Adam Jacob (co-founder and board member of Chef) joins the show to talk about the keynote he’s giving at OSCON this week. The keynote is titled “The war for the soul of open source.” We talked about what made open source great in the first place, what went wrong, the pitfalls of open core models, licensing, and more.
By the way, we’re at OSCON this week so if you make your way to the expo hall, make sure you come by our booth and say hi.
Matched from the episode's transcript 👇
Adam Jacob: Yeah… It’s too soon to know for sure. It’s always too soon to know for sure. When you think about the enterprise sales cycle, typically you’re looking at like a six-month window from initial conversation to “I closed a deal.” It would be pretty common. So you’re probably still a little too close to really know for sure. But the early reads are in, and they’re good.
I think the feedback - not on the business side, but on the community side - has been mostly positive. One of my experiences is that you sort of never can please everybody. I don’t know if you know what a utility monster is, but essentially - in utilitarian philosophy, the idea is that we make good life choices because we put more aggregate happiness into the Universe. So for whatever your metric of happiness is, if you’re putting more happiness into the Universe, then we’re making good decisions, versus bad decisions… In the smallest philosophical nutshell.
And the utility monster is someone who when you feed them whatever the happiness is, they get more happiness out of receiving it than anyone else. A great example there would be the Cookie Monster. The Cookie Monster loves cookies; so when you feed the Cookie Monster a cookie, he’s like “Hum-hum-hum-hum! That was the best cookie I’ve ever had! I looove cookies! Cookies, cookies, cookies!”, right? So that means that we should definitely give all the cookies to the Cookie Monster, because his happiness for the cookie is so much higher than ours. So the Cookie Monster just gets all of the goodness in the world.
I think when you’re running a big open source project, you’re kind of surrounded by Cookie Monsters. Everybody has a point of view about what the most important piece of it is, and it’s whatever they need; it’s the business, it’s that patch that I wanted filed, it’s my ability to influence the direction of the project… Whatever it is that their utility is, whatever their most important thing is, that’s their point of view… And they kind of assume that everybody else shares that point of view. And if they don’t, there’s kind of a No true Scotsman moment, where they’re like “Well, then you’re the one who’s not really living up to the true ideals of open source.”
I think the community feedback has largely been that it’s great that everything’s open source, where it will be great if it brings more contributors into the system. “We’re a little irritated that you’re no longer producing distributions that we can just use the way we used to…”, because you know, I used to drop the cookies off at your house; now, if you don’t wanna pay me for the cookies at least a little bit, for some number of people, then you can’t use the software anymore. And that’s irritating, if you were in that camp. Now there’s a cost.
There’s also – I hesitate to classify it this way, but I’m gonna anyway, because I get to say what I want… But there’s the cynical crowd as well, who are like “This means that you’re not really open source”, which to me is just the most insane conversation I’ve ever heard. But there is a tangent of that community that looks at that decision and goes “Well, this is just you stealing all of the goods”, even though it’s all in the open, and it’s free, and we’re supporting creating those community distributions and doing all that work… They kind of don’t care about all of that, because what they want is us to keep producing – they would like all the software to be open, and to be able to get it for free, and to not have to worry about paying for it… Which sounds great, but it just means there’s no more business to support it.
So that’s sort of what I think the full gamut of feedback has been. Oddly enough, a lot of the folks who are maximally cynical used to work for Chef.