually think this is one of the things where conventions can really help. I still recommend Rails to people who are getting into web development, because when you do Rails new, it comes with an opinion on what your web server should be, what your testing framework should be, what JavaScript libraries you should use. And there's a set of reasonable norms, the current maybe flavor or opinion of the core Rails team, but that's valuable. If you don't know better, than actually picking what they recommend is completely fine. It's not gonna trip you up.
+I relatively recently started doing some Node stuff and I wanted to find a testing framework; I just wanted to write some tests, and I ended up going through about six in about five hours and it seemed by my assessment of what's going on, the community was moving so quickly - three of the frameworks are all written by the same person. They clearly changed their opinion and had a preference about the way that they were going to now work, but I literally couldn't get... It wasn't a very satisfactory experience because things were moving so fast.
+I consider myself reasonably technical and pretty good at using GitHub hopefully, and I found it hard to find a good set of defaults. I don't know, I think finding the right thing, it's...
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** It's very similar in the browser at the moment. It's hard to know - is this library the right thing anymore? I find myself going to, and I use DotCom to work out, like "Is this mirroring and API that now is a standard, or has it moved on?" because the browser has been evergreen mix, everything really hard to... And you can't freeze anything in time anymore with anything that's delivered to a browser, because Chrome is updating every day almost.
+**Arfon Smith:** Yeah, I don't know... The other thing is if you actually went out, stick your neck out and say "You should use these things" then somebody's obviously gonna shout at you on the internet and say "You're an idiot. You should use this thing." I think it's hard for the individual to have a strong preference and be public about that. It's an unsolved problem, I think.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** The scary thing to me is that there is no correlation that I can find between the health of a project and a popularity of a project.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Yes!
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It's totally fine if it's not the coolest thing, but people are still working on it and it's still maintained. But things actually die off and the maintainer leaves and it's still popular and still out there, and still being heavily used because it's that thing that people find. But as you said, that maintainer already moved on to a new project, didn't hand it over to anybody, has a new testing framework that they're working and doesn't really care about this thing. So we don't have a great way to surface that data or to just embed into the culture, like when you're looking for something, look for health, and what does health mean to a project?
+**Nadia Eghbal:** And making that argument to someone that... They might not care about the health, because they're like, "Well, it's popular and everyone's using it." I struggle with sort of like what is a good argument for saying "You should care about this" to a user.
+**Arfon Smith:** Yeah, it's a very long-term thing as well, because if you get an instant result and you can ship it and be done, you're like "Oh, that's fine, I don't need to come back and look at this again", whereas in six months, a year's time you might come back to it and be like "Oh, I wish I didn't do this." But you have to be quite forward-thinking; especially as a beginner, that can be something that you just don't consider, the long-term implications of bit-rot on your software.
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** Yeah, I feel like there was a thing relatively recently on Hacker News, like "Commiserations, you've now got a popular open source project", or something like that. It was this really well-articulated overview of, so you publish something on GitHub; now a bunch of people are using it, and now you've got the overhead of maintaining it for all of these people that maybe you don't really wanna help.
+\[44:06\] For me that's just a good demonstration of, you know, lots of people publish open source code, and they're doing that because that's just normal, or maybe they're doing that because that's the free side of GitHub, or whatever the reason is they're doing that; or they're solving probably their own problems - they were working on something because they were trying to solve a problem for themselves. If that then happens, to become incredibly popular, because that's a useful thing and lots of people wanna use it, there's no contract of "It's my job now to help you." There's just conventions and social norms around what it looks like to be a good maintainer, but there's no...
+I think a lot of people who publish something that then becomes popular maybe don't want to maintain it, or maybe don't have the time to maintain it. Money helps, I think, but I think funding open source is hard; for lots of people it isn't their day job to work on these things, and I think there's not a good way yet - apart from the very large open source projects - of handing something off to a different bunch of people. I think that's actually not very well solved for. You see Twitter do it with some of their large open source projects, they put them in the Apache Software Foundation, but that's a whole different kind of scale of what it looks like to look after an open source project.
+Nadia, you've written a bunch about this, I'm sure you've got a bunch of opinions on this as well.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think that you've really highlighted the basis for the shift in open source, which is that we've gone to a more traditional peer production model. If you read anything from Clay Shirky about peer production, it's like you publish first and then you filter, and the culture around how you filter and how you figure that out is actually the culture that defines what that peer production system looks like.
+And in older open source, in order to get involved at all it was so hard, that you basically internalized all of that culture and then basically became a maintainer waiting in the wings, and that's just not the world anymore.
+People publish that have no interest in maintaining things at all, because everybody just publishes, that's the culture now. I think we're actually gonna come into a break now, but when we get back we're gonna dive into what are those metrics of success, what are those metrics of health and how can we better define this.
+**Break:** \[46:36\]
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[48:49\] And we're back. Alright, so let's dive right into this. What are the metrics that we can use for success? How can we use this data to show what the health of an open source project might be and expose that to people? Let's start with Arfon, since we have so many new metrics coming out of this new GitHub data.
+**Arfon Smith:** Yeah, so I'll start by not answering your question directly, if you don't mind. One thing I would love to see is... There are things that I can do, and anybody who's looked at an enough open source software... If you give somebody ten minutes, "Tell me if this project is doing well", you can answer that question as a human, right? You can go and look at the repo, maybe you find out they have a Slack channel or discussion board, you go and see how active that is, you maybe go and look at how many releases there were, how many open issues there are, how many pull requests end up being responded to in the last three or four months... You can kind of take a look at a project and get a reasonable feeling for whether it's doing well or not, and that I think is the project's health. I think that's what we can do as an experienced eye.
+What that actually means in terms of heuristics, the ways in which we could codify that in terms of hard metrics, I think that's a reasonably tough problem. I don't think it's impossible by any stretch, but it's things like - we could make some up right now. Like, are there commits coming and landing in master? Are pull requests being merged? Are issues being responded to and closed? Another one I'm particularly interested in because I think this is pretty important for the story we tell ourselves about open source, the kind that anyone can contribute, "Are all the contributions coming from the core team, or are they coming from the outside of the core team?"
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yes, yes!
+**Arfon Smith:** There's one quote that calls this the 'democracy of the project'. Is it actually - 'meritocracy' is a dirty word these days, but is it the community that's contributing to this thing, or is it just three people who are actually rejecting the community's contributions and are just working on their own stuff?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Is it participatory, right? Can people participate? That's the question.
+**Arfon Smith:** Yeah. How open is this collaboration, is the way I like to think of it. Because I think that's the thing we tell ourselves, and that's one of the reasons that I think open source is both a collaboration model and a set of licenses and ways to think about IP. For me, the most exciting thing about open source - and actually about GitHub - is that I think the way in which collaboration can happen is very exciting. You have permission to take a copy, do some work and propose a change, and then have that conversation happen in the open.
+A lot of people do that, but they're actually working in a very small team, or working together. Actually, a while ago I tried to measure some of this stuff on a few projects that I use, and you can see quite clearly that some projects are terrible at merging community contributions. They're absolutely appalling at it. I can't name names; some of them are incredibly popular languages.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** You can name names.
+**Arfon Smith:** I totally won't, I'll absolutely not. Some of them are very poor. But then actually, just to counter that, okay, so what does it mean if you are very bad at merging contributions? Maybe that means your API is really robust and your software is really stable, right? It's not clear that being very conservative about merging pull requests is wrong, but it does mean that the community feels different. It does mean that the collaboration experience is \[unintelligible 00:52:44.16\]
+**Nadia Eghbal:** That's exactly what I wanted to tease apart a little bit. I just had a talk recently where I was looking at Rust versus Clojure and how both of those communities function, and they're really different. Rust is super participatory and Clojure is more BDFL, but one can make the argument that both are still working, and Clojure really prioritizes stability over anything else, so that's why they're really careful about what they actually as contributions.
+\[53:10\] So we talked about popularity of projects and then we're talking now about health of projects, and it feels like two parts of it. One is around "Is this project active? Is it being actively worked on and being kept up to date?", and you can look at contribution activity there. The other part is "Is it participatory or is it collaborative? Does the community itself look positive, healthy, welcoming?" But those are two pretty separate areas in my opinion.
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** Yeah, I've been looking into this a little bit as a way of... The libraries will sort all the search results by kind of a quality metric and try to filter any ones that it thinks is bad. One of the best metrics for that kind of thing... "Is this project dead?" isn't really the activity in the commits, because if something is finished, especially if it's really high-level... Like a JavaScript thing that has no external dependencies, it probably doesn't need to change. So it doesn't necessarily mean because it's not been updated in a year it's particularly bad, but the amount of the activity on the issue tracker, so if there's actually... Like, "What's the average time to response for a pull request or an issue?" is a really good indication of if there's actually someone on the other side of that project that can help, that can merge those pull requests if need be. That may mean that the project doesn't need anything happening, but at least the support requests are being listened to, and it gives you a good indication of if there was a security vulnerability found in this, would there be someone who could ship a new version? And the data in the package manager is for the number of users that are available, I guess is... There's a lot of data that's locked up in package managers that never gets out. Does the maintainer log in regularly? Are they even still around? Are they releasing anything? That would give you an indication of if that person is still there. Because that ends up being kind of a single point of failure. Often there would be lots of people with a commit bit on GitHub, but not necessarily the ability to publish that via whatever package manager, or even for the lower-level things, push out to something like `apt` or `yum`, which is an even smaller number of people for the project that could actually publish whatever changes were merged in, unless everyone is literally pulling from GitHub directly, which I don't think most published software happens that way yet.
+**Arfon Smith:** My prediction here is that the people and the organizations that are gonna solve this are gonna be the ones that are paying most attention to business users of open source. Because if you are a CIO and you're thinking about starting to use open source more extensively in your organization, then assessing the risk of that in terms of maintenance and service agreements and understanding of whether a project is - if it does have a security vulnerability that's likely to be patched... It's useful to know in open source generally. "Should I use this library because it's likely to see updates when Rails 5 is released?" or "When something happens, can I use my favorite framework with this, or my favorite tool? Is that likely to happen?" That's useful to know, but it's not business-critical. I think the people who really want a hard answer to this are more likely to be business consumers. That's my prediction. I think there's actually a lot of opportunity to do good stuff in this space.
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** \[57:12\] The Linux Foundation are a little bit around that with the Core Infrastructure Initiative, where they're trying to see, "Has this project had a security review? When was the last time it was checked for the people that are behind the project?", which I think is a harder thing to do automatically. You end up having to have a set of humans that go and contact other humans, which if those people are anything like me on email, it may take ages to get a response.
+There's a fair number of metrics that we can pull in automatically to give you a light indication of if the project is healthy. I guess you have to split it in half again and go like, "Well, what do I care about the project? Is this thing that I'm doing a throw-away fun experiment or a learning exercise, or is it something I'm gonna be putting into production?" Then you have to look at things with two very different sets of metrics.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think the methodology that they used is somewhat applicable here though. I know a lot about the CII thing because I'm at the Linux Foundation. The NodeJS project was one of the first to get a security badge. Essentially what they did was they came up with "How do we do a really good survey on projects that are problematic? Do they have a security problem?" They asked some of the similar questions that we did, like "What makes a project healthy? How do we define that?" Then they went out and did this huge survey to identify all the projects that are having a problem. Later what they did was they turned all of those things into basically a badging program. There was a set of recommendations that you can do, and if you do all of these things, then you get the security badge.
+The Node project was one of the launch partners of this. It's really simple stuff, like have a private security list, have a documented disclosure policy, have that on a website somewhere. It sounds really basic, but the number of projects that are heavily depended on that don't do that is surprisingly big. And just having a really basic set of things that people can go do that make people feel better about their software and are actually good for the health of the projects is like a really good set of recommendations that we can come up with, that would actually be based on metrics and some really good methodology.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I'm curious to kind of move this a little bit to thinking about analytics from a maintainer's point of view. So if you're a maintainer and you have a project, the project gets popular, what should they be measuring for their projects? What do you think they should be paying attention to at a high level?
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** Someone asked me a question the other day on Twitter... They were wondering for a given library that they were maintaining what were the versions of that library that people depended on. They wanted to see for the 500 other projects that depended on it what versions were they using, because they wanted to get an idea of which things could they deprecate. As Mikeal said earlier, we wanna know the actual pain points here and if people are stuck on an old version, and how can we move them forward, so that we can drop some old code or we can kind of clean up something that we don't like anymore. That data is very easy to get, although trying to lump that in together with SemVer ranges ends up going like, "Oh, they depend on something around this version", as opposed to something very specific.
+\[01:00:59.03\] But having that actual usage data around the versions, which some package managers really give you the data of a particular download for a version as well, so you can see, "Oh, this thing looks completely dead. No one has downloaded this anymore", as opposed to the last two releases that are really heavily downloaded. And you can get that data from RubyGems. I don't think npm has download data on a per-version basis, as least publicly available. For other smaller package managers it's kind of all over the place, whereas at least on GitHub you can assume everyone is looking at the default branch.
+Then also looking into the forks is something that maintainers might wanna do to be able to kind of go, "Oh, people are forking this off and changing things manually. They haven't wanted to contribute back? Why didn't they contribute back?" It definitely seems to me to come down to very human questions, as opposed to kind of like "What versions of Node are people running when they're using my library?" It's more kind of like, "How can I help these people either move forward onto a newer version, or what are the exceptions that they're having that I never see?"
+I was talking to the guy at Bugsnag, who do exception tracking, and they collect a lot of exception data that actually is thrown up by an open source library and they see it in the stack trace, like "Oh, this error has come from Rack", for example, and they were investigating if they could use or at least ask for permission for users to report that error, exception tracking data, like "This line of your source code is causing lots of people lots of exceptions, for whatever reason", which I thought was quite interesting. I don't think they've actually got around to doing that yet, though.
+**Arfon Smith:** Yeah, I'm also interested in the types of roles of people on your project, as well. One of the projects I maintain for GitHub is called Linguist, which is actually one of our more popular open source projects, and it does the language detection on GitHub; it's kind of a somewhat self-serviced project, like if a new language springs up in the community and you want to GitHub to recognize it and maybe syntax-highlight it, then you need to come along and add that to Linguist. The longest time it's been myself and one of the GitHubber merging pull requests, and we just realized that the rate at which the project was able to move from being responsive was actually really severely limited by our attention. So I went and looked at who made the best pull request and being most responsive on the project in the past 6-12 months and I actually just gave a couple of those people commit rights to master.
+We've got a little bit of policy around who gets to do releases still, just because it's kind of coupled to our production environment, but doing that has just breathed new life into the project, and I think one of the things that was not straightforward, but you can get it from the pulls page, to see who's got the most commits to master in the last year or two... Paying attention to who's active on your project and then thinking about their role - it's not the kind of hard metric, but thinking about who's around and who actually really understands and cares about the project, has been contributing... I don't know, I'm just reflecting on that; it's only a few weeks that we've been doing it, but it's been really successful so far, and has really put a shot in the arm in terms of energy of the project.
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** \[01:05:02.19\] My approach with open source projects I maintain like that is based off a Felix Geisendörfer's blog post, which was I guess a couple years ago. He basically just goes, "If someone sends me a progress, I'm just gonna add him as a contributor. Because what's the worst that could happen? If they merge something I don't like, then I can just back it out." And later on maybe give them release rights when they've kind of proved themselves a little bit that they're not gonna go crazy... Which seems to work really well, so you get a lot more initial contributions, and those people might not stay around very long, but you see a spike in activity.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And that really developed in the Node community, too. Eventually, that turned into open-open source and more liberal contribution agreements. It's really the basis now for Node's core policies as well. There's been a lot of iteration there on how you liberalize access and commit rights and stuff like that.
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** It's been quite interesting to have GitHub actually go like, "Oh, this is the third pull request you've received from this person. You should consider adding them as a collaborator so they can do this themselves."
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, that'd be awesome.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** In the Node project we do a roll-up every month just to show, "Okay, these are the people that merge a lot of stuff", and then there's a note next to them if they're a committer or not, so that they can get onboarded if they're not. That's how we base the nominations.
+If that was automatically integrated into GitHub it would save me so much time... Not having to run those scripts and post those issues, it would be fantastic.
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** I think Ruby on Rails runs a leader board as well of the total number of commits into any of the rails projects, and you can kind of see a little star next to the ones who are currently Rails core. It kind of gamifies it a little bit, which I don't know if that's a good thing or not. I guess as long as it's people actually doing stuff for the contributions rather than just to get up the leader board...
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I think it'd be cool to see that for other types of contributions too, like people that are really active in issues or people that are doing a lot of triaging work, or whatever. I hear that from people, of "Well, I also wanna recognize all these other people that are falling through the cracks or that we don't always see."
+**Arfon Smith:** Right, yeah. We did this blog post recently called "The Shape Of Open Source" that kind of just shows really clearly the difference between the types of activities around a project as the contributor pool grows. You can see that the lion's share of the activity goes from commits if it's just a solo project to actually comments on code, and pull requests to actual code review, but then just comments on pull requests and issues, and replies to those issues. It just demonstrates the project's kind of transitioned to... A lot of it becomes user support, and that's a ton of work and it's something that I think what that contributor role is. There's been some nice thinking going around that, but I don't think it's yet kind of baked itself into changes in the way products like GitHub actually work.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, to wind this down a little bit and look more towards the future - are there any trends like that that you see actually growing over time? I'll ask this to both of you... We've talked a lot about what the data looks like right now. If you look at the data now, compared to last year or compared to the year before, what are the biggest growth areas in terms of what this data looks like?
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** \[01:08:47.15\] Well, for me there's an accelerating number of packages everywhere, across every package manager that is in a language that is still very active. Perl is slowed down a little bit, but most package managers seem to continue to gain more and more code. There's just more choice and more software to keep track of and to choose which things you should use. There's never just like, "Oh, there's the one obvious choice for this thing." It feels like it's reaching a point where... The internet happened 10-15 years ago, where the Yahoo! curated homepage was no longer useful because they couldn't keep up with the amount of things that they were putting in. We have the equivalent in awesome lists where people are manually adding stuff. It's kind of like the Yahoo! Directory of the internet, whereas you need something like Google to come along and go, "Actually, here's the things that are gonna solve your problems."
+The dependency graph does give you something like a page rank to be able to go, "If we used a combination of links to that...", either the GitHub page or the npm page, and dependencies from actual software projects, you would then have a good picture of the things that are the most considered to be useful. Which is something that I've tried to put in, but there's a huge amount of work to keep on top of and to build at essentially Google again, but for software.
+**Arfon Smith:** Right. Clay Shirky has been mentioned once already on this today, but let's mention him again - he's like, "The problem is filter failure, not information overload." I think currently a lot of what we've talked about today, it's like it's hard to find the right thing, because the volume of open source software is growing exponentially.
+I think it's almost becoming standard to hear some of these conversations happen. Now people are like, "Yeah, but how can we measure health? How can we know whether a project is doing well?" How is the data changing? I don't know that the data is changing necessarily that much; I think Homebrew's adding those metrics to capture usage, I think that's a really good step in the right direction.
+Some of this is there's data missing that we don't necessarily have, and it will be better to have more explicit measure of consumption in the use of open source.
+I think the other part of it, the biggest change that I'm seeing is that the conversation is moving pretty fast, and that to me speaks of a demand and a better understanding of the problem generally in the community, and I think that means that we're likely to see product changes and improvements that help solve some of the really common issues for people.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** \[01:11:59.23\] Can't wait!
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That's great, I'm excited!
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** There's a lot of people working on that kind of area as well. Did you see the Software Heritage project that was released yesterday?
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Yes, yes.
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** So far they're just collecting stuff, but building those kinds of tools on top of all of that, like the internet archive of software, could be a really powerful way for collecting those metrics and making them distributed out and allowing people to do interesting things on top of them
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Yes.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think we'll leave it there. Thank you all for coming on, this was amazing.
+**Arfon Smith:** Thanks for the conversation.
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** Thanks very much.

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+**Nadia Eghbal:** On today's show, Mikeal and I talk with David Cramer, CEO of Sentry, and Isaac Schlueter, CEO of npm. Sentry is a developer tool for detecting application errors, and npm is the default package manager NodeJS. Both started as open source projects, which David and Isaac have built into businesses.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Our focus on today's episode with David and Isaac was around building businesses in open source. We talked about why they decided to turn their side projects into full-time work, and how they experimented with finding steady sources of revenue.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** We also talked about raising venture capital, working with investors and with community and different company approaches to developing open source projects.
+So let's get into the history of Sentry and npm before we get started. Both of you have pretty interesting backgrounds on how you built these businesses over a number of years. Sentry, David, I know that it started as a project that you built for work when you were at Disqus, and then it seemed like it was this side project, even though it was making money for years. It only went full-time a couple years ago, and you recently announced that you raised some venture capital. So in some ways it seemed, from reading about it, that you were reluctant to turn it into a full-time business. Can you tell us a little bit about that evolution, from going from a work project to a side project, to a full-time thing and why you decided to double down on Sentry?
+**Isaac Schlueter:** Yeah, absolutely. So Sentry is pretty old, it's about eight years I think, at this point. When I joined Disqus, they were using what eventually turned into Sentry. Terrible piece of code, so my first month there we kind of revamped it, brought it up to speed with the quality that we needed, and then kind of built it over the next couple of years. During that time it started getting traction.
+I guess one thing that always fascinated me with open source was you can kind of share results with the world, they provide feedback; the communities are very interactive, and that traction kind of lead to us continuing to build it. That mean things like adding more support for other languages, for other platforms. Honestly, just adding things that we never needed ourselves at Disqus.
+Then fast-forward a few years, we had built a little SaaS service on top of it, and it was making a little bit of money. The running joke when I kicked it off was, "It might cover beers." So not a lot of ambition there. And here we are, about four and a half years since that day - we decided to go full-time last year, at the start of the year, so it's been about a year and a half. The decision for us was we had a significant number of paying customers and it was really, really hard to have two jobs, so we had a decision to make. It was either to let Sentry kind of crumble, or take it to the next level.
+One of the forcing factors for us was just in the last few years there's been a huge amount of new competition in our space, and anybody who knows me knows that I'm not one to kind of let somebody step in and take over whatever I've been doing. So we really risked Sentry becoming obsolete if we didn't double down on it at the time.
+That also is kind of a lot of the reason we went down to venture capital, just to continue to compete and do well. But yeah, happy to dive into more specifics if need be.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** \[03:51\] I'm wondering why you were so reluctant to just go full-time in it from the start when tons of people were using, big companies were using it, and people were paying for it. Why did it take so long to actually go full-time in it?
+**Isaac Schlueter:** I'm fairly risk-averse, so I did not go full-time on Sentry until we were able to match salaries, and I was working at Dropbox before (Dropbox pays fairly well), so there was a little bit of that. It was also just, we didn't really wanna go down the venture capital route. Honestly, it just wasn't interesting to us; it's a very different kind of company at that stage. Our goals now are very, very different than our goals were a couple years ago, but it is what it is.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** At any time did the project kind of suffer from not having that kind of support?
+**Isaac Schlueter:** I would say absolutely over the course of the years where it was purely a side project. I was building a lot of things at Dropbox during the prime of Sentry's life, and juggling those two full-time gigs was really hard. So what it meant is the iteration speed at Sentry was greatly reduced. That's kind of fixed today, but it took us a good year to really build up that momentum to start shipping things very aggressively again. And that was just because of the balance of building new things versus supporting new customers, versus supporting the infrastructure behind Sentry. Really tough to do when basically it was just me and my co-founder, who is a technical designer.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Isaac, does this sound at all familiar to you, or is your story a bit different?
+**David Cramer:** It's not that different. I created npm in 2009; it was a big part of the Node community for a long time. Obviously, it's the thing that you do when you're doing Node. And by the end of 2013 it had been my side project for a little around four years, and it was still running on donated infrastructure and just my side project while I was running the Node project Joyent.
+It just kind of grew to the point where that approach no longer worked. We had about two months of... I joked that we had one nine of uptime and it wasn't in the first digit, like it wasn't in the tens place. Stuff would fall over and I would start getting messages and emails and tweets and angry GitHub notifications, and eight hours later I'd wake up and actually deal with it.
+I had some help from some very noble souls who basically said, "Look, you can either start paying for this thing or take it somewhere else, because we can't do this for free anymore."
+Around the same time, I was getting a lot of feedback about it from people working at pretty big companies, some of them saying, "Look, we really wanna use this thing, but a) we can't trust it because it falls over all the time, and b) it's all open source; we need a thing to host our private code and all the alternatives are kind of annoying to use and inconvenient, compared to how easy it is to manage open source code with this tool."
+That seemed like a happy coincidence of events there, and we raised some money from True Ventures and a couple of angels and started the company at the beginning of 2014. It really was a shift from... You know, it wasn't a business with paying customers that I was really only working on part-time, it was something that I was doing literally the minimum required effort, because I was so busy with Node, and it was just falling into disrepair and that was really very sad to see.
+So it seemed like the obvious choice was to start a company around it so that I could justify hiring some full-time, dedicated ops people and actually build some products to address the needs of companies that were using it to manage their JavaScript modules.
+\[07:57\] Since then, we've grown to about 25 people now, we have two products and they're growing pretty well. It's a ton of work running a company, but at least it's actually full-time, front and center work. That's been sort of nice, to be able to focus on it.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I think we touched a little bit on your projects being open source, and that it was important to you. Do you think at all about how that might affect running a business while having an open source product and whether it might be a little more difficult?
+**David Cramer:** I think for npm it's always been pretty clear to me that the client itself, the CLI program is not what people are ever gonna pay for. They're willing to pay for the service that enables the workflows that they're using, but there's no benefit really to not having the npm client be open source, or even most of our infrastructure, because really what they're paying for is access to this gigantic community and a service that's always going to be up and running.
+If it was easy, I would have been able to do it without starting a company, and I think that that's sort of the thing that puts us in that sort of strategic position in order to run a successful business. I have really no worries whatsoever about it being open source, and honestly the investors that I've talked to, some of them get it, some of them don't. The ones that don't are never gonna be a good partner anyway, so I don't really care too much.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** How about you, David?
+**Isaac Schlueter:** Yeah, it's kind of the same on our side. Sentry is an infrastructure service. A lot of people run it themselves. I would say they're not overly thrilled with that idea, but due to the nature of data that Sentry works with, it's kind of a requirement that we work on premise. But we get enough small businesses and even some larger ones that use our SaaS service, so it was kind of a natural fit, and it's really allowed us to balance it out. The way we see open source is that it's a thing that's allowed Sentry to be accessible without us having a massive company backing a product.
+I think that was especially great early on in the project's lifecycle, and today in terms of marketing and other aspects it's very valuable for us to continue to grow. Honestly for us, we think of it a lot like a traditional freemium model. We don't offer free accounts on our SaaS service, but if you wanna use Sentry for free, you can just run the same code that powers our SaaS.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** So Sentry and npm both started while you were at companies, or developed a lot while you were at Disqus and Isaac was at Joyent. Can you tell us a little bit about the relationship between the company and the project? Did having those projects help the company that you were at, or were they involved at all?
+**Isaac Schlueter:** Yeah, so at Disqus, like I mentioned, the first month I was there we kind of kicked off Sentry. We kind of had the "happy accident" that it was pre-licensed, because we just built on additional code, and the founders of Disqus were totally on board with open source.
+So I was able to get some help building out Sentry for our needs at Disqus, but I made a pretty clear point to never just build random features on top of Sentry during my time at Disqus. I would work on it in the evenings and things like that, but we would also build out features that we needed to make it better. I think the company saw a lot of value in it, not just Sentry but in open source in general. It helped us on recruiting fronts, it kind of gave some confidence to the technology team that what we were doing was useful, and I think in general it was a good situation for both sides, and today we still have a very good relationship with the founders of Disqus.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And there was no tension when you left... Because if it was a recruiting tool, you have to imagine that that recruiting tool kind of goes away if now there's a Sentry company and they're not the Sentry company, right?
+**Isaac Schlueter:** \[11:50\] Yeah, I mean that's how the world works. When employees go away, you can no longer use them as recruiting tools. There was no tension that I'm aware of when I left. I still keep in touch very closely with at least one of the founders, and on good terms with the other.
+**David Cramer:** As far as npm and Joyent, I think I got the job at Joyent in part because I had written npm.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Not in part, I mean in whole. \[laughter\]
+**David Cramer:** Yeah, basically Ryan Dahl was like, "Hey, come work on Node. I need somebody to help with this thing that Joyent is paying me to do", and I happened to be jobless at the time when he said that, so it worked out. But no, I always maintain that npm was my thing and not Joyent's thing.
+Honestly, I think it's sort of tricky -- I don't wanna speak for Joyent, obviously; it's a whole different company than it was when I got hired, and it was a whole different company when I left than when I got hired. It's a whole different company now. But I think for a lot of the time, the view of npm was that it was sort of this thing that's attached to Node.
+Maybe it's just like egotistical, but my point of view has always been Node is the thing that enables npm, and I was mostly trying to keep Node going good and working on it, because I think it's important for the broader JavaScript community, and I think that npm is a central part of that.
+Obviously, I'm biased; this is my pet project, and it was my labor of love long before it was my company, but there was no bad blood as I was leaving. I honestly don't think they really cared that much. It's not like they ever hired people to work on it, or anything like that, and it was never seen as a Joyent product.
+There was some discussion early on, like "Why don't you sell npm to Joyent and then we'll put a team on it?" I think we were several orders of magnitude away from one another in what kind of value we assigned to this thing, so it was not likely to work out. Again, I don't say that in any kind of disparaging way towards Joyent; they kind of saw it as a thing that enables Node, so they weren't gonna throw a huge team of 50 people behind it or anything, whereas I kind of saw this as a product that works really well, but it had to be run in a very particular way. Joyent being first and foremost operating systems and infrastructure type of company, I think it just kind of didn't have the right sort of DNA to be that supported for this particular product.
+Again, I really have nothing disparaging to say about them, it's just there are different types of companies and different types of teams and different skill sets, and it just was not really ever gonna be a good fit, I don't think. So that's a big part of why I made the decision to move or to leave.
+We also explored the option of putting npm in a foundation or creating a foundation for it, and really just focusing on the community/open source aspects of it. The reason why I didn't go that route is that it works out to being about the same amount of work for fundraising to create a foundation as to get a startup off the ground. You still have to go and make a pitch to a bunch of people and get them to put money in the foundation. The difference is that there's a different set of motivations and different sorts of companies that put it in for different reasons. A VC is putting money into something that they think is going to be a profitable enterprise that they're either going to get a positive return on their investment. A large company generally invests in a foundation because the success of that foundation is in their interest. Let's say they depend on Linux, and they wanna make sure that Linux keeps being healthy because they use it so much, so they're gonna put some money in the pot to kind of keep this thing alive.
+\[15:55\] Another reason why they tend to do that is because it's a nice marketing boon. You see, "Oh, IBM supports WordPress. IBM must not be so bad, because I love WordPress." And because of the sort of background and very developer-centric role that npm occupies, and the fact that I hadn't spent four years marketing it, I spent four years making it something that people could use, developers loved it. But there was no real buzz around it, and there wasn't a huge marketing benefit to having IBM put a bunch of money in npm, or any company for that matter.
+So setting up a foundation for it would have been at least as much work and not as much benefit. And then getting a foundation to say, "Look the real challenge here is that we need a private service, and it needs to be a thing that people pay for, because if you don't pay for a thing that's guarding your privacy then how can you trust it?" So we needed to build a business around it anyway, and doing that under the auspices of a foundation is just a much more challenging thing to kind of figure out how to fit.
+So yeah, in the end we're still on good terms, we're actually still a Joyent customer, for we use a couple of their services. Obviously, we use Node very heavily; we're part of the Node Foundation. It's all generally peaceful and good.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** And the last question, was there any concern around -- if you're talking about foundations versus businesses, that being a business and a startup, especially taking venture might be perceived as being at odds with what the community wanted, or just changing your incentives.
+**David Cramer:** Yeah, I think that there is always going to be some concern around incentives anytime you're dealing with people, and the less well you know them, the more concerned you're gonna be about their incentives. When somebody's your friend, you can kind of have a little bit more of that sort of natural primate trust that comes from being in the same tribe.
+But in general, there are some really interesting things about the JavaScript community in particular. The JavaScript community in particular is pretty pro-business and they're pretty open-minded about things like that. It's a sort of interesting melting pot, because almost every application touches JavaScript, touches a frontend at some point. So you have developers who think of themselves as Rubyists, Python developers or Java developers, but they still need to use JavaScript. So there's a sort of liberal attitude about a lot of these things, and I think also just sort of the place in history that we are made it a little bit of an easier sell.
+WordPress already sort of crossed a lot of these bridges for us. There is a bunch of other examples of relatively healthy open source projects that were in some way tied to a company or to a foundation, or just some sort of hodgepodge - a foundation made up of several companies. So having a profit motive - for a lot of people I think actually makes it easier for them to see what your incentives are. They can look at npm and say, "This is the product you're selling. Okay, I get it. If I need that product, I'll maybe come consider it, but I can see that you're not trying to sell my email address. You're not trying to sell advertising space on the command line, or weird tracking beacons or whatever."
+It's all open source, it's all very clear what we're doing. We're trying to be as transparent as possible, which I think is key when you're interacting with an open source community.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** David, what are your thoughts on that? I mean, Sentry obviously has a very different community. How did they respond to the venture announcement?
+**Isaac Schlueter:** \[19:45\] The venture announcement - it's all been like "Thanks", "Yeah, good luck!", "It was awesome!" We have a few people - we'll call them the Hacker News crowd, who always question everything. \[laughter\] But yeah, in general it's been good. The reason we kicked off the SaaS fundamentally was people wanted to pay for stuff, and I think that mentality easily caters to a VC-backed company. The biggest response we got from people was like, "Oh, I hope Sentry doesn't change", and this is just often from people who are more a little bit ignorant about how businesses work; of course things are gonna change, but it doesn't necessarily mean change is bad.
+We're very different now than we were a few years ago. Mostly the product's significantly better and we're able to do a lot more, and we're able to make it a lot more accessible. But you have a lot of the negative nancies that are like, "Oh, Sentry charges $10/month now. They're gonna start charging New Relic process."
+So we had a little bit of that, but from our actual customers and our actual users, everybody was thrilled.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That's great. I like where this is going a lot. We're gonna take a short break and then when we come back we're gonna talk a little bit about how these projects make money, and I think I'm just gonna ask outright how much they both make, as in salary. \[laughs\] No, I'm not gonna do that. We'll be right back, everybody.
+**Break:** \[21:04\]
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And we're back from the break. Now let's get into how y'all make money. How do Sentry and npm the companies make money? Really quickly, and then we'll kind of go from there.
+**Isaac Schlueter:** Yeah, so Sentry is a simple SaaS service. We actually have a tiered business model... Nearly all of our revenue comes from SaaS. More than our SaaS customers, we have free open source users and also those free open source users happen to be the largest companies. There's some tradeoffs to be made there...
+Longer term we're looking at how we monetize the enterprise without creating what I call crippleware - that is like an open core product. We're trying to prove that we can be successful without that, and I think we can. So we've started exploring some of that, but fundamentally the SaaS is what's gotten us off the ground.
+**David Cramer:** For npm, we have two main products. One is npm Enterprise, which is a standalone registry that you can spin up really easily inside of your company's infrastructure, and it integrates with SAML or LDAP or whatever special snowflake authorization/authentication system you might have.
+Then we have a private modules SaaS system that you can use for organizations and teams. We shipped private modules for individuals and then about six months later added the organizational and team features, and what's really interesting is you can see from the registration graphs and the new customer signup graphs that the individual product was not the product, it's not what people actually want. The folks are willing to pay or are paying for organization and team features. That's about evenly split between our SaaS and enterprise products right now. In all of our early customer conversations when we were trying to figure out exactly what we should go build, what we found was about half of the people said, "No, no, no... We're never gonna be able to put our code anywhere other than in our infrastructure, and multi-tenancy is absolutely a no-go for us."
+\[24:06\] The other half were like "There is no way that we're gonna install a thing. We only want a SaaS, we only use SaaS." It's kind of interesting how that's born out in practice almost as if that was a perfectly represented example; it was almost exactly 50/50.
+As far as the open source users, we have about four million people using our service on a regular basis, four million humans. By several approximate measures that you can try and figure out, that's about what it works out to. But much fewer than that are actually paying users, which is sort of fine. I think there's actually something sort of morally good about -- if you're using something at a company and you're using it for proprietary code and that proprietary code is gonna go make money, you should be paying for a service that supports the open source community; that's doing things that are ultimately benefitting all of us.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I know that the companies that you're inspired by... I know that npm gets compared a lot to GitHub, some of what you're describing with Sentry reminds me of Travis a little bit. Are there other models that you're going after?
+**David Cramer:** I think GitHub is the one that we definitely get compared to the most. We've basically created our business model almost exactly from them. The funny thing is actually our org's product, we've always charged per seat, because it just seemed like it was the easiest thing to reason about, even though that was a departure from how GitHub did it, where you paid per private repo that you have on GitHub.
+The most frequent pushback or complaint we got about it is "Why can't you just charge us like GitHub?" and then GitHub changed their pricing model to be per seat, and... Now we do charge you just like GitHub, it's great.
+The other company that I think is a pretty interesting or inspiring model is Wordpress, or Automattic, to be more specific. Just because they've taken something that was a vibrant open source community and really in some very creative ways have spun it into an extremely successful business.
+**Isaac Schlueter:** For Sentry, early on we straight up copy-pasted somebody else's pricing model, and I think they put about as much thought into it as we did, so we're still working on fixing that.
+But in terms of other companies, I actually think GitLab is very interesting. They are in a way similar to Sentry, where the entire product is open source. It's licensed very differently, but they try to ship both. They have an enterprise offering and then they have the SaaS service. You can interact and contribute to both of their codebases, and it's very compelling. But yeah, just like npm, we very much look at other tools and developer services in this space, GitHub being one of the big ones. We also look at a lot of infrastructure tooling, how does New Relic price, and actually we look at those more so like "This is not what we wanna do." But there is a lot of variance in how things work, because often in the open source space you end up with a kind of support and services model, and I think I can probably speak for both of us in saying that that's absolutely not what we wanna do. Those companies are Elastic, and potentially Docker, depending on which direction they go. And then a lot of the older database companies.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** It's funny to hear both of you say that you basically started by copying someone else's model and then tweaked it as you went along. A lot of people that I've talked to who have open source projects, they're interested in monetizing them. They're sort of like, "I have no idea where to start. I have no idea what a business looks like and I don't have any great models for this." How did you both learn and figure out how to run a business? Was it just watching other companies and learning?
+**David Cramer:** \[28:09\] I don't actually know how to run a business... \[laughter\] That's not exactly true. You just have to very aggressively learn as you go. I think that as far as pricing model, just to get to your first question about copying and pasting somebody else's pricing model and then tweaking it a little bit, honestly I think that's kind of a sensible way to go. I know this is sort of a controversial opinion, but I sort of think that the more time you spend worrying about your pricing model, chances are that's time you should have spent going to market.
+It definitely pays to stop and do some slow thinking about it, and it's been really interesting to hear about some of the thought that went into GitHub's original pricing model and now how they've changed it for their organization's SaaS. Any pricing model is applying a tax to some particular behavior. If you look at it that way, charging per private repo is saying "There is a tax on your private namespace, and the bigger that namespace gets, the more things that are in it, the more you pay us. But you can have as many people as you want involved in those projects." So that was obviously sort of a play to make sure that they're growing their user base as aggressively as possible.
+Once you have a big user base, once you have a big community, growing that community bigger is not gonna benefit you more. At this point, GitHub is probably close to nearing saturation of all the open source development that happens on Earth, right? GitLab is obviously a big one, there is also Stash - there are alternatives, but GitHub is the one that's sort of the dominant player in that space. The benefit to them of having that be the tax was probably no longer the best thing for them to be doing.
+On the other hand, if you say "We're gonna charge per user in your paid organization", now the tax is on having a bunch of people who are not participating in the open source world. Participation in open source remains free, but you want an organization to be on your product and you want them to be using it in the same way that it's used in open source. You don't want a company to come in and say, "Gosh, we don't wanna have to upgrade our plan, so let's just stuff more stuff in this one mega-repo that has all of our code in it", because it's just not how it's done in open source.
+Applying the tax that way ended up having some weird, perverse incentives.
+That being said, GitHub threw something together, they thought about it for a little while and then they went to market with it, saw how it did and saw what the impacts were. I think you can really easily get yourself into analysis paralysis around that decision and avoid ever building something useful. Yes, there is a lot of science and a lot of art around pricing models and stuff, but whatever; it's fine. Figure out a way to charge it, work out a model that shows you getting profitable eventually, and then see how it does. It's one of those things where the less thinking you do about it, in some cases, the better.
+**Isaac Schlueter:** Yeah, and I think from my side the best advice I have is make money on whatever you're doing. This is not my first time I've attempted doing something on the side, and the lesson I learned each time was if I have to keep showing out money to keep things running, I'm not gonna keep it going, no matter how interesting the product is.
+\[31:56\] From day zero, we've never put money into Sentry. We bootstrapped it, we got sponsorship from a couple companies, Heroku and Softlayer, both hosting companies, and from there we were always cash flow positive. Now, we weren't paying ourselves any money at the time, but that didn't matter because we were employed elsewhere. That's really allowed us to take the time to figure out the business side, and that's not saying we figured it out. By no means are we done. But it really allowed us to grow organically, and especially for open source... And anybody who's asking those questions, it's gonna be more like an individual or side project-esque kind of thing, and I think that's a very good way to go about it. See where you can cut costs, see where you can get free sponsorship...
+For example, Sentry gives away free service to open source projects, and I think that there's a lot of companies that will help you out and really help you get off the ground. That varies, because clearly for a SaaS service it's a little bit more straightforward, but I definitely think looking at what other people do and how they've approached problems is the most valuable thing you can do.
+**David Cramer:** I'm incredibly jealous about the luxury of having something that was cash flow positive from day one. We pulled the business together around this ship that was more or less on fire at the time, and had not been cash flow positive. But it's improving.
+**Isaac Schlueter:** Don't worry, the first thing when you take VC funding is to burn it all. \[laughter\] We've since fixed that...
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Sometimes when you say the term "open source business", people are thinking about old school enterprise companies. Then I look at Sentry or npm and I'm like, "Oh, these are the cool, new, shiny open source businesses." I don't know whether that's just because y'all are just like newer businesses that they feel shinier, but I haven't tried to pin down whether there's something that's actually changing in the way that people think about open source businesses, whether it's more SaaS than enterprise stuff right now, or something. Are there any trends that you're seeing around what an open source business is now, versus in the '90s or something.
+**David Cramer:** I think the biggest difference is that the internet exists now, and it's a real thing. People do things on the internet; they have SaaS systems, they do stuff online... It's less of an assumption that what you're buying is the kind of unlocked version of the crappy open source thing. I think you call it crippleware... You see that a lot in databases and to some extent in operating systems traditionally. The real value in an open source world, and the value in an internet-connected world is in communities and in not having to have the teamwork in your company to build a lot of these things.
+We use a ton of SaaS at npm. We use AWS, we use Joyent, we use Fastly... It would be completely impossible to build this business without leveraging all of those same things. I think when we imagine the stodgy old enterprises, even those are increasingly either selling services or selling very large support contracts. If you're somebody like IBM or Ericsson and you're selling something to a humongous, multinational oil company or the Department of Defense, or the water and power of Europe - these massive deals for huge infrastructure projects, like... Okay, yeah, that still happens. That's gonna keep happening. But I think when we talk about open source business, we're talking about a handful of different things that are somewhat dependent on what type of open source thing we're talking about.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** \[36:10\] Totally.
+**David Cramer:** npm is a business built around a workflow which has been pioneered in an open source community, so we're not really selling our open source thing; what we're selling is some tools to make it easier to use this open source workflow, which is a little bit of like a subtle thing to wrap your head around. I think Sentry is a similar kind of thing, it's an open source product; you can use it, you can have it. What you're really selling is the service, and that's a thing that is like "Yes, of course I will pay for that, because the alternative is I pay even more for it."
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, even the term "open source business" is not really actually a term; it's like a business that might have a component to it that's open source, but how that is monetized, or whether it's even relevant to the business itself seems to vary a lot. A lot of companies now that are saying they're an open source business or they open source a certain aspect of their products, and they do it for recruiting and they do it because they're trying to build a platform and attract all these developers to it and whatever. Those things are I think very different from what npm or Sentry does.
+**Isaac Schlueter:** Yeah, I agree with this whole ship that makes it more accessible - cloud services fundamentally - but I think the thing that really would make you think that npm or Sentry are these hot new open source ideas is because of the market that we're going after. Both of us focus on the developer market. Not necessarily directly the enterprise market... We go through developers to get to the enterprise market, and that's a significant change; that never used to exist. It never used to be that a developer at a big bank could run npm or Sentry internally and really drive the decision "We're gonna pay for this." It used to always be passed top-down. I think that's the major change that we're seeing, and that's why there are companies like us and are going to be more companies like us going forward.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I think that's a really great point. It kind of coincides with a lot of other things around more like bottom-up everything, instead of top-down.
+**David Cramer:** Also, you mentioned you're not sure if "open source business" is even a real term; that does not stop anybody from using it. \[laughter\] It absolutely is a thing that people say, and even use it in kind of ludicrous ways. Like, how can you open source-ify your business, which is a....
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Oh, god...
+**David Cramer:** It's a real sentence I've heard a real human being utter. It's challenging, right? I mean, not every business makes sense, and the role that open source plays in some businesses might not make sense. There's a lot to be said for proprietary software; there's a lot of proprietary software in the world, and we use a lot of it. But I think increasingly what's happening is where almost anything that you would give to a customer is probably mostly open source, and anything that you're gonna charge for is probably behind, running on your own infrastructure anyway. It's just easier to build a business around that, I think.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Alright, we're gonna take a short break and when we get back we'll dig a little bit more into the open source side of things.
+**Break:** \[39:30\]
+**Nadia Eghbal:** And we're back with Isaac Schlueter from npm and David Cramer from Sentry. Let's get into the open source side of things with both of your businesses. For the projects that you're stewarding as a company, do you think of your projects as something that the community builds and you're sort of another actor in that community? Or is it something that your company is building and then open sourcing to the community?
+**Isaac Schlueter:** Sentry has never been kind of a community-built project, and we're totally okay with that. Even today, which is probably not great for a CEO, if you look at the contribution graph, it's like I wrote nearly everything, and I think this is valuable because it allowed myself to drive the direction of the project, which is atypical of a lot of open source projects where they kind of end up like this hydra going a bunch of different directions and you really have to wrangle them in.
+That's been very beneficial to us. That said, on the other side what we have done is we really pushed a lot of "Here's how it's extensible, here's how you can integrate or send data" and things like that. And what we saw early on is a lot of people were interested in that side. It's much more accessible than a complex infrastructure project is, it's much more appropriate for their situation. So what that means is we started building the project around the Python community. Somebody from that community went and started working at a Rails company, and they're like, "You know, it would be really nice if I could send my Ruby data to Sentry" and it's like "Oh, we have an API for that", so they built our first Ruby client.
+Somebody else was like, "Hey, it'd be cool to be able to use GitHub to create issues from Sentry", so they went and they built the GitHub integration. That's really where a lot of our power has come over the years. For us especially, that's been a very compelling story because while we might be very good at what we do, we definitely are not experts in every language and every platform, and we barely know what kind of tools exist in the ecosystem anymore. So opening it up to allow contributions where contributions make more sense has been really good
+But then we also do now and then get bug fixes from companies. Back in the day, when this big gaming company started using Sentry, they started contributing these really compelling performance patches that were very specific to their needs but were very interesting. Fast-forward today and we still have that same idea. Square has recently started contributing a bunch of small fixes here and there whenever they run into any issues, and often what that is it's because they're running something in a slightly different situation - in this case they're using a MySQL instead of a Postgres database, and they have a very specific issue that comes up... We'd probably fix it for them, but the fact that it is open source and the fact that it is accessible really just brings in the contributions. But they're never anything that's really driving any kind of product features, and that's actually worked out extremely well for us. I think it helps because it caters more towards a classical business, rather than a big open source ecosystem.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I'm interested to hear Isaac's take on it, since npm is literally an ecosystem.
+**David Cramer:** \[43:49\] That's always been a little bit interesting with the npm client, because it was... There are a couple of different things to talk about when we talk about our participation in open source. There's the npm project itself, the CLI project. There's the massive number of open source modules which are published and shared and installed on the npm registry, and then there's the broader open source JavaScript community which sort of includes Node, React, Amber and all the rest.
+The npm client is open source - it always has been - but for a very long time it was essentially a single-author open source project, which is a very simple governance style. The governance was, "I make all the changes, and if you have an idea, I'll either take your pull request or not", but it was essentially just run by me.
+That's since changed significantly. We have a team of people working on it - there are three individuals working on it today, and quite a bit of their actual day-to-day work is spent on communication with our open source users. We take issues on the open source GitHub issues list, they have a semi-regular call that they do as an open hangout where people can suggest things for their agenda to discuss for that week, and they do regular releases with release notes, and are very responsive to the community.
+That transparency has caused an increase in the number of pull requests and the quality of bug reports that they get, but they've also been working on making the codebase itself a little bit more accessible, which is a big and somewhat overlooked challenge in any open source project. I think the social structures around most open source projects make it so that you never really address that, because all of the people who are working on it obviously are the ones who are capable working on it, who are not intimidated by the codebase and who think it's totally fine... Whereas newcomers can look at this, the way that it's structured and the way that the architecture isn't really well explained and say, "Gosh, this seems kind of hard. I don't know if I really wanna get involved." So they don't get involved, they don't get a voice and so it never changes.
+I've seen this in literally almost every single open source project I've ever been connected to - npm, Node, PHP Core project, the Linux Kernel... Although the Linux Kernel probably does a better job of this particular aspect than most projects. It's still pretty daunting, though. You can approach it in a couple of different ways, by breaking things up into smaller modules, breaking things up into sub-projects that people can contribute and be a part of, but it's still just an ongoing, difficult, unsolved problem to make a codebase accessible.
+But in terms of our role in the community, that's been a little bit more challenging. I feel a personal weight of responsibility to make sure that this community is a functional community and to make sure that our users are able to use the service and not be in too great a conflict with one another, and able to actually get what they expect out of it. As the community has grown, we've gone through several different stages where different sorts of governance approaches have made more or less sense.
+In the very early days actually, Michael wrote the first version of the registry, which had no authorization or authentication whatsoever. It was like, "You wanna publish a thing? Alright. You probably know what you're doing if you know what this thing is." That didn't last very long. That had people taking advantage of it almost from day one, so we scrambled to add some authorization in there, but it was the simplest possible thing and now we're kind of grown up to this stage where we have private code, where we have teams, and you can specify which team has access to which modules, to read access, write access and so on.
+\[48:08\] Also, as a community, you go from the state where literally everybody has met everybody else. Where everybody was one or two degrees of separation from each other, to the point now where there's more npm users than in some major American cities. This requires a different sort of policy, it requires different practices in terms of having things more well-documented and a little bit more regimented in how we approach certain types of conflict.
+While on the one hand it's a little bit troubling to have a for-profit company - or any entity, really - in this position of authority and control, at the same time anarchy doesn't really serve anybody. Anarchy just means that the loudest voices have the most control, and that's really not any better. I feel like there does need to be some sort of governance structure, and a body with a dedicated interest in keeping this community healthy is in charge of keeping this community healthy. Otherwise it doesn't happen, and you end up with a tragedy of the commons really quickly.
+At the same time, we try very hard not to abuse our position and to be as transparent as possible. Some of the things we do there - we have a support team, which if you email support@npmjs.com you will talk to them. They're not there to do your Node homework, they are there to resolve issues that you might have with the service if there's no other outlet that sort of makes sense. It's sort of the frontlines of our support for the community.
+We also have a lot of time and effort and money and energy spent on keeping the service running, which is sort of the core thing that keeps the community healthy. We try very hard not to abuse our position as much as possible. We are trying to run a business, but the actual purpose of this business is to keep the community alive and running and healthy. My main goal with starting a company is to keep the npm registry running forever. I think that's in the interest of most of our users, so I can sleep okay at night because of that.
+If two people want the same thing or are fighting over something, the one that you don't agree with is gonna be very upset at you about it, and there's sometimes just no way around that.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Do you think it's possible for a company to actually be in a community or part of a community, or is it always sort of this outside patron that is kind of facilitating the rest of the community? Because this is in some ways like talking about protecting the npm community... For either of you, do your employees represent Sentry, do they represent npm when they're communicating within the projects, or is it like they represent themselves?
+**David Cramer:** I think that all too often we talk about a company as if it's a single entity, and despite what politicians and Super PAC say, companies aren't people; corporations aren't people, they're legal entities with interest, but they're just sort of a bunch of people working together for some kind of common interest. That's essentially what the company is - they're a social fiction designed to make money. That's not a bad thing inherently, but it can get things a little bit twisted when you start saying "Well, the company says this" or "The company says that." It's like, "No, you say that. You're just hiding behind this weird logo."
+\[51:44\] The brand of npm I think is very strong. Like I said, I have a large personal interest in continuing that and making sure that we're a force of good. I think mostly that can very easily become a virtuous cycle or a vicious cycle, depending on how you spin it. Most of the people who work for me have, as far as I can tell, also considered themselves part of this community individually, and would continue to be part of it if they stopped working here. It's just that this is the job that they're doing and they are doing it because they believe in it and also because we pay them.
+It's kind of weird... I think frequently where you tend to get into trouble is when you try to have a company pretend that they're part of the community when it's pretty clear that they're not. If they're saying, "Look, we're using Node, we're a part of this community, so therefore you should like us, because you like Node." It's like, "Maybe I don't. Maybe I don't agree with what you're doing."
+I think it's actually kind of rare that there are companies like npm or Automattic or Sentry where not only are they just kind of involved with this community in this sort of abstract sense, their products and services literally depend upon it and their success depends upon the success of the community, and the people working at the company consider themselves part of the community.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** David, how about Sentry? Are they Sentry employees or are they themselves?
+**Isaac Schlueter:** It's very different for Sentry, just because we're not a community. npm has tons and tons of users and they interact heavily with their own code, their own projects through npm, whereas Sentry it's like you're using our product, the product that we built. I very much believe that everyone at Sentry is acting on behalf of Sentry, but as themselves. Their interests are Sentry's interests, that is the company and the project; we think of them as kind of one and the same. But it's not a community as a whole. It's very much like, "Hey, we're all of the same mindset, we all wanna build this thing. This is our singular voice and how this thing is gonna be built."
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Does this affect how you think about recruiting? Are you looking for people that are...? I mean obviously, probably people that have already been involved with Sentry, or care about it, or think about, but do you that sort of like strengthens that unified voice if you're hiring someone who is already involved with the project and already feels like they're a part of it?
+**Isaac Schlueter:** It absolutely does. I think we're a slightly non-traditional company, at least in the VC-funded startup world, in that the entire team is engineers right now. Most of the team has contributed to Sentry or runs Sentry, or at least used Sentry before joining the company. So it helps that a lot of people... It's not even a vested interest, it's just they had a genuine interest in Sentry before coming onto the team, and that helps a lot with how do we build the product, how do we think about the product, how are each of the members of the team individually involved in the product.
+It's been very valuable for us to have that. I would say that everybody has a different idea for the small branches of how Sentry should work, but everybody has the mindset that this is super valuable what we're doing, we agree with the direction we're going, how can we contribute to make that a reality? I think there's different tradeoffs and different challenges for a community-driven project versus -- I kind of consider us more like a BDFL situation. There's absolutely value in the community and I think it's something we're going to explore as time goes on, but we'll see.
+So far, what we've done has worked well for just building a singular project.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** How do your investors think about the whole -- having to work with communities or just outside users that might have a say in your projects, that aren't actually a part of the company.
+**Isaac Schlueter:** \[56:00\] Speaking for Sentry, I'm not sure the investors really consider it much. I think a lot of the trust... Like, when we talk to them, the mentality is like, "You've done very well to get where you are. Whatever you're doing must be right. How do we push it to the next level?" So I think there's a lot of explicit trust even there. This might be very different for npm because again, we are a very focused, single project; I wrote most of the server itself and pretty much everything is now built by us, the company. But it definitely just comes down to, "You guys are clearly the experts at doing what you're doing. There must be something that's correct there. We're not gonna tell you what you to do, since realistically you should know better. We're betting on you, at the end of the day."
+**David Cramer:** I think as far as the community interactions and advice from our investors, they... I don't know, I don't wanna say they don't care; I mean, certainly they're very excited that we have so many users. Both of our investors, if you look at their portfolio companies, what they tend to go for are companies that have some kind of a network effect, where the more people use this thing, the more other people will end up using this thing. True [Ventures] is in Automattic, they're invested in a bunch of other SaaS companies, BVP, they just saw some really big success from Twilio, which just recently went public, and they're sort of very focused on developer-lead enterprise products with some kind of a community or network effect, and open source just sort of plays to that strength really well.
+That being said, as far as managing the community, they're not really experts in that. I think they are betting on us being experts in that. Obviously, we've built this huge community, we have this huge type of funnel; they're mostly just concerned with how well we can turn those eyeballs into dollars, so to speak, to fall back on awful dotcom parlance.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** It's funny hearing both of your... I think it's important hearing both of your experiences, because they are very different types of projects and they way that you'll run them and monetize them and manage the community is naturally very different. I think it just speaks again to the fact that not every open source project is the same; it's almost like weird that we use this term that tries to encompass all these different cultures, where actually each one is quite different.
+Do you think that building businesses like these is different from building other types of startups at all? Is there anything about having the open source side of things that makes it different from any other startup wisdom that you might hear?
+**David Cramer:** I think for npm it kind of makes it a lot easier. One of the biggest hurdles is getting people to use your thing, and I guess it's a little bit suspicious to say that it's easier... I mean, we've traded one set of problems for another, but there are certainly some very big problems which are fatal problems for many companies, and we just sort of haven't even had to worry about, which is sort of a luxury.
+**Isaac Schlueter:** For Sentry it's fairly similar... There's things that we could not have achieved without the open source aspects, at least not at our scale. For us, cross-platform is a true fundamental strength and requirement of our product, and there's no way we could have done most of this without the community. But I think at the end of the day, outside of that, Sentry looks just like a normal company. Again, that's very different from npm, but it's interesting for us because -- we don't necessarily publicize it super well on the website, but we often get questions like "Is Sentry open source? Do I have to pay you? What does this mean?" Because we have for example an enterprise version, which is fundamentally just a support contract.
+So there's still a lot of challenges around conveying what open source means to your users and how that affects your business and things like that. But I think it's just another channel that you treat differently at the end of the day and each business does that differently. Open source is just one factor that influences that. There could be many other factors, depending on the industry or the type of product.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** That's a great idea to end on. Thanks for talking with us, David and Isaac. We really enjoyed this.
+**Isaac Schlueter:** Yeah, thanks for having us.
+**David Cramer:** Thank you!

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+**Nadia Eghbal:** I'm Nadia Eghbal.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And I'm Mikeal Rogers.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** On today's show, Mikeal and I talked with Karl Fogel, author of Producing Open Source Software. Karl served on the board of the Open Source Initiative, which coined the term 'open source' and helped write Subversion. He's currently a partner at Open Tech Strategies, helping major organizations use open source to achieve their goals.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Our focus on today's episode with Karl was about what has changed in open source since he first published his book ten years ago. We talked about the influence of Git and GitHub, and how they've changed both development workflows and our culture.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** We also talked about changes in the wider perception of open source, whether open source has truly won, and the challenges that still remain.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So back in 2006 I started working at the Open Source Applications foundation on the Chandler Project, and I remember we had to kind of put together a governance policy and how do we manage an open source project, how do we do it openly, and basically your book kind of got slapped on everybody's desk. \[laughter\] The Producing Open Source Software first edition, and it was like "This is how you run open source projects."
+**Karl Fogel:** Wow, that's really nice to hear, thank you.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And it was... Especially at that time it was an amazing guide, and I know from talking with Jacob Kaplan-Moss that the Django project did something similar, as well. I'm very curious how you got to write that book and what preceded it. It's produced by O'Reilly, right?
+**Karl Fogel:** Yes.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I'm curious why O'Reilly wanted to do something... It's very deep and very nerdy, so...
+**Karl Fogel:** Yeah, actually I wanna take a quick second to give a shout out to O'Reilly because... I mean, that was never a book that was gonna be a bestseller, and they sort of knew that from the beginning, and they not only decided to produce it anyway, they gave me a very good editor, Andy Oram, who made a lot of contributions to the book in terms of shaping it and giving good feedback. And they let me publish it under a free license, which to a publisher, that's a pretty big move, and it's not something that they do with all their books. So I really appreciated the support I got from them.
+So the answer to your main question there I'm afraid is pure luck. I really think that in the early 2000s, 2005-2006 the time was ripe for some kind of long-form guide to the social and community management aspects of open source to come out, and my book just happened to come out. If someone else had written a long-form guide, then... You know, it's like in the early days of physics - if you just happen to be the first person to think of calculus, you'll get all this credit; but there were probably ten people who thought of it, it's just that someone published this first.
+So yeah, I just got really lucky with the timing. And the way that I was motivated to write it, that O'Reilly had contacted me about doing a Subversion book... I was coming off five or six years as a founding developer in the Subversion project and it had been my full-time job, and I'd gone from being mostly a programmer and sort of project technical - not necessarily technical lead, but technical arbiter or technical cheerleader in some sense, to more and more community manager. I mean, I was still doing coding, but a lot of my time was spent on just organizing and coordinating the work of others and interjecting what I felt were the appropriate noises in certain contentious discussion threads and things like that.
+\[04:09\] So when it came time to write a Subversion book, I had already written a book, I knew folks at O'Reilly, and they said "Would you like to be one of the authors?" There were a couple other Subversion developers that I worked with who were also interested in writing, and we had all agreed that we would co-author it.
+Then as I started to write, I really let down my co-authors. I said, "Hey, folks, I'm really sorry. I don't wanna write another technical manual. I've already done that once. You folks go do it, it's gonna be great." And I wrote the introduction and they wrote a wonderful book that became one of O'Reilly's better sellers and is still quite popular.
+So I thought, "Well, what was it that I wanted to write if that wasn't the book?" and I realized the book I wanted to write was not about Subversion the software, it was about the running of a Subversion project, and about open source projects in general - Subversion wasn't the only one that I was involved in. So I went back to O'Reilly and I said very meekly, "Could I write this other book instead? What do you think of that?" and they said yes. So I sort of backed into it... I was forced into the realization that I wanted to write this book through trying to write another book and failing.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Was that a popular view back then? Like, when you said that you wanted to write this non-technical, more management-focused book around open source, were people like "Why?"
+**Karl Fogel:** Let me cast back my memory... No, but then again, the people that I talked with - that's a very biased sample, right? Most people were encouraging, and if they were mystified as to why I wanted to write this, they hid it very well and were nothing but encouraging. Then it took a little bit longer to write than I thought, and people were asking "How's it going?" and I'd always give the same answer, like "How's your book going?" "Never ask. Thank you." \[laughter\] No one ever listened to that, they would just ask the next time. But eventually it got done.
+I think there was, among people involved in open source. For example, the role of community manager was already a title you started to see people having. You started to see a phenomenon where the coordinating people, the people doing that community management and projects were no longer also the most technically sharp people. I was definitely not the best programmer in the Subversion project; I could think of a lot of names - I've probably even forgotten some names of people who I just think are better coders than I am, who were working on that project.
+And that was true across a lot of open source projects. I could see that the people who were doing technical and community work together were not the Linus Torvalds model - and Linus Torvalds isn't by any means a typical example... The Linux kernel in general is not a typical example of how open source projects have ever operated. It's been its kind of own weird, unique thing for a long time. But one thing you can say about it is that the leader of the project is also one of the best programmers in the project. Linus is a very technically sharp person. But that was not the case in a lot of open source projects, and that to me seemed like a clue that, "Okay, something's happening here where open source is maturing to the point where different sets of skills are needed", and you've got these crossover people who are often founding members of a project and active in coding and other technical tasks, but their main focus, their main energy is going to the social health and the overall community health of the project.
+\[07:45\] I wasn't the only person sensing that. A lot of people seemed to already understand the topic of the book before I explained it to them.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** For that first book, I mean, you came up through the '90s open source scene and were clearly doing a lot of community work on the Subversion project - did you write it mostly just from your own experiences and memory, or did you go through a phase of research and reaching out to other projects?
+**Karl Fogel:** That's a really good question. Yeah, I researched other projects. I did rely a lot of my own experiences, which were somewhat broad; I had worked on a lot of projects by that point. But I was worried that I would be biased, and particularly towards backend systems projects, because I was a C programmer, I didn't do a huge amount of graphical user interface programming or stuff like that. Web programming was kind of new then, but I still hadn't done a lot of it. So I deliberately sought out some other projects to talk to and people were very generous with their time. I think I listed them all, either in the acknowledgments or in the running text or the footnote. So not all those were projects that I worked in, they were just places where people were willing to be informants.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Interesting. You mentioned that people were starting to come around and you were starting to see community manager as a title, but I do feel like the book addressed something and reset people's expectations about how open source projects run. It did bring a lot of this community stuff and not everything being purely technical to the forefront. If there was one presumption that projects had at the time, that the book was meant to address - is there one that you can point at? Or any kind of general stories that you might have heard about shifts in people's... What I really wanna get at is, people's conception of open source had been this pure meritocracy, pure technical side of things, right? Not a lot had been done in a formal way to address the role of people and people management, and processes and barriers to entry until your book, as far as I know.
+**Karl Fogel:** I think I get the question you're asking, and it's a good one. I've never really thought of the book as addressing a sort of as yet unacknowledged need, but I guess in a way it was. The observation I had at the time in Subversion, and then as I started to talk to people in other projects I realized it was just as true for them as it was for subversion, was that there's no such thing as a structureless meritocracy, and there's not such thing as a structureless community. We're all heard of the famous essay The Tyranny Of Structurelessness, in which the author points out that if you think you have a structureless organization, what you really have is an organization where the rules are not clear and people with certain kind of personalities end up dominating by sometimes vicious or deceptive means. And that has certainly been the case in some open source projects. I don't wanna name names, but we could probably all think of some.
+What I saw on Subversion was that managing a bunch of people who were not all under one management hierarchy, like they were coming from different companies, and some of them were true volunteers in the sense that there was no way in which they were being paid for their time, or only very indirectly, but a lot of them were being paid for it and they had their own priorities, and to make that scene work and to have the project make identifiable progress, you had to broker compromise; you had to convince people like, "Okay, this feature that you want needs some more design work, and the community has to accept it. That means it's not gonna be done in time for this upcoming release, but we don't wanna delay the release because there's another thing that this programmer or this company wants needs to be in that release and they're depending on it. And by the way, if you get them on your side by cooperating now, he'll be much more likely to review your changes and design when your stuff is ready." Things like that. Making sure that the right people meet or talk at in-person events. Occasional backchannel communications to ask someone to be a little bit less harsh toward a new developer who is showing promise or is perhaps representing an important organization that is going to bring more development energy to the project, but we need to not offend their first person who comes in, who is maybe not leading with his best code; it sometimes happens.
+\[12:17\] There were all sorts of stuff that had to be done that was not necessarily visible from just watching the public mailing list. So the book was basically - I realize I'm giving a long answer, you should feel free to edit this down, by the way... Now I'm trying to be a little less verbose...
+**Mikeal Rogers:** No, this is perfect.
+**Karl Fogel:** Okay, I'm glad. \[laughs\] I guess the thing the book was meant to address was you get a lot of programmers who land in open source somehow, they find themselves running projects or occupying positions of influence, and both because no one has ever said it, and because it's not visible from the public activity on the project - or not entirely visible - and because there is a predisposition among programmers to be less aware of social things; statistically speaking, programmers I think are somewhat less socially adept people than most people. Obviously, there are exceptions to that, but I think it's a broad categorization that is statically true. So for all of those reasons, I wanted there to be a document that said, "Hey, you need to start thinking about this as a system. You need to start thinking about the project in the same way you think about the codebase. Parts need to work together, and you need to pay attention to how people feel and to their long-term interest, and you've gotta put yourself in their shoes. Here's a rough guide to doing that."
+That's what I was thinking when I was writing the book, and I never really articulated that until you asked the question, but I'm pretty sure that's more or less what I was thinking.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I mean, we're still struggling with that today. \[laughs\] We're talking in the past tense because the book came out ten years ago, but I'm still struggling to get people to recognize that today...
+**Karl Fogel:** Well, let's go right to the controversial stuff. The Linux kernel project is famous for kind of having a toxic atmosphere, right? And Linus has basically said that he equates the thing that most of us call toxicity with meritocracy. In other words, the kinds of people who write the kinds of code that he wants to end up in a Linux kernel are the kinds of people who flourish in the atmosphere he has set up.
+Maybe that's actually true, but I just don't think the Linux kernel project has run the experiment of trying to... Forking the project and running a nice version, where everyone is welcomed warmly and not insulted personally by a charismatic leader, in which they can see whether that theory is actually true.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Right. I was actually not even thinking about projects that are more than ten years old, but even projects that start today struggle with this. Just acknowledging that soft skills matter and that somebody needs to pick up this community work.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I think it's interesting that you said that you wrote the book in 2005, around this time when you felt like people were starting to notice and care about the need for skills beyond coding, but I feel like that's almost what people would say about right now too, so I wonder if anything's even changed in ten years or not.
+**Karl Fogel:** Well, just imagine how much worse things would be if we hadn't all been through that. \[laughter\]
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah.
+**Karl Fogel:** You never have an alternate universe in which to run experiment, unfortunately. But I think it will always be true, because the startup costs in open source are so low - although that's changing a little bit, and we can talk about that later - so that the people who start projects, they'll just land in it coming from a technical interest. They're not starting out by thinking of soft skills, so the projects are always launched in a way that's sort of biased towards a certain kind of culture, and then they end up having to correct toward a more socially functioning culture, even though that imposes a small amount of overhead on the technical running of the project.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** \[16:17\] And if it's a useful project and people are like "Well, I'm gonna use it"... Or even if it's not useful, but it's just kind of a legacy being used, it's like, what incentive is there really? I think it's still very hard to tie together, and in some cases you can tie together the health of a project with its popularity, but sometimes it's a popular project and it's just not that kind of place.
+**Karl Fogel:** Yeah... I can only make anecdotal studies there. One example is the LibreOffice project - it has really gone through a great deal of trouble to be welcoming to developers and to make their initial development process easier. Building a project is now way, way easier than it used to be; they've just really sunk a lot of time into making it easy to compile it from source, to welcome new developers. I think that's having a good effect, but how do you know how popular or how successful the project would be without that? You just don't.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** You mentioned that you've released it under Creative Commons license, and I saw that you've actually kind of kept it a little bit up to date and you've kind of pushed small changes to it over time, but in 2013 you decided to actually do a full new edition of the book. What precipitated the need for an entire new edition, rather than just adjustments?
+**Karl Fogel:** A few things. One, the adjustments that I had been doing in the years from 2006 roughly to 2013, they weren't that trivial. I mean, there were a lot of small scale changes that went in. I think most sections of the book got touched, some of them pretty heavily, but I was never thinking of it as a full rewrite. And then it was really partly my own feeling about certain things that were out of that and partly feedback I was getting from other people. One thing everyone noticed - and I noticed too, because I also use Git for my coding work, although I use Subversion for non-coding version control - was that all the examples used Subversion, which was totally the right thing to do in 2005, because that was the thing that you stored your open source code in, but it just wasn't by 2013; Git was the obvious answer, and frankly even though the site itself is not open source, GitHub was clearly the thing to use. For example, most active open source code is just on GitHub, and if the book doesn't acknowledge that fact, then it's just not reflecting reality and it's not giving people the smoothest entry into open source that they can have.
+So one obvious thing was the revamping of all the examples to use Git instead of Subversion and to talk about GitHub. And also in general, the project hosting situation had changed. I'm sorry, I just don't consider SourceForge a thing anymore. \[laughter\] So many ads, too much visual noise, not compelling enough functionality, and that's despite the fact that the SourceForge platform itself finally went open source, as the Allure project - which is great, I'd love to be using it, but I'm afraid I just have a much better experience with GitHub and Git, so that's what I use.
+So the recommendations about how to host projects really needed to change to be oriented more around the Git-based universe and to at least acknowledge and recommend GitHub, while acknowledging that it itself is not open source... Although I hope that they see a grand strategic vision whereby opening up their actual platform makes sense some day; I think that the real secret sauce there is the DevOps, it's not the code, so I hope they do that someday.
+\[19:53\] The other thing that changed kind of in a big way was what I think of as the slow rise of business-to-business open source, which is... The old cliché was "Open source always starts when some individual programmer needs to scratch an itch"; she needs to analyze her log files better, so she writes a log analyzer and then she realizes that there are other sysadmins who need to do the same, so they start collaborating, and now you've got an open source log analyzer, and she's the de facto leader of this new open source project. Well, that did happen a lot, but now you have things like Android. You have businesses putting out open source codebases like TensorFlow. I don't mean to pick on Google examples only, it's just that those are the first things that come to mind, but Facebook also does this, Hewlett Packard does it... Lots of companies are releasing open source projects which are - I guess you could call them it's a corporation scratching a corporation's itch, but it is not a case of an individual developer; it's a management move, it is done for strategic reasons which they can articulate to themselves and sometimes they also articulate to the world.
+And I thought that the rise of that kind kind of project needed to be covered better, and that that was a trend that if the book could explain it better to other managers in tech or tech-related companies, that perhaps it would encourage some of them to join that trend.
+And sorry, I'm realizing that there's one more component to the answer - the other thing that changed was that I expected governments to be doing more open source by 2013 than they were, and I had at that point been very active in trying to help some government agencies launch technical products as open source, because they were gonna need that technology anyway. It's taxpayer-funded, why not make it open source? And they were just really culturally not suited to it. There were just many, many things about the way governments do technology development, in the way they do procurement, in the way they tend to be risk-averse to the exclusion of many other considerations, really made open source an uphill struggle for them, and I wanted the book to talk a lot more about that, because I wanted it to be something that government decision-makers could circulate and use as a way to reassure themselves that they could do open source and that it could be successful, and that they didn't have to look at it as a risky move.
+So there were some new trends that I wanted to cover and there were some new goals that I had for the book, and they just required ground-up reorganization and revamp.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Wow, that's great. We're gonna take a short break and when we come back Karl's gonna get into how GitHub has changed the open source landscape.
+**Break:** \[22:46\]
+**Mikeal Rogers:** We're back with Karl Fogel. Karl, in your mind, what have Git and GitHub changed about open source today? What are the biggest shifts that happened from the Subversion Apache days to now?
+**Karl Fogel:** \[23:44\] Well, so I might have to ask you for help answering this, because I wonder if I was so comfortable with old tools that maybe I was blind to something that was difficult about them. I didn't feel like GitHub changed the culture tremendously except in the sense that Twitter changed the culture of the internet, which is to say it gave everyone an agreed-on namespace. Right now Twitter is essentially the "Hey, if you have an internet username, it's whatever your username is on Twitter. That's your handle now." And in open source your GitHub handle, which for many people is the same as their Twitter handle, that's like your chief identifier. And it's not a completely unified namespace and there are plenty of projects that host in other places and many developers contribute to projects that are hosted in places other than GitHub... But it is sort of a unified namespace.
+If you have an open source project and you don't have the project name somewhere on GitHub, someone else is sure to take it for their fork, right? So you've gotta get that real estate even if you're not hosting there.
+But I think the way GitHub wants to think about it is that they made it a lot easier for people to track sources, to make lightweight quick, so-called 'drive-by contributions' and to maintain what used to be called vendor branches, that is to say permanent non-hostile forks; internal, or sort of feature forks that are maintained in parallel with the project, where the upstream isn't going to ever take the patches, but they'd have otherwise no particular animosity toward the changes, or are even willing to make some adjustments so that the people who need to maintain that separate branch can do so.
+So I think their goal was to make all that stuff easier, and also to make gazillions of dollars, which I'm happy to see they're doing. And I think that it is part of GitHub's self-identity - for the executive and upper management team, it's part of their self-identity to think of themselves as supporting open source, that they are doing good for open source. And as I said, I always remember that the platform itself is not open source, but that aside, I think in many ways it's true, they do a lot of things to support open source.
+The moves that they made to give technical support and kind of a little nudge to projects to get real open source licenses in their repositories was a really helpful thing. Nowadays most active open source projects on GitHub do have a license file, and that's partly because GitHub made a push to help that happen, and they've done a lot to support getting open source into government agencies and things like that. So I think they had sort of cultural motivations, as well as technical and financial motivations.
+So has it changed the culture of open source? That's the thing, I'm not really sure it was all that hard to contribute to an open source project before GitHub. Maybe that's because my specialty was working on one of the tools that is the main part of the contribution workflow, with the version control tools; I worked on CVS, which was the main open source version control system in the network on Subversion, which was for a while the main open source version control system. So if I wanted to make a drive-by contribution to some other project, of course I never had any problem doing it, because the version control tool is probably something I hacked on; it was just no trouble. But maybe you could tell me, was it actually harder?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, there's a couple things you are glancing over. Just a couple. And I suffer from the same problem, where you'll jump through hoops without realizing that they're hoops, because you're just used to doing this kind of stuff... But the Twitter analogy works really well; so yes, there's a shared namespace - and before that, people had email addresses, so it's not like we'd lacked identity, but it did sort of unify those, so you know where to find anybody by a particular name, where to find a project by a particular name. But another thing that Twitter does too is it has a set of norms around how you communicate and how you do things with DMs and add replies and stuff like, right?
+**Karl Fogel:** \[27:59\] That's a really good point, yeah.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Source control is certainly part of the contribution experience, but if GitHub was just Git, it wouldn't be the hub... It wouldn't be GitHub, right? There's an extension of the language and the tools around collaboration that they also unified. In Subversion I can create a diff, but how I send that diff to you and how you communicate that it may or may not go in or out, how we might communicate about that review process, that is not a unified experience across projects in older open source the way that it is in GitHub, right?
+**Karl Fogel:** That's true, and that's a really good point. I mean, it was never hard to find out. Usually you mail the diff to the mailing list and people review it there, right? But you had to find out the address, you had to go read the project's contribution documentation, and maybe that didn't exist or was not easy to find... And you're right, on GitHub it's 'Submit a pull request'. You know what to do - fork the repository, make your branch, make your change, turn it into a pull request against the upstream, and now it's being tracked just like an issue, and by the way, the issue tracking is also integrated, so now you don't have to go searching for the project's issue tracker.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I mean that workflow itself may not be more discoverable than sending a diff to a mailing list, but once you do it, it's the same everywhere. I think that's the bigger shift.
+**Karl Fogel:** No, in fact I think it's less discoverable, in the sense that the actual... I mean, I've trained a lot of people in using Git; I go to a wonderful organization... In fact, I'm gonna do a shout out for them, ChiHackNight.org, the Chicago Hack Night, on Tuesday nights here. There are a lot of newcomers there who haven't used Git or GitHub before, or they've heard of it and tried it out. So I've had to walk people through this process of creating a PR, making their own fork or repository, and people get so confused, like "Wait, I'm forking the repository... But what's a branch? What's a repository? Where does the PR live?" It's conceptually actually not easy at all, but once they know it, they know it for every project on GitHub. And I think your point is very good, it's not that it's easier, it's just that you only have to learn it once now.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I think there's also something to be said for the friendliness of GitHub, even just visually, right? Twitter is again maybe a great analogy for that... It's just prettier. People feel more comfortable on a more consumer-facing website than navigating around the corners of the internet.
+**Karl Fogel:** Yeah, and that's one thing that Subversion never had - a default visual web browser interface. There were several of them and your project had to pick, so the one you picked might be different from what some other project picked. With GitHub it's like... There are a lot of people who think of Git as GitHub. They think that that web interface that you see on GitHub, that is part of Git. Obviously, in some technical sense that's not correct, but in a larger sense, as far as their experience and their actual workflow is concerned, that's a pretty accurate way of looking at it.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. I think also - and this is one that is really easy to glance over if you have any experience, but because we're in this new, publish-first mindset, newer people will publish stuff and put it up there, and they'll actually get contributions. And it actually takes a much broader skillset to take contributions than it takes to push them to other projects, especially in traditional tooling, and GitHub also makes that incredibly easy. Their diff view is quite nice. They have the image different...
+**Karl Fogel:** Yeah, it really is.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** ... and all of these other features, right? So if you're somebody that doesn't know Git very well and you just got your project up, getting a contribution and then having to pull it down locally and look the diff, it's actually like a whole big extension of that collaboration toolchain, and they make that so easy for first-time publishers that are now dealing with contributions coming in. It makes that workflow for them really easy and it also just allows them to enjoy the process of getting contributions from people.
+**Karl Fogel:** \[32:00\] Yeah, you're right. I've never thought about that, but the process of becoming an open source maintainer is a lot easier on GitHub, and it's so satisfying when you click that Merge Pull Request button and it just goes in. All you did was you clicked the green button and you've accepted a contribution from a perfect stranger on the internet. It's so empowering, right? And that was not an easy process for new maintainers. In the old system you'd manually apply a diff and then commit it, and you'd have to write their name by hand in the log message, or something.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think we're also skipping over this entire generation of tools like Trac and JIRA, that in a lot of ways were much harder to use than sending a diff to a mailing list. \[laughs\]
+**Karl Fogel:** Well yeah, I don't know, because I got so used to them. I don't think that they were a discrete generation; I think that they were a continuum of tools that as soon as the web came around, people started making bug trackers that... The original bug trackers were worked by email submission. You would communicate with them by sending them email and getting responses back, and actually a lot of projects ran on that. Then people started making websites that would track bugs and you could just interact with the website directly, and then that was integrated with Wiki functionality, Wiki was invented, and it just took a while for interfaces to sort out the conventions that actually worked. In a lot of ways, GitHub is the beneficiary of all the mistakes that everyone made before GitHub was created. If GitHub had been invented in the year 2000, they would have made all those same series of mistakes themselves, but instead they could just look back and see what everyone else did and not make those mistakes. No libel on them, of course, that's what they should do, but that's why it worked out so well for them.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** It's like MySpace and Facebook, or any sort of second adopter.
+**Karl Fogel:** Yeah, exactly.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, I do think there's another element of this though, which is that those tools - and JIRA in particular is very good at this... It's developed for maintainers and for teams with a big project and a big process. So it is customizable to a project's process. That means that's great for that individual project if it exists alone by itself, but in an open source ecosystem where everytime I go to a JIRA there's a different workflow, that's incredibly daunting for individuals out there.
+GitHub, because they were thinking about Git in the scale of people and contributions and forks and repos - you kind of take for granted that no, you can't have super customized workflows at the repository.
+**Karl Fogel:** Yeah... One of the things I kind of admire about GitHub's management team is... I mean, if you look, GitHub has its own bug tracker. They have an open source code, but you can file bugs against GitHub itself, and that tracker is public. If you look through there, there are like thousands of these feature requests and modifications that people want, that for each person requesting, this change would suit their needs, it would really make life easier for their project, and basically GitHub employees spend their lives saying no. You just look in those threads and they are polite and they explain why, but they have to turn down most of those requests because they have to really think about the big picture and keep GitHub simple for the majority of open source projects, and they do a really good job at that.
+\[35:44\] One of the things that I hope is happening, and I assume it is and I would like to look into it more is that GitLab and other open sourcers - in GitLab's case there is an open source edition and also a proprietary edition - should be using GitHub as kind of like their free of charge research lab. All the things that are being requested in GitHub and all the decisions GitHub is making, and all the innovations that GitHub has to not experiment with because of their scale and all the existing customer base that they can't afford to tick off - that is a real opportunity for these other platforms to say, "Hey, GitHub made the wrong call there. We're gonna do that and try it out," because they have less to lose right now and a lot to gain, and I think that there could be a very productive interplay between the two, that is in the long run good for open source. We'll just have to see. But the fact that GitHub is making all these decisions in public is very useful, I think.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I agree. So when you first got involved in open source in the '90s, it was sort of a counter-culture movement, and of all the things that you could say about open source today, I don't think that you could say that it was a counter-culture movement.
+**Karl Fogel:** Well, it's funny... I think open source no longer thinks of itself as a counter-culture movement, especially in the United States. Well, actually let me back up a bit. So the term open source, at least for this usage of it, was coined in '97, I think.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Right, right.
+**Karl Fogel:** And open source was going on for many years prior to that. I had run an open source company and had been a full-time open source developer long before the term was coined, and people just used the term 'free software' and got confused, because there was just widespread confusion about whether that meant free as in there's no charge. AOL used to ship CDs to everyone's doorstep and that software was free, but it wasn't free in the sense of free software, in the sense of freedom. So there was a lot of terminological confusion.
+One of the things that I think is downplayed today, or there's a little bit of historical amnesia about is the degree to which the coining of the term 'open source' was not simply an attempt to separate a development methodology from the ideological drives of the free software foundation Richard Stallman, but was also just an attempt to resolve a real terminology problem that a lot of people - and especially people who ran open source businesses - were having, which was "What term do we use that won't confuse our customers and the people who use our software?"
+Cygnus Solutions, which later got bought by Red Hat, tried to go with the term 'sourceware' for a while. That was an interesting coinage, and in fact my company, Cyclic Software, which I was running with Jim Blandy at the time, we actually contacted them to see about using that term, and we got a non-committal response where it wasn't quite clear if they were trying to trademark it or they intended for only Cygnus to use it.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** That's even weirder.
+**Karl Fogel:** So that didn't fly, right? That wasn't gonna work... If only Cygnus can use it, that's not gonna be the term that kicks over.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** That defeats the purpose, yeah.
+**Karl Fogel:** Anyway, it didn't have a good adjectival form, so it wasn't... On its own merits, it had problems anyway. Eventually, when the term 'open source' came out, I just felt this tremendous relief. I was like, "Okay, no term is perfect. This term has some possible confusions and problems as well, but it is way easier for explanatory purposes than free software has been, so I'm just gonna start using it." And I didn't intend any ideological switch by that. I was still very pro free software, I ran only free software on my boxes, I only developed free software... But I just thought, "Okay, here's a term that also means freedom that will confuse people less."
+\[39:48\] And then roughly a year after that coinage, when Stallman and the FSF (Free Software Foundation) realized that a lot of the people who were driving the term open source, who had founded the term - not necessarily people who were using the term, which was a lot of us - were also not on board with the ideology. Did they start to make this distinction between free software and open source, and say "Just because you support one doesn't mean you support the other. They're not the same thing, even though it's the exact same set of licenses and software... So what do we mean by 'not the same thing'?"
+So that ideological split is kind of a post-facto creation. It was not actually something that was going on to the degree that it was later alleged to be going on.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** And in your book, I'm trying to remember - it's called Producing Open Source Software, but isn't the subtitle also How To Run A Free Software Project?
+**Karl Fogel:** Yeah, the book is a total diplomatic 'split the difference'.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, you really went right down the middle there.
+**Karl Fogel:** ...How To Run A Successful Free Software Project. \[laughs\]
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah... You didn't commit to either one.
+**Karl Fogel:** Well, I didn't want to, because to me it's the same - like if there were two words for the vegetable broccoli, I might use both words, but it's the same vegetable. Open source to me is one things; I can call it 'free software', I can call it 'broccoli', I can call it 'open source', it is still the same thing. People have all sorts of different motivations for doing it. Someone's motivation for participating in a project or launching a project are not part of the project's license, and therefore they're not part of the term for me.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** That's a good transition into our next section. We're gonna take a short break and when we come back we'll talk about the mainstream version of open source.
+**Break:** \[41:42\]
+**Nadia Eghbal:** \[43:57\] We're back with Karl Fogel. Karl, today a lot of people are saying that open source is basically one, in the sense that a lot of companies are using it, a lot of people are roaring around the term 'open source' who might not have traditionally been engaged with open source... Do you think that open source has won, or they're just sort of like different battles to be fought? Is that helpful vocabulary?
+**Karl Fogel:** It has absolutely not won. I do not know why people think that. Where do you walk into a store and buy a mobile phone that's running a truly open source operating system? I mean yeah, Android Core is open source, or is derived from the Android open source project. I guess when people say it's won, what they mean is that if you think of software as a sphere where it's constantly expanding - or as Marc Andreessen said "eating the world" - the surface of that sphere is mostly proprietary.
+The ratio of the volume to the surface is constantly increasing, and most of that volume is open source, so people who are exposed to the backend of software and who are aware of what's going on behind the scene in tech say, "Oh look, open source is winning" or "Open source has won" because so much of the volume inside the sphere is open source. But most of the world only has contact with the surface, and most of that surface is proprietary, and that surface is the only link that they're going to have with any kind of meaningful software freedom, or lack of software freedom; their ability to customize, their ability to learn from the devices that they use... Their ability - I mean, it's not the case that every person should be a programmer, but perhaps they should have the ability to hire someone else or bring something to a third party service that specializes in customization and get something fixed or made to behave in a different way. And for most of the surface of that sphere it's completely impenetrable and opaque and you just can't do that stuff; you have to accept what is handed to you. So no, I don't think open source has won in the meaningful ways.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I think there's a really important distinction there between software as infrastructure and software on the consumer-facing side. The research I've been doing and where I'm interested is almost exclusively on infrastructure, and I noticed there is this difference on maybe the ideals of free software to begin with, or around being able to change the Xerox printer, that was the Richard Stallman thing.
+**Karl Fogel:** Right, that's the legendary story, which I think is true, of Stallman trying to fix a printer and not having source code to the printer driver.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Right. And so I wonder, is that frustrating for them...? In some ways it really won on maybe the infrastructure side, and it's almost even - I keep saying "won", or just been massively adopted almost because it's equivalent of free labour, like price-free stuff that startups can use, and so has the needle moved at all on the principle side of things? Or does it even matter?
+**Karl Fogel:** Well, I have a very utilitarian view of the principle side of it; I do think that software freedom is important, but it's increasingly an issue of control over your personal life and your families and friend's lives, or at least being able not to put them in harm's way. A great example is Karen Sandler, the executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy, she has a heart device; she has a congenital heart condition, she has a device attached to her heart, and that device is running proprietary software. That software - I don't know the exact version running on her device, but that type of software has been shown to be extremely vulnerable to hacking, to remote control.
+\[48:03\] In fact Dick Cheney, the Vice-President had a similar device in his heart and apparently had the wireless features on the device disabled for security reasons. Think about the fact that the Federal Agency in the U.S. that is responsible for approving medical devices not only does not review software source code, it does not even require that the source code be placed in escrow with the Agency in case an investigation is later necessary. It just evaluates the entire system as a black box and says, "Yes, approved" or "No, not approved", and they have nowhere near the resources or the confidence, let alone the mandate to review the software for vulnerabilities, when software vulnerabilities are increasingly affecting everyone. Everyone's had a credit card account that's been hacked in some way.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I wonder if those battles are gonna be addressed maybe not through software freedom or open source or those types of movements, but I guess as you're describing it, I'm thinking more around hacker/maker movements and hardware stuff, or they might come at it from the same angle, saying "Why can't I just modify anything?"
+**Karl Fogel:** Yeah, and you do see a lot of that. I saw a keynote at the O'Reilly OSCon, the Open Source Convention, you probably saw it, too... The woman who had hacked her own insulin pump; the software that controls a device that dispenses a chemical into her bloodstream turned out to be hackable, so they hacked it.
+So I think you're right, the maker movement is driving it, and they share a lot of language and people with the open source movement. I just used the open source movement unironically; to me it's largely the same as the free software movement.
+So yeah, there are various pressures toward people having the ability to customize or to invite other people to help them customize the devices that run increasingly large swaths of our lives. I guess what's happened is open source kept winning individual battles, but the number of things that software took a controlling role in kept increasing so rapidly that the percentage of things that are open source on the surface has been going down, even as open source keeps winning area after area.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think that if you separated it nicely into two camps, if you look at the production of software versus the consumption of software, the reason we keep talking about "open source is winning" is because it really has won or very close to winning the production of software. If you were a developer in the early '90s, most if not all of your toolchain was proprietary. The way that you developed software was to use other proprietary software; that's completely turned on its head.
+**Karl Fogel:** Yeah, that was probably true, although it didn't have to be.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It didn't have to be at the time, but now the predominant way that you develop any software, including proprietary software, is to use a bunch of open source software.
+**Karl Fogel:** Right, that's a really good point. I think you're right.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I mean, that proprietary code that's on that hard device is probably compiled with JCC. \[laughs\]
+**Karl Fogel:** Or one of the other free compilers.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Or LLVM, yeah. And so because the voices in our world are so dominated by the people that have actually produced the software, there is this mindset that "Hey, I live in this world all day that it's 99% open source." It feels like it has won. And I think the reason that it won though - in that space, and not in the consumer space - is that there is a utilitarian reason that you need something open source. It is infinitely more useful if it's open source, and more useable as a producer if it's open source. And there's all these network effects that make it better over time that I can evaluate as a producer.
+\[52:12\] But if you're looking at products and the consumption of software, it being open source or not is not visible to the consumer of that software, at least not immediately. So there needs to be some kind of utilitarian argument around that, and I think it may be privacy and security. That's a very, very good argument and it's getting more tangible to consumers now.
+**Karl Fogel:** Yeah, I think that's at least part of it, and that has been a winning argument. A lot of the open source privacy and security projects have seen a lot more adoption and a lot more funding; just for various reasons, many of those projects tend to be non-profit, or at least not plausibly for-profit. It's very clear that for all of his eloquence as a writer and speaker, which I think is considerable, the reason Richard Stallman succeeded was Emacs and GCC. He wrote or caused people to coalesce and help him write two really great programs, and then motivated a lot of people to write a lot of the pieces of the rest of a Unix-like system; didn't unfortunately get the kernel, Linus Torvalds got that, and that has caused some bad blood ever since. But it was writing good code, that people could actually use, that gave him influence.
+That's why they took his other writings seriously, it was the utility of the code. But I think going back to the way you started presenting that idea, I think one of the important goals, one of the important motivating factors in the free software movement was keeping blurry the distinction between producers and consumers; the idea that there should not be a firm wall between these two camps, and that anyone who just thinks of themselves as only using software... I sort of prefer 'user' to 'consumer' because when you use software, you don't - it's not like apples, where once you use it, it's consumed. \[laughter\] The software is still there after you run it, so it's not being consumed. But the idea that any user has the potential, by very incremental degrees, to be invited into the production of the software... In fact, that's what happened to me, that's how I got into it. I was just using this stuff for writing my papers in college and exploring the nascent internet, and someone showed me how to use the info tree.
+That was like the documentation tree for documentation that covered all of the GNU free software utilities, and right at the top of the introductory node, the top-level node in the info documentation browser was a paragraph that said "You can contribute to this documentation. To learn how to add more material to this info tree, click here", where 'click' meant navigating with the keyboard and hit return; I don't think there was a mouse. There was no mouse on those terminals, they were VT-100 terminals, but the idea that the system was inviting me to participate in the creation of more of the system - that struck me as really interesting.
+\[55:38\] The idea was to keep the surface porous and allow for the possibility that those users who have the potential to become participants in improving the system do so. It wasn't just freedom as an abstract concept, it was freedom as a practice. And still today, I think the way a lot of people get at open source is that they learn that they can affect the way a web page behaves by going behind the scenes and editing the JavaScript that got downloaded to their browser and noticing that things change; then they realize that "Hey, this is not a read-only system. The whole things is read/write. I can make things happen." That's what worries me about a lot of the user-facing devices and interfaces that we see today - there's no doorway, there's no porousness to the surface; you have no opportunity to customize or hack on it, or get in touch with the people who are one level closer to the source code.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I think there are a couple of interesting things that might be happening in tandem around that now. We haven't talked about this at all, but just the definition of a software developer has changed radically in the past five years, where a lot more people are learning how to code. Maybe they're not at a very high technical level, but just enough that they are able to modify small things around them and see that power. I think learning how to code has just become so much more accessible, so you have so many people that are interested in modifying the world around them in much more casual ways. That is blurring the line between consumer and producer. Look at any child today, everybody is learning how to code, and just imagine when they grow up and they just expect that everything around them can be transformed. It's almost like people are coming at it from a different direction, but then at the same time you see all these very proprietary platforms that are basically exploiting network effects to centralize where people congregate on the internet, and those things are still total black boxes.
+I don't know what happens when the youngest generation now grows up... Will they say, "This is bullshit!"? "This is not how we were raised to see the internet."
+**Karl Fogel:** They'll say "This is bullshit", but they'll say it on Facebook.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Right! And that's the hard part, is sort of like you have this tyranny of ... yeah.
+**Karl Fogel:** I think that point about network effects is really important. What happened as an increasingly large percentage of humanity got internet connections was that the payoff ratio for building a proprietary system changed. It used to be that if you were building a system there was some reward for making it a little hackable, because the users you were likely to attract... Well, people on the internet at that time were already more likely to have potential to contribute to your system, so there was statistically some potential reward for making your system have a slightly open door to people coming in and helping out. But if you're launching something like Facebook or Snapchat in the age of most of humanity being online, then the trouble you go through to make that thing hackable versus the payoff when most of those users are not going to take advantage of that, the reward matrix just looks different now, and maybe it just doesn't make economic sense for those proprietary platforms to have a porous surface.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** And oddly you see, like on Snapchat for example, where people are... Snapchat offers tons of things to make people essentially modify around them, like stickers, drawing on things or whatever. So it's that same behavior, but it's still on Snapchat's platform.
+**Karl Fogel:** Right, and they control it and they track... Like, you can't fork Snapchat and make your stickers in the forked Snapchat, let alone do something else.
+\[59:41\] The uncharitable way to say it is that everyone's creative and environmental improvement impulses are being coopted and redirected into limited and controlled actions that do not threaten the platform providers. Basically every platform provider's business model is "I wanna be like a phone carrier. I just wanna have total control over the user base and have people have to join in order to get access to the rest of my user base", and that creates a mentality that is antithetical to the way open source works. You don't fork a monopoly-based thing. You don't fork a thing that has network effects.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I have a hard time thinking that that is necessarily... That these things have to be in conflict. I don't think that users are ever gonna... I don't think that you can sell a product to users in a competitive market based on the values that will attract a community around people hacking it. You have to be a great product compared to everybody else on the terms that most users are using it, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you can't also be hackable. You just have to have a culture around the product of actually creating something good.
+Look at the one success story that we have, for a short period of time, which was Mozilla. They won for a while and took a huge amount of market share away from Microsoft - enough that Microsoft actually came and participated at Web Standards again - because they made a better browser for users, and not just for people that were hacking on websites.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** And it's because it's better, not necessarily because of those...
+**Karl Fogel:** Oh no, my doom and gloom is not a moral condemnation, it's an observation of economic reality. I think what you're saying is correct, but it's still not good news for open source.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** No, and I think that's what's so interesting about right now in even how people are using the term open source, and a lot of people say something is open source when it's not actually. So the term itself has been sort of being coopted into different definitions, and for a lot of people now that are just coming into it, they say the term 'open source' and they just mean "Why shouldn't I share what I made with the world?" or "Why shouldn't I change something that I see?", but it doesn't necessarily carry all that other history or expectations with it.
+**Karl Fogel:** Well yeah, that coopting has been going on. Ever since the term was coined, there have been groups and people using it in ways that don't mean what it originally meant. There have been people coopting the term since it was coined, but there's always been counter pressure to preserve its original meaning, because the original meaning is so unambiguous and so clear. It's so easy to identify when it's being correctly used, that the counter pressure usually is successful. So I don't see any more of that now than in the past. I think that's just a constant terminological tug of war that's going on, but mostly the meaning of the term is as strong now as it ever was.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Well, I think it's as strong now to a set of people that still hold on to that term really strongly, but to be frank I think they're almost putting blinders on to how so many other people are using it. We've talked about this - at what point does that new definition just become the definition because so many people are using it that way?
+**Karl Fogel:** Yeah, that's how the language works and I'm totally on board with that, but I guess what I'm saying is I try to see that happening - and a number of people do, and then they actually go where possible... When it's an organizational source of terminology dilution, they'll go to that organization and say, "Hey, the term doesn't mean that. Stop doing that!" and in almost every case the organization reforms their usage, and that's the only reason that open source still means anything; it's because that constant process is going on, and I haven't actually seen the ratio changing that much lately, and of course it's a very hard thing to gather data on, and Nadia you have been trying to gather data on this and you've been out there doing research on this so you might be right, but the blinders are anyway not intentional. We are actually out actively looking for that, and to me it looks like it's about the same as it ever was, and we just have to stay vigilant.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[01:04:08.23\] That's a nice recap of the problems of people misusing the term or using it for something that's not within the scope of what open source means. But there's also a fair amount of - I don't know how to say this without being mean...
+**Karl Fogel:** Oh, go for it.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Corporations or projects that are open source within the definition of open source, but aren't what we would call open.
+**Karl Fogel:** Actually, I think that's okay and I don't care. In other words, if you're forkable, you're open source. And if you run the project as a closed society and even the developer's names are kept top secret, as long as the source code is available and its under an open source license and it could be forked, you're open source.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** You're thinking more about the future of it, rather than the current reality. Like, even if I can't get anything done now, if it becomes a big enough problem, I have that option, right?
+**Karl Fogel:** Well yeah. I mean, the fact that you have that option affects the behavior of the central maintainers, whether they admit it openly or not. The knowledge that your thing can be forked causes you to maintain it differently, even if you never respond to any of the pull requests, you never respond to any of the emails of anyone from outside the maintainer group. The mere fact that someone could fork it forces you to take certain decisions in certain directions so as not to increase the danger of forking, for example. So you still get open source dynamics, even when they're not visible.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, that's a good question, Nadia. I do think that some people put blinders on and try to ignore it, but they tend to get reminded of it. \[laughs\]
+**Karl Fogel:** I didn't hear Nadia's question, I'm sorry.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I really wonder whether some companies actually see it that way, or whether they're actually acutely aware of the fear of a fork. Because again, like we talked about network effects, where even if nobody likes the thing anymore, if everybody is using a certain thing, it's very hard to actually switch off.
+**Karl Fogel:** Well, it just requires... I mean, for business-to-business open source. Again, Android is a classic example. Google is very aware of the potential for forks; they are very aware of the business implications, to the extent that those are predictable, depending on who might fork it. And indeed, some forks have started to appear, and that is something that gets factored into their decisions as to how they run their copy of the Android project, which so far most companies still socially accept as the master copy, but they are not required to do that. So that means at least the Android Core code is indeed open source, even though it is not run in the way most open source projects are; although I think actually they have taken contributions from the outside. It's not quite as closed as the tech press indicates it is.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** From what I understand of your views, you see it as like the license and these guaranteed freedoms are what makes it open source and that's all it really matters, because you're saying if need you could always fork it.
+**Karl Fogel:** I'm not quite saying that that's all that really matters, I'm just saying that it's a main thing... And sure, I would much rather have a project be run by a community, but that potential is always there as long as the open source license is there.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, the reason why I think collaboration and community is so intertwined is because, again, network effects... And it doesn't really matter whether something can technically be forked if there is actually no ability to change it, so I worry that relying too much on that core definition could act... It's sort of like this great hypothetical about whether that really happens. It's like anyone can create an alternative to Facebook in theory, but no one has successfully created an alternative, because everyone's on Facebook.
+**Karl Fogel:** \[01:08:04.11\] Well, but I don't think that network effects in an open source development environment are quite the same... Let's take a couple of examples. GCC got forked years ago. It had a core group of maintainers, and then it had a bunch of revolutionaries who were not happy with how those maintainers were maintaining it. And from the beginning of the project there was no doubt about who this sort of socially accepted master copy was. It was the one maintained by the Free Software Foundation with a technical council that I don't know how they were selected, but I think Richard Stallman was involved in selecting them, and when these revolutionaries grew increasingly unhappy with technical decision being made and with how contributions were being accepted or not accepted, they had corporate funding, they went off and created EGCS.
+EGCS started accepting all those patches that the GCC copy wouldn't take, and eventually it kind of blew past GCC in terms of technical ability to the point where the FSF said "Well, I guess you're kind of where stuff is happening now, so we're just gonna take the next version of EGCS and call that GCC and merge the two, and you won." And it was totally successful, and it happened because the problems were big enough that people were willing to devote resources to forking and solving them. Could the same thing happen with the Linux kernel? Absolutely. If Linus started making bad decisions, or if he started ticking off too many people and enough kernel developers who had the technical plausibility to launch a fork chose to make a fork - yeah, it would succeed, there's no question. But it's just that Linus is running the project well enough that no one needs to do that.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, I see your point, it is different.
+**Karl Fogel:** Yeah, but Facebook, on the other hand, that's a whole different kind of network effect. I don't mean to completely argue your point away because I think it's a good one, which is that there are network effects, and it is a lot of effort to fork a popular project that has a successful or at least a cohesive maintenance team and a clear leadership structure.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** And you need to have a community that cares enough to fork it. Again, fast-forwarding to some sort dystopian future that I don't actually know is the future or not, but if open source projects become more about users than about contributors, and people are just sort of using the thing, then it becomes a lot harder to mobilize people to change something. But maybe I'm just sort of making up...
+**Karl Fogel:** Well, the degree... The ease with which it is possible to motivate people to make a fork or to change something will always be directly proportional to the amount of need for that change. If no one's motivated to change anything, that just means it's not important to someone for something to get changed, so why should we care?
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, I don't know if--People can hate using something... There's a ton of legacy open source projects that are used in everybody's code and it's just really hard to switch out because everyone uses them.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think the difference though is that there's just not enough people... Yes, people hate using it, but there's not enough people that want to be developing on it that can't, that would then fork it and fix it. And think that there's a tension here between the people using it and the people that wanna contribute and can't, or wanna fix this and can't. And sometimes it really is too difficult to pull that out. But io.js was a pretty successful fork, and that was in large part because there were a lot of people that wanted to contribute that couldn't, and that wanted to take on ownership of the project and couldn't. So there was a thriving community actually working on it, and then people that were using were like "Oh great, I can come and use this."
+**Karl Fogel:** \[01:12:00.15\] Unfortunately I don't know the details of that particular fork, it sounds like you do. If you think there are interesting lessons to draw from it, please explain more.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So I've said this on a couple occasions, but I think the size of the user base is proportional... There's some percentage of that that would contribute, that wanna contribute in some way, and if they're enabled to, you'll have a thriving community. If you don't, you eventually will increase the tension, not just with your overall user base, but also with these people that would be contributing. And eventually, if that tension rises enough, you get a fork.
+I think that where that starts to pare down is that when you look at Android, the users of the Android code base are not the users of Android. The users of the Android code base are companies that manufacture phones, for the most part.
+**Karl Fogel:** And indeed, they started forking Android.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yes, exactly. So they have the resources to do that, and their needs do not necessarily line up with the needs of Google. The problem is that their needs are in many cases counter to the users of Android, so it puts Google in a strange place where they're not satisfying the needs of the users of the Android code base, but they are satisfying the needs of the Android end users. If you talk to anybody who uses Android, they're like "Oh, I have to use the newest Google phone that only takes the Google Android, because the ones where manufacturers have forked them are pretty much terrible." Except, I heard Java is really good. I think we're getting into very specific things right now... \[laughter\]
+**Karl Fogel:** Well we are, but just to make a quick point about that, in theory, in some sort of long ark of software justice, there should be a link between what those companies are doing with their forks of Android and user's needs, because otherwise they're not gonna sell phones. Of course, I would love all those phones to be running a fully open source operating system, and the reasons why they're not are an interesting topic in their own right, but there should be some connection eventually between those forks and some kind of technical need being solved.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So when you're looking towards the future though, do you see that tension rising, and users starting to come more in conflict with that model, or are you more pessimistic about it and you feel like the surface is going to continue to be dominated the way that it is now?
+**Karl Fogel:** I wanna give the optimistic answer, but I have no justification for it. Because software is increasingly being tied to hardware devices, and the hackability for a hardware device is so much... Like, the hacktivation energy, the threshold for hacking on something other than a normal laptop or desktop computer is just so much higher that the ratio in any given pool, in any given user base, the number of those users who will be developers, the percentage is gonna be lower. Just to hack on an Android phone - alright, you've gotta setup an Android development environment, you've gotta plug into the phone using a special piece of software that gets you into a development environment, and all of that software might be open source, but it's not like just compiling and running a program and then hacking on the source code and running it again on your laptop. The overhead to get to the point of development is just so much higher. And that's just phones. Do you think hacking on your car is gonna be easier than that? No, it's gonna be a lot harder.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think unfortunately we have to leave it there with this view of a dystopian future... \[laughter\]
+**Karl Fogel:** Always happy to make it darker for you.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** ...but we'll be back next week. We're gonna continue with Karl and talk about some much happier things, like contributions and governance models...
+**Karl Fogel:** Oh, I'll turn that dark, too.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Oh, okay. \[laughter\]
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Can't wait!

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+**Nadia Eghbal:** I'm Nadia Eghbal.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And I'm Mikeal Rogers.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** On today's show, Mikeal and I continue with part two of conversation with Karl Fogel, author of Producing Open Source Software. Karl served on the board the Open Source Initiative, which coined the term 'open source' and helped write Subversion. He's currently a partner at Open Tech Strategies, helping major organizations use open source to achieve their goals.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Our focus on today's episode with Karl was around shifts in open source communities and governance. We talked about the role of casual contributors in a world of rising open source activity, and have different projects handle this increasing demand.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** We also talked about cultural gaps between generations of open source and where it might all come together in the future. If you missed our first show with Karl, make sure you got back and listen to part one of this interview first.
+So Karl, there are more open source projects today that are an order of magnitude higher than they were even ten years ago when you wrote the first edition of your book. There are also more people that are learning to code than ever before. How is this difference in scale of projects and resources changed the open source landscape.
+**Karl Fogel:** Oh, what a big question. The part that I notice - and this is gonna sound very like curmudgeonly old man-ish, is that it's no longer possible to know everyone in open source. Of course, nobody ever knew everyone in open source, but you sort of at least knew their names or you were at most one degree of introduction removed from whoever was running that project over there, and that's just no longer true. Open source is just this gigantic, teeming world of people, most of whom you will never meet, and that feels different - I like it, it's like wandering out into a real world, instead of a clubby little tribe, but you have to sort of adjust and realize that you might as well throw away your Rolodex because you're just never gonna meet everyone at this point. So that's a very personal answer, like how does it feel to me. How does it affect the dynamics of the ecosystem? Or is it even meaningful to say THE ecosystem as one unified thing now...? It's funny, the effect it seems to have had is actually that it's forced a greater uniformity and standardization of processes. It's just like light sockets - once every building gets electrified, you really have to have a standard socket size; you're going to use your devices in every building now, so you have to be able to plug in everywhere, and it's the same... People need to be able to wander from project to project and just get stuff done, so they're gonna look for a file named 'readme' and maybe it's gonna have a .md extension. They're gonna look for a filename 'license', they're going to submit pull requests the same way, they're going to look for a contributor's guide, and it's usually gonna be 'contributing' in the top-level of the project tree, things like that. Those standards have become more important as the number of people involved and the diversity of types of projects and of levels of skill of programmer have changed, and I think that's great. Anything that can make open source more accessible to programmers of all types and all skill levels is a good thing, in my opinion.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** \[\\00:03:48.17\] I don't know if this is an apt comparison, but it reminds me a little bit of something that Rod had said in our episode about the role of contribution - when you have tons and tons of people coming in and a higher volume of contributions, then it's actually counter-intuitively harder to change things than if you had a BDFL [Benevolent Dictator For Life] or whatever; I think he's trying to say that people who are afraid of giving up control or opening things up because they're afraid that the crowd is essentially gonna change the project, but actually when you have tons of people involved it becomes harder to change things. So your comment about how greater scale can actually help standardize things and help make projects more uniform is kind of a good thing, even if it doesn't always seem that way.
+**Karl Fogel:** Well, when you say 'change things' you mean like change the technical procedures of the project, not change in a technical direction, like feature changes or design changes.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Right. It's almost like those structures become more codified, because you just have to deal with so much volume.
+**Karl Fogel:** Yeah. It's interesting, you made a contrast there between having a BDFL (benevolent dictator for life), the person who is the final arbiter of decisions when the group can't come to consensus in an open source project, versus having a lot of diverse contributors. I actually don't think there's any contradiction there. In fact, a BDFL is probably, if anything, more likely to happen in a project that's growing rapidly and where lots of people are coming in, because it's a much faster way to resolve conflicts. Democracy - direct democracy especially - doesn't work very well in a place where the electorate is constantly changing and it's not even clear who the electorate is, whereas the one thing about the BDFL is it's very clear who's making the decisions when decisions need to be made. And it's not real dictatorship; if people can fork it, then dictatorship becomes safe. It's an okay option for governance now.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That's an interesting comment. I do think that it's more common for BDFLs or de facto BDFL models, because they're never actually codified in projects like this, at this scale. But also, I keep thinking about the sustainability of those projects, and if one person is essentially responsible for all the decision-making and maintenance and they're not growing other people that can handle that burden, in this new world where you have all of these casual contributions and all these drive-by contributors, how are you managing that increase and load? What's a sustainable strategy to do that?
+**Karl Fogel:** Well, that raises a really interesting question. One question I wonder about sometimes is "How do we know whether the Linux kernel is good or bad?" I mean, my box is running fine, I'm not worried about it crashing, but Linus has been so good at keeping the project unified that there hasn't really been a serious attempt to fork, and because there hasn't been, that makes it much harder for anyone who is contemplating it to actually do it. So with that positive feedback loop, they decide not to do it, so you never hear about it. But in a project like that, how do you know whether things are as good as they could be? Maybe there are gazillions of really good patches that just never get incorporated. I don't know, I'm not involved in kernel development at all, but I think for projects like that it's very hard to know unless you're closely involved whether the project is actually being successful in its own terms, or as successful as it could be.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And also, the Linux kernel is not GitHub, right? It's not dealing with a flood of casual contributions like those that would come from GitHub.
+**Karl Fogel:** I don't think the fact that it's not on GitHub is the reason it's not dealing with a flood of casual contributions; I don't think you can be a casual contributor to something as complex as the Linux kernel. There's just too much to learn. I'm involved in another project, the Emacs text editor; I'm not one of the major developers at all, but I maintain a few of the Lisp packages in Emacs; \[08:01\] if you're really gonna work on the internals of Emacs, there's just a lot to learn, and they could put Emacs... It's in Git, it's not on GitHub, but it could be on GitHub and it wouldn't make a difference in terms of... The obstacle to writing a code change is learning the incredibly intricate internals and coding conventions of the Emacs source code; it's not where it's hosted or what the PR process is. And that's definitely more true for the Linux kernel.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I disagree with this in a couple ways, because I hear projects say that a lot, and usually that project has awful documentation and a shitty website. Those are things that are not very difficult for people to actually technically go and fix, but they're not being fixed because the barrier to trying to fix them or engage in them is just to high. And because you don't have people coming in at that level...
+**Karl Fogel:** Okay... I have a counterexample for you.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** ... and because you're not bringing in people to fix small doc changes or to fix the website, you're not even growing a culture that is thinking about barriers to entry, so of course you're gonna continue to develop conventions that are very hard to make it through. You're right that we don't have a fork of the Linux kernel to look at, but just look at FreeBSD. FreeBSD is a lot easier to contribute to, has done work to make it simpler to get involved in the community - at least compared to Linux - and while it's not on GitHub, it does have a huge and thriving localization community; the number of users of it is significantly lower than Linux, but it actually does have a pretty enviable amount of contributors.
+**Karl Fogel:** Yeah, that's a really interesting point. It may be worthy of more study, because I haven't looked closely at that project. I mean, I do believe that its user base relative to Linux has been going down, unfortunately... Or unfortunately for them; I don't know if that's unfortunate in the global sense or not.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So market share-wise yes, but market share-wise on servers everybody's losing to Linux no matter what, right? I think that their growth rate relative to themselves - their growth last year - is actually looking well.
+**Karl Fogel:** Well, I'm glad, because I think some degree of diversity is healthy. I don't want all of the free software operating system eggs to be in the Linux basket either, even though I'm a long-time Linux user myself. But just to give you a quick counter-example, although I think what you said surely is true of some projects, but the ones I'm most familiar with, where I've looked closely or in one case I am a direct participant (Emacs) it is not the case that they have set up extra barriers. There is incredible documentation on not just how to contribute, but how to understand the internals. There's a mailing list that is ready and willing to answer questions and does all the time, and for things like documentation and the website they accept changes all the time. The website just recently got revamped by a total out of the blue contribution from a volunteer who did a great job.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It looks great, yeah.
+**Karl Fogel:** But the core of it is just hard, and it's just not about being on GitHub, it's just you have to understand how the C source code interacts with the Garbage Collection routines, what macros to use and how the redisplay engine works. You have to spend a lot of time studying it, and that's not gonna happen for drive-by contributions. And I think that is also true for the Linux kernel, and there are some other projects where it's true.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. I mean, it just doesn't map with my own experience. We've just had areas in NodeJS that we never thought that we would end up getting contributions to, outside of a core group of people that were spending all their time working on Node, because they were just too technically complex. And the more that we opened up... Yes, we saw a flood of contributions for the things that were much easier to get involved in, but over time people leveled up into those areas.
+**Karl Fogel:** \[11:59\] Yes, I didn't mean to say that that doesn't happen. That happens, but I think that that leveling up is going to happen - do you think that being on GitHub or not would have made a difference in that leveling up?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think that one, you have to have good processes in place and a culture of mentorship to level people up. But if you think about it like a funnel, GitHub is gonna increase the size of the funnel coming into that process, unquestionably. So I do think that it would increase the number of people coming into the funnel; I don't think that in and of itself it's a solution though to leveling people up.
+**Karl Fogel:** I can't argue that that's not true, I just don't know. And certainly there are other dysfunctionalities in the way the Emacs project is run, although they have been improving a lot lately. That sort of confound this experiment, so it's hard to know. But yeah, I think the idea of increasing the funnel makes a lot of sense. So if I was arguing with you, then I've officially stopped.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] I think maybe a good thing to study would be to look at projects that have a long history that then decided to move to GitHub, and see what happened there. I have a couple examples. For instance, jQuery was one of the first larger projects with a big history to come over, and at the time pull requests were barely a thing, but John Resig spent a lot of time looking at people's forks... Like, literally they're off in their own corner just doing something and he's guiding them to do changes in a way that might actually be incorporated later...
+**Karl Fogel:** Wow...
+**Mikeal Rogers:** ... so it actually did turn into... I mean, it was a lot of community management on his part, but it turned into a big change in the project and how many people were involved.
+**Karl Fogel:** Well, but it's also seeding a culture. Every one of those people where he was off helping them with their own fork, not even in the upstream core repository - they remember that experience, they carry it forward and most of them will help do that for someone else later on. I think it's not so much the mechanism, it's just the psychological message of paying attention to people and giving them feedback and encouraging them to do the same for the next people who come along; that's what makes the real difference.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. I mean, even the people that weren't directly involved see it, because it's happening in public. When we had Rod on we talked about how it's really important that every change comes through a pull request, even from people that have been contributing for years, because then everybody sees it, they see the same review process, and it just creates this culture of review and mentorship, and helping people along.
+**Karl Fogel:** Yeah, making that visible is a huge, huge part of a healthy project, I completely agree. You know, one of the things you said about how... A really good thing to do would be to find long-running projects that switched over to GitHub without making any other major changes and see what effects that had. It reminds me of one of the unfortunate economic realities, which is there are a lot of really interesting research questions in open source, and there just is not that much funding to do them. Nadia, since you sometimes do have that funding, I hope that you're able to do all this research, or at least some of it, because this is stuff like from my company... We help organizations and government agencies launch open source projects and manage them and run them and fix their contracting language, and stuff. But I'm always looking for the customer that is gonna magically pay for us to do that kind of research, and it's very rare that happens.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Very rare, that's true.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, there's a couple projects that have gone from proprietary to open source on GitHub, and did so with good policies of accepting pull requests and mentoring. Surprisingly - well, not surprisingly anymore, but surprisingly if you talked to me ten years ago, Microsoft has been really good at this.
+**Karl Fogel:** \[16:04\] Yeah, it's been amazing.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, and ChakraCore as a JavaScript DM... It is a fairly complicated piece of technology, and their total contributions and the number of people involved shot up hugely when they went open source. But it wasn't just putting it out on GitHub, it was also having a culture where the people internally that have been working on it for a while have time set aside to review code and mentor people and bring them into the project.
+**Karl Fogel:** Yeah. Well, also if the change was going from closed source to open source... Sure, contributions shot up, because it wasn't possible to contribute before. \[laughter\] The experiment there seems fairly clear cut. Open sourcing your code gets you more contributions. \[laughter\]
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That is definitely true.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Some of your research for the revision of this book, you were looking at how the CLA landscape has changed. Can you tell us a little bit about what's changed in the past ten years or so and how that dovetails with these casual contributors?
+**Karl Fogel:** Yeah, I think the past ten or fifteen years was a time of experimentation among CLA. For listeners who don't know, a CLA is a Contributor License Agreement, which is basically like there's some upstream open source project that you wanna contribute some code - maybe you fixed a bug or added a new feature for them - you send in your changes, but they want you to also send in some kind of assertion, digitally signed or maybe fax in an actual real signature saying that you are giving the project this code donation and all future donations made via the same mechanism under a certain open source license or under certain terms, so that they can incorporate it safely without any fear of legal repercussions later into their codebase. The idea is later if you change your mind and you're like "I didn't give you that code to distribute under the GNU general public license, I'm suing you now", they can say "Well, we have the CLA that says you can't turn around and do that."
+What some companies started doing - and they've mostly stopped now, because this got unpopular, although a few still do it - is they would have CLAs that would say "You agree that you're donating this code to project XYZ and that we, company Q, which is a major sponsor or the founder of project XYZ, are allowed to redistribute your changes under any terms we want." That includes the open source project license to the project, but it also means that they could make a proprietary fork of the project. Some of these companies did that in order to retain the right to do a proprietary fork, or sell licenses to, or something like that.
+Those kinds of CLAs have gotten pretty unpopular, because a lot of developers just said, "Well, I'm not gonna give you asymmetrical rights. I'm giving you code under the license here, giving the world, including me, code under license. Let's just keep it symmetrical and not give you rights that I don't have." This became objectionable enough that then when a company or a project would set up a CLA of that style, they would just immediately be noise.
+What surprised me though - this is something I discovered during the research for the book, and I have to give a shout out to Bradley Kuhn, who follows this stuff; he's at the Software Freedom Conservancy, and was able to tell me a lot about what had changed in the CLA landscape and point me to examples. It's that not only have those particular odious kinds of CLAs become less popular, but CLAs in general have become less popular. More and more projects have just said, "Look, as long as you certify that you are the author of this code or that you have the right to contribute it under our license to the project, and that we can redistribute it under that license, then we're good." So that's not really a licensing agreement for the contribution, it's called more of a DCO (Developer Certificate of Origin) where you assert, and usually an email or maybe a digitally signed document of some kind is enough to just say "You have this code. Here's my DCO, and now we don't have to sign anything or have an agreement."
+\[20:20\] So I think the world is moving more toward DCOs. There are still CLAs out there. Some projects have important reasons why they need a CLA; for example, apps that are gonna be distributed in the Apple App Store but are free software under a copyleft license, there are various things about the Apple build and production process that get things in the Apple Store where the terms that the project has to agree to with Apple are not compatible with the GPL, so the developers who contribute all have to sign a CLA with the project, where that gives the project enough of an exception to the GPL to be able to sign this agreement to get the thing in the Apple Store, but otherwise the project is under GPL.
+There are some cases where CLAs are still necessary and many other cases where projects still use them and people generally agree with them, but I do a general move away from complicated or onerous CLAs and towards simpler, more lightweight things like DCOs. I think - although I should stress that this is not legal advice to anyone - my business partner and friend James Vasile, who is a lawyer, has observed some of the same trend and clued me into it, so I should give him some credit for keeping tabs on this as well. Does that answer your question?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yes, that's a very good answer. And it dovetails great into what we need to talk about next, but first we're gonna take a short break, and then we're gonna come back and we're gonna get a little more deep on governance policies.
+**Break:** \[21:56\]
+**Mikeal Rogers:** We're back with Karl Fogel. Karl, earlier you said that the scale of open source has lead to the standardization of a lot of processes and policies. From my perspective, I haven't seen a coalescing around particular governance models, at least not yet.
+**Karl Fogel:** Oh, I'm glad you said that, I agree with you. I have not seen it either.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. Do you have any thoughts on why that might be?
+**Karl Fogel:** Yeah, I do. I end up explaining this to our clients. Our clients are people who are much less familiar with open source than anyone on this call. For many of them it's their first foray into this, and one of the things we always have to tell them is that governance is not the first thing - or even the fifth thing - that they should be thinking about. By the time they come to us they thought, "Okay, we're gonna release this thing as open source software." Maybe they've written it already or maybe they're in the process of writing it, and the first thing on the agenda for that kickoff meeting with us is like, "Okay, we need to write down a governance policy, a clear membership structure and all this stuff for how the project's gonna be governed", and we're always telling them "Don't worry about that, don't give it a thought. Just release the code, make sure that the developers managers are aware that the developers will need some time to deal with incoming questions and pull requests, and we'll sort out the governance later", and they're always kind of shocked, because they brought us in as experts, they thought, on governance, and we're telling them not to worry about it.
+\[24:16\] The reason is, let's do a thought experiment: why do we have government at all? This word 'governance' comes from the idea of authority structures, and those authority structures exist to help us make decisions about how to allocate scarce resources, right? We have private property and ownership of real estate and stuff, and the whole point of government is to quickly and definitively adjudicate disputes over the use and allocation of those non-replicable resources. But an open source project doesn't fit that definition - it is replicable, you can fork it, and so you don't need governance. To a first approximation, you don't need governance at all, and that's why BDFL works.
+The reason to have governance is the non-replicable resource; the finite resource in an open source project is obviously not code, and it's not the CPU cycles, it's the developer's attention. The scarce thing that might go away if there's a fork is that everyone might start paying attention to this thing over here instead of that thing over there. And that is a decision that every individual who's attention is in play makes for themselves. So governance is really a form of marketing or persuasion. What you're trying to do is convince every developer in the project that every other developer is going to stay here, so they might as well too, because nobody wants to do a fork where they're the only one forking, right? That's a losing proposition right from the gate.
+This is a very cynical way of saying it and I don't actually think of it this way, but it's a kind of Stalinist move. How to become Joseph Stalin or any dictator? You convince everyone in the room that everyone else in the room will obey you. Once every person believes that about the people around them, they will obey you too, because it's too dangerous not to. Well, open source is the nice version of that - how do you convince every developer that every other developer really believes in the current leadership structure and in the way things are going. Once you figure out how to do that, you're gonna have a stable project.
+So that is not really an exercise in governance. You don't need a police force, you don't need a national defense, you don't need a courts system to make that work. You just need persuasion and personal skills.
+Now, we can notice of course that many projects do evolve some kind of formal governance structure and sometimes it involves voting. Usually, voting is a fallback mechanism for when consensus cannot be reached. It's not like they vote on every decision, but everyone knows that the potential to hold a vote is there, and so they will sense which way the wind is going and give a decision and just compromise and go with that, because they know they will lose the vote anyway or, conversely, win the vote.
+So the reason I think that projects move toward those kinds of governance structures is that once a BDFL leaves - the charismatic founder of the project maybe goes off and does other things, or screws up in such a way that nobody trusts their judgment anymore, or whatever it is... Once that happens, there is not a clear answer for who should be in the driver's seat now, right? And so the default answer, the solution that everyone can quickly agree on, and more importantly, the solution that everyone believes everyone else will agree on is "Oh, we'll have some kind of democratic, consensus-based governance model", and so that's what they do, because it's the proposal that everyone know is gonna be accepted, so it almost doesn't matter who makes the proposal.
+\[28:13\] And it's especially helpful when you have organizational participants. If you have corporations or governments or nonprofits who are investing money in the project, either through direct contribution or by donating developer time - or, we should say, investing developer time - the managers, the decision-makers at those organizations, they feel more comfortable when they see that kind of governance model, so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The investment energy is gonna go to a place who's governance structures make everyone comfortable, even if you never actually have to take a vote. And in practice, there's usually a few people who have technical leadership just by default, because they know the code really well or they have good people skills, or a combination of those two.
+So I think governance is very soft in open source projects; it's mostly not necessary, and it's usually not the most interesting topic. It's way less interesting than figuring out the right workflow for incorporating contributions and things like that.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Do you think it doesn't really matter what model we use? Is there really just no difference between BDFL and a meritocracy or whatever?
+**Karl Fogel:** I guess I'd have to ask, matter for what? What's the objective by it mattering?
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, that's a good point... Because I feel there is a difference in terms of... And I don't know how to put my finger on it or articulate it, but sort of just like philosophy, or culture, or some other very soft word like that? Especially in how people think about welcoming new people and how they think about handling contributions. When it comes to decision making, I actually feel like everyone is kind of the same, in some shape or form. There's always some sort of ultimate tie-breaker in how well it's enforced and not.
+**Karl Fogel:** That's a good point. I think you're right that projects that have a single leader who is the arbiter or stuff tend to - I think, this is sort anecdata, but I think they tend not to concentrate as much on welcoming new developers and on making the contribution workflow easy etc., partly because when it's a single person who feels responsible for steering the project, that person naturally falls back on dealing with the people that he or she is already most comfortable with, and those are the people who are already incorporated in the project and know the procedures.
+Whereas when it's a group, for a given person in the group, a good way to have an influence on the project and to make things - whether it's out of desire for personal influence or a genuine idealism about keeping the project healthy or whatever the motivation is... One of the best things you can do visibly in a project is get more people into the project, as long as those people are good contributors and they play well in the sandbox, so to speak.
+So for group-governed projects, there's a natural feedback loop where the group wants to make it possible for new people to come into the group.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, and I don't know if I would call it governance. I struggle with this... It's about something else, I think. Participation models? Contribution models?
+**Karl Fogel:** Yeah, you're right... There's no good word for this. I guess we'll probably end up using governance as the word, but then everyone will misunderstand what we mean.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** In Node we do have a separation between the governance of the project and the contribution policy of the project, because one is the formal structure for decision-making and the other one is like "How do we get contributions in?", but...
+**Karl Fogel:** I think every project makes that distinction.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[32:00\] Right, exactly. So there is a distinction in those policies, but where I do think they meld together - and I really love your method of saying, "Government is there to allocate scarce resources", so how do we identify what the scarce resources are? I think one of the shifts that happened is we have all of these contributions coming in that are small, we're not lacking those resources; it's a matter of how do we incorporate those, and then the scarce resource actually stops being the time and attention of a ton of people and really just the time and attention of those people that are maintaining or trying to get things in. In a BDFL model, if the BDFL can handle all of that workload on their own, then there may not be a problem, but usually they're spending time on more than one project, right? So maybe the BDFLs are involved in a ton of different projects and just don't have the time to do all of that workload, so governance becomes a way to share that workload and to have a system by which we can share the workload and make decisions as a group, because it's actually less effort on any one individual.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** It's just like management models, or something.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Right, right. So this is like a really good, basic economic model, but if you look at it in terms of behavioral economics and you're like, okay, let's assume that people are not always rational, I think that what we see is that a lot of people don't move to these models. They stand in a BDFL model until they burn out, until it's bad for them and bad for their project.
+**Karl Fogel:** Yeah, that happens a lot. But that's kind of like, "Okay... Well, whatever it takes." Maybe the project has a rough year until they finally get it through their head that they can't go on this way.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** It happened on Linux. I mean, it's still BDFL, but there was this sort of like time of reckoning where they were like, "Oh, we need to fix all these problems."
+**Karl Fogel:** Yeah, Linus is the BDFL in the sense that if there's controversy, everyone will agree that he can resolve it about a decision, but he's not the BDFL in the sense of he's the only person who can incorporate patches in practice. He's part of a group of people that he has appointed who are all now approved to put those patches in.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I'd like to hear more about this dumbbell effect that you've talked to us about before. You said that you were noticing in today's open source an increase of more one-person projects on the one end, and then you have these very large B2B projects on the other side. If we're talking a little bit more about different project models, however related that is to governance or not, what are the emerging norms around different project models that you're seeing?
+**Karl Fogel:** Yeah, so what I meant by the dumbbell effect... I think that's partly a consequence of the standardization of the contribution workflow model around whatever GitHub promoted, which is basically the pull request model, which now even not on GitHub is basically the way other sites work, and also a result of there being largely one user-facing development and usage environment, which is the browser. I think that's an underappreciated revolution. It used to be that if you were gonna write something that went on someone's screen, you had all sorts of options, like which widget, ex Windows or other graphical user interface widget library were you going to use, how was it going to interface with the system; you had to make all sort of decisions and your code would be incompatible interface-wise and perhaps library-wise with things that had made different kinds of decisions. And now there's this one world; the browser is, if you take mobile platforms off the picture, and even they are somewhat browser-based, the browser is like the only platform that matters. Nobody writes native apps anymore, except a few exceptions like LibreOffice and things like that.
+\[35:54\] What that means is there're all these users who started learning to do View Source and then they started learning that all that JavaScript is minified, and if they got the unminified copy, they could read it and understand it, and it's this tremendous gateway for individual programmers to start making contributions to open source, because every company's writing web programs, and they've gotta find people who can write web code and surely there's tremendous demand; everyone knows that's a promising route to go if you're learning to code. And the result is you get this huge universe of JavaScript libraries and JavaScript-based projects that were started by a person, who suddenly finds themselves overwhelmed with contributions coming in from this huge number of programmers, because they all agreed that JavaScript and the browser was the way to go for programming. So that's one side of the dumbbell, this swelling of that kind of project.
+If you were just some normal journalist and were not really involved in this stuff, you could be forgiven for thinking that open source is essentially just JavaScript stuff on GitHub. That's what it all looks like, right?
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah. \[laughs\]
+**Karl Fogel:** And then the other side is this new thing where companies start using open source releases and projects as a strategic move in markets, where they open source things because they see for example that a competitor is moving in on something, and the first company realizes that if they get first mover advantage by releasing a decent library that's open source - okay, their competitor will use it, but the first company has all the employees with the expertise, they have momentum, they will be able to run the project and maintain influence, and the second company won't really have a choice, except to get on board. So at least now you've put them in a kind of parasitic position relative to yourself. You gave them free code, but you also hobbled them a little bit, you coupled them to you in a way that is advantageous for you. And that's just one motivation, it's not the only reason companies release open source.
+The other end of the dumbbell is these large scale, always salary-to-developers funded multi-company projects that as an individual contributor you're not very likely to waltz in. I'm sure there are some people who are talented enough and have the time or the ability to go in and make some fundamental, important contribution to TensorFlow, but I have a feeling that most of the changes going to TensorFlow are from Google employees or from employees at other companies who are using TensorFlow and where they have to make the changes part of their job.
+So that stuff, that requires a higher upfront investment and expertise, and it's only sustainable because there are corporate dollars behind it.
+And then the middle part of the dumbbell is thinning out a little bit, which is what I used to think of most of the open source world, which is this kind of profusion of apps written in all different languages, for all different kinds of platforms, with different GUI widget toolkits and things... It's not that they don't exist, but as a percentage of open source activity, I think that's going down.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, also that middle is... Even Windows projects exist, they're actually just collections of all of the smaller projects at the other end of the dumbbell, right?
+**Karl Fogel:** Yeah, actually that's another... I never thought of that as being part of the reason, but you're right. Part of what's going on is that there are so many libraries now, that most of what you used to have to write by hand you get from a library. So to get whatever done, you're just writing less code to get that thing done. But that means that most of the actual open source activity is happening out in the things that are your dependencies, which is the left end, or the first end of the dumbbell.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** \[39:53\] From a sustainability perspective it becomes really interesting that there are all these different emerging models, because on the company/corporate end I think the sustainability is not really an issue, it's more of "Can we actually get people to use this project?" And on the very lowest end, of people having very small projects, sometimes it's trivial to manage. But then there's this awkward in-between of... It's big, and there are a ton of people using it, depending on this thing, and I don't exactly know what model it fits into for the future.
+**Karl Fogel:** Right. It's like, I know this thing has economic value for a lot of places, but I don't have any clear path for channeling some of that into the maintenance and into supporting my work on it.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Right, and it's not so big that... It goes into a foundation, or something.
+**Karl Fogel:** Yeah. I mean, it seems to be one of the areas that you've been focusing a lot in your writings, which I'm really glad to see, because there are a lot of important projects that fall in that in-between zone, where there's just this burnt out lead developer who doesn't know how to sustain this thing, and yet there are all these people depending on it.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. I think this is a great time for a quick break. Then we're gonna dig into that middle section, and how these cultural shifts have affected sustainability in open source.
+**Break:** \[\\00:41:15.21\]
+**Mikeal Rogers:** We're back with Karl. Karl, we've talked a lot about projects in terms of differences in governance models, and I think that there's... We've kind of been taking for granted this notion of starting a project or developing a plan, but I'm curious how older projects that have a set of policies are affected, because yes, we have this huge amount of growth in open source contributions, but it's really happening in these new tools, in these newer models. How do we sustain existing projects?
+**Karl Fogel:** I'm trying to think of some examples of what you're calling the existing projects, just so I can draw on them and sort of focus the answer a little bit. Are you thinking of things like infrastructure projects, like the DNS servers?
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Right, right... That's a pretty extreme example. I mean, you could even think of languages like Python...
+**Karl Fogel:** Oh, okay. I do think there is a sense in which software projects reach maturity and they just don't need a huge amount of maintenance, or not as much as they used to. I get the feeling that the effort to reach Python 3, that was probably the last big push in Python. I'm not sure... Like, where would the language go from there, right? They're always gonna have bugs to fix, and there will always be a core maintenance team, and there are plenty of companies depending on Python, so there will always be money to support that, but...
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, but the world changes around you and the market changes around you. For instance, one of the problems with Python is that we're moving towards this sort of microservice, dockerized world where we actually have fewer resources for each application process, and Python isn't particularly good at resource utilization in that world, right? Java has some of the same problems as well. So unless they can get people to work on things that they had not traditionally worked on, like improving VM performance, they may not be as good of a fit as some of the new languages, right?
+**Nadia Eghbal:** \[44:12\] And those are major overhauls...
+**Karl Fogel:** Yeah, there are some products that have long-standing, or future, upcoming technical issues that one can see down the road, but I feel like the question of whether it is important for Python to solve that problem will be answered by whether Python solves that problem. If it's really important to someone - by someone I mean some company or a group of companies; that's the kind of resources it takes to pay for things like that - then of course it will get done. They'll fork Python if they have to...
+**Nadia Eghbal:** That's sort of a tragedy of the commons kind of mentality though, right?
+**Karl Fogel:** No, I don't think so.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Like, someone out there will take care of it, but sometimes it doesn't get taken care of.
+**Karl Fogel:** No, I think the tragedy of the commons - to the extent that it exists is a different thing - that's when every company is sitting back, waiting for someone else to take care of it.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I think that's what actually happens to a lot of projects. We might think, "Well, surely a company that depends on this will make it happen" and then I hear from maintainers, "Well, why is nobody stepping forward?"
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, you mentioned Emacs earlier, and you said that Emacs has done... Emacs has made a lot of changes in how you contribute, and as the profile of an open source contributor has changed, Emacs has been able to continue to change along, and it's certainly not done. I don't think Emacs will ever be done, but it clearly is moving forward.
+**Karl Fogel:** Oh no, I think it has been 30 years already and it's still not done. But actually both Emacs and Python, and probably almost every project we've talked about - there's a pattern that keeps happening in them that is really important, that I think answers some of these questions, which is that they all grow some form of extensibility mechanism; plugin systems, add-ons... In Emacs' case, Emacs Lisp is a full programming language with the ability to just have modules that are separate from Emacs, and what happens is that a lot of the interesting creative work, the places where maintainership energy would normally go end up happening in these satellite projects like an Emacs. I would say some of the most interesting stuff at Emacs is actually happening outside the Emacs tree, in the Org mode project. Org is growing by leaps and bounds, it's got a lot of happy users, it's got its own conference, I think... It's incredible. That's all happening in Emacs Lisp, the programming extension language that is used to program Emacs, but it's not part of the Emacs project officially.
+Similarly with Python - tremendous stuff has been happening for years in the scientific Python community... You know, the sort of big data and mathematics Python libraries communities, but do you consider that stuff to be part of Python, or are they separate projects?
+I think what happens is as soon as you grow an extensibility mechanism, the energy moves out to these things that from the point of view of the central project or satellites, but are actually core things to their own communities.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Right. I think that one of the problems that you do run into though is that now that the energy has moved into this ecosystem and there's a lot of smaller projects that are not centralized in this place, that new community that's building around that has a very different set of expectations about what it's like to contribute and what the barriers to entry might be and how easy that might be, and if the core that the ecosystem is built on remains really difficult to work on and doesn't adjust any of its governance policies, then all of that energy that's happening in the ecosystem may be happening on top of a project that's not sustainable and can't continue to move forward in the best interest of its users necessarily.
+**Karl Fogel:** \[48:11\] Well, now we're addressing a different question. If the idea is that the original core project is difficult to contribute to, specifically because of policies rather than just being technically difficult, that's a different problem. But I don't' see that many projects actually in that situation. Maybe if you can give me some examples we could look at them, but generally these core projects, the reasons that they lose maintenance energy is just because they've kind of reached maturity and the core is now very large, and if you wanna make a change to it you also have to add a regression test, because you gotta make sure your change passes all the existing regression tests, because there's such a huge legacy installed base to take care of; the core is always gonna move more slowly over time.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Going back to the economic model, where you are competing for developer attention to some extent, if there is this huge ecosystem of projects that are easier to contribute to, aren't they going to take a lot of the resources out that could potentially be dedicated to maintenance if the policies there don't change? And I don't mean this in terms of the policies have gotten worse over time, it's just that the expectations of people have changed.
+If there's a core group of people that are really comfortable with the contribution policy and the rest of the world and even their own ecosystem moves on to policies that make it much easier, that core isn't all that incentivized to change for the people that are already there. It's really an opportunity cost that they're missing out on.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Right. I think it's sort of that uncaptured thing that we're not seeing.
+**Karl Fogel:** Well, but it sounds like we're saying it is getting captured, just by someone else. Maybe people who would be fixing core Python are writing SciPy stuff instead. I mean, are we talking about a zero-sum game or a positive-sum game, I guess is my question?
+**Nadia Eghbal:** At some point maybe it's zero-sum, because we only have 24 hours in a day. I mean, you could work on multiple projects, but at some point you'll only have so much time.
+**Karl Fogel:** I guess the reason you're hearing me resist the thesis is I don't know of any good way to evaluate the question of whether a project is getting as much resources, as much developer time as it 'should', because I don't know what the 'should'...
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Well, this is the hard thing about any sort of software infrastructure, the tension between do you just build something new or move on to the next thing when the old one has run its course, or do you try to reinvest back into older projects? And I get that software or anything digital will always move a lot faster than anything physical, but a part of me wonders whether we just accept that norm of "Oh, you know, we just move on to the next project" because there are no resources available for people to improve the existing ones?
+**Karl Fogel:** Yeah, I don't know how to make the argument that the places people are allocating the resources now are the wrong ones, and that they should be allocating them in some other way instead. Because whenever I look closely at how someone is allocating their time and attention, I can see the reasons why they chose to do that, and I don't see a convincing way to say to them, "Oh, you should be doing this other thing instead."
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I don't either, and I think that's part of the problem.
+**Karl Fogel:** I never dreamed that I would be making a market fundamentalist argument; I'm the last person to do that, but I guess I kind of am. \[laughter\] Yeah. Next thing you know, I'll be voting for Rand Paul.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[51:57\] Back to your point that if it gets bad enough there will be a fork - I think that's sort of like escape hatch, like the reason that "the market is gonna figure this out" is that if it gets bad enough there will be a fork.
+**Karl Fogel:** Oh, yeah.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And certainly that has happened and could happen, but the problem with that being the main approach that we have, or the only recourse that we have, is that there is a fair amount of time that it takes for the situation to get bad enough that there's a fork, and then it takes time for that fork to ever take over or get to the point where it will be merged back. So that time that you lose in that tension getting worse and worse and worse - during that time we could just move on to something else. And not because it was necessarily good for that community or good for that project, or that the technology had run its course, it was just that we had this particular artificial barrier that created this tension, and that meant that no work was happening for a particular amount of time.
+And also, I'm not convinced that we necessarily move on to a new thing. If we move up the stack, we tend to just forget about things that are bad at the bottom end of the stack and we end up with problems like OpenSSL, right?
+**Karl Fogel:** That's a very good example, yeah.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I mean we have very good methods by which we can forget about how bad a project might be run or what state it might be in in terms of sustainability by just isolating it, rather than dealing with the problem. And that's a very problematic way to do it.
+**Karl Fogel:** Yeah... You know, it's funny, the argument I've been making reminds me of one I hate... I hate George W. Bush actually made this when he was governor or Texas. Basically, there were these prisoners on death row, and some of them were innocent, and these nonprofit, volunteer-run student law clinic things would go into all this research and prove that the person was innocent and finally get them off death row after years and years and every obstacle in the world being thrown at them. And when that happened, the governor who had not ever pardoned them or anything until the evidence was clear, would say, "See? The system works."
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, that's you now, Karl. You're like George W. Bush. \[laughs\]
+**Karl Fogel:** Yes, so I'm sort of saying, "Look, things get really, really bad and people move heaven and earth to make the right outcome happen and like "Hey, the system worked," because they could fork.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** That's my fundamental... For coming from nonprofit background from way back in the day, it just sort of boggles my mind that... Yes, in the nonprofit sector for example, no one expects to get rich in nonprofits, but you get a salary, so there is money flowing into the nonprofit sector in some shape or form. I just suggest that there should just be no money flowing in, or if it works because volunteers do everything, that's fine. Sure, it might get done, but is that really the right way of doing things in the world?
+**Karl Fogel:** Well, the question of whether something is done by volunteers seems to me to be a separate one. There are a number of projects where someone is maintaining something on the side, where that thing helps them do their day job, but it's also kind of a personal project; they're sort of a semi-volunteer, but not completely volunteer. But then there's also a lot of open source that is under-resourced, but the resources it has are salaried.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, I think that's why I'm still wrestling with the original question I've had coming into this space, of like, if you have money, where does it go? I still think it's a very, very hard question to answer, and one that is extremely delicate. But I know that the answer is that there must be more that can go in there somewhere, and I wanna be really careful about where it goes.
+**Karl Fogel:** \[55:51\] I completely agree that that's a huge priority, and I'm glad you're focusing on it. And my answer hasn't been terribly helpful, I think, in providing any guidance on that.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, I think that we're very good at fixing crises, right? If something hits a point of crisis, then we have mechanisms by which to fix it.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** OpenSSL.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Right. We can deal with heart-bleed, but we can't deal with the situation that OpenSSL was in ten years ago when it was obvious to everybody involved in the project that something was wrong.
+**Karl Fogel:** I wish we had - and maybe Nadia should be the executive director and you all can be the board - an open source weather center, where you're funded to just keep a lookout, keep in touch with a lot of projects and identify whenever a certain kind of intersection happens. An intersection between a project that a lot of people depend on, and that project showing signs of burnout or under-resourcing. Then just say, "Here are the warning signs, here are some people to talk to", or you could be the go-to people for the foundations or companies who are looking for help.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think CII is doing that a little bit, and I think that that works for projects that have been around for about ten years, or maybe even five. I think the troubling thing is that we're coming into contact with this problem and recognizing this problem at the same time that we're also recognizing that all projects are getting more distributed, that they're becoming collections of all these little tiny things with these incredibly complicated dependency chains. So the idea that you could have a centralized weather center that then talked to centralized projects or looked at centralized projects to try and figure out what the state of the ecosystem was, it's getting less and less practical as we move into that future.
+**Karl Fogel:** Or maybe it's inherently built into the nature of the solution that you're envisioning, because if you're going to allocate money somewhere, that's an inherently centralizing thing to do. The money's gotta land in some bank account somewhere, so the trick is just to identify of all these myriad moving parts and intricate interdependencies which are the key things - like OpenSSL or one of the JavaScript libraries that everyone depends on - which are the ones that are really going to be in pain and that everyone's gonna feel that pain, where we can just see it coming five years ahead of time.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Some of it also structural, right? It's like, "Should we build this way?" or "Are there bigger ways of thinking about reorganizing entire system that that work should be happening and it's not?" And also people are thinking about this around like DevOps for example... I'm trying to figure out, shouldn't we have an XYZ set of projects that together can just make a better system, versus cobbling together from all these different things right now? That's sort of like bigger work than any one project.
+**Karl Fogel:** Yeah. Actually one of the reasons - I'm gonna try to squeeze in this observation because I know we're running out of time - I'm focusing a lot of my work and our company's work on helping governments get more involved in open source is that despite their reputation and despite what we see in the current US presidential campaign, governments are in some ways really good at focusing on long-term questions, and especially in the US and in similar systems it's partly because there's a civil service that has such good career and pension guarantees that people stay in their jobs for 30 or 40 years. Now, in the tech world we think that's horrible, and we're like "How can somebody possibly still stay skilled and relevant in tech for even 10 or 15 years, let alone 20 or 30?", but from a long-term open source project sustainability perspective the more government dependency we have on open source, the more government engagement and funding of open source we have, the more there is a force for long-term trend observation and solving of problems in open source.
+\[59:55\] One of the problems that we have is that open source is rooted in a personnel sense in the tech industry right now, and that's people who switch jobs every three years, and that's considered long. So the actual individuals involved, their priorities keep changing because their jobs keep changing, because it's such a fertile field for new things happening, and there are not that many institutions that have long-term personnel involved in open source, and I think that we see that causing problems in open source as a whole.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, that's a fantastic observation about software in general. It came from a very fast, very high growth, very capital flush sector, so that changes how we think about it. But then if you look at it in economic terms, open source doesn't actually fit into that at all - it's much more like a public good - and where is the institution that supports that? Government tends to do that for all other aspects of life, but it doesn't do it here. And it's not gonna be as easy as just being like, "Oh, now we have an agency that deals with open sourcing government", because that would also be weird, in some ways probably awful. But trying to figure out how you get those longer term thinking institutions to care about something that is a longer term question within software that often gets overlooked, I think that's the challenge.
+**Karl Fogel:** Yeah. Like, what is the actual level of state dependence on the Debian project, versus the level of state funding that's going into the Debian project? There's probably a huge imbalance there.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Is part of the struggle getting government into open source? This differential, that they're thinking more longer-term and the communities that are trying to engage around open source are a little bit too short-term and distributed?
+**Karl Fogel:** I don't think that's what's preventing them from getting involved. I think it's partly that the actual personnel (the people in IT and government) historically they're not coming from a background that would have had them involved in open source. The managers don't have background, and especially the elected officials at the top of these command hierarchies, their main concern is risk-aversion. They don't want to do anything that could embarrass them or give their opponents something to work with, and open source has just more exposure.
+If you launch a technology project and it fails and only your department ever knows about it, that's okay. But if you launch it on GitHub and then it fails, now some journalist can write a report about that, and you can end up in the next weekly news and then your opponent can hold it up at the next debate. So I think it's more just the general culture of government is incompatible in some ways with open source.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Right. There's a lot of churn on GitHub. It's sort of baked into the system that if you do things as much, many of them are gonna fail.
+**Karl Fogel:** Yeah. This was the exact argument... We actually saw this debate play out with Solyndra. The US government gave some form of loan guarantee, I don't know the exact structure, but some kind of subsidy essentially, to a bunch of solar power and other clean energy companies - Solyndra was one of them - and in fact, the government turned out to have been a pretty good VC. Its successful investment ratio was not bad for those solar investments, but Solyndra was a pretty big fail in that set, so the administration got hugely slammed for a portfolio that any VC would have been happy to have. This just shows you how different the incentives are in government.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Man, I think that we have to leave it there, but I anticipate probably having you come back to talk just about this, government and open source.
+**Karl Fogel:** Alright, I'd love to do a podcast on that. And you guys, I really feel bad for talking for so long, because when I let you speak you had such really interesting things to say, and good prompting questions. I love these conversations, so I'm happy to do it anytime.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yes, that was fantastic. Thank you, guys.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Bye.
+**Karl Fogel:** Thank you, I'll talk to you later.

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+**Nadia Eghbal:** I'm Nadia Eghbal...
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And I'm Mikeal Rogers.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** On today's show, Mikeal and I talk with Heather Meeker, intellectual property lawyer at O'Melveny & Myers. Heather spent over 20 years on legal matters related to open source, and has published several books, including Open Source For Business: A Practical Guide To Software Licensing.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Our focus on today's episode with Heather is open source licensing. We talked about why open source licenses are historically significant, how much developers really need to know, and how much developers think they know about them.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** We also talk about mixing commercial and open source licenses, and how lawyers keep up with an ever-changing landscape.
+Heather, you started your career as a paralegal at a record label in Hollywood. How did you go from that to taking the leap into becoming a practicing lawyer?
+**Heather Meeker:** Well, I had a very zigzag course to my career - that's probably the nice way of putting it. There was a thing going around on Facebook a while ago about listing your first seven jobs, and when I did that I think I got up to the paralegal job, so...
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Oh, wow! Tell us about your first six.
+**Heather Meeker:** I've done a lot of different things. I was out of college for 12 years before I went to law school, and during that time I was a computer programmer, a professional musician, and eventually ended up working as a paralegal. I got into that because I was working as a musician and I desperately needed some money, so I got a temp job at a record company. They put me in the legal department, and then there was a permanent position, and they put me in that, and then one of the paralegals left and they put me in that job. Then it was a bad economic time and they were actually letting lawyers go, so they gave me a lot of their work, and I decided "Well, I could actually be a lawyer and make a lot more money doing the same work", so I went to law school.
+It was a long and zigzag course, but during that time I was interested in what we call content music, and also had worked as a programmer, so by the time I got to law school and this thing that they called - at least at that time - convergence of the content in technology industries was going on, so it was a very natural fit for me. After that, I kind of never looked back.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Were you working on anything around intellectual property or the things you're doing now, while you were taking on all this lawyer work from previously departed lawyers?
+**Heather Meeker:** Actually, I was working on intellectual property but it wasn't software-related, it was music-related. So yes, I learned a lot about copyright when I was doing that, and then after I went to law school, I started applying it to technology.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** And where was open source when you started specializing a little bit more deeply?
+**Heather Meeker:** \[03:51\] Well, I first heard about it in around 1996. By that time, it had been going on for a while, but I would say it had not hit the business consciousness of the world. People describe it as a hobbyist movement before that point - I don't know if that's exactly accurate, but it wasn't something that the technology business was embracing. That really started happening at least from where I was sitting in about 2000, so it took a few years between the time I first started paying attention to it and the time it burgeoned like crazy.
+I had started to take a look at free software, reading the GPL, trying to figure out what was going on there in around 1996, and I just found it incredibly interesting. I kind of pursued it as a matter of personal interest. My clients were asking about it, but it was mostly just something I found intellectually interesting. I tried to learn all about it I could, and then it turned out that in about 2000, particularly when the internet bust started to happen, people really started focusing on open source as a way to save money. After that time, it just kept snowballing and snowballing until, as they say today, it's eaten the world.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** You mentioned that you had a programming background before - is that one of the reasons why you took such an interest in it even before it was being demanded by your clients?
+**Heather Meeker:** Yeah, I suppose so. I mean, I have to say that my tech background is ancient, really. It's several generations back. It's like, every two years it's another generation back. But I was always interested in software, because I found software interesting from the work I'd done in it, and just kind of as a matter of personal interest. Something that was like an extremely complex software licensing paradigm was just about exactly my cup of tea.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Were there any particular legal issues right around the time that you started diving in, that caught your attention or really rooted your experience?
+**Heather Meeker:** Well, I think everyone who gets fascinated by open source or free software probably starts by reading the general public license, and being interested in what it has to say. It's a very complex document, so it requires a lot of attention to try to figure out what you think it means. Also, there was this sort of ironic thing going on where the free software advocates were trying to limit the scope of copyright law through a copyright license almost. I don't know if that's exactly accurate, but they were trying to get people to give away some of their copyright rights with a copyright license. It's your classic being an agent provocateur from the inside, and I think anybody who gets interested in open source starts by marveling at the beautiful structure of how that was done, and getting interested in the implications that it has for software licensing.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That's really interesting. That's one of the earliest open source licenses, the GPL. How have things changed, and how has the open source landscape changed from then until now, and how have you kept up with all those shifts?
+**Heather Meeker:** \[07:49\] Open source licenses have gotten a lot more standardized over time, or at least people have fully embraced the benefits of having them be standardized. Today, there are still people writing open source licenses, but this notion of license proliferation is considered a definite negative in the community. If you roll back the time 20 years ago, you had the GPL and you had a few others, but people still thought it was a good idea to write new ones. Now, there's a real notion that it's not really a good idea to write new ones. That is, I think,q mostly sensible because they tend to be kind of difficult documents to interpret, and you have to, for instance, import a lot of knowledge about how they are used, and so forth.
+Most of them are shorter documents that don't have a lot of detail, so every time you write a new one, when you start on day one you don't have any history with the license to use to interpret it, and that's difficult.
+I should step back... For instance, GPL version two became widely accepted by industry, but a big part of that was that industry got comfortable with the community norms for how to comply with it. That is sort of outside the four corners of the license. Normally, when you're interpreting legal documents, you basically just look at the four corners of the document. You look a little bit outside, but one of the primary roles of interpreting licenses is you have to look at what the objective meaning of the license is. With GPL version two you had this long history of use that was very helpful and made people much more comfortable about what it meant, understanding that it's a very complex document.
+That's the long way of saying that today everybody understands the value of standardization in open source licensing, meaning standardization of the license terms in a way that was kind of a side benefit of open source. So if somebody comes to you and says, "I'm using this software in a tender Apache2 or a tender GPL2", I know immediately what that means, whereas in proprietary licensing, you have to actually read every single license.
+Over time, a lot of what has changed is that people have converged on a half a dozen licenses or so, almost to the exclusion of all else. There are still new licenses being written, but they tend to be at the margins.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I hadn't really thought about that before... I guess proprietary licenses - everyone's drafting their own version, so it's almost like a meta benefit of open source itself as what it's done for licensing.
+**Heather Meeker:** It is, and when you hear people complain about license proliferation, I think it's very interesting. Because in proprietary licensing, there is nothing but license proliferation, \[laughter\] so it's a little hard for lawyers to hear complaints about license proliferation... It's like, "Yes, and...?" Because every copyright owner has the right to set whatever license terms...
+**Nadia Eghbal:** It's actually something that we talk about at GitHub where I'm at now...
+**Heather Meeker:** Yeah, it's hard for lawyers to get used to, but I would kind of turn it around and say that the standardization is actually a benefit, it's kind of an extra added bonus of open source licensing, and that's a great thing.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** \[11:55\] Then how much do we pair it down to... Like, do we really only need one type of license for each situation? Something we suggest is like Apache 2.0, GPL and MIT, but then we hear complaints from BSD saying "Why aren't we included in that list?"
+**Heather Meeker:** Yeah, I mean... If anyone can tell me the difference between BSD and MIT, I'd really like to hear it. There's really no difference between the two. They're obviously different documents, but substantively they're so close to identical that nobody really treats them any differently. Then I think what you would have to add to that list are the so-called "weak copyleft, or file copyleft" licenses like LGPL, or Mozilla Eclipse and that kind of category of licenses. You do need those, because you need copyleft licenses that apply to libraries or files, but you can really break it down to permissive Apache and BSD/MIT, and then GPL, LGPL, and I'll vote for Mozilla because, of course, I like Mozilla.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Biased. \[laughter\] It sounds like licensing has changed a lot of times since you last went to law school, right? So for a space like open source, where everything is changing so quickly, where do you go to keep yourself fresh and learn about what's going on, and how do you continue to self-educate?
+**Heather Meeker:** Well, I always tell people that being an open source lawyer is kind of like being a tax lawyer, in the sense that you spend an incredible amount of your time keeping up on what the rules are and what's going on. I think compared to other legal practices, you have to spend more time doing that. There are certain practices that are like that.
+For me, maybe 15 years ago I would read everything I could find about open source licensing; now it would be impossible, because there's so much out there. I've gotten more selective in what I am reading, just because I don't have the time to read everything anymore. There are a couple of discussion groups I'm on that are very useful, and at this point I kind of know the people I like to follow. When they write interesting stuff, I will always take the time to read it and maybe even communicate with them about it.
+I have maybe half a dozen people I'm looking for the stuff that they've written. Then the IFOSSLR, the law review that's done by the people who started the Legal Network and Free Software Foundation Europe - that's a great law review. If you are disposed to read something more like a law review article, that's a really good place to start.
+Honestly, there's been a fair amount written about open source licensing in traditional law reviews, and I usually don't find those terribly useful. I'm more interested in stuff that's very pinpointed, on a pinpoint issue, or something that is practice-related. And of course, anything that gets published by Free Software Foundation, Software Freedom Conservancy that's like a position on an issue, of course I will be reading that, so that I would understand what their positions are.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[15:50\] Are there any things that you just decided to opt out of staying on top of, because they just got to be too much? Like, "You know what, I'm not gonna keep following the Oracle/Google lawsuit..." Is there anything like that?
+**Heather Meeker:** Yeah, I had to follow that, but...
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, note for our listeners - you're involved in that lawsuit, right?
+**Heather Meeker:** Yeah... So for example, there's a discussion group to discuss new open source licenses, and I pay some attention to that. There's no way I could possibly read all of it, so I'm trying to figure out what am I gonna be reading and what am I not. I don't know, there's just a lot of stuff written out there that I can't follow. The things that take the most time to weed through are the discussion groups; it's just the nature of discussion groups. Maybe you don't wanna read every single comment that anybody's making, particularly if they're arguing with somebody else about something, but you do want to keep your finger on the pulse of what attitudes people have and what they're talking about.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Do you think formal law education in law schools knows how to teach open source?
+**Heather Meeker:** I don't think they know how to teach law... \[laughter\]
+**Nadia Eghbal:** That's the bigger problem!
+**Heather Meeker:** I mean, that's the real problem. I could go on all day about that. Law schools teach people to be judges, they don't teach people to be lawyers. Or at least, I would say that's probably true of the top echelon of law schools. Ironically, it's probably true that the lower tier of law school you go to, the more you actually learn about being a lawyer, because they teach you more practical stuff.
+There are certainly classes on open source in a lot of law schools these days; there will be a seminar or something to that effect, but all law school classes tend to be pretty theoretical. That is the problem with legal education, or an issue, I guess. There are probably people who would disagree with me and say it's not the job of law schools to teach people how to practice; that's the job of law firms. And I guess that's maybe a fair comment... But you're really not gonna learn much that's actually useful in counseling clients in law school.
+It's a great idea to learn the basics of open source, and one of the reasons I say that is that open source licensing tends to be... I've called it "Bizarro-World IP", and that's because it tends to be very opposite from everything you learn about IP, and rightfully so. As I said, it's kind of a mechanism to get people to give up IP rights... Being exposed to it is really useful, because it takes a while to absorb the ideas, and you don't wanna be absorbing those ideas the first time you have an actual issue to figure out; you wanna be comfortable with the ideas already.
+So it's great to get exposed to it, but realistically people who are studying law really should not be expecting to learn very much about what's actually useful in counseling clients. That's just the nature of a law school.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** And you published a book, Open Source For Business, last year. Why did you decide to publish that book?
+**Heather Meeker:** You know, I am the kind of person who works out what I'm thinking by writing. If I come upon an idea that I wanna focus on, the way I work through it in my mind is by writing something about it. What I did over the course of the years as I was learning about free software and counseling clients, I would come up with ideas or issues that were interesting, so I would write some short piece about that.
+\[20:13\] Then, in about 2006-2007, I started feeling like it would be useful to collect all that stuff into a book. So I took all the stuff I had written, I added a few more things and put it together. Of course, the stitching together of it took hundreds of hours, \[laughs\] but that is the nature of writing books... Even though I had basically written the whole thing already.
+So I did that book, it came out in 2008, and then it really needed an update and my publisher was not inclined to do an update, because unsurprisingly, my sales were less than that of Harry Potter books. \[laughter\]
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Niche topic, I'm sure.
+**Heather Meeker:** Yeah, it was the kind of topic where there are maybe a few thousand people who really wanna read a book about it, but they REALLY want the book... \[laughter\] So I think the book was very successful given the audience, but it's never gonna be broadly successful.
+Then I decided, "Okay, now I'm gonna publish on my own because that means I can update whenever I like", not that I have been as diligent about that as I would have liked to be... So I just basically rewrote the book from scratch, because it had been 7-8 years by then; it was really time to do a total refresh of it. Some issues that seemed important in 2007 really didn't seem that important in 2014, so I added some stuff and took some stuff away, and did a huge update.
+One of the things I did on the book which was a lot of fun is there's a fairly detailed technology tutorial in it, because a lot of lawyers who are trying to grasp open source issues struggle with some of the technology concepts, and in open source licensing some of those actually matter. In lots of IP licensing it doesn't really matter that much, but I wanted to give people the opportunity to learn the technical concepts too, so I put a lot of effort into that. The technical tutorial in the book is greatly expanded from the previous one.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** That's awesome!
+**Mikeal Rogers:** That sounds great! We're gonna take a short break, and when we come back we're gonna get into what developers need to know about licenses, versus what they probably think that they know. We'll be back in a minute.
+**Break:** \[22:56\]
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And we're back. Alright... Heather, one of my favorite jokes that I heard recently was "I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on Reddit." \[laughter\] Developers are somewhat notorious for playing lawyer. What are some of the biggest misconceptions out there that developers have, and what are the important ones that people tend to get wrong?
+**Heather Meeker:** First I'll say that there are a lot of developers who are extremely sophisticated about open source licensing, and then there are a lot of them who basically have no concept about it at all. The problem is distinguishing between the two. If you're a person in business and you're not an engineer, the first question is "Should I be listening to what my engineers are saying or not?" There is a certain decision point there.
+The ones who don't know that much about it, the things they get wrong are -- I think the classic misconception is that it's okay to dynamically link to GPL code. This is a meme that has been traveling around for at least 20 years and it's basically wrong.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** What does that mean?
+**Heather Meeker:** If you'll forgive a small foray into the technology, when you build a program it's not just one big, amorphous blob, at least not usually. You build it in pieces and you kind of stitch it together. That process, at least in a language like C or C++. It's called linking - you take all the little blobs and you stitch them together, and that's called linking. There are at least two ways to do that: one is dynamic and the other is static.
+The static way is where you tell the program that's building your program, "Just put it all together and smash it into one binary." That's static linking. Once it's put together it doesn't change, in the sense that all the blobs are sticking together in exactly the same way, and that fact doesn't change.
+Dynamic linking is something a little more sophisticated where one of your blobs, say, might do something that you don't wanna be doing all the time, like printing a file. So you tell the builder that is building your program, "Build the program, but leave the printer blob on the side. When you need it, go get it, and execute it, and then flush it out of memory." It's a way of conserving memory at an expense of operating speed. Now, you can tell I'm an old programmer because I don't even know if programmers think as much about that anymore, but we used to be always trading speed against memory usage. It's one of the reasons why you have dynamic linking. You don't wanna be stuffing your memory full of code that you're never using, or rarely using. It's much more efficient to say, "Okay, when you need that thing, go and get it, execute it and get rid of it." That's dynamic linking.
+To make a long story short, GPL is for whole programs, and if you put the program together as one big blob or a bunch of blobs, it doesn't really matter from the point of view of GPL compliance, whereas a license like LGPL allows you to use a dynamically-linked library and bifurcate the licensing. \[27:58\] A proprietary program can use an LGPL library as a dynamically-linked library. I am greatly simplifying the rules there, but that's a sort of basic compliance rule.
+So that's the difference... It's a difference about how you engineer the build of the program, and LGPL in particular is directed towards libraries that are primarily used as dynamically-linked libraries.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And also in a lot of modern dynamic languages, everything is dynamically linked; nothing is statically linked.
+**Heather Meeker:** That's a really good point. The LGPL and the GPL - the way they're written and the compliance rules that people talk about are really focused on a language like C, that has this notion of static and dynamic linking and building. The higher-level scripting languages... There's almost not a concept like that. And you're right, they're much more like dynamic linking. The programmer in that case has less granular control about how the program executes. The value of the low-level languages like C is that you have a lot more control and you also have to tell the program a lot more about what you want it to do. The higher-level languages do a lot more without you telling them a lot of details, but you have a little bit less control. Those higher-level languages tend not to have even a concept of static linking.
+If you're a businessperson or a lawyer and you talk to an engineer and you say "You can dynamically link this library" and you get a blank look, the most common reason for that is that the person you're talking to is developing in a language that doesn't really have that kind of concept. That may very well be so. A programmer like me who is ancient - they will all understand the concept because the higher-level languages tend to be a little more recent, by which I mean in the last few decades. \[laughter\]
+**Nadia Eghbal:** What are some things that you think some developers are quite sophisticated about legal issues? What do you think are some things they get right, or that they know a lot about?
+**Heather Meeker:** Engineers who have been around open source for a while, particularly ones doing Linux kernel development often have a very sophisticated and nuanced sense about GPL compliance in the Linux kernel space. That, I think, is where most people find the most challenge in figuring out what GPL means. Again, when you stitch stuff together in a Linux kernel, which is essentially one big blob - I mean, it does have the ability to have dynamically-linked modules in it, but they call it a quasi-monolithic architecture, meaning that it's basically one big binary blob.
+The engineers who are working on that will have a very good sense about what GPL means in the context of kernel development and what you can or cannot do. Their knowledge is particularly useful when you get into these very detailed questions like "What if you have multiple processors? What if you have a small embedded system that can't have dynamically-linked modules?" and so forth and so on.
+\[32:09\] When you get down to these very detailed questions, it's ultimately kind of the engineers who know the answers and not the lawyers. Many of the engineers who have been around a while know the compliance rules best, better than the lawyers do, because what they are telling you is what community practice is. And ultimately, particularly with GPL and particularly with the Linux kernel, that is what you're trying to figure out - a little bit more than a pure legal question of what the license means and what you might argue in court.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** So for developers that are not working on kernel-level work, and who aren't working with the GPL - let's say your average developer today who just wants to write something and put it up on GitHub and then slap an MIT license on it... How do you think that developers' self-education is changing, going from that highly sophisticated developer who might have this very deep understanding of GPL issues, to today's developer who might not really care at all, but still wanna open source their work?
+**Heather Meeker:** Yeah, so the conventional wisdom is that the new kids on the block don't care about licensing issues at all...
+**Nadia Eghbal:** And is that okay?
+**Heather Meeker:** That's perfectly okay. I mean, as long as they're not treading on other people's rights, they can decide to share their code with anybody and let anybody do anything they want with it; that's their prerogative as a copyright owner.
+I would say a few things to developers who are thinking about this stuff. First, you have to have some license, because the default with no license is no rights. I actually spend a moderate amount of time in my practice contacting developers on GitHub or elsewhere and saying, "Could you please apply a license to this code? And if you would like people to be able to use it, use BSD, MIT, Apache, or even CC0 (Creative Commons Zero), which is a public domain dedication." I would also say as a corollary to that, "If you really don't care even about people giving you credit in the sense of delivering a license notice, dedicate it to the public domain." I think people underestimate the amount of burden involved in license notices, even for licenses like MIT/BSD. So if you really just want to set your code free and let everybody do whatever they want, dedicate it to the public domain, because that's actually what you want.
+I would really summarize it as "Any license is better than no license." If you really don't care, don't burden the world with any licensing requirements at all. I guess one final thing I would say is that you can always move from a more copyleft license to a less copyleft license. If you decide to release code and you put GPL on it, you can always change it to MIT later; that's very easy to do. Going the opposite way - you can do it, but anybody can still use the code under the more permissive license, so it doesn't work very well. If you're uncertain, you typically use the more copyleft license first, and then change to a more permissive one later, if people ask you to do that.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[36:05\] I'm a little bit curious - mostly for my own personal reasons - what is involved in migrating from one license to another? I know that you're involved in the Mozilla public license version two, and that was a very large effort to migrate to. I think that there's this conception that if licenses are "compatible", then you can just move around them freely, but my understanding is that is actually not true, even though most people seem to believe that.
+**Heather Meeker:** Well, there are two things going on at work there. One is the versioning of a particular license. Many of the copyleft licenses have this mechanism in them that, say, if you take the code under this license as it exists today, and the license steward (the person that wrote the license) issues another version, then any recipient can use the code under the version that exists today, or any later version. That is the default for most copyleft licenses.
+For instance, when we were working on Mozilla, anybody who had code under 1.1, which was the most common version at that time, could then automatically use it under 2 once it was issued, assuming the code was issued under that default structure, which is this version or any later version. So in a way, you don't have to do anything in order to version a license and have the code available under the new version. There are some exceptions to that, and of course the notable one is the Linux kernel, because that is under GPL 2 only, and not later versions. For that, you really can't migrate to a new version. Then there's a separate question about changing licenses in all other circumstances, and that is if you have a codebase with a specific license on it, can you then change the license? Sometimes you can, but sometimes you can't.
+For instance with the kernel, there are literally thousands of contributors, and the license basically can't be changed because you would have to go to every contributor and get their authority to change it. One thing that people do in order to avoid that problem is use something called the contribution agreement, which gives rights to the project steward, who then can choose the outbound license. That is actually a relatively unpopular thing to do, particularly in community projects, but it's done in most corporate projects today.
+That means that if I'm running a project, you as a contributor just grant me the right to do whatever I want with the code, and then I decide the outbound license. Then, all I have to do is stick a new license notice on the code, and going forward everybody can use the code under the new license, but importantly, it doesn't stop the rights under the old license for the old versions of the code. For that reason, people don't usually change licenses unless they're doing a pretty major update to the code, because it just doesn't make a lot of sense to do that.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[39:40\] I think we need to walk it back just a little bit, because a lot of times when I talk to newer developers they think that in open source a license essentially means that they're no longer the owner, or that the author is no longer the owner, and they're essentially just putting it out in the world. But there is this distinction that the author/authors of a work are the owner, and the public license is in agreement with the public. So what you're saying is that if the authors agree to take on a new version of the license, or somebody wants to use a new version of the software under a newer version of that license - many licenses have that provision - or there might be a CLA in place where a steward can have the rights to shift the license if necessary.
+**Heather Meeker:** Yeah, exactly. As to the question of ownership, one of the core principles of intellectual property is that intellectual property rights are the ability to exclude others from doing things. So if you are a copyright owner, you have the right to prevent other people from doing certain things with your copyrightable material - copy, distribute... The rights that are enumerated in the copyright act (at least in the US). So if you grant someone a license, what you're saying is "You can do these things that I've specified in the license, and I will not be able to sue you for infringement for doing that", but it in no way changes the ownership.
+If you release code under something like BSD, which is a broad, permissive license with really only one condition, which is the license notice, you don't have much of that exclusionary right left, but you still have some left. It is not getting rid of ownership at all, it's just that you've granted a license to the world, so there's not much commercial value left in your copyright ownership.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I've seen some of that tension, I think, culturally at least, where more and more companies are relying on open source software, and there's this sort of expectation that like "It's your code, you fix it", and sometimes the project owner is like "Well, it's not my code, it's everyone's code. Use it at your own peril." I'm sure the legal side can help settle those kinds of debates, but there's this increasing tension between what people functionally think open source does or what it says about ownership, and then what the law actually says.
+**Heather Meeker:** Well, really my main reaction to that is a company that's building a product - it's fine to use open source stuff, but it's not a licensing decision to figure out whether that code's gonna be maintained or not, \[laughter\] and the open source author has no obligation to do that at all. Just because you have the right to use something doesn't mean you should... \[laughter\] People still need to make responsible technical decisions. There have been and are everyday issues with people grabbing code and not really knowing who's maintaining it, or whether it's secure or whether it is reliable code.
+Don't get me wrong, the most commonly used open source code out there is great. A lot of it has got great maintenance, very robust and secure, but the fact that something's open source doesn't mean it has a community; it just means it could have a community, and when people are making engineering decisions about using components and products, they need to be making a technical decision, too.
+\[43:57\] We've had some issues in the past, because there have been security problems with some open source software, which is really down to the fact that a whole bunch of people were using this software without contributing back any resources to maintain it.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Right... Which is their right. That's one of the rights in there. But I think there is a bit of a misconception - copyleft people and permissive license people both really care about community, and you need to care about if there is a sustainable community there when you use the software; it's just that the copyleft licenses try to embed some of that in the license. The permissive license people essentially just allow that to become another community or economic dynamic of the users and contributors to the software.
+**Heather Meeker:** Yeah, fair enough.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** That's a good point to break at. When we come back, we'll talk about the role of companies and commercial applications in open source.
+**Break:** \[44:54\]
+**Nadia Eghbal:** And we're back! One of the things we talk about on this show - well, kind of the main theme - is open source and sustainability, and in the topic of sustainability there have been all these sorts of experiments around trying to make the production of open source sustainable through licenses, and trying different kinds of experiments.
+I know, Heather, you helped draft the Fair Source License. Recently, the founder of MySQL just came out with the Business Source License, which they're using for MariaDB. There are also all these dual-license models; some of these go between open source and closed source, and have touched off a lot of debates... What do you think about all these different efforts to mix commercial licenses with open source? Does this remind you at all of the shareware tech movement from the '80s? Is this different?
+**Heather Meeker:** Well, I'd say that something is open source or it's not open source. For instance, fair source is not open source, and nobody would have claimed that it was. The hybrid model - maybe you call it source available, although that's a pretty awkward term. Fundamentally, what makes something proprietary rather than open source is any kind of license restriction. So something like fair source that says, "You can use it up to X number of users and then you have to pay us", that is actually a user restriction of a sort. It's a light one, it's not like the user restriction that you would get in your basic commercial proprietary license which would say something more like "You can use this for a hundred users. Period. If you go over that, you're a copyright infringer." That's more draconian and that's the quintessential proprietary license model. But nevertheless, something like fair source is actually license limitation, and so it can't be open source, because the open source definition - the most important thing about it is "no license restrictions."
+\[48:00\] Maybe this is obvious, but people who manage software in organizations spend an extraordinary amount of time managing license restrictions. You can go to entire conferences on how to figure out whether you've exceeded your thousand-user limit and so forth, and there's also technology to monitor it and all this kind of thing. Well, open source liberates you from all of that. That is one reason why people love open source - you don't have to manage license restrictions.
+Now, if you're an author and you wanna release your code, you can choose open source or you can choose something else. If you choose something else, it's pretty much designer; you get to pick whatever you want. Example - fair source; pick a set of terms that you think are fair, and that will make sure that people can use the software, but that if they're making a huge amount of productive use out of it, that you get some kind of financial benefit from it.
+I'm a lawyer in private practice, so my job is to serve my client's interest, and if they wanna pick a proprietary model, that's their right to do it, and I will help them do it. That's my job. My main goal in doing that is making sure that they're calling it open source when it's not, because that would actually be problematic.
+Then there are other sort of hybrid models where it's like, "Well, something is released under a proprietary license, but it transforms to open source after a certain amount of time." Okay, that's definitely a hybrid model, but it changes from one to the other very clearly. One thing I would point out is that you don't necessarily need a license to do that. What you can do is release something in proprietary form and then later release it under an open source license. Now people have written things where that happens automatically after a certain amount of time.
+If you take a larger view and say, okay, all you're really doing there is releasing something under a proprietary license and then later releasing it under open source terms, that's a time-honored tradition in the technology business, where companies will put a lot of development into code and they will give it sort of on a first-look basis to paying customers, and then they will release it open source to the world for free. I don't think there's anything nefarious about that; they're trying to recoup some of their cost, or get some financial benefit for the development effort they've put into it. Of course, I don't think there's anything wrong about that, as long as they're clear about what they're doing.
+There are infinite variations, and when you're in the proprietary area, not open source, as I mentioned as we were discussing previously, by definition there are infinite variations, because there's no standardization in proprietary licensing. I'm fine about all these models as long as people are clear about what they're doing and don't leave the whole world scratching their heads about what is going on.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[51:47\] Right. So there's this practice - and I won't name any companies by name - by which a company will put out software under the AGPL; any contributions that come into it will come under a CLA, so that the company retains some rights to that. And essentially what they do is they allow everybody to use the software freely until they're making a fair amount of money, and then they say "Hey, you know what? You're actually using this AGPL-ed software in your infrastructure. With other proprietary software, you're gonna need to buy a license from us." I can see how the semantics of the license are different between that and fair source, and why one is technically open sourcing the other, but is there a real material difference between the two?
+**Heather Meeker:** What you're describing - I'm just saying this because obviously you understand it, but for the benefit of others listening - is kind of a classic dual license model, maybe with a twist of limited enforcement. A company will release something under a copyleft license, and today the most popular one is Affero GPL, because it's the heaviest copyleft conditions of any standard one at this point. It used to be GPL, but now it's Affero GPL.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, this is exactly what MySQL did, right? People would have to modify MySQL in their proprietary...
+**Heather Meeker:** Yes, they pioneered this model; they used a slight variation of GPL too, but essentially what it means was if you wanted to distribute the software in a proprietary product, you had to go and buy a commercial license to the code. This has been around for quite a while. It enjoyed, I would say, a great deal of popularity in the late '90s and early 2000s. It is not as popular as it used to be, but it remains a popular business model.
+Then, I think also what you're describing is that if the assumption is that most commercial enterprises couldn't use the code without violating the open source license, the company would not go after them until they thought they were making enough money to make them interesting as a licensing target. And that, they have the perfect right to do.
+I spend a lot of time trying to resolve issues like this in the context of transactions. When a company is being sold to another, lawyers like me spend a lot of time doing due diligence on licenses and so forth. This comes up a lot, so here's the canonical situation that happens. A company has developed a product and they've used some of this dual license code and they're not complying with the license, because they're using it in a proprietary product, or whatever. It depends on whether it's AGPL or GPL, whatever. And then when they go to sell the company, somebody audits their licenses and they say, "Oh, this is a problem. You're gonna have to get a proprietary license." That issue usually gets resolved when a company gets acquired. Sometimes before, but often not until they get acquired.
+The thing is that those issues are not hugely difficult to resolve, and the reason is twofold. One, clearly there's a proprietary alternative available. Two, you can usually buy the proprietary license at basically a list price. The list price doesn't tend to be hugely expensive because there's essentially a free alternative. So those issues, from a commercial point of view, are not hugely difficult to resolve in most cases. There are some license sources out there - whom I will not name - who really charge a lot of money for alternative commercial licenses, and then it can be a big problem. But in about 90% of cases, that's not a problem.
+\[56:13\] There is a certain aspect of this dual licensing that it's kind of introducing a "license bug" into the world. So if you take a library that's GPL and you put it out in the world, people can use it internally, but as soon as they distribute it, it's a license bug, basically. If you're gonna do that and create a license compliance issue that's obvious for everyone in the world, you have the right to do that, but you really ought to be extremely straightforward about it. If I have clients who are looking at that kind of strategy, what I usually tell them is "You have to do an FAQ, you have to be extremely transparent about your licensing practices. Because otherwise you're basically putting a bunch of copyright landmines out into the world, and that I don't think is really a very useful way to do business.
+There are some people who really look negatively on dual licensing; actually, I think it's got a fair amount of acceptance in the free software community because the notion is "Well, you have to make your money somehow." But for me, working out issues practically with clients every day, it's really about transparency, and if you are clear about what you're doing, then in a way all can be forgiven. Because you set the rules, people will abide by the rules. The worst thing you can do is hide the ball about what rules you expect them to follow.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** You mentioned that it's less popular today than before - why do you think that is?
+**Heather Meeker:** You know, I think it was not a hugely profitable model, because as I say, the prices for software like that tend to not be very great. One of the things I've said already is one of the great things about open source is that it's standardized. What that means is if I wanna use code under an open source license, I just use it. There are no transaction costs at all, meaning negotiating a license. The license is the license, and I take it or I don't take it. But proprietary licensing is a very expensive way to do business, in the following sense: if you are a huge company, like Adobe or like Microsoft, you just say what your proprietary licensing terms are, and for the most part, your customers take them or leave them. If you're a mid-sized or small software company, you have to negotiate every single customer agreement, and it's a license agreement, so it's a little complicated to negotiate, and you need IP lawyers to do that; it's a very expensive licensing model, with high transactions costs to sale. So the people who are doing dual licensing, I'm reading between the lines, but I think what they usually found was that it was an expensive business model to implement, and they just weren't getting the kind of returns that their investors wanted.
+By the way, when I say the licensing model was popular, the way that happened was the venture capitalists started to warm up to it, and I think they viewed it pretty favorably for a while, but it fell out of favor probably because it just wasn't all that viable from a commercial point of view.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[59:54\] You had a nice line a little bit ago, "People need to make money somehow", and that kind of tracks back to this general topic of sustainability that we've been talking about. GPL licenses have tried to inject some sustainability by requiring contributions to come back in and modifications to come back in, and things like fair source and the business source license are also trying to bring in that monetary component as well. How do you see licensing in the future of sustainability in open source, and being able to bring sustainability in open source?
+**Heather Meeker:** I think that we're really at the point where what is working these days for sustainability are these big community projects. I mean, Linux is a poster child case. Many companies involved, many individuals involved, sufficient funding for the project, mostly from the corporate interest that are taking advantage of it. That's a very sustainable model. The model of a company running an open source project on its own I think is pretty hard to sustain. Unless the company is making money doing something else, it's not gonna be sustainable in the long run.
+The traditional wisdom on this is that if you're gonna run an open source project on your own, as a business, you have to be selling razor blades, meaning that you're selling something you're making money on - traditionally, that's the razor blades, and you're giving the razor away, which is the open source. So if you're selling hardware, or you're selling services, or online services and you have open source software that helps implement one of those things, and you release it and get some community interest in it, that might work. But a pure software model doesn't really work if you're a business trying to do open source. It's just not sustainable.
+It is also sustainable to get many people in the industry to participate and cooperate in a big open source project, and have it be funded by the members - that's probably the more popular model now, to have these community organizations like OpenStack and Cloud Foundry and Linux Foundation, where they're running big projects with a lot of contribution by the members. That's a sustainable model too, but the notion of a company running an open source project on its own and trying to make money - that's just not a sustainable model, I think.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, that's interesting. When I think about that in the kind of startup case, it's like, you know, startups are releasing libraries and framework all the time, and contributing to them, and all of those underlie how they're building their product, but at the end of the day they're making money on the product, and a lot of the community in open source benefits of making the software underneath better flow into their ability to make money on that end product, at the end of the day.
+**Heather Meeker:** That's exactly right. They have to reserve something on which they're going to leverage their assets to make money and it's quite possible to do that, but they're never releasing whatever is their core value for their company.
+\[01:03:43.05\] Now, there is a model which is like a pure services model. I kind of put Red Hat into that category, and some other companies that have come and gone... So you can make money doing maintenance and support and custom development and so forth around an open source project, but the -- I mean, Red Hat aside, because it's a fantastically successful company and I would never say anything to the effect otherwise... That is a hard model to sustain because service business - the traditional wisdom is they're not very scalable. You have to have a lot of resources to get skilled people to do the work, and it's expensive to do. I think that's why there's basically one Red Hat.
+A lot of the companies that tried to make money doing Linux development services, they kind of came and went. They may have been successful in the short run, but I think in the long run it just wasn't considered the kind of business that would be funded by outsiders. It might be perfectly viable as a personal business, but it's not really gonna get funding these days.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** That's a good way to wrap things down. Before we close out, I just wanna see if there's anything else that you think people should know around emerging or interesting legal issues that we haven't yet touched on today.
+**Heather Meeker:** For me, things that are interesting include... If you read in the media about open source -- it's pretty amusing to read in the media sometimes about open source, because people come up with a new open source thing every month. Things like "open source yoga", you know... \[laughter\] I can't remember the stuff that I've seen because it's so bizarre... The important thing about open source is that there is a source code, right? And if there's not, maybe it doesn't make that much sense.
+There are really interesting ideas in open data, open hardware, the intersection of open source software licensing with standards licensing, and so-called open standards. These models are very nascent. People have been trying to figure out how they work, but they're very challenging to even structure, much less implement. Open Street Maps is a huge project that lots of people are interested in, and that's basically an open database project with a very complicated and interesting license associated with it.
+I think that a lot of what's interesting for me -- I like the newest ideas of course, and those models have not sorted themselves out yet, so there will be lots of interesting things happening in the next decade or two about open hardware, open standards, open data, and I think that's where the frontier of some of this stuff is.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** An exciting future to look forward to!
+**Heather Meeker:** Yeah.
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Thanks for talking to us, Heather. We really enjoyed this conversation.
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It's been great.
+**Heather Meeker:** Thanks, this was a lot of fun. Thanks very much!