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**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 ... |
\[35:54\] 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 contrib... |
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 adva... |
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 contri... |
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... |
**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 g... |
**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 en... |
**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 ... |
**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 affe... |
**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... |
**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 r... |
**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... |
**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 do... |
**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 gr... |
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 wha... |
**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 situatio... |
**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... |
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 the... |
**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... |
**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... |
**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 ev... |
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. |
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