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**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 p... |
**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 m... |
**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, t... |
**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. I... |
**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 t... |
**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 featur... |
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 redi... |
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 beca... |
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 ... |
\[20:20\] 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 p... |
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 adv... |
**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 f... |
\[24:16\] 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 estat... |
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 inst... |
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 ... |
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 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 clea... |
\[28:13\] 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-maker... |
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 th... |
**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... |
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 projec... |
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... |
**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 un... |
**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... |
**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 a... |
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