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**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 individ... |
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 featur... |
\[35:44\] 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 thin... |
**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... |
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 ... |
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... |
**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 wa... |
\[39:48\] 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.... |
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 ... |
**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 th... |
**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 ... |
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... |
**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 t... |
**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 ne... |
**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,... |
\[48:03\] 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 co... |
**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 jus... |
**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 i... |
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 controlli... |
**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 ... |
**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,... |
\[52:12\] 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 arg... |
**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 ... |
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 consum... |
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 i... |
\[55:38\] 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 i... |
**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 ... |
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