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**Nadia Eghbal:** Yes, that's exactly it. |
**Evan You:** I think this is something that we haven't really figured out at this point. I hope we can find a good model for this in the near future. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I'm wondering a little bit about just like the logistics of -- knowing all that now, is there a legal entity that's associated with Vue? Is there a company? |
**Evan You:** Currently no... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Wow, that's so interesting. |
**Evan You:** Yeah. I mean, I have a single-person LLC, but it really has nothing to do with how the project is organized; it's mostly just for me to send invoices, and stuff. But as far as I know, I also looked if it's possible to start a non-profit organization for it, but it's awkward because Vue is at a scale where... |
It's stuck in this awkward place where we're basically trying to figure out what to do with it. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah... That's so interesting, because people -- I refer to it as like "Vue is funded through Patreon", but really it's your work that's funded through Patreon, and Vue is still an open source project without an associated entity, which is actually really cool. |
**Evan You:** Yeah. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I have to ask the obvious question of like why didn't you decide to start a company and raise venture? I mean, you worked at Meteor - they kind of went that path? |
**Evan You:** Yeah, there were actually people asking me that. There were some VCs in China that actually wanted to give me money, but the biggest obvious problem is I don't have a very clear business model for making money off of Vue, because it's an open source project; it's MIT-licensed. I don't want to sell it. I d... |
I also don't want to feel the pressure of scaling and monetizing beyond what is enough to sustain myself, at least at this stage. That's something that's been put on the table before, but I just don't feel like it's the right choice, at least for now. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** \[36:25\] It makes sense. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Not having a business model hasn't seemed to stop most startups in San Francisco... \[laughter\] |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, at least you're honest. \[laughs\] |
4: I think it's interesting, because frameworks like React and Angular are essentially backed by huge business entities, but Vue is completely independent, I would say. It's an independent open source project. For similar projects in the same boat with Vue, independent open source projects that are pretty popular but n... |
I kind of want to mention a project, which is Babel. Many people kind of have the impression that Babel is backed by Facebook, which in fact it is not... Although Sebastian, who is the original author of Babel, works for Facebook now. He actually no longer maintains the project. It's largely maintained by Henry Zhu, in... |
Henry worked at Behance, but he actually worked on Babel mostly in his spare time. I talk with Henry pretty often, and he's struggling with finding more time to work on Babel. He asked me for advice because he saw me have a pretty successful Patreon campaign. When we talked about how we could potentially fund his work ... |
In Henry's case, a lot of people don't even know he is the main maintainer behind Babel now, so it's really hard for Henry to start a campaign and say "You should give me money for me to work on Babel." We've discussed this a lot behind the scenes, but sadly we haven't really found a really good way for him to be able ... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Absolutely. |
Coming up after the break, we go further in this conversation. Nadia, Mikeal and Evan go into the struggle of corporate and community-funded open source. We asked questions like "Do you have a sense of being David battling Goliath? Do your goals change in open source when you start working on it full-time?" and as Vue ... |
**Break:** \[40:00\] |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Evan, you were starting to touch on Henry's story with Babel, and the perception that Babel is supported by, or is an official Facebook project... I'd love to dig in a little bit more around -- I think a lot of people are perceiving right now that companies are getting involved in open source, and tha... |
**Evan You:** I can't really make a prediction, but I think if we want to have a world where corporate and independent open source live in harmony. I think the enterprise and a lot of the businesses that are using open source need to have their mindsets somewhat transformed or updated. |
Sometimes - I've been thinking about this; maybe it's just speculation, but it just seems the incentives for businesses to give open source projects money is at this moment just too weak. They're getting value out of these open source projects, but they don't feel obliged to do it, even if the open source project is ac... |
One of the things I've encountered in Vue's campaign is in the survey, actually 25% of potential donors backed out because they couldn't get their managers or whatever to approve the charges. And I think this somehow shows that some of the businesses don't even consider donations to open source are a valid type of expe... |
If we can somehow clear this barrier, where when a developer's saying "Hey, we're often using this open source project and we should support it. We should donate money to it", and if we can somehow make it so that these businesses would gladly agree that they should do it, I think would be in a considerably better situ... |
I know that a lot of developers don't even ask their managers, because they know they would not approve it. This is somewhat sad. I think if we can somehow raise enough awareness that the industry actually considered donating to open source a very regular, very common thing, then we'd have a much better world. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Absolutely. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[44:01\] I think that there are some companies that at least are willing to put in people resources; they're at least willing to open up their people to contribute back. But you're right, there's this whole other section of companies that aren't willing to do that and aren't willing to put in any mo... |
**Evan You:** Yeah. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I'm just thinking back to how Patreon is really about funding your work more than Vue as an entity, and whether -- I think in Henry's situation, he got his employer to agree to give him more time to work on Babel during work hours... I wonder if that's sort of like a viable solution, instead of donati... |
**Evan You:** Yeah. In some way, I think Behance can be considered the main sponsor of Babel now, because they allow Henry to work on Babel for some portion of his time. And I think that's cool. I don't want to put Henry in an awkward situation, but I think -- |
**Nadia Eghbal:** We'll just have to get him on here... |
**Evan You:** Yeah... This kind of arrangement still has its potential problems, where the maintainer's energy is kind of pulled between what the company would expect of him, versus what the open source project itself calls for. But as far as I know, there are some cases where similar to how some engineers at Google wo... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Right. |
**Evan You:** The thing is these projects originated from within those companies were -- as the case for Babel is... Babel is essentially still an independent open source project. No one owns it. The code is maybe MIT (I don't know); it's not technically owned by a company. It's fully driven by the maintainers. Althoug... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Let's talk about that a little bit. I think that you've identified one of these interesting cases where corporate sponsorship - for a lack of a better term - or even in this case just the appearance of corporate sponsorship is actually kind of a liability, because if they're not putting in enough peo... |
I remember when Angular was released... The fact that it was used for Google-scale web apps was a selling point, and the same thing for React from Facebook. You've been on the other side of that, sort of building up a project and not saying, "Oh, we're backed by a mega-company" and you turned that into an advantage, ri... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I wouldn't say that has given us much advantage; I think we've always been fighting an uphill battle as in that we almost every company adopting Vue are asking the question of "Why wouldn't we choose React or Angular, because they're backed by Facebook and Google?" I've been asked that question so man... |
\[48:17\] To that, I usually ask them "What do you actually think it means for an open source project to be backed by a big company?" and they say, "Oh, it's more stable. You know because they rely on it that this project wouldn't die all of a sudden", and I guess in some cases the buzz factor is smaller... So usually ... |
I think it's usually more reliable if you look at these numbers directly, rather than making assumptions just because some project is backed by a big company. In reverse, you make the assumption that if a project is not backed by a huge company, it must be somewhat inferior in certain aspects. That's usually the best a... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** It's interesting to think about... Because there's also so many examples where a company has shut down an open source project, or kind of just abandoned it or not really paid attention to it, so it's funny that the assumption is that somehow it's more stable or supported. |
**Evan You:** Yeah, I usually try to avoid mentioning that, but it's true... The thing about company-backed open source projects is that in a lot of cases big companies open source their projects sometimes because they want to make it sort of an open standard for a certain industry, or sometimes the simply open source ... |
If this project no longer serves that purpose, then most companies will probably just cut it, or (in other terms) just give it to the community and let the community drive it. I don't know... I'm not arriving at any conclusions here, I'm just trying to... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, I think you actually covered the contrast earlier a little bit. You talked about earlier how the needs of the community and what people were building continued to kind of drive where Vue.js was going. In these corporate-backed open source projects that's not always the case. They're driven by w... |
So their whole notion of "Well, it's always gonna be around..." -- well, it may not be around in a way that's even usable to you. Angular 2 went off and did a giant breaking release that I don't think a lot of their community was asking for. It was sort of driven by the people internally at Google that wanted to make t... |
**Evan You:** \[52:16\] Yeah. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Mikeal and I have talked about this - my experiences talking to especially older generations in open source... They see what's happening now and they're like "This is the thing that we were trying to prevent." This is why you have like -- I don't wanna speak for Apache, but you have stuff like Apache ... |
That's why I also - especially earlier on - would hear a lot of resistance to people bringing money into open source... Because they said, "The amazing thing about open source is there is no money involved" or "The project is not being directly funded, and that means no one can take it away. People are just contributin... |
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