Bryan Cantrill: Yeah. So the origin of Oxide, first, long before we had a name or an idea, is that I wanted to do something with Steve. So actually, Steve and I had been together at Joyent. I went to Joyent, I loved the technical positioning, but I wasn’t necessarily in love with the folks that were running the company at the time. And I didn’t meet Steve until after I came to Joyent. I met Steve on my second or third day at Joyent. And I remember exactly where I was when we had that first conversation, where it’s like “Wait a minute, who is this guy?” This is great. And Steve and I had a great run together at Joyent. Ultimately, we both [unintelligible 01:06:45.26] we hired Scott, and Steve and I both learned a lot from Scott. And after the acquisition of Joyent by Samsung, as we were beginning to realize that like “Okay, Samsung is not where I’m going to spend the rest of my career”, and “What’s next for me?”, Steve and I wanted to go do something together.

And you know, the environment such as it is at Samsung, there was always a little bit of a concern that one of us would get axed before it was time to go start a company… And the unstated belief there was - it would be Steve who’d be axed, just because Steve was running… He was running our go to market on the commercial side for Joyent, and it just felt like that’s a function that Samsung might get rid of. You just didn’t know.

And I remember we were at a coffee together, and it was just really important to me that Steve and I do something together. Again, no idea what it was this point. And so I’m trying to make – and he and I are both concerned, reasonably, that Steve will be on the street, and I’m like “I need you to go consult for a year, or something. I don’t know, I need you to wait for me, basically”, because we were all going to be at Samsung for three years, kind of the term of the deal, and so on.

[01:08:07.20] So as we were saying this - again, with this kind of implicit assumption that if anyone was going to be axed, it would be Steve- I get a text message from Scott, my boss, saying “You’ve gotta get back here right now. The folks at Samsung want to talk to. I’ve got no idea what this is about.” And Steve’s like “Maybe you’re the one that’s gonna get axed.”

Kelsey Hightower: So here’s the number I need for the family, multiply it by three, and I think that deals with – I mean, so here’s the thing that I as a person that’s humble and realizes the value of people… In order for someone to retire, that means everybody else has to keep working. Because your water needs to run, trash needs to be picked up… All these things need to occur. And so in order for that to work, that means other people have to respect this thing called money. So the money you amass, you need to be able to use it.

And so I thought about, “Okay, what’s the average salary of a person that has a decent life?” And to me, my budget, I never spent more than $100,000 in a year. I mean, after taxes. Vacations, everything. I’m debt-free, everything is paid off, house included; everything is paid off. And so in that mode, I was like “Okay, what would I need to earn, maybe through interest, that the average salary of the average person that’s doing pretty well in my eyes?” And everybody’s metric is different. And so when I looked at that number, I said “Alright, if I can triple that number, and get it through interest payments from like Treasuries, that is my criteria.” Because I knew I would be okay based on the lifestyle that I would like to have, plus cushion, and weird stuff like inflation. And so that was the mental thing I needed to get comfortable with making that jump.

José Valim: Yeah, so Bytepack was a yak shave… And it’s a very funny story, because we were working on our own software product, so something that – it’s not fully decided yet, but you can think like probably something based on the open core model, where we would release a new project, and then there would be advanced features on top of it that would be paid…

So we were working on this idea, on this product, and the reason why we were working on the product is that we didn’t want to build a SaaS; because building a SaaS now means that maybe someone needs to be on pager duty, things need to be working all the time… We were working on the software product idea that people would install somehow – it would be an Elixir project, but maybe you would install it as an Elixir package or as a Docker image…

So we were working on this, and then we figured out “Okay, sure, but when we have this ready, what is the next step?” People need to be able to buy it. People need to be able to buy a license. So we need to manage licenses for them. Then they need to be able to download the latest version, so we need to integrate with whatever tooling they are using… And then we’ll have to create a landing page for this product, and any other things that I learned along the way, like things regarding taxes… I learned that if you’re selling a digital good, you may be liable for taxes in any country in the world, if some person buys from that country…

So when we started looking into it they were like, oh my god to better our product like that we need to run a service for supporting this distribution of the software product. And then we started talking to people, and people were like “Yeah–” People that were running their own software product, they already have something that they are selling to other developers, they were like “Yeah, that’s what I had to do.” And I basically MacGyver the whole solution here. I connect this service with this service, that pings the service that gives a token, and somehow things work together… Or sometimes I’d still need – if somebody cancels a subscription, I need to remove the token manually, and they are like “You know, it took me a lot of time, a lot of effort.” And I would actually talk to some people where they were like “I want to launch my software project, but I know I have to solve those things and I don’t know how, or I don’t want to.”

So the yak shave came where we said “Well, what if instead of solving this problem just for us, can we solve this problem in a general way, that is going to be useful to other people as well?” So our goal is to still have something that works for us, but if it can help other people along the way, that’s going to be fantastic.

So the idea with Bytepack is that we help you sell, package and deliver software products to other developers and to companies, to enterprises. So the idea is that if you are a developer and you want to sell a pro version of an npm package, for example, you will be able to do that for Bytepack. You’re going to push the package to Bytepack, your clients are going to receive the versions, they can audit the versions, they can control, they can download it… So that’s what we started working on. And I think maybe 2-3 week ago we launched a landing page to collect feedback on our idea. We have a beta that we’re already using internally, but what are the features that people think we should focus first and value first, what people are most interested on, and so on.

Gerhard Lazu: Yeah. It has also like 192 gigs of RAM, so it’s like fully maxed out… NVMe, the whole – it’s like a fully maxed out, or it used to be fully maxed out PC maybe about a year ago. So yeah. It’s okay, but trying that world, it is my editing machine. And I love when Tim said that. You need to have roles for your machines, and that’s what it is. And if it was to break down, that’s okay; there’s another machine to use to replace it.

Pia Mancini: Exactly - the host’s role is to receive those funds, those supports earmarked for you (in your name), and hold that money for you. Then, when you submit an expense – for example, you have your hosting costs, you submit that expense on your Open Collective page and the host organization reimburses you, pays that expense for you. That’s the role of the host - receiving funds for you and then paying for your expenses.

What the host organization does as well - and this is the part that we were talking about, of how we’re removing friction - for Project X, in this case, is they keep the books on that money, they are compliant with regulations on that money and they pay taxes if need be on those funds. That’s why they charge a fee for hosting you.

So these are the two parts of Open Collective - the public page, where you can receive the funds, and then the host organization that is a legal entity that receives the funds in your name and manages it.

Erik St. Martin: Yeah, so it’s interesting… We’ve talked about this before on (I think) Go Time and Changelog as well… It came around as a really interesting story. At the time, Brian Ketelsen and I worked together at a company; this is 2011 or so… And we were both using Go, and we were attending lots of conferences… And so early 2013, we kept talking about the fact that like “I really wish there was a Go conference. I really, really want to go to a conference and meet other people who develop Go.” We both live in Tampa, really big in the tech industry for healthcare, which is not, a bleeding edge technology adopter… So it was basically just Brian and I covering all of Tampa at that time with Go. It was still very, very early. And so mid-2013 rolls around, like April-May or so, and some folks in Denver, from the Denver Go meetup group were talking about “I really wish there was a Go conference.” And Brian and I were “I know, this is what we’ve been saying.” And so it was basically “Why don’t you guys do it?” And we’re “Well, how hard could it be? We should. We should totally do it.” It turns out after the fact - really hard. It’s actually a lot that goes into it. We knew it’d be a ton of work, we totally underestimated just how much work it would take. But yeah, so that’s sort of how things came about.

It was really interesting, because we were hoping to just get, 100-200 people together. At the time, we didn’t know how many gophers there were; the language was still super-new… And so we planned to hopefully get like two or three hundred people together, and then it just sort of exploded from there. We had to keep calling the venue back to get more room. We maxed out at 750 people the first year… So that was really crazy for us, because - I mean, anybody in the conference circuit kind of knows, like… I mean, most conferences take years to even hit those numbers. So we were just really, really in shock.

[08:15] It was really a humbling experience though too, like the number of sponsors who came on… And same thing, they just wanted a conference for this technology too, and so many of them weren’t even worried about ROI at the time. They’re just “The ROI is a Go conference starting, right? We need to hire people, we need these events to exist.” And so that was really awesome.

Then like all of these people that we really admired in the Go community were there helping us stuff bags, swag bags… It turns out stuffing 750 swag bags takes a long time. Who knew…? So yeah, it was just really interesting to have – I’m trying to even remember… Steve Francia, Bill Kennedy, Damian Gryski, Dave Cheney… There were so many. I’m gonna leave people out here, which I always hate doing those things… But trying to remember all of the people who were like back there - we’d sit here forever. But it was just kind of crazy, all of these people who were like “No, no, you should be giving talks. Why are you helping the stuff bags?” But yeah, I think everybody was just really excited to just see this thing that happen, and anything they could do to make it an event that would be remembered, they were willing to do.

And the same is true about MC-ing, right? At the time, Brian and I were running around just putting out fires, because there’s so much stuff that happens behind the scenes that people don’t even know, and like things that you need to manage while you’re on site… And so we’d be like putting out a fire and then running up on stage to introduce the next speaker. And Kelsey Hightower came over and was like “It looks like you guys are kind of a little busy here… Do you want me to take over introducing the speakers for you, so that you guys can handle everything?” And so he did, and that’s just like another example of people in the community just trying to pitch in to make it something.

I think that all of that probably sparked the atmosphere that exists there today, where we care more about the community than anything else, and everybody just sort of contributing to it being a great time.

Gregory Kurtzer: [01:16:17.01] You’re bringing up some fantastic points. The first thing that I wanna touch on is something you said right at the beginning, which is the Rocky Linux Foundation. So one thing that we have done in terms of “How do we ensure that this is going to stay in the community? How do we ensure that what happened to CentOS does not happen with Rocky?” And a big piece of that is to create an organization, a foundation that has a very specific charter, it has rules, expectations… You can almost think of it like a social contract of what we are promising the community. And we will hold ourselves accountable to that promise. But the process of doing this, even the process of accepting donations requires an entity to be formed. So we have formed the Rocky Linux Foundation - it is a Delaware organization - and we have put together all the necessary starting points such that when we’re ready to go for tax-exempt status, a 501(c)3 - at least U.S. tax-exempt status - we can do that.

But these are all of the foundational pieces that are necessary to do this. This is a personal outlie of funds for me. My company that I work for [unintelligible 01:17:35.28] We are also investing in this in the sense of sponsoring. So my company is putting money in, I’ve put money in personally… And what we want to do is make this – so it is not about me; I definitely don’t wanna keep outlaying money, if I can help it… And it’s not about my company. It’s separate. This is a completely separate organization, really for the community. But there are certain costs associated with it; there are certain resources that we need to be planning for, and for that, we’re actually going to be opening up donations and sponsorships. Donations for individuals to put in some money to help out with some of the expenses, as well as sponsorship for organizations.

We’re still thinking through what sponsorships will gain organizations. At the moment it’s really just to help us develop and help us manage the bills… But at some point we may be able to do something along the lines of giving organizations some amount of banner space on the website, or something along those lines… But we have to be really, really careful, because we can’t sell anything. We’re going for 501(c)3, we’re going for tax-exempt status, which means we’re not selling products, we’re not selling services. We can’t. We don’t want to.

It was funny, we had a conversation about merchandise, because we have an organization who’s going to be setting up a merch store for us, for Rocky Linux Swag… And you can go there and get hats, and stickers, and shirts, and all that sort of stuff; coffee mugs, and whatnot… And one of the initial thoughts was “Well, if somebody personally donates a certain amount of money, can we give them a shirt?” And the answer is no. You can’t. [laughter] Because then it looks as if we’re selling a shirt.

Quincy Larson: Yeah, we’re breakeven, essentially… So what we did was as soon as it became clear that we were gonna get our tax-exempt status; not that we actually got it quite yet, but before that, we had always been just shifting – “If you wanna support freeCodeCamp, here. Donate money instead to Women Who Code, or donate money to Hack Club, or donate money to Hacker Dojo”, or some of these other nonprofits that are helping in developer education… Because we really wanted to make sure that people were able to deduct things, and the money was going to a proper nonprofit.

[11:48] So once we got the nonprofit status, retroactively, all the donations to us were tax-deductible. And I remember just holding my newborn son, and holding up the certification that I got from the U.S. government, and that was kind of the light at the end of the tunnel. From there, we just worked really hard to get a whole lot of people doing monthly recurring donations to us, which is beneficial not only because a lot of people can afford $5, even $25 - we had a few people giving $250/month… A lot of people can afford that. And since it’s monthly, it gives us the ability to project out a budget.

For an organization like us, we just need to be able to budget. We’re not trying to make huge fixed cost investments. We’re just paying for servers, we’re paying for people to be working at freeCodeCamp full-time.

Paul Vixie: I would like to say so. [unintelligible 00:35:26.26] ever taken on something that was going to be clearly possible… [unintelligible 00:35:31.23] And at the time, I left nonprofit service and went back into the commercial world in 2013. I was trying to do exactly what say. I was trying to figure out “Well, if there were a replacement to the DNS protocol that you could opportunistically adopt…” So you as an information publisher, you as let’s say a smartphone maker, just creating a lot of DNS requests, you’re going to fetch a lot of information, and just try to enumerate all the different entity types in the entire DNS economy, and say “Well, how could they speak both for some transition period”, which by this time is 30 years, “but anybody who was an adopter would immediately get some improvement [unintelligible 00:36:21.16] performance, less resource use”, whatever it is that would be the incentive to adopt. And in a way, that’s how HTTP/2 and now QUICK (HTTP/3) are doing it. And so I was really tinkering hard with this, at the time that I just kind of said that “That’s it. I’ve done 18 years of nonprofit service. I need to go think about my retirement” and I went back into the commercial world.

But I’ll tell you, the biggest impediment to this is that everybody wants to be the creator of that. So you’ve heard of crypto, and Bitcoin, and digital currencies… All of them followed each other along this model of “We don’t like the fiat currencies. We want to be able to have money via a matter of private contracts, without governments being able to either inject money into the economy, or control interest rates”, or whatever. And the problem is nobody [unintelligible 00:37:21.09] came in later and said “It’s a really good idea. I’m going to adopt [unintelligible 00:37:26.02] most popular.” What they did is they came in and they said “Whoever owns this is going to be a trillionaire”, and they created [unintelligible 00:37:32.20] Why would you use an existing one instead of submitting your own?

So some of those very same people have come along and said “Yeah, we could use the blockchain to encode domain names, so that takedown was impossible. So that no matter whose trademark you were infringing, or whose intellectual property you were infringing, there’d be nowhere to target a lawsuit, as you [unintelligible 00:38:00.03] There’d simply be nowhere to go to request takedown. And wouldn’t that be better than having government? I’m not sure it would be, but I’m pretty sure that that type of anarchy might do more harm than good. [unintelligible 00:38:18.25] opportunity.

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 conceptions of what’s wrong in open source are just as valid as anybody else’s.

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 a change in order to be able to support industry competitive salaries, and it wasn’t because they didn’t have enough money - because of their deal with Google they had lots of money, by most standards, and even today they have a pretty solid endowment. But nevertheless, they went through all of the work to create a tax-baring entity, Mozilla.com, that was completely owner by Mozilla.org.

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 them involved with us.” And it was challenged eventually by the service, and they won in that examination, so I guess that’s a viable model now, although there’s a whole lot of moving parts if you wanted to replicate it.

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 the very best people that I can to share services, and I’m going to charge discounted rates to projects that come in and need those services, but the people are gonna get paid industry standard rates because I’m gonna raise money on each of these little foundations that I spin up.”

[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 it’s not clear who’s getting taxed on that, and they’re wondering if there should be some taxation on that. They’re trying to figure out if they made a mistake allowing open source foundations to happen, so they stopped making new ones. And there weren’t any fewer projects that wanted to get there, so all of a sudden it became very difficult… Where before it was like a two-week process (maybe four at the most) to become a non-profit in open source, all of a sudden it was taking years… And Jim was able to streamline that for people, because he and his lawyers figured out how to spin up new foundations under their umbrella.

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, I’ve just lost the fourth one. Do you remember?

Kelsey Hightower: So one thing I have to realize is that I think a lot of times when people get money, they believe that they’re smarter than other people that don’t have money. So they think that their ideas should rise at the top. They’re obviously right about something, because their bank account reflects just how right they are. That’s the mistake. To me, I know that I’m lucky, and a lot of things could have went in multiple directions, and it doesn’t end up with this particular number. And so one thing I’ve challenged myself for the last maybe 20 years, “Who am I, and why do I believe what I believe?” That’s it. Sometimes I believe things because I didn’t have time to research them, so I had to just take them at face value, they were taught to me, I didn’t have time to challenge them, so I took them.

So these days, when I look at it, I try to humble myself, and be like “Kelsey, do not fall into the lifestyle inflation. Do not over-index on showing people what you have. It is okay if people don’t think you’re in the top X percentage of anything.” Remind myself that “Yes, you could buy it, but you don’t need to. What’s caused you to want to do that kind of thing?” And that helps me avoid the conspiracy. For example, if you say “I need more money”, you will be really mad that you pay taxes, because people are taking away the very thing you want. I don’t mind paying for the bridges, the highways, the medical stuff…

[01:02:05.01] Do I like the waste? Absolutely not. I’ve seen waste in enterprise, so I’m not surprised that there’s waste in government. So I don’t over-index in that, because I also know that people are hard to be very good 24 hours a day forever. It’s not happening, folks. So I’m a pragmatist when it comes to that stuff.

But the conspiracy theories - whenever one pops into my mind, I say “Kelsey, it’s time to do some research here. Before you start running your mouth, before you go on Twitter just saying random stuff…” For example, when I wanted to understand inflation, I had to go read The Monster on Jekyll Island, how the Federal Reserve was formed… Buy some, Treasuries actually buy Treasuries from Treasury Direct, look at the interest rates, look at the curve… Why do people start feeling a certain way when it goes up, start feeling a certain way when it goes down? Who buys them, who doesn’t? How big is the Treasury market versus the stock market? Treasury market’s dramatically bigger. Why is that?

So these are the types of things that I go into to just try to resolve the conspiracy components with actual facts. And then I just talk to people. “Hey, explain to me how this works, please, because I don’t know.” And then people give me insight, give me something I don’t know, they close the knowledge gap. And then I’ll test. So if I’m really afraid of something, I’ll test it. When the whole crypto movement was going, I was so afraid, because I saw [unintelligible 01:03:25.25] It doesn’t matter if things are logically correct or not. It don’t matter. If the world decides that we should all jump off our roofs, with no helmets, then just people start doing it. It’s like “Oh, what are we doing?”

Paul Bakaus: Yeah. I think there’s a theme here too for the individual creators, which is that if you talk to a content creator, all of them will say that they want community and they want to have something like a forum on day one. So most of them, for instance, use things like Discord now, to do this. They want all of those things. But you know what they want most? They want to create content.

Everyone I talk to are saying the same thing here, which is “Just let me create content”, but 80% of my day is focused on all the stuff around it. And this is a huge problem. If you need to fight the trolls and counterattacks from everywhere, do your taxes… There are so many aspects of being a creator that are not about creating content, and I think anything we can do as a platform and as a web community to make this easier would be amazing.

Jerod Santo: Yeah, like I’m tracking a budget, or my taxes, or something.. And this is not a collaborative thing; this is not something that I’m gonna put into the cloud… Or I’m playing a game. I’m playing Solitaire on my phone. I do not need a network connection for Solitaire on my phone.

We see this a lot, even in the gaming industry… One of the things that I don’t enjoy about games today is that when I’m playing offline on my Switch and the game requires a network connection. And it’s like, “No, I’m just playing Single Player mode, on my Switch, at my house… I do not have to be connected to the network.” Those things of course are often business concerns and not technical concerns in that sense… But this constant connection to the server – I think some people (and it’s probably a minuscule amount) were growing weary of that, to a certain degree… But I’m with you, some things you absolutely do need to have cloud storage.

George Neville-Neil: I’m standing there and I’m talking about it, and I’m thinking “Now what do I say?” besides thank you, which I said like three times. And we got to talking about the column, and he actually asked if he could write a letter to Kode Vicious. And I’m thinking “How do I sarcastically respond to one of the nicest and most brilliant people in computer science as Kode Vicious? I am screwed.” But of course, to Don I said “Sure, I would love you to write a letter. That would be incredibly kind. I’ll do my best to answer.” And we talked for about 20 minutes.

So Don doesn’t do email. He has a secretary who handles his email for a long time. So he sends me a postcard, which I have on my shelf… Because when I’m feeling like I don’t wanna write this month’s Kode Vicious, I just look at the postcard from Don Knuth, and I’m like “I guess I have to write this.”

So he wrote a postcard asking about his current book, and I sent him a personal response instead of putting this into a Kode Vicious… Because like I said, how am I going to respond to Don Knuth exactly as Kode Vicious? It just seems terrible.

So that was the story of Don writing a letter and getting a response. It was actually cited in – I’ve got the books on my desk; I think it’s in 4A. The response is in there; so my name is in one of the volumes of The Art of Computer Programming. So 2012 was basically the year that I didn’t need to do anything else as far as I was concerned, because I’d gotten all the kudos I was gonna possibly get… But you mentioned that he wrote the introduction, which is another story…

So every year there’s the Turing Award dinner ceremony, which is a bunch of geeks in fancy dress. It is really quite terrifying to see all of us in tuxedos, and the women are in top-of-the-line dresses, and overall a bunch of nerds dressed like that, waiting for things to be announced… And I will tell you that [unintelligible 00:19:37.07] thus far has the best tuxedo of anyone who goes to the Turing Award.

So my publisher, Jim, was trying to get me to do the book, and I was like “Well, you know, I don’t know… It doesn’t make any sense. We’ve already done all of these things. It would be interesting to collect them together…” I was thinking about it.

[19:58] And it was Jim’s suggestion, he said “Well, why don’t you ask Don to write the intro?” I’m like “That seems like an imposition on someone who’s been very nice to me…” But I saw Don at dinner, and I asked him about it; I was like “I’m thinking about doing a book. I know you’ve enjoyed the columns… Would you be willing to write an introduction?” He says, “Oh, I don’t usually do that, and I’ll think about it.” I was like “Okay, he probably won’t do it.” That was about a year and a half before last November, when I again saw Don at this conference that we both go to in California… And Don comes up to me and he’s very excited, and he says “Oh, I need to show you… I’ve written you the most wonderful introduction.” And I realized “Uhh… I’m gonna have to write the book.” [laughter]

Feross Aboukhadijeh: Things that make it hard. So the first is that companies can’t donate money to people, in general. It’s a lot harder for a company to do a donation than it is for them to just buy a product. So if I was selling a license to a text editor, like Sublime Text, for $100, then pretty much any developer at that company could just buy that editor and then expense the $100 to their company, and their company would have no problem paying for that editor, because it’s making their developers more productive.

But if that same developer goes to their boss and says “Hey, we use code by this guy named Feross, and a bunch of these other people. They’re asking for donations… Can we donate to them?”, their manager is gonna be like “How do we do that? We need an invoice saying that we’re paying for something. We’re not a charity, we’re a company, so we can buy things for ourselves, but we can’t just give money away.”

And even if that manager happens to be one of the few managers who really would appreciate the value of open source and wants to donate, and they go to their CFO or their finance officer and say they want to do this, that person’s gonna be like “Who’s this person? We can’t just give money to a random person. How are we gonna explain that to our shareholders, or on our taxes?”

One big problem is what are you actually asking for from these companies? If you’re not giving the something that they can just pay for, then they’re not gonna be able to support you. That’s one huge lesson I learned.

An example, what can you actually ask for? You can say “Okay, this is not a donation, this is a sponsorship. You’re buying advertising, basically, on the project’s website. We’re gonna get your logo there and we’re gonna put a link to your site. We’re gonna say you support open source.”

Andy Hunt: Exactly, exactly. So I would say – I don’t know that they’re my favorites, but I think that they’re the most important ones that people need to pay attention to, and heed… There’s a new tip called “Don’t outrun your headlights”, and it kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier, about Dijkstra talking about the importance of being a humble programmer. Not going faster that you can see. Taking small steps, small bites. And there’s several different tips that express variations of this idea. The essence of design, going for something that’s gonna be easiest to change, taking the smallest steps possible; the essence of agility, trying something small, seeing what happens, and then acting on that feedback. So there’s a set of tips that go around this idea of not going faster than you can; taking the small steps, getting the feedback, working on it… And that’s expressed in a couple of different ways, from a couple of different angles, different levels of abstraction, but it’s a very common thought of “Don’t overextend yourself.”

If you’re trying to be as clever as you possibly can when you’re writing the code, you’ve got no bandwidth left when it’s time to debug it, or explain it to someone, or port it, or do whatever you have to do with it. You’ve already maxed out your capacity, your capability; you’ve got no headroom. So you actually wanna go the exact opposite - you wanna write the absolute simplest, most concise, most elegant thing you can get away with, and then go from there.

Mehan Jayasuriya: Yeah, so it is kind of all of the above. It is very much a thing that varies from project to project. This is one of the ways in which we try to maintain as much flexibility as we can, and sometimes our lawyers and our grants people hate us for the amount of flexibility that we give folks… But we do wanna understand that there’s all sorts of different setups that people have for maintaining open source projects. Some of the projects we fund could be a loan developer who’s kind of the steward of that project, some of them could be a 501(c)3, a non-profit organization, like you said, like the Tor Project, or Freedom of the Press Foundation, or something like that. And then there’s everything in between, there’s all other different types of projects.

So we try to provide funding in the way that makes the most sense for the project receiving it, while also educating them on things like tax liability and some of these questions that they may have to answer down the line if we do provide them with a chunk of money. On our application form actually we ask people “Are you an individual applicant? Are you a for-profit? Are you a non-profit?” We also ask them, “How much funding do you want to receive from us, and in what currency?” And then based on those questions, that kind of starts the conversation that we have with the awardee, once the award has been granted, about “Alright, what’s the best way for you to receive these funds?”

[27:59] So if you are a 501(c)3 we can give you a grant, instead of an award. That way, since you are a non-profit organization receiving those funds, you don’t have to pay taxes on it. There’s certain other restrictions that we would maybe have to abide by in other cases, where if you’re a 501(c)3 there’s certain things that can change the way that the funding is received and handled, and things like that.

If you’re an individual, you’re a group of individuals or something like that, we normally ask one person to step up and say “I’m gonna be the person to receive this money, and then is responsible for any tax liability”, and things like that. We’ve given money to folks in Albania, we’ve given money to folks in India, we’ve given money to folks all over the globe, and in some cases if we need to make a wire transfer to a bank account in a country at the other side of the world, we’ll make that happen, if that’s what we need to do to get the funding to the person.

But then in a lot of other cases too, we’re kind of having a relationship with the grants manager at another non-profit and kind of granting them money in more of a traditional foundation way. So it really depends on the needs of the project, and we try to be as flexible with the funding as we can.

Jen Looper: It doesn’t touch NativeScript or Vue, but it touches me really closely, because this idea of foundation - I need to talk to Jory a little bit more on what it means to be a foundation… Because we’re actually in the process of turning Vue Vixens into a private foundation at Progress… So it’s super-interesting to go through, and I’m working closely with Progress’ legal, and I’m very grateful that they’re giving me all this pro bono work; Progress legal, accounting and taxes. Basically, I’m not responsible for paying all those taxes that I’d probably have to pay if I crowdsourced everything, and had everything donated. But I’d like to have a better grasp, and maybe I will be able to after this conference, of what it means to be a foundation.

I think one of the keynotes said “A foundation is just another tool, another framework”, because maybe they’ve gotten pushback on being a foundation… So it’s interesting, I wonder how does it impact you as a brand to be a foundation, how does it feel for your users to be part of a foundation? I’m just learning all this stuff.

Henry Zhu: I don’t think I ever thought “People think it’s gonna be dumb or bad.” I actually never thought that. It was just more like “What’s gonna happen to me? Am I just seeking after something and taking the risky road, instead of just having a safe, comfortable job and working on it half-time? Maybe I should be okay with just working on it half-time, which is already better than a lot of people.” But I guess in the end I felt so convicted to wanna do it that much that I decided that was the right thing to do, and when I went there I felt pretty confident in going in and doing it.

In the end, I didn’t really have any issues, when I got to that point. But before, there was a lot of just not even wanting to think about it in the first place, because you’re like “That’s such a dream” or “That’s such an impossible thing”, that I never just thought about it seriously. So trying to do that, thinking about the taxes and insurance and all that… You know, just trying to make it seem more realistic; not in terms of like it’s easy or hard, just that “Those are things I’m gonna need to think about if I’m gonna do this.”

Bill Kennedy: [51:50] I do. So I was just in India for the Go conference there… A very quick back-story… So I met a young man last year named Aman Kapur… A young man, he was in school, and he wanted to take my training class last year, so I was fortunate enough to get him into the training class last year.

And I got to meet him again this year. And again, he’s a student, I think he’s in his final year. What’s amazing about this young man is he saw a problem at his school where the school is trying to place people in jobs, but all of the information about placement gets lost in this 1990 banner that moves across the screen, and there’s no real way to get to the data or interact it, and Aman built a mobile application using Go on the back-end to scrape all of these data - he calls it Placement Pal - so the students don’t have to miss anything. They can see all of the opportunities they have for getting jobs, and it’s all in one place. And I saw what he built and I don’t think I could have built it. I mean, he built a beautiful mobile app. It was all browser-based but for mobile - amazing. So Aman Kapur - I’m just so impressed with this young man and what he’s doing, and he’s just starting out. So amazing.

The other thing that I saw at GopherCon in India was a talk by Matt Ellis. Next to Stabby’s talk - Sean Kelly gave an amazing talk on interfaces. Matt did a talk on a product he’s working on called Flogo - Flogo. They call it an ultralight edge microservices framework, but it’s - and maybe I’m wrong, but my impression was like, “Oh my God, a business dev person with just a little bit of programming skills could actually build out integrations and little web services on this thing.” It was really impressive with what they built, and they created a plug-in environment so you could add anything. They’ve already got stuff for like sending taxes, and these types of things.

You’ve gotta look at it because it was mind-blowing what he was showing me, and the UI’s were all there… I think it’s going to help a lot of companies to be able to move quicker on certain types of projects that they need to work on. And like I said, you didn’t necessarily need the highest-end developers to get – but your higher-end developers could add plugins. Anyway, Matt Ellis of Flogo - really impressive stuff.

Alyssa Wright: I mean, as we sit at the brink of a debt ceiling crisis, and like the IRS funding coming out from us, it’s hard for me to imagine that we’re going to get more taxes on anything for public good. But that’s my perspective on the political context that we’re in, not necessarily the need for collective responsibility. So I continue to think that this will be a private entity, maybe collaboration. You know, like organizations, academic institutions… Maybe government is a player, but I can’t imagine that we’re gonna have a federal tax to help us figure out open source sustainability. I think it’s on us to figure it out as an individual organization.

Adam Jacob: It’s pretty serious now. They’ve got Jim Zemlin money. They got the blessing of the Pope, you know… And so now, when you go into those sales meetings, they put a number out, they’re like “Hey, here’s what you’re gonna pay”, and the response from the other side of the table is always gonna be “Why shouldn’t I just use OpenTofu for free?” And then he didn’t answer. And the best answer is “We can’t trust those OpenTofu guys. They stole from us, we sent them a cease and desist, we sent a DMCA takedown letter…”, on and on and on. It doesn’t have to be true that they stole from you. It just has to exist. They just need the evidence in the universe. Because once the evidence is in the universe, you can be like “Well, some people say… Some folks were pretty sure…”

Luis Villa: The TL;DR for copyright ownership of code is the same as it is with every piece of music, every piece of art, every piece of poetry… If a human writes it down, it’s copyrighted. But of course, you see already where we’re going with that, which is the “if a human” part. And that’s where this all gets very complicated, very fast, right? Because the basics of code - there’s a lot of sort of common mythologies around intellectual property. “I need to put All Rights Reserved. I need to put the years.”

There was a big – Curl, the popular Get Things From the Internet program recently did a big commit a couple of days ago, removing all of the years from the headers of all of it, because somebody finally convinced the author like – because he had done a commit saying, “Oh yeah, well, we’re gonna add 2023.” And somebody’s “you don’t actually have to do that.” And he’s “Really? I’ve been wasting my time all these 20-some years” that he’s been maintaining Curl, updating those every year… And on Twitter and Mastodon a few people chimed in saying “No, really. You don’t have to do it.” And he was “Okay, great.” Bonk! Gone.

[06:06] But there are these sort of mythologies built up, but like the bottom line is really if you as a human being exercising some kind of - in the US in particular, exercising some kind of creativity… If you’re writing down a phone book, you don’t get copyright on that. And again, the exercising creativity part is going to come in - and then you have ownership of your code.

The one other thing that’s relevant in this context is, of course, that our employers often can contract that right away from us, right? So when we sign our employment contracts, there’s a clause in there that essentially says, “Yeah, you’re gonna write a bunch of copyrightable stuff, and we, your employers are gonna own that.” So there’s some nuance there, but that’s the general gist of it, is that if you’re writing for an employer, that employer is going to own that stuff.

And so then we come to this question of, “Okay, well, what happens if a machine writes it?” But before I want to talk about that, I want to tell like my favorite funny story, which is very relevant. So on Wikipedia there was a – one of the big things that the Wikipedia legal team does is it defends people who edit Wikipedia against legal claims. So that can be like very dramatic stuff, like a politician is suing because they think their biography is slander, or libelous… Or it can be very silly things, like a monkey took a picture, took a selfie, and somebody uploaded that selfie to Wikipedia, and there’s this very – it ended up being, in some ways, a sort of sad story, but the person who owned the camera, who’s a nature and wildlife photographer, told Wikipedia that he owned the copyright on the photo. And long story short, the Wikipedia legal department believed that this takedown request was not quite wasn’t done with the proper formalities, and that also… His original story was that the animal had taken the selfie, and as I said, a human - and this is where it ties into the machine learning part of things - a human has to take the picture.

And so there was a whole big drawn-out drama, threats of litigation over this question of “Well, okay, did the monkey take the picture?” And eventually, the US Copyright Office, in just sort of a footnote kind of way, weighed in and was “We’re pretty sure monkeys cannot take – if a monkey takes a selfie, no copyright.” There wasn’t a human involved in that loop.

And that was the sort of abstract thing, because it turns out the category of – there is a category on Wikipedia of “Art created by animals”, which is fairly small, but includes paintings done by elephants, a few other… There’s some sheep selfies in there, if I recall correctly… And that gets us to this question though of like - okay, well, when we use machine learning to create code, to create, as we’ve all seen over the past few months, really interesting works of imagery, is that more like the monkey? What happens to the humans who are in that loop, to the computers who are in that loop, to the data that’s in that loop? And it suddenly gets very complicated very fast, and I think part of the challenge is that honestly, attorneys can understand the monkey stole the camera and pointed this– As you start talking to them about “Well, here’s how we trained the model”, eyes start to glaze over, and it gets very complicated very fast.

So I don’t know, is that where we start today? Do we want to talk about, “How much are you assuming that you’re –” It feels like every technologist has wanted to dig into machine learning. I don’t know, how much of you three had time to do that?

Mike McQuaid: It’s one of those things for open source that you don’t really understand until you run a big project for a while. When your project has no possession effectively, then there’s not really a need as much for a thing like Software Freedom Conservancy. The problem is when you have – we had a Kickstarter a few years ago which was really great, that let us buy some Mac Minis which we used for our CI. As I get older - thankfully not that old, and I’m a bit of a paranoid person anyway - part of me is like, “Okay, well these CI’s are in a data center that a friend of mine runs on OSP in the UK, and we have a bunch of money in a bank account, which again, I have access to, but other people have credentials too, and stuff like that. What happens to those servers if I get hit by a car? What happens when they go down? What happens to the money in that bank account?”

That stuff gets a little bit more worrying and it becomes one of these things where you think, “Well, it’s actually not very responsible of me just assuming that this project will survive my health”, and it also means that if I ever did want to or have to step away from the project, then the unwrangling of me from the project could be a lot more difficult.

[01:12:06.03] What the Software Freedom Conservancy provides is a legal entity to own these things, and a legal entity to… If Homebrew ever got sued for whatever reason, then the Software Freedom Conservancy would defend us. On top of that as well, they’re a 501(c)(3) for non-Americans and a nonprofit in the U.S., which makes it a lot easier to accept donations, which are tax-deductible for individuals and corporations to provide. We’ve not managed to do a mass amount of fundraising yet; that’s probably my next big project, to try and lean in on that a bit more, because our recurring monthly revenue is zero, but basically just all those things that kind of help provide some more infrastructure and architecture around the governance and running of the project.

Jordan Lewis: One of the most interesting things to me about doing performance measurement of simple things – because that’s what we really love to do as programmers… We’re like “Well, let’s try to figure out, what’s the fastest possible way that we can write this fairly simple algorithm that just does a couple of things?” So we love to do that, we love to write a micro-benchmark… Go’s micro-benchmark support is excellent; it’s got all these different facilities, and there’s benchstat, and you can profile things up the wazoo etc.

One thing that I find very interesting and that’s kind of bitten me several times is that if you just take a look at a CPU profile of a little micro-benchmark that does a bunch of allocating, it’s gonna seem really cheap. Those allocations are really fast, because the garbage collector is really good when the computer isn’t under load, and when there isn’t GC pressure; when the garbage collector isn’t too taxed, it’s gonna be very cheap to allocate, and the garbage collection is gonna happen in the background, and everybody’s gonna be pretty happy.

What I’ve seen over and over again is under-estimating the effects of doing a lot of allocations in a real program, kind of micro-benchmark versus real program. In a real program, those allocations are almost always going to add up to be more than what it seems like in your micro-benchmark.

Andreas Kling: Right. The company that I have is just kind of a necessity to be able to pay taxes correctly in Sweden, where I live. So it’s not a company that aims to make any kind of product. It’s more just a way for me to pay my dues with the government, and do everything the right way. But it also allows me to pay other people to work on stuff, which is a very recent phenomenon. For the longest time, I was making just enough to scrape by.

Adam Stacoviak: That’s even it, too - the difficulty of reporting it, especially as someone who’s only collecting 1099’s… That’s really difficult, it really is. And you’re so focused on just like – at least for me, in my experience… I was so focused on just showing up and doing that I felt like “Gosh, could taxes be a little easier to do?” And so I just didn’t do them… [laughter] For like a couple years. It was no big deal. But the point was this - what started to move it into this full-time business, or even an option for it, was 1) obviously, we’ve heard the back-story of Jerod, and all these things sort of orchestrating and coming to be, but then 2) I had just been recently married; my wife and I, we met in 2010, we got married in 2012, and this is around that time I mentioned when I stepped away, late 2012… And I would say 2012 to 2013 was the years we began to formulate what has become a business.

It had been in place since 2009, didn’t really become anything business substance until 2012-2013, and that’s when my wife helped me as a man guard my time… Because as somebody who’s just ambitious, you will often throw yourself into things that you probably shouldn’t say yes to. You probably should say no more often. And to help me understand that and guard me from that, she said “If you’re gonna do this, if you’re gonna take time away from our relationship, our future etc. you’ve gotta find some way to make money, make it worth it.”

What was really interesting about that was having the heart to love on and care for our community and show up and do these things basically for free; no one downloads a podcast and pays a buck, right? It’s all for free… But somewhere along the line we’ve gotta find a way to make a business model or develop a business model that can help us do what we plan to do, which is create this awesome content, and thrive in the community, do it consistently, like the three C’s say… But have a model that allows us to operate that way. So that was the hardest part, figuring out what that model was.

It gets kind of easy, because sponsorship for podcast seems to be the most typical - especially now that it’s become a thing - earlier, in 2009-2012, even in that era, there weren’t a lot of podcasts; it was still early. It was before Serial, and the big boom of podcasts, and whatever. So obviously it would make sense to build a business around sponsors.

Now, the early version was like no sponsors, members-only kind of thing… And in all honesty, I would love to run a membership-driven only kind of business… Maybe not love. It would be nice, it would be fortunate to do that, but it’s just not enough to do what we try to do. So we’ve tried some different models…

Nick Janetakis: Okay, I’ll have to check it out. Yeah, it’s interesting, because with Htop - you know, it’s a tool I’ve also been using for a really long time. But usually, I’m reaching for it very occasionally. On my really, really nice work machine now, if I want to see if my CPU cores are pegged - all four of them, by the way - I can run an Htop and just see those little bars to be like “Oh, well, three CPUs are maxed out, the fourth one’s still doing good.” Or maybe I just want to see what is using the most memory out of a list of processes.

So it’s interesting that you mentioned configurability. In my mind, I would want to configure nice themes with tmux and everything, but like an htop, it didn’t even ever cross my mind once to like jump into its config to tweak it out… Just because usually I’m going in a very specific thing, and then like exiting out 20 seconds later.

chg: For sure. So I think one of my core ideas is that the web – the web is hypermedia. The thing that made the web interesting - at the start, in any event - was it was a distributed hypermedia system. And there was a lot of thinking that went into that, there were a lot of new ideas, and it was something that was developed in reaction to the older sort of 1980s-style thick clients. This idea – there’s this thing that, you know, if you’re familiar with Roy Fielding, who… I don’t know how nerdy your listeners are, but he wrote a really famous dissertation sort of about the web back in I think the late ‘90s. And the design of the web, and the way hypermedia works is it’s designed such that there’s a really strong decoupling between the client and the server. And the client here is defined as the web browser. And so one thing I try to stress to people is when they think about a web browser, even – just take JavaScript out of the whole equation here, and think about the fact that you have a piece of software on your device, that can talk to a pet shop, it can talk to a car lot, you can reserve a hotel with it, you can get your news from it… And this one client that is sort of a universal client that’s able to speak hypermedia, and is able to do all these things. And if you told someone in the 1980s that they would be using the same piece of software to pay their taxes, work with their bank, pay their utility bills, and do everything else - order the food or the dinner for the evening - they would have looked at you cross-eyed, because that’s just crazy. How could you have a client that – it just wouldn’t have computed for those people.

So I think that hypermedia - it was really exciting. I remember – I was sort of like late in the game. I was very young when the web sort of hit… But looking back on it, you can see the excitement around this sort of different way of building software that was based on this notion of hypermedia.

And just to give your listeners a definition of what hypermedia is - it’s something that has hypermedia controls in it. And hypermedia controls are things like links and forms. That’s if you’re just talking about HTML. So links and forms. And what’s special about links and forms, or what’s interesting about them, is that they encode an interaction with a remote system within themselves. So when you get a web page from some new website that you’ve gone to, the links and forms that are in that web page have the URLs and the interactions with that remote system baked into the HTML itself, baked into themselves. They’re sort of self-contained; they contain the remote logic necessary to do the things that website wants to do. And that gets at something called the uniform interface from Roy Fielding’s dissertation. But it’s really that idea of hypermedia controls that’s what defines the hypermedia in my estimation. And HTMX, what it does is it generalizes that idea. It takes the two hypermedia controls most people are familiar with if they do web development, that is links and forms, and then generalizes it so that any element can effectively act as a hypermedia control.