Jerod Santo: I agree. That was my first thought, was “Isn’t Evan Yu already doing well financially?” I went and looked, just to remind myself… Because Vue is highly sponsored. And if you look at him personally on GitHub Sponsors, he has 230 current sponsors. Now, he has 954 past sponsors, so maybe this is indicative of people kind of come around, sponsor a little while, and then move on, and so you have this churn that perhaps makes you wonder, as a maintainer, if this is going to continue. But then if you go over to the Vue.js Open Collective, they are receiving over there an annual - well, this is estimated annual budget. I’m not sure if that’s their expenses. No, I think this is how much they’re getting in… Of almost $190,000 USD. And so you combine those two things, and you think, does he need to go raise $4.6 million? I don’t know, he must have thought that he did, because that’s what he went ahead and did.

But yeah, I was with you. I thought he has been a shining example of “You can make this open source maintainer thing work financially.” Now, it’s not everybody that can do that, but some people can. And he, I thought, had. And maybe he has, but maybe he’s bored. Maybe he wants to just try something different.

Adam Stacoviak: I want to contrast this though, because you mentioned this in the preparatory stuff, and this is something I knew about Oxide, is they, Bryan Cantrill and Steve Tuck, when they founded the company, they were like “Okay, we want to sort of pay ourselves a good enough salary. We don’t have to stress so much about money. It’s not so much that we’re making – our company may be valued at x, and on paper we’re worth more, because over time Oxide begins to have a higher and higher valuation”, but their salary is 175 a year USD. And when I met some folks recently at All Things Open, I was surprised to learn – this is when I first learned, I learned face to face that everyone in the company makes the same amount of money as the two founders. And so they said “We want to pay everyone the same.” And so I think in that context, Jerod, that might be interesting for us, you and I as Changelog, to say “This is how much money we make.” Now, it would really be amazing if we paid everyone else the same thing we pay ourselves… But that’s not exactly true. So that might be embarrassing to be like “Okay, there’s a there’s that divide there”, so to speak.

At the same time, we’re also the ones taking all the risk, and riding the wave of down years, up years etc. So I get that. But we’re not building an Oxide company. In that light, if I were building an Oxide and I had similar possibilities and ambitions that Bryan and his team do, then I would probably do that. That sounds like a good thing for the morale, and a good thing to market, like we’re talking about it in this moment, because it’s cool. There’s a marketability to it.

Clip from The Changelog 517: What is USD?

Darcy Clarke: Yeah. It’s definitely tough to think about a future without some canonical or sort of centralized registry, unfortunately… Because the costs are pretty significant, maintenance is pretty high… So again, I do have a lot of empathy for the folks that do maintain the infrastructure… But you’re right, in October GitHub announced they had hit 1 billion ARR. They are making 1 billion USD in revenue, and the investments that they make should be telling to the ecosystem about what they do and don’t prioritize… And it’s unfortunate that there’s a lot of these things that go unprioritized, or they’re slow to react to. Again, as far as I know, it’s more than six months they’ve known about this, so…

Break: [45:13]

Daniel Whitenack: Yeah. I would say basically if you try to work in that 7 billion or fewer zone, your life is much easier infrastructure-wise, I would say. And that probably will also change over time, but I think it’s the reality now. And one interesting thing of the Salesforce thing - I love it when people post this. They posted that the training cost was around $150,000 USD on Google Cloud using TPUs. And this model is released under Apache 2, which is cool for me.

The other one that I mentioned that was the 8k context length was the MPT 30 billion model, which was released recently… But also note there the difference in parameter size. The XGen model from Salesforce supports that context length at 7 billion parameters. And for MPT, you kind of have to go up to that 30 billion… Which the MPT models are really great. I love them, I’ve been using them. But that’s just the differentiation. You could see why maybe Salesforce XGen is trending, because of their focus on this sort of thing.

Beau Perschall: Right. USD is actually the file format, but it’s more than that. So in most applications now either export USD directly, just like you would if you’re working in a CAD application you might export a DWG file, or a DXF file, or something like that, or a SolidWorks part file. If you’re in manufacturing, you can now export USD directly, in many of these apps. They’re all starting to get on board, which is great for the 3D industry, because I can tell you that when I was coming up, every 3D app, every tool had its own 3D file format. And so nothing played well together. It was always a nightmare to try and get content from one place to another, without question. It wasn’t like 2D imagery, where a pixel is a pixel. 3D is much more complex as far as that goes, orders of magnitude.

And so now we’re starting to kind of hone in on USD as a primary file format. Technically, there’s another file format that’s open, that’s run by the Khronos Group, called glTF, and it is essentially a web standard for 3D. And I was part of the group that was helping kind of define the standard for 3D commerce, so that you could see things on your Apple phone, and spin them around in the websites, and things like that as well. So that’s kind of the JPEG version of the 3D. Well, the USD file is more like a layered Photoshop file; much more robust. But they play very well together, and Omniverse supports both of them too, so this is great.

Daniel Stenberg: No, I had a bot in an IRC channel, so you could just have a currency rate translation service in the chat… So “Hey both, what’s 100 USD in Swedish Kronor today?|

Quincy Larson: So you’ll build a role-playing game and you’ll learn basic JavaScript from that. You’ll learn typography from building a USDA nutrition label.

Jerod Santo: Exactly. So it’s close enough, where you don’t have to go from USD to Ether to BAT, or from USD to Bitcoin to BAT. You can go from USD pretty much directly to BAT, and that will hypothetically remove the price volatility from BAT, away from Bitcoins, away from Ethereums, assuming a certain amount of transactions and liquidity over time.

Adam Stacoviak: From what I understand – so I think the base level is roughly $5 (USD) and I think if I understand the mechanics too, that’s a split, even split with Twitch the platform and you the publisher… Is that right, Suz?

Jerod Santo: Right, but on the other side you have network effects limiting Bisq. With the current size - maybe I’m ready to buy Bitcoin to USD, but there’s just no offers to sell out there. So as a community, this is something that Bisq (the networks) needs to overcome in terms of volume for it to be feasible… Which is a chicken and egg type of a thing, is it not?

Adam Stacoviak: [08:02] Right, when you turn it into your denomination - USD, EUR, or whatever your currency is - you turn it into what we consider maybe real dollars, real cash… At that point you could be subject to capital gains?

Ron Evans: Yeah, that’s how dedicated I am, my friends. [laughs] But yeah, it’s really exciting… For 10 USD, it’s a Raspberry Pi with all the trimmings AND the built-in wireless. I’m very excited. I’ve been a big fan of Raspberry Pi since I had – I was fortunate enough to actually have the first Raspberry Pi in America. I did a demo using the Raspberry Pi the day before it was formally introduced at Maker Faire New York at the Golden Gate Ruby Conference, when we first showed kids Ruby running on the Raspberry Pi. So I’ve been a big fan for a long time; they’re really hardworking.

They’ve had tremendous community buildup around it. There’s all kinds of interesting software that runs on the Raspberry Pi. Gobot runs really well, especially with Go 1.8’s improvements substantially as far as Go’s performance on ARM… Somewhat less so on x86 just the performance was already quite good.

Todd McLeod: Yeah, and I also really believe in pay it forward, help the world… I only got to where I am because tons of people helped me out along the way. I think ‘gotime’ gives you access to my courses for $10, so if you can’t afford that because you’re in a third-world country where 10 USD is a month’s wage or something, or you’re just a student and you’re eating Top Ramen, just send me a note on Twitter and I’ll give you free access. Don’t even think twice about it; I love to do that, I love to help people out, and it’s awesome for me just to see… I truly believe education is one of the noblest of endeavors, and as somebody improves themselves, they’re improving the world. Like Gandhi said, “Be the change.” If you are that change, if you are making change in your life, if you’re educating yourself, you are making the world a better place. And then once you have risen up, once you’ve lifted yourself up, you’re now in a position to lift other people up.

I’m a full believer in doing what I can to help others, and if you can’t afford it just send me a note and I’ll give you free access.

Hillary Hartley: Yeah, The Acquisition of Services Fund is essentially a revolving fund that they use to purchase good for government services and tools, essentially. So they made an investment in 18F; we have a three-year memorandum of understanding with them that essentially says, “We’re gonna be your startup fund.” When we use the ASF, as we call it, programs are required to have a plan to get back to cost-neutral, so we’ve gotta be cost-recoverable; we’ve got to eventually get to the place where we are putting the investment back into the fund.

I think to date, over the last three years, we have lost about ten million a year, but again, we grew from 10 to 200, we’ve made investments, and interestingly, we’ve focused on projects like cloud.gov, like the Micro-purchase platform, even our guides, that, as we discussed, we could not operate as an efficient team, nor could we plan to be a sustainable and efficient team into the future without those guys and without all that documentation. That all takes time, and it’s unbillable time; it’s things that we don’t bill to anyone but ourselves, and that’s we got scrutinized for in this report… It was really kind of not putting enough back into the fund. But we are on track.

A similar investigation was actually done by the General Accountability Office… The GAO looked into those 18F and USDS over the summer as well. What we’ve confirmed is that we do have a plan to get there. We’ve been saying that we will probably be cost-neutral in 2019, and in the meantime we are growing revenue…

[01:08:07.17] I think the stat that we put in our blog post as a response to that IG report was that just from the fiscal year 2015 to 2016 I think there was a 69% increase in revenue. We are growing our pipeline, we are growing our business, and we also are now able to spend less time on some of this foundational work. We’ve invested the time in the Agile Blanket Purchase Agreement so that we now have 17 other vendors that we can go to to help us scale our efforts. We’ve invested the time in the Micro-purchase platforms, and we’ve got 92 other businesses that are helping us do small tasks; we’ve invested the time in these guys, and things like that.

I think it’s just really important to not miss the forest for the trees. Absolutely we haven’t been perfect, we’ve been in startup mode, but we’re on the right path.

Jerod Santo: Still here. So let’s talk in terms of market value. I’m not sure what Ethereum maxed out at pre-DAO hack, but it looks like it’s trading against the USD at about $14.

Max Ogden: Yeah, because you have to have invested dozens of years into the nepotistic system of existing government procurement. It’s not a technical problem to fix procurement, but if somebody fixes procurement — and by the way, it is being worked on now, because like I mentioned this earlier, healthcare.gov was so bad that the silver lining around that — that’s actually pretty exciting — is that there’s two new organizations in the federal government that are hiring remote, and they’re hiring technologists, and they’re paying people to work on open source inside of government. One is called the US Digital Service, and the other is called 18F, or one-eight-F. They’re a brother-sister organization; one is inside the executive branch, and they’re the technology advocates. They’re almost like the role that the EFF plays. They have people come up with policies, and they get the different agencies to adopt policies. I have a friend that works there; he gets to go in the VA, or the Social Security office, and they’re like, “Hey, check out this new hundred-million-dollar database that we contracted. What do you think?” He used to build data centers at Twitter, and he’s like, “If I was building this, I could have done it for $5 million, and saved you $95 million. Why did you bill this for $100 million?”

And they’re like, “That’s what the vendor told us.” “Oracle said this was a great deal!”

[01:08:08.12] So that is a really important cause right now that has a fair amount of momentum. 18F is where you go to work if you actually want to build the solutions. They’re like an actual contractor that is government employees that like hires people to work on the actual projects. USDS is where you go to set the policy.

For instance, they are doing a lot of stuff around making all federal websites have mandatory SSL so that the NSA can’t snoop on what you’re browsing. There’s a lot of cool momentum in fixing that system.

So if I was going to place a bet on where all the grants are going to be in the future, it’s around delivering government services in more efficient way, and actually competing for government grants because that landscape is about to get a lot more accessible to open source stuff because of all the work that’s happening at the federal level.

Another way I would answer this question is… Procurement reform is one thing, and that’s happening, so keep an eye on that space. The other thing is, like I mentioned, we don’t know how to describe our project in terms of are we a non-profit, are we an academic project? We don’t know what our label is, and we’re trying to figure out with some other groups a model for supporting projects in this ecosystem. A great example to look at — I think they’re doing some great work — is if you look up this thing call the Substance Consortium, there’s this awesome text editor. It’s like a JavaScript, a rich text editor and editing environment called Substance. It’s really beautifully designed, and it’s all open source.

They had been working for this open access scientific journal, writing a journal article viewer and editor. They had all these other organizations… They were basically being contracted by this one journal called eLife, and they built this thing called eLife Lens, which is a really beautiful way to read papers. Because most people read papers on PDF, but trying to read a paper on your phone on a PDF, it has really wide columns and it’s like, “Why can’t I just have this be a web page?” They’re trying to fix some of these problems, but they had all these other organizations in this space, and they were like, “Well, we also want to invest together in better editing tools for science, or just editing tools for the web in general.” So they set up this thing called the Substance Consortium. There’s four stakeholders that all help pay for the development of Substance, but they’re not hiring exclusively the Substance team to work as employees on their projects. What’s really cool about it is Substance itself can still be its standalone project that can make reusable open source tools, but it has an open governance structure so any of the member organizations can help influence the project direction in a positive way, and work together to support the project without controlling the project. Their whole thing is cooperation without control. That work is being facilitated by a group called the Collaborative Knowledge Foundation, which is one of the stakeholders, or one of the people paying the Substance team.

Substance is just the editor components, but the Substance team doesn’t have a… They’re just two people, they don’t have the linkage to the social issue, they don’t have the grant-writing capability at this point. They want to get to that point, but they need incubating, and they need support for their project.

[01:11:45.01] Collaborative Knowledge Foundation is a couple of folks that started it that are really focused on fixing the scientific publishing ecosystem. They want every journal to be using open source publishing tools. So they have the social mission, that’s a huge social mission. Access to research is a really big cause right now. What’s cool is the Collaborative Knowledge Foundation has got some grants to work on fixing scientific publishing, and instead of hiring the Substance people as employees, they’re like, “Let’s support everyone in this ecosystem together, and have Substance still be standalone.” Because they think it would be toxic if they actually exclusively hired the Substance people that worked on their one thing. They would rather have Substance flourish and have a whole ecosystem, because…

That’s where open source works really well, when you have a bunch of interests that are supporting a factored-out, common infrastructure. I think the Substance Consortium model is really exciting; we’re trying to figure out how to… We need to come up with a cool name for that way of doing things. Ideally, the Dat project, since we are a distributive file system, it’s a pretty low-level component, and there’s a bunch of different interests… It would be awesome if we could get a similar thing for Dat, so we’d have a Dat Consortium. We would have the Dat project itself just be the technology, but then we would have all the different organizations that have a specific cause be able to support our work. Maybe we split up into two teams, like one of us is the science cause, and all the low-level people go and work on just the infrastructure stuff.