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**Nadia Eghbal:** Yes! |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah... |
**Danese Cooper:** There was a recipe that running around on the web for a while, and there was a story that went with it, which I think got debunked... But the story basically said "Somebody at Nordstrom started to charge me $14 for a cookie - and it was a really good cookie - and I got the recipe and I'm gonna share ... |
So what they were trying to make sure was that if anybody came up with a clever hack like pecans, everybody got to have the pecans and not just the -- people couldn't make money off the pecans, and adding them to a recipe that everybody else contributed to... So it was a sharing thing, and kind of a fairness thing, and... |
But the freeloader problem is where people aren't contributing both code and support, right? There's different ways to get involved in open source. One of them is if you've done something clever with the code, you give that back, but that's not even always all that desirable, because what you did with it might be esote... |
So are they a freeloader? They're not giving up those changes. Maybe those changes would be super useful to everybody else and maybe if they would give them up, the commoditization of search engine technology would mean that we didn't have to deal with that AdSense quite so much. On the other hand, they're trying to ba... |
I hear from younger open source people a concern about the flow of money, and I think that's a really interesting question. Some of the modern foundations are really designed to attract a lot of money, and that attraction of money is then gonna be spent on things that are last mile projects, or things that the group of... |
\[24:11\] That problem of "well, the group that have attracted this can't get through all the work that we'd like to do" problem isn't a new problem, right? But some of older foundations are designed to run on almost no money, and I think that that was a conscious decision. The Apache Software Foundation runs on almost... |
Originally, when Brian Behlendorf first talked to me about the desire to create a foundation - it was obviously before the foundation happened - as he's explaining it to me, one of the design concerns was a concern about patent trolling, and they had looked at Mitchell Baker's work on the patent piece license part of t... |
But the idea that patents could make it in as part of a give was an interesting idea for a while. IBM opened 500 patents at one point. Scott McNealy famously told everybody that the patent situation with the Solaris was -- basically, he was indemnifying all the members of the community against any kind of patent action... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I think this is a really good lead-in to foundations, and... |
**Danese Cooper:** Well, especially that Mozilla story is probably the best lead-in I gave you to that topic. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** That's a pretty good story. |
**Danese Cooper:** Yeah. There's a piece of that, by the way, Nadia, that I always wanted to tell you. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Oh, great. |
**Danese Cooper:** So the piece I left out of that story has to do with Mitchell Baker... Have you ever met her? |
**Nadia Eghbal:** No. |
**Danese Cooper:** You know who she is though, right? |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Yes. |
**Danese Cooper:** She runs Mozilla. She has run Mozilla since the beginning of time... So she started as a lawyer and she wrote the license, and then she got intrigued by the project. She had actually worked at Sun before she went to work for Netscape, so they knew her as a lawyer. And she got intrigued... She got a j... |
She had a pretty good severance package, she had a golden parachute of some kind, so she wasn't worried about money. She went home, she dusted herself off and she logged on and she kept running the project, and all of the engineers kept deferring to her, more importantly, right...? \[laughter\] And to be fair, they did... |
So she called me up one day and she was just panicked. She was like, "They're gonna pull the plug", and that's when we got it together to strong-arm them to create a foundation, basically. But think of that chutzpah, man, right? That's open source. |
\[28:15\] When I give the talk now to people about standing in their power as open source developers -- because honestly, the influx of new people that have come into open source, the most troubling this for me hearing them talk is a lack of understanding about where they can push back, and that they're gonna lose the ... |
**Break:** \[29:00\] |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Having that history is so important because what I've seen is a lot of people feeling isolated and not having that sort of long historical lens of seeing examples of where the other people have been able to push back and really understanding that, and I think almost some of that comes from open source... |
**Danese Cooper:** Yeah, if you were an engineer before we did all of this work to change things -- I mean, it would be a lot like being an engineer now in a lot of places like Accenture and those places. Think of yourself as a cog in a wheel for a minute; the problem is that engineers are artists. A good engineer is a... |
I mean, one of the reasons that Microsoft was so opposed to open source I think was their developer base -- when Steve Balmer ran around, screaming about developers with the sweaty armpits and all that, he wasn't talking about people that were gonna get to invent Microsoft products, he was talking about consumers of Mi... |
\[32:26\] So there's two kinds of programmers - there's people who invent stuff, and there's people who work with Microsoft's tools, and that's why it was so dangerous to them. And that was a gross generalization; of course, there are people who invent stuff with Microsoft's tools, but there's a really large percentage... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I think that's a big distinction that's growing now, especially as programming is becoming easier for a lot of people... And that's sort of the point, right? You have these tools that you don't have to go deep into the weeds and figure out how to build things. |
**Danese Cooper:** Well, that's what abstraction does, right? We're working on five and six GL languages now, and those abstractions save you from having to pay attention to pointer math, or any of the things that you used to have to really have got, like, powers to learn how to use the language well. But along with th... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** That's how I felt coming into it as an outsider... Like, "Wait a minute, all these people are forming the foundation of software for everyone else, but they seem to not have the leverage that they should", and I think that that's the part where even for an open source developer today who's pushing thi... |
**Danese Cooper:** Yeah, which is why I do that talk... \[laughs\] |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, which is really important. |
**Danese Cooper:** ...which we're gonna call the superpower talk. It has a superhero in it, and everything; he happens to be a little boy, but... Yeah, I think it's really important for people to realize that you've gotta be uppity, because you know, it's kind of like democracy, right? If you wanna talk about the real ... |
When we started out, people were just so excited to have an opportunity to work together and get stuff done so much faster and so much more efficiently than it was happening in their day job. People used to say things like, "Look, if my employer ever tells me I can't do this, I will quit, because this is the only thing... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Wow... That's such a difference from now, where people just flow in and out of contributing to open source in their jobs, a lot of the time... Whereas back then it was like, "Oh no, this is what I do to stay sane on my \[laughs\] nights \[unintelligible 00:35:29.24\]" |
**Danese Cooper:** Yeah, very much so. It very much was that way. And part of why I've been pushing inner source so hard is because I think we'll see a time - as with democracy - where it's so much an accepted fact that we start to lose ground on what we want for ourselves... Because we want a lot of autonomy and a lot... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[36:21\] Well, also a lot of projects are global; it's always night somewhere, so... |
**Danese Cooper:** Exactly. Before the internet, we didn't have good enough communications to do global projects. That was baked into open source, that assumption that somebody was always awake. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. So moving on through this a little bit... |
**Danese Cooper:** Yeah, you're trying to get to foundations... I apologize. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, it's okay. This is all great, so it doesn't matter. You've been involved in more foundations than I can count... I mean, just for the audience to be aware - you mentioned Mozilla and Apache, the Node.js Foundation you've been a part of since we started... |
**Danese Cooper:** Yeah, the Open Hardware Association - I helped them get off the ground, the Drupal Association... I've had conversations with Ushahidi, I've spent a fair amount of time -- I've done a lot of "Let me just help you with this one little problem" with lots and lots of different foundations. |
Before there was the Linux Foundation, there was something called The Open Source Developer Labs (I think that's what it was called), and I helped them out, although they were really set up so that Linus would always have an employer, because Linus took a job with a chip manufacturer at one point, and announced that he... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, that's a word of warning for future BDFL projects. When you have a BDFL and a bunch of companies depend on your project, you need to be terrified that one of your competitors will eventually hire that person. It's one of the old things that LF (Linux Foundation) still does - they make sure that... |
**Danese Cooper:** Well, and to circle back on companies, I always say that there are no open source companies, there are only companies that are good to their open source employees, and if you look at Guido van Rossum, for instance, who invented Python, or Rasmus Lerdorf, who invented PHP - both of them had really, re... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah... So getting back to what I actually wanted to do... So a lot of these foundations have very different contexts that they came out of. When does a project need to start a foundation or they need to go into a foundation? What are the constraints that it's under where it needs that kind of instit... |
**Danese Cooper:** They're just on GitHub somewhere, yeah. So in the early days, the foundations were another way to convince people that you were serious about open sourcing, and you weren't gonna try to control it over much. There were a lot of attempts in the early days to leverage open source by big companies that ... |
\[40:25\] They kept throwing tarballs over the wall everytime they did something clever, but unfortunately that completely ticked off the people that were working on the public project and trying to solve some of the same problems... Because it'd be like, you know, I'm building a snowman - I've done the body, I've done... |
If Apple had created a foundation and made a commitment to working within that foundation to build their product in addition to everything else, that would have been unimaginable for them, but there were a lot of projects that went "Okay, let's make it a foundation, that way anybody that wants to can come in and work h... |
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