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After the web server was a done thing and Apache was wondering about how to be relevant, Brian was really big on "Well, let's do Java. Java is the newest thing since sliced bread; they're gonna need to do some open source, let's make it the home for Java." Sun ended up not wanting to use that home, but at the same time... |
But that argument, that battle happened transparently at Apache. Anybody that cared about that cared about that could watch it happen, which is different than standards bodies, where everything happens behind closed doors by design, because none of the companies want anybody to see the political machinations they're go... |
Well, let's see... We might as well talk about Node, since both Mikeal and I work on Node. Node ended up at a foundation because we were trying to heal a fork. The community was rebelling against the trademark holder, because it was set up as a BDFL organization, and the thing that people don't understand about BDFLs i... |
\[44:13\] There were a lot of disagreements, there was a lot of desire on the part of the community to move forward, and the trademark holder couldn't keep up with the pace of interest in change, because they hadn't resourced it to deal with the growth that was happening... Because it wasn't part of their direct line o... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** It's interesting, I feel like I'm hearing a lot about... Foundations are - and especially historically - meant to be a governance mechanism, right? And I think there's sort of a misinterpretation of foundations sometimes as the way to raise money in itself or pay a maintainer to work on a project, but... |
**Danese Cooper:** Yeah, the deal about the money... I have to say, I've spoken out against pay-to-play boards, which upsets Jim Zemlin. I think everytime I say it, Jim Zemlin thinks that another kitten has died in heaven, right? Because he is genuinely trying to do the right thing; he's not a bad guy, and his concepti... |
One of the things he really saw was the inability to attract top talent because they just couldn't get paid at the same scale to work on foundation work, because the foundations didn't have that kind of budget. Now, Apache really kind of only spends money on sysadmins, and I think they do pay them pretty close to scale... |
Mozilla had the same problem, actually, that Jim identified. They were losing their top talent to, say, fellow travelers - not so much competitors, just fellow travelers - like Google, because Google was the new hotness and they were sucking up all the talent in town... But Mozilla really felt like they needed to make ... |
This was kind of new thinking on their part, because it was challenging the way that the tax authorities like to see things done. But they were trying to do the right thing; they were saying "No, we'll pay taxes on our profits, and we'll generate profits and that will allow us to hire people and pay them what will keep... |
But Jim's idea was "Let me streamline fundraising" -- and he inherited OSDL, which the buy-in cost to be part of OSDL was pretty high, and it wasn't clear what you were getting for that money, so a lot of his funders were really balking at the high price. So he reimagined all of that, and part of it was "I'm gonna hire... |
\[48:34\] He was aided in this quest by the fact that the whole idea of an open source foundation became controversial to the government... Because when they started out, we looked like raggle-taggle bands of hippies, right? And 10-15 years on, all of a sudden there's huge value being created in these foundations, and ... |
Apache went the other way - there's only one Apache Foundation, but you can be a project under that foundation. And there are a couple of others we should probably mention. There's one that came out of the free software movement called The Software Conservancy, and there are a lot of projects that are there, and... God... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** There's a bunch of other ones... There's the FSF, there's the Software Freedom Law Center, there's the Eclipse maybe... |
**Danese Cooper:** Yeah, exactly... I clearly forgot about them. Well, yes, but no... Eclipse was built for a different reason. It was originally organized around a project that IBM created, a development environment for Java, and it was an anti-competitive move, or a competitive move against Sun, because Sun had an op... |
Now, you're right that Mike Milinkovich has moved it into a space where there are a lot more than just that there, and not all of it is Java anymore either, so yeah, I guess maybe they are... But it's almost like neighborhoods - a certain kind of person is a tenant at the Eclipse Foundation, versus the Software Conserv... |
Software Freedom Law Center is not actually a home for software, it's a home for legal advice... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Right, right. |
**Danese Cooper:** ...but the FSF has been, and maybe was the first foundation that accepted other people's projects. Their way or running things is very particular. You're basically trusting the Free Software Foundation to run your project forever forward. In fact, they made an assumption early on that if you put your... |
**Break:** \[52:20\] |
**Mikeal Rogers:** So I'm trying to pull this back a little bit from the history and get it more into what these foundations actually offer to projects, so why you would wanna spin one up or join one. I think there are some huge disparities in just what these foundations do, for instance. You mentioned that Apache runs... |
So with the member organization, you definitely need to have a wall between the project and the board, because the board is the corporate interest, right? Like the pay-to-play board, and you can't have them just sticking their thumb in the project... |
**Danese Cooper:** That's how Jim has it set up. There are other possible setups, right? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, well there are infinite possible setups. |
**Danese Cooper:** He's using board membership to drive fundraising. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Right, but also there is not a connection between board membership and, for lack of a better term, project ownership. So you have this wall between the project governance and the board governance, and the board governance is mainly dealing with the institutional aspect... Whereas I think in Apache be... |
**Danese Cooper:** Well, only in extreme cases, actually. 99% of the time as appeals come to them to deal with issues, they turn it back to the project committee. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yes, but the projects also operate under a process that is pretty strict, and the interpretation and how that process is written is owned by the board, right? |
**Danese Cooper:** Yes, that's true, but getting them to take the kind of action that you're talking about... Like, troublesome member of my project - this person on my project is really creating a lot of problems for the whole project, and everybody's mad at them and we can't figure out how to get rid of them; the boa... |
They only get involved in really the most extreme cases, or if that person is actually on the board, they would deal with it because they are the project, right? But yeah, it can be vexing actually, the extent to which they wanna turn it back to the project, and a lot of the -- it's been very successful for projects th... |
They have a couple of times stepped in and restructured a project that they thought was otherwise healthy (had a lot of contributors), but there was some kind of poisonous aspect to the project brewing. They have put in almost like a special master, who is nominated by the board to get the project back on track... Less... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Right, right. I wanna get into the future of open source a little bit, and I think that I know how to bring us there. In the io.js days, in the fork, when we were considering where we could go, like "Could we put this into a different foundation? Could we go into Apache?" were we going to need a new,... |
It was less than six months old, and we had been iterating on it a lot, and we were wildly successful, but we were not confident enough that what we had written down at that time was not going to need to evolve and change, and it definitely has had to evolve and change over the last few years... And one of the constrai... |
\[01:00:06.25\] So if we're looking at like where new projects go -- I think just in the last few months Apache said that you can even have your project on GitHub, so... If you wanna use new tools, if you wanna use new governance structures, there are constraints with some of these other foundations. And then moving aw... |
**Danese Cooper:** Well, it's an interesting question. The Drupal Association was having some problems last year - not the problem that recently happened, but more funding problems the association was having, because they make their money from a conference, so they're subject to the vagaries of the conference business.... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** It's a liability, it's not an asset, right? |
**Danese Cooper:** But he was unwilling to take a project on that didn't host itself on GitHub, so he's made a tooling trace as well. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** There have been projects that were brought on in that time, that use non-GitHub tooling. I think that the distinction though is that they don't have tooling that they entirely have to own the maintenance and hosting of, right? |
**Danese Cooper:** Right. Well, everybody had to do that back in the day, because SourceForge, although it existed, you couldn't really run a project on it. I think going forward, there's a general consensus that spinning up a thousand foundations is probably not gonna keep scaling, partly because it's so hard to do no... |
It depends on how you define umbrella. Apache thinks it's an umbrella, the Linux Foundation also thinks it's an umbrella... Each of the Linux Foundation foundations are technically separate - they have separate by-laws and separate articles of incorporation - but they're under the Linux Foundation family, if you will. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Also, some of those individual foundations are their own umbrellas, as well. It's complicated... |
**Danese Cooper:** Right. Jim is point out that those foundations can leave the nest anytime; they lose some things, but they might also gain some things by doing that. I think if too many of them do that and he becomes known as a foundation mill, then he may have trouble, if it turns out that the tax authorities are n... |
And then there's the whole question of the locus of the foundation. The vast majority of open source foundations exist in the U.S., and that's because most of the really deep pocket funders also exist in the U.S. and they get tax breaks if it's a non-profit. And also, it's relatively easy to start a non-profit in Europ... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** So there's the question of whether to spin up your own foundation or not, and I think we've talked about that. Then there's also the question of "Why join an umbrella foundation now at all, especially (I think) if you're not, let's say, a Node-sized project?" What does Apache or Linux or any of the ex... |
**Danese Cooper:** \[01:04:09.12\] Right. Well, a smaller scope project probably wouldn't do well in Apache, because there's an assumption of ongoing contributorship that isn't just you. If you are looking for additional contributors and it was sufficiently interesting, then it might make sense. The tiny projects that ... |
Now there's a foundation trying to retroactively help them without them actually being part of the foundation, and it's a little bit "cat herd-ey". |
I think that a middling sized project can totally just live on GitHub. I think that companies need to not create foundations to hold their IP. Microsoft did that at one point about five years ago, maybe four years ago, and there were some other companies that did it because it looks attractive, because you can create a... |
When PayPal asked me if they should create a holding foundation for their open source assets, I said "Oh, hell no!" I think that's been proven as a bad answer. |
But for an individual project, I think you start on GitHub, you see how much traction you can gain... If you get to the size where big, deep pockets are starting to come calling, you're probably gonna find yourself pushed into a foundation, if only because they're more comfortable that the legal procedures are somewhat... |
A lot of the way that we do things in open source comes down to Sun legal and IBM legal coming up with things that made them comfortable. Most of these licenses rest on copyright law, and copyright law is a good choice because they're almost immediate remedies if you can find infringement; you can stop software from sh... |
So copyright law is what they rest on, but U.S. copyright law, if you have to go to court, you have to assemble all of the people who have any claim to copyright and get them to - at least the majority of them - agree to your line of defense, and that's not gonna be easy if you haven't already aggregated the copyrights... |
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