Adam Stacoviak: [01:27:59.25] Okay, so the Iconic Pro Package… Hey, Orman, if you like this, pay us… But listeners, just check it out. Don’t buy this. Don’t go and buy this. I’m kidding. You do what you want. Solo is 99 bucks a year, and team is 249 a year. And you get access to all the icons. There’s new icons every week. So I think if you revisited this as your passive income plan, John - steal their model; borrow their model.

Adam Stacoviak: So you’re selling your stuff to start this new company, and even in the video you say you don’t have a plan for income for the next (I think you said) month, or a few weeks at least. So it’s not hard for you to get hired, because as we know, you’ve got a ton of experience with iOS, so it’s gonna be easy for you to get hired pretty much anywhere, should you really need money and pay bills… But you have choices, and the choices you’ve made are actually what are financially strapping; you’ve made choices to be financially strapped to this point, right?

It’s not like you couldn’t go out and make more money. You could go get hired for $150,000 or $200,000/year it seems like. It seems like your financial position is based on your own choice to be where you’re at.

Adam Stacoviak: What's pretty interesting is something you've mentioned there, talking to the designers at GitHub about this, is that these choices manifest into infinite complexity when it comes to hierarchy on a web page or a design… And I guess ultimately the software behind it is empowered, but gosh, I'm primarily an interface kind of person, and so I think about user experience all the time, and I actually was in the nonprofit business for a while, where we were doing recurring donations and single donations, and it was very difficult to sort of give people a well-ironed path that they can easily go down without having to give them so many user experience-fatiguing opportunities throughout the process, because you wanted to give them infinite opportunities to give, because hey, people are generous… "Help me give the way I want to give, because I'm the user I wanna do." And I actually asked this question to you before in the notes we sent you about what we might ask you… Because I actually almost gave somebody some money recently through a sponsorship, and I wanted to give them a one-time – it wasn't a long-time sponsorship opportunity for me, and I couldn't give them a one-time donation… I was like "Hm. Okay."

But now, hearing the other side of this, of how that might change or cannibalize recurring, I can see how in the name of sustainability, part of that is stability… So you wanna give somebody (an organization, an individual) an opportunity to understand what their revenue or what their income might be for that project, so they can plan accordingly. If you have spikes up and down, it could be difficult… And obviously, cannibalizing some of your recurring opportunities would be a pretty bad thing.

Gergely Orosz: It’s also really interesting, because the last decade, like from 2008, which is actually when the financial crisis ended - and it did hit tech a little bit; it depends on what region, but for the most part it wasn’t as bad as it is now… But that was combined with the revolution of – there was still the internet boom going on, the internet was still spreading… I remember the stats every year, more and more people were on the internet… And the mobile smartphone revolution started. So those things drove – companies like Facebook, where… Facebook was founded in 2004. Snap was founded later. Dropbox, Pinterest… Sorry, maybe not Pinterest, but Airbnb - they were all founded around like 2008, and there’s this wisdom, I think Paul Graham likes to say that the best time to start a startup is during a recession… And he kind of referred to how many great companies were born… Y Combinator was also, I think, started around that time, or started investing…

[46:06] But I think what everyone conveniently forgot is that there was a technology revolution going on, and there was a whole new host of companies. Uber was actually started in like 2010, off of iPhone. So there was this huge demand to get people to build things that did not exist at a new scale, distributed systems, mobile, web - you name it, it was on fire. But what I’m a little worried about is I look ahead for the next 10 years… Do we have a similar technology revolution? And internet is everywhere, mobile phones are everywhere… The Metaverse, actually, and augmented reality is there… I think they’re investing so much, because they hope that this will be the next revolution, but it seems it will be a lot smaller, if anything. There’s AI that’s kind of spreading, but it’s not taking the whole industry by as much force as we’ve seen… So I’m kind of wondering, if we’re gonna look back, are we gonna say that this was the golden decade for employees in terms of - there’s such incredible demand that just being an employee and taking very little risk, you could make outsized income, if you’re at the right place, at the right time, at the right companies, but even working at these big companies… And we might see, now that the market is cooling, that there will be just fewer of these opportunities, and it’ll be more niche areas.

I look through the public reports of Meta, Facebook, Google, and I looked at what is the one thing that they’re all saying that they’re investing in, which is a fancy way of saying, “We’re gonna put a bunch of money and we’re gonna hire people, and we’ll pay them well.” And the only thing that they all mentioned was AI. That’s the only one, but I don’t think AI will be as big as, let’s say, generic software engineering was; there was a mix of – we needed everything. We needed [unintelligible 00:47:38.23] mobile… And also, realistically, those skills, of building large-scale distributed systems, or large mobile apps, or large web apps - they’re a lot more common today than they were like 5 or 10 years ago, and now there’s a lot of infrastructure. You no longer need to build or manage your server fleet; you just use AWS, and use their service that just auto-scales for you.

So I feel there’s definitely been a commoditization of skills that used to be very unique, and it’s going to continue, and the only way I think we would see this golden decade continue after this bounce back is if there was more areas that are just new, that you need to learn, and a few people know it, or you need to hire these people who keep doing it. Data engineering is a little bit of this right now, machine learning, AI… I think it’s only around AI that I’m seeing a large pull right now.

Jon Calhoun: Yeah, mine was – when I started learning Go, I realized that there weren’t any resources like… Like, Rails tutorials is how I learned Ruby on Rails, and I really liked that project-based book, or video course, or whatever; it ends up being both if you want, but… I really liked that approach, and when I was learning Go, they didn’t have it, so I basically just started taking notes with my journey, and I got to a point where I was like “I should probably turn this into something and share it with people and try to create something similar.”

And then it just happened to be that the startup I was working at was in some rough times, and it made more sense for me to just branch out and see how that went. So at first, I started doing consulting and teaching, with the two sort of augmenting each other, but it didn’t take very long until I’ve actually found a place where I was living off of just the teaching income, so that’s what I kind of focused on.

[08:14] It’s been a lot more fun; it’s really rewarding to see people get stuff and to take a different approach. It’s kind of interesting to me, because I see the benefit in having all these different styles put together, and I really feel like - and I’m hoping as a result of Covid we start to see all of these sort of get merged together, and find ways to find the best of both worlds… Because up until now, I just don’t feel like that’s happened. But we can go into the one-size-fits-all discussion first, that’s completely fine. Or, Mat, do you wanna talk about your teaching experience?

Will McGugan: Um, I guess I could share – I don’t know if I said, but this is my plan B. So plan A - I was working on Textual and realized I got a bit of a following, and I had this idea for the web application. And at the time, I was a bit down on my day job, and I figured what I’d do is I’d take a year off. I’ve got some savings… I would just live frugally, live off my savings, and some income from sponsorship which I was getting the time… And that would have happened. If it was this point, I would have been running low on money… But that’s when the venture capital firm got in touch with me, and we discussed it, and I discussed my plans, and came up with a business plan, a pitch deck, and turned everything around. So it was as much a surprise to me as it was to anyone else.

James Long: No, those are all paid, yeah. I don’t have a free plan. So those are all paying, 800. So $3,200 revenue. The cost of the business was really only a couple hundred dollars total. So about $3,000, which is not a bad side income stream.

Adam Stacoviak: Certainly a plan of exposure for, as you mentioned, smaller teams. So if Jerod and I got excited one day and we were like “Hey, we wanna compete with everybody who does CI and CI”, given that we may be willing to share a percentage of the income with GitHub - which we wouldn’t mind, right Jerod…?

Daniel Vassallo: Yeah. And I think one technique that I really like is the idea of negative visualization, that I think applies to everyone, no matter on what end of the spectrum you lie, whether you prefer the structure, stability, whatever, or more chaotic sort of arrangements… You should be thinking of what would happen if what I’m living right now gets disrupted? What if I were to lose my job? What would the consequences be? Would I be able to recover easily? Will I be able to find another job quickly? Would I be able to keep my current lifestyle? Would it affect me significantly? And if you convince yourself that things are fine, then you’re in a good spot. I think you sort of suddenly realize that there’s not much to worry about, and whatever happens, happens. That you will be able to react.

[45:53] But if you realize that you’re in a bad spot, that you’re unlikely to get hired maybe because your skills are now – you know, something I realized for example when I was working at Amazon, in these senior positions, at big companies… There’s probably only maybe ten companies in the world that would want that kind of level or that speciality, because they’re senior executive directors for some specific thing that maybe only Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and maybe Facebook would ever want. So what if those five companies were suddenly to realize they don’t care about this act function anymore? What would it make to you? Would you be able to do something different? Would you want? Would it affect your dignity, or your pride, or would it affect your lifestyle, because you’ll make significant less money? Are you prepared?

So it’s not a pleasant thing to think about the bad things that could happen, but I think it’s a technique to, paradoxically, improve your peace of mind. In my course I like to use the example of the preppers, the survivalists, who worry about a volcano erupting… What do they do? They don’t just worry about it and say, “Oh, hopefully it won’t happen.” They prep. They stock their bunker with food and medicine and water and fuel and whatever… So they don’t want it to happen, but if it were to happen, they know that they have reasonably prepared.

So I would recommend everyone to do this… To think about the worst-case scenarios and how you would react to them. Sometimes you realize all you need is a little bit of planning; maybe you can buy some insurance, maybe if you have some emergency fund savings, you’re in a much better spot… Maybe you realize you need to reskill yourself, to retrain yourself, you need to know some other things to be able to fall back to them if they were to happen.

Some of the people in our community like having some side hustles for this season, to know that if I were to get disrupted, I have something independent that’s going on. Yes, it might only be 10% of my income, not something significant, but if I were to get disrupted or affected significantly, there’s something I could fall back to, and eventually I could [unintelligible 00:48:02.29] which is much better than going back to square one, starting from scratch.

Mutembesa: Yes, thank you very much. One of the things that we really do is – so there’s two ways to think about it. One of the ways is that you have a regulator or an authority on that kind of data, that is working with you. If it’s a hospital and you’re looking at working with patient data or clinicians, then you want to also be working with the lab techs. In agriculture specifically, which is sort of where our way in has been a bit greater, is once you’re working with groups of farmers, you’re also working with a national crop service or national animal service. In that way, what you do is that you end up having a lot of work go into how fair can we be in our data collection geospatially, what are the important areas to go to, so that there is data representation that has equity.

If you’re involving multiple teams or multiple groups within a certain community-sensing exercise, you have to have a selection criteria, which is not developed by us alone. That has to be in collaboration with a national regulator, which means that such a selection protocol or a selection criteria is sensitive to different national or community needs… So like, okay, we need people to participate, but there has to be some gender equity in the participation, where we always try to balance participation of both women and men. Of course, there’s some degree of sexism, and in some places it’s actually a challenge due to some of the cultural norms that you have to overcome.

But we look at the idea of ethics from that fast point - the ethics, the bias and the data, looking at who is collecting that data, geographically where are they going, and being able to involve the subject matter experts, and then provide the subject matter experts… They weigh in, and then we provide the technology that sort of sustainably has to be able to collect this data over time. So that’s the first way we look at ethics, or fairness, or transparency, or accountability for these data collection mechanisms.

Coming around all the way at the end of the projects, until recently, we started doing what are known as evaluations where we try and evaluate the impact that we have had on those communities. So we go back to the community – of course, we have close-knit relationships with them, and so we have regular sessions where we have interfaces with them… But at the end of a certain trial period we go back to them and then we do some impact assessment.

[28:01] If we have collected data from you, has the data come back to help you? Ever since we gave you this tool, has this tool been of help to you? And using that kind of technique you can be able to quickly evaluate which parts of the livelihoods of our technologies or this data collection impacted. You know, did it improve some metrics that we thought it would improve on the holistic, end-to-end picture? Has this had a significant impact? Being able to measure that impact with some relative accuracy from a qualitative and quantitative point of view.

So recently, maybe just as an example really, to just be very clear - we had a livelihood assessment; we wanted to know, from 2016 (maybe 2018 more) we have been working with groups of about 200 farmers; we wanted to evaluate how well we have contributed to their livelihoods. Because when we first met these farmers, they were small holder farmers, with a very low income, just enough for their food and for their households… So we tried to evaluate whether our tools that we have put into their lives - that is including a tool to diagnose their plants, a tool for data collection, which they send to the national service, and the national service gets back to them (the national crop service).

We have had a tool which we like to joke and call it like a farmers’ WhatsApp, but it’s really a question and answer tool that allows them to connect with experts, and also connect with fellow farmers to increase the local knowledge transfer between and among them.

So we evaluated for a period of about three years that we’ve been trying with about 200+ farmers how has that impacted them financially, socially, economically, intellectually, among other things. We’re about to publish this work, and you could definitely see a positive correlation with the use of these technologies, and many of the people that have come out to be leaders. Now many of these farmers - about half or more - are known or considered as village information points, where people within their villages or localities are able to run to them.

So once you start seeing that positive impact trend within the communities, that is, you know gender, then you start seeing the connection between the endpoints and the selection criteria that we had, that sort of tries to minimize bias within the data, within the groups participating, and many other things. That’s how we look at bias. It’s a two-ended stake for us - before, and then after.

Emma Bostian: Yeah, it’s exciting, but I’m also terrified… But it’s interesting to see how different companies operate. Lynda was very structured; you had weekly meetings with your producers… I’m sure you can attest to this too, Jason - Frontend Masters is very much on you, which is great, but it’s also like “Oh, there’s no accountability.”

But then you have Egghead. Egghead is very much also self-directed, but each of these have different payment plans; I don’t like “payment plans”, that’s not the right phrase… Different payment structures, I guess… So yeah, to the point of like passive income – some companies will actually pay you upfront to work, and then you also make royalties off that… But some companies - you’re solely on royalty-based income. So it really just kind of varies… But agreed, the amount of work you put into a course is absurd, and then you also have to update it.

I wanted to just mention a few of my favorite course-makers… To Wes Bos, tangentially, is Scott Tolinski. He’s incredible; his Level Up Tutorials site… I have taken so many courses on there, he’s a great teacher, but he’s always updating it. Tyler McGinnis as well, I loved all his React and JavaScript stuff. Dave Ceddia works really hard… Bianca Gandolfo - I liked her courses over on Frontend Masters as well.

You can tell great teachers… They make it seem so easy, but when you look at the amount of work they’ve put into it… It’s like “Oh, that’s why you’re so good at this”, right?

Sahil Lavingia: Totally, 100%. Yeah. So with Bezos and Amazon I think it’s interesting, because he has a similar mindset, I would say; the faster horse thing. He always says “Look, we know exactly what we’re gonna be doing in ten years. We’re gonna be dropping prices, we’re gonna be shipping faster, we’re gonna have more inventory… It’s not that complicated. Stop focusing on the things we don’t know about, and do the things we already do, better.” That is his ethos. And even when you think about the Alexa, and things like that, Kindle etc. I think it’s still core to that vision. But he’s built the most valuable company on planet Earth maybe; I don’t know, it depends on the month, I guess.

So I think it’s a mindset, and I agree with it. I don’t think they are mutually exclusive at this point. I think you can totally build an Amazon by just this ultra-relentless focus on the customer. But I do think you end up with issue. You just have to acknowledge – look, there are a lot of Amazon employees that are pissed off, that are frustrated, that are peeing in cups in a warehouse because they can’t take bathroom breaks, or whatever… And I think you have to understand that Amazon lives in a broader world that is increasingly concerned about “late-stage capitalism”, billionaires, income inequality - these very prevalent issues in our time… And how does Amazon fit into that? Because I think at the end of the day you wanna be loved.

And I think even though Jeff Bezos executes on everything, I think the thing that Bezos and Dorsey share - and maybe this is just what happens when you become rich - but people don’t really like those people that much. And how do you do those things, how do you fulfill the customers’ needs and still be loved? Because I think that is a central component. And Bill Gates for me is still an all-time hero. He does that; people love Bill Gates, because he is running this amazing foundation, the largest in the world. I think he employs more people today than he did ever at Microsoft through it. So he made the leap. He is relentlessly focused on the customer. He doesn’t give a shit about profits or revenues (sorry for swearing).

Yeah, I think they are different attitudes. My guess is that Bezos will probably at some point have a similar realization to Bill Gates. Bill Gates is on his second mountain, and Bezos is still on his first, and Jobs died before he had the opportunity… So I don’t know; I don’t really have an answer for you, but I think it’s interesting to think about.

Allen Gunn: Sure. I’m not looking at my list of outcomes, so I’ll try and freestyle… But one that I’ve found really compelling, and I wouldn’t claim this event led to this outcome, but it’s something that was discussed at the event, and has continued to enjoy some very strong leadership… There’s a couple of funders - Ford Foundation and Sloan Foundation, that are really thinking holistically about what they call public interest infrastructure. Open source software, in their parlance, is a critical component of public interest infrastructure, and they’ve continued to commission resources and commission research and also to allocate resources to really make sure that we’re continuing to have this conversation with a research-driven lens, and really trying to characterize that which is and that which needs to be.

I really salute them for the leadership they’ve shown, both in supporting participation in these meetings - they actually help us buy some plane tickets - but they and their larger program work are driving this dialogue with this research lens and trying to make sure that we don’t treat this as a per-codebase, per-GitHub project type of paradigm, but instead think at systems levels around how open source supports critical internet infrastructure, critical public infrastructure and critical community infrastructure.

Some of the other interesting conversations that have gone forward - I have the privilege of facilitating and organizing a lot of events focused on free and open source, so there are a number of ongoing conversations about sustainability that I think got wind in their sales at that event. Again, I’m not saying they started there, but I think they certainly found springboard moments in there, if you’ll indulge me that metaphor.

One project that wasn’t there, and we’re still trying to get them to this year’s event - folks like the Reproducible Builds project. I don’t know if folks are familiar with that… I think it’s one of the most important free and open source projects going. It’s a bunch of folks, many of them from the Debian community, that are trying to figure out “How can we build software that we know at a deterministic level is matching the source code we think it came from?” This matters for security, it matters for integrity, it matters for all kinds of code quality and code reliability reasons.

[11:57] We’ve been working close to them over the past year. I think their approaches to sustainability are brilliant, because they are trying to do a multi-faceted model where they earn some money, fundraise some money, and otherwise sort of allow folks to contribute in kind… And I’ve seen a lot of communities doing that kind of hybrid sustainability models, and I think a lot of those conversations that happened last year have just given people food for thought, have given people ideas on trying “more than one thing.” Because if I were to offer a loving critique of mini free and open source projects, they tend to be a single revenue stream paradigm. Rare is the free and open source project that really intentionally thinks about a basket of individual donations, large donors, grant funding, earned income… And there are other options, depending on your religion, including sponsorship and investment. But yeah, I think that’s the kind of stuff that came up that I’ve found very gratifying.

I think the other conversations that have been ongoing are the complex dynamics of the ecosystem. Some of these free and open source projects are tied to large for-profit corporations, and that is neither a good or a bad thing, it is a complicated thing, because values and priorities do not always align. What I find compelling about those dynamics is how resilient having free and open licenses makes that paradigm… And that is to say, with free and open source, you are always able to fork or go in a different direction if you are feeling that the way a project is going is not consistent with what you wanna be working on. But I think those are problems that we’ll continue to discuss. How do we have free and open source projects enjoy the support of large companies, but also maintain autonomy and vitality independent of any one particular source of sustainability?

Annie Sexton: Yeah. Which - I won’t say the disappointment of that was surprising at all; it was just the staleness of every day. And I also want to say that many people would kill to have a job like that, where they just get paid to do nothing. And I think that’s fine to want that, and I don’t want to say “Oh, I’m just way more intellectual than other people. I’m just different.” I don’t want to come across that way. I want to acknowledge that I’m very lucky to have had a job in the first place, and so I’m grateful… I was very, very grateful for that income, but it was no good for my mental health. So I’m only speaking about my personal experience, and I don’t want this to turn into commentary of people who have types of job like that… Because having a job is a wonderful thing. Having income is a wonderful thing.

Louis Pilfold: So I don’t earn as much as I would if I was doing a developer job here in London. I would like to get my income up to the point where I could pay myself that full salary, and then I would really love to be able to start employing, or like outsourcing, or contracting or something the core team members. There’s a few people – the first one is probably Jack, who lives in Italy… He’s an amazing guy; he does so much work. And I would just love to be able to pay him for the amazing work he’s doing.

And yeah, it’s a bit daunting working out how we’d get enough money to be able to do those things, but everything’s moved so fast since v1, it makes me think “Oh, actually, this is really doable.” Things that didn’t seem possible before do seem possible.

There’s lots of avenues… I think sponsorship’s always gonna be a big part of that. And I like sponsorship, because it really feels like an open source thing to me, this idea that if you want something, you support it, whether it be by fixing a bug, or like testing something, or like giving them $5. That’s awesome. I really want to find ways to get more corporate sponsors like Fly. I think as more companies start to invest and use Gleam, I think we definitely naturally get more who want to support in that way. But I also want to explore doing some other things, like having maybe like a Gleam enterprise, which is the same as support, but it’s just wrapped in a way to help you get it through procurement. [laughs]

But things like premium educational content… There’s a bunch of open source projects that have something like that, where they just have like some amounts of educational content or references, and stuff like that… And then you pay a small for a company subscription amount of money, but large for an open source project amount of money, and that gives you access to that. And from talking to projects that do this, it seems that a lot of them - the companies don’t actually seem to use it that much. It’s just that companies like buying things, so I want to sort of play around with that interaction a little bit. It’s hard for a capitalist company to just say “Yes, we’ll give you some money”, but it’s easy for them saying “Oh yes, we’ll give you a few thousand dollars every X amount of time, such that we can have this relationship with you, and we have this content.” So that’s something to explore.

Other things are merchandise. I’ve got a friend working on a merch store… So if you want to buy your Gleam keycaps and Gleam T-shirts and Gleam stickers, that’ll be a thing we can hopefully do soon. I have no idea if that will actually make money or not, but I just love the idea of people having like little Gleam logos on their keyboard.

Parker Selbert: This is all anecdotal, but I think safety’s one part of it. It’s hard to be a contractor; it’s really hard to start software from nothing. To bootstrap something is tricky. And the amount of time it takes, if you have a day job, to build something else for that safety, to try to get to that place where you can actually run it without worrying about an income stream - it takes a lot of dedication. And that’s double work, in some ways, and not everybody’s up for that.

But then also, you get so many startups, and what’s the goal of most startups? I mean, they’re incubated in some way; they have people backing them, therefore those people want a payout. And usually, you have to grow to be able to get there, or you’re letting down your investors. And if you let down the investors and you don’t get to some sort of exit, then as a business you’re kind of a failure.

Whereas if you’re an indie mom and pop kind of place, or however you break it down, even if it’s just a few employees, you don’t have those – you just don’t have that incentive. It’s your lifestyle. And so I don’t know if people see lifestyle business as a detractor, but to me it seems like –

Alex Russell: [10:24] I’m apparently a product manager on the Edge team at Microsoft. But I still work on making web pages faster. And that work started when I was on the Chrome team at Google for a long time… Because we started to see that folks who were trying to build these kinds of richer experiences that we were just talking about were getting beached pretty frequently. Folks would start with high ambitions for the end user, and then because of the tools and techniques and cultural assumptions that they had brought with them from what was in circa 2015-2016 the dominant ideology about how you built nice things on the web, we ended up with teams who had built themselves into a corner with extremely tall piles of JavaScript, in a moment when the market was changing dramatically.

So since 2015 or 2016, we’ve seen just the continued explosion of what happened in 2007 with the iPhone moment. But from – I want to say 2013, 2014, it was pretty clear that diffusion was going to take hold worldwide, not just in wealthy Western markets, and that meant that we were going to see this extreme profusion of cheap devices, where every year, to the extent that Moore’s Law continued to play out, it meant that you could get more transistors per year, per dollar. But that didn’t translate into faster phones for most people; that translated into their first smartphone. And that meant that every year, the same capability got cheaper. And that just grew the market.

And so it’s only now, 2023-2024, that we’re starting to see full saturation, or let’s say replacement of what used to be the market for dumb phones being replaced by smartphones. Feature phone handsets were as late as 2019 half of the entire market in India, and that has finally rounded the bend. And so now we’re in a place where folks are starting to get maybe their second phones based on replacement rates and income worldwide. That’s not what it is maybe where we live, but the global reality is continuing to change… But that change, for most of the last decade, has meant that computers didn’t get any faster. They stopped getting faster. And so our patterns and practices as a culture for people who are building on the web had been set; they sort of cemented in 2013 on this idea of “CPUs get faster, networks always get faster, and that means we can afford more JavaScript every year.” And that has created one gigantic branch mispredict. And that great branch mispredict in the sky has caused us, sort of at a cultural level, to make choices that are not compatible with actually delivering good experiences for most people, including people who are wealthy, but just don’t happen to be at the right time in place right now… And so it’s been fascinating to see this turn to access, and then hopefully away… But I’m excited about HTMX and some of the patterns around it in that context.

Cory Doctorow: Oh, there’s a ton of them. So I’ll talk a little about interop – and as I say, I’ve got this other book coming out, “The internet con”, from Verso, in September, that’s just about interop. But audiences and artists get locked into platforms because platforms use the law and technology to block interoperability. Systems are intrinsically interoperable. Turing-completeness just seems to be like a thing we can’t get away from. I go to DevCon, Hope, or CCC, and there’s inevitably some presentation from someone who’s like “Hey, guess what? It turns out PostScript is Turing-complete, and I wrote a printer virus”, right? “It turns out that the scripting language for MySpace that lets you do animated GIFs is Turing-complete, and I wrote that MySpace virus”, right? You just can’t get away from it.

[54:03] You can always make interoperable things. The problem is that the normal interoperable things that we do - reverse-engineering bots, scraping, whatever - have become increasingly prohibited behind a wall of copyright, patent, trademark, trade secrecy, contract law, Terms of Service, and so on. We’ve created what Jay Freeman from the Cydia Project, he calls it “felony contempt of business model”, right? Like, when Apple wants to solve the fact that everyone who uses Windows uses Office, and Office for the Mac sucks, and so people are just throwing away their Macs because they can’t talk to Windows computers - they don’t like beg Bill Gates to make a better Mac Office, right? What they do is they reverse-engineer those Office file formats, and they make Pages, Numbers and Keynote. And they’re just like “Yeah, now it just works. You can switch from the Mac to the PC, PC to the Mac, you can send files back and forth…” And they even ran this ad campaign, this Switch campaign, about how you can just switch from one to the other.

So if you were to make a runtime, like an iOS runtime that let you leave your iPhone behind, or your iPad, and go to another platform, Apple would say that you’re a pirate, right? When they did it, it was progress. When you do it, it’s theft. They would nuke you until the rubble glowed. They would come after you with Computer Fraud and Abuse claim for violating their terms of service, they would say that you’re engaged in tortuous interference with contract, they would say that you violated Section 12.1 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by reverse-engineering, whatever.

As a practical matter, engineers can figure out how to do this. Engineers can figure out how to add extra app stores to platforms. We’ve got legislation pending in the US now about to be reintroduced, that came up in the last session, to create what’s called the link tax, where we’re going to say “If you talk about the news on social media, the media company gets a piece of it”, which is crazy. Talking about the news is like not a copyright violation. If you’re not allowed to talk about the news, it’s not the news. It’s a secret. But there are a couple of ways that tech platforms seriously steal for media companies. For one thing, every app has a 30% commission on every sale, to process a transaction.

Do you want to increase the subscriber revenue of every media company in America? Write a law that lets people install alternative app stores. And then there will be a race to the bottom for payment commissions. It won’t go to zero. It might go to 2%. So 28% increase on revenue for every subscriber, with one law. That’s more than you would get from a link tax. And that’s an interoperability measure, right? Letting people choose other software.

If you want to go even further, follow through on this law that we’ve got pending that forces the platforms to disaggregate their ad tech stacks, right? Google, or Facebook, they both operate a marketplace, a demand side platform and a sell side platform. It’s like the NASDAQ also owning the companies and the brokerages. Right? It’s like the referee owning the team. And so it’s no surprise that their share of income from the platforms for ads went from like 7% to 50%.

You want to increase the amount that ad supported media gets? Break up and make interoperable and disaggregated these ad tech stacks, so that they have to compete, so that they can’t just command these ridiculous shares of every dollar brought in in advertising.

So those are remedies that actually are about distributional outcomes, right? They change the amount of money being made by different entities. Not only that, but where we’ve had link taxes, like in Australia, where we created a link tax, the Murdoch Press took the link tax, gave it to its shareholders, and fired its reporters. Meanwhile, the smaller papers didn’t get the share of the link tax that the Murdoch papers did.

[58:09] So if we get rid of the app tax and the ad tax, then people starting small, independent publications are going to be able to get 100% of the revenue that they’re entitled to. It wouldn’t just be a gift to large media companies that could bargain for these rights. It would be a gift to everyone who makes media, including small, local, crowdfund-supported media platforms that are doing the shoe leather work of going into school meetings, and the waterboard meetings, and whatever. It’s not just a way to transfer money to private equity companies that have bought and strip-mined newspapers up and down the country.

So these are ways that technologists building interoperable layers like abstraction layers on top of things, or shims that sit between two different platforms, can actually help entertainers and media brands make more money by building something that audiences like better, while taking money out of the pockets of the big tech platforms that once promised you “Hey, this is a place that you can come and work for three years until you do your own startup”, and then said, “Oh, you’re not really going to be able to do your own startup, but I’ll tell you what - come work for us and we’ll give you massages and kombucha”, and are now like “Hey, guess what?”

Adam Stacoviak: I have an idea here. And Evan, maybe you might like this. So what if Mastodon.social was the de facto. And that’s fine, go there. If you’re brand new, and you have nowhere else to go, go there. What if it was encouraged to sign up there, but leave? Take your profile or whatever it’s called somewhere else. Like, it’s encouraged, where they track not only growth, like income, but also outgoing; like, they’ve found a home. Like, it’s the incubation place.

John Spurlock: So I guess stats is a good jumping off point to talk about OP3… It’s a little esoteric, and so you kind of have to know all the pieces. But I think we’ve talked about the various pieces at this point. So it solves basically three problems. The first problem is the problem that Jerodd, you talked about… It’s that we actually have these nice third-party independent analytic services, but the incentive for them is to take the download data that they get, and immediately join it to other third-party IP address databases to enrich that data… Because they’re interested in not only showing how many downloads a particular show has for an advertiser, but what the demographics of that audience is, and what the income of that audience is, and breakdowns by gender, and by ethnicity, and by political affiliation.

[00:24:08.27] And I’m sure you guys know, it’s just a matter of how much you want to spend to how kind of creepy the level of detail you can get, down to the neighborhood level, down to what apps they have installed, down to what they were yelling about… And they have an incentive to do it, because that makes their product more attractive. But they also have an incentive – or even if they were not as interested in that, they also then become, if they’re popular, like Chartable and some other companies, they become a very attractive acquisition target. So they can be joined by a yet larger company with their information, for strategic reasons.

So that is kind of one problem that’s out there. So even in – you mentioned already that Chartable and Podsights, two of the largest of these analytic services got acquired in February. And you can imagine, I’m sure even some of your listeners might be thinking “Oh, this sounds like a great business, so I could probably write some Perl scripts to do this. I’ll just be the next Chartable.” And that doesn’t really solve the problem, in my estimation, long-term; it just repeats the pattern. So they’re gonna get popular, and they’re gonna have the same incentives, they’re gonna – it’s the same sort of pattern. So that’s problem one.

Problem two is that the hosting companies themselves, there’s all of these hosting companies now; they are very mature, and they all offer very similar features. As you say, table stakes features. They all now have to have some sort of stats ability, so they have to task someone as part of their sprint every month, like “Oh, make sure the stats are clean, that we’re filtering out all the bots, and making sure we’re performing the calculations properly.” And they’re basically all showing very similar charts, similar charts and graphs. And it’s even more ironic, because the larger shows then turn around and use a third-party service to they use their stats, because they don’t trust the host stats.

So it’s table stakes, and it’s a lot of work, and they’re all doing it separately, right? So it’s not really value-add anymore. It used to be. Maybe even five years ago, it was like a selling point; you could say, “Hey, we offer great stats.” But now, most offer stats, and they don’t really view – they would love to get on and work on other things. So they kind of view stats as a – I don’t want to say a commodity, but you know, you specialize; when an industry gets mature, you specialize into functions.

So that’s problem two… Problem three is a little more esoteric, but it’s the whole notion of – we talked a little bit about kind of open podcasting before we started here. One of the cool things… I was around – I’m old enough to know, like, before the internet was around at all. And when the internet came around, as somebody who likes to build things, you just have this limitless possibility of “Oh, how cool would it be if we did this? Or that?” and you’re only limited by your ideas and the building blocks that are available. Obviously, there’s some downsides that we’ve seen as well, but there’s still so much opportunity there. And podcasting is one of those sort of interesting places where you, anyone can publish an audio file and have it pretty much distributed automatically to all these different venues while they sleep. So it’s not that hard. However, there’s some big chunks of the system that are not like that, even in open podcasting.

So let’s say you had a great idea for an app, you wanted to create the next big podcasting app. You can go out and scrape all the RSS feeds, you can get the show and episode level information, you put it all together… Hopefully, they have nice chapter information, and tags, and so forth. But think about what YouTube does - they have some things that you currently can do, like comments and monetization. But even a more core thing is recommendations. So what podcasts are people listening to? What podcasts are people listening to around you? People that subscribe to this, subscribe to that. Even if it’s a very popular app, they know within their app stats like that, but they don’t know across the whole industry, because it’s so distributed. There’s no place where that information resides. It resides basically in silos, at different levels; at hosts, and so forth.

[00:28:23.18] The services, these third-party analytic services - they have it, actually a fairly broad sample, but they don’t make it available. So that’s kind of a third aspect, is it would be great, it would unlock all kind of more features that we could build on top of the open podcasting system, keep it competitive, if that data was available. But then, as a listener being available in a safe way, right? Because more people listen to podcasts than make podcasts; you kind of need to satisfy both concerns. And as a listener, I’m not sure I love the fact that my IP address is going everywhere, right? That’s where these analytics services come in. And most apps don’t disclose that this kind of stuff is happening, right? So you want services to kind of do right by the listener, even without an explicit agreement there.

So OP3 is a system that I was putting together, I was like, “This is the internet, and I can build stuff… Let’s try to build an ideal system that solves a bunch of these problems at once.” So it is an analytic service in that is very similar to Chartable. You add a prefix, op3.dev/whatever to your episodes; it’s completely free. It runs on a CDN platform, so it’s up 100% of the time. It’ll never be the bottleneck in getting to your content… But it’s sort of radical in that it turns around and does all the minimization, and so forth. It throws away most of the requested information, and it stores it. But it turns around and makes all the participating shows data, the minimized data, the minimized request logs available to anyone. So it turns around and makes hashed IP addresses, what episode was downloaded, when it was downloaded, the user agent… Things that are not user-identifying necessarily - it turns around and makes that data available, so that now a startup can go and look at that data to say, “Oh, this is a signal of what podcasts are trending in Cleveland”, that sort of thing. So that is radical, because none of these other services will – you know, they are very against that. That’s kind of the core mission, is not to do that.

Leo Mutuku: Thanks so much, Joyce. I agree with you and Godliver on the data sources that you mentioned, that might be available in terms of supporting the building of technologies to support agriculture. In our context, we have tried to use mobile phones to basically collect groundtruth data which typically is not available, as you mentioned. Datasets out there might not be relevant for our context.

So we are trying to see what are the easiest tools and technologies we can use to collect this data directly from the farms themselves, from the farmers… And we’ve found that mobile phones, using tools such as the GeoODK app, really help in maybe creating proxies for some of more advanced data collection tools such as the Garmins, which might be expensive in our context… And we’re using this to collect data, for instance, on farm boundaries. It’s very important to calculate an area and the cultivation, and what is being cultivated within these different lots, so that we can try and estimate, let’s say, the yield production, the access to inputs required for bountiful harvests.

[15:51] So farm boundaries are one of the datasets we also try to collect. The other is the access to specific inputs. When we talk about climate-smart agriculture, in this case we would like our farmers to access hybrids of seeds, for instance, and fertilizers that work well in their context. So access to input data and what inputs are being applied in different parts of farming communities is a very important dataset to collect.

You mentioned the use of things such as photos to be able to identify pests and diseases as part of farm management practices, but I would also want to talk about another dataset that we find very important, which is commodity prices. So what are the market prices of these crops once they are harvested at different times throughout the year… Because if those are predictable in a way, then it’s easier even for farmers to estimate what their income would be once they take their crops to the marketplace.

So I think across the general ecosystem, different stakeholders have a role to play to make these datasets available. For instance, the market prices might come from government sources, and yield estimates, while a lot of projects are trying to see how we can make it easy to collect this groundtruth data from farm samples that can be used to train artificial intelligence algorithms and tools.

Saul Pwanson: So I’m so much more willing to work on something if someone’s subscribed by Patreon, if they have an idea. And like I said, it’s not that they’re paying me to do it. It’s not worth it for me to get three dollars to do whatever feature that takes me four hours… But just the mere fact that they’re invested in any way is motivating. So that’s the reason behind the Patreon, it being a Patreon thing.

And I don’t actually take money out of it as an income for myself. I have a full-time job, so I don’t really need that money in a certain sense. What I do with that money is I run other experiments. For instance, this last winter I was working – there’s a guy whose name is Tom Buckley-Houston (I’m hopefully pronouncing that right, Tom). I wanted to see if I could get VisiData on the web. So he makes brow.sh (browsh, he calls it), which is a text interface to the browser. You can basically run a full browser in your terminal, and you can do things like play YouTube videos through it. It’s totally great.

Caleb Porzio: Yeah, that’s a great question. I will say that I maybe barely consider myself in a sustainable place. This started out as a sabbatical. I’ve been really in the financial independence and that whole community for a while, so I’ve already kind of taken on the habits of somebody reaching for early retirement. So I cranked up my savings when I was working full-time, and I was just kind of piling money away in investments…

And my standard of living is pretty low. My wife and I both – we don’t have any school debt, we share one car, we rent a small apartment… There’s a lot of things about our life that just – we don’t need a ton of money. So there’s that, there’s also the pile of money sitting there, and so I went to take the sabbatical and thought “I mean, I can live for two months on no income, easily.” So I did that, and then it just kept going, and at some point – so I decided I’ll never pull from savings. I’ll never go into my investments. Anything I put in for 401K or anything like that - I’ll never do that. If I get to that point, I’ll get a job, or something.

So a) my wife is a photographer, so she brings in some money, where before it was always just kind of on the top, because I had the developer job, and now it’s–

Jeremy Fuksa: Flexibility was key. Humility… Probably even more than flexibility. Everybody is absolutely right when they say “Do not start a business unless you have at least six month’s worth of savings.” They’re not joking. I always felt that I was pretty good at communicating, accepting feedback, giving feedback, collaborating… Those types of things. I realize that I was not as good at that as I really truly thought that I was. Because that was something that, for the most part, had always been walled off from me. Empathy - you know, I’ve always been a pretty empathetic person, but it was easier to empathize in a larger range of things than what I was able to before.

[27:53] The flexibility that everybody craves for being your own boss, the ability to go do whatever you want, whenever you want - it’s a little overrated. The perfect example was my parents were incredibly generous, and for Christmas last year they bought my family and my sister’s family a trip to Disney World, and we went to Disney World over Memorial Day, and the week after that. It was a great time with the family. Imagine - you’re in the happiest place on Earth. And I think that I probably was never more stressed out and anxious than I was on that vacation… Solely for the reason that if I’m taking seven days off, I’m not working, which means I’m making zero income. And honestly, that was really THE moment when I was like, “Dude, this isn’t sustainable. I mean, I should be having the time of my life, and yes, I’m having fun, but I should not be caring anything about the things that I’m caring and worrying about right now.” That was when I really had that big epiphany that something needed to change.

Donald Fischer: This is actually one of the fundamental reasons why we started the company, and one of the fundamental contributions that we wanna make - it’s really hard to dedicate your efforts on an ongoing basis to an open source project if you’re not sure what you’re gonna be paid tomorrow, or especially if your income is swinging erratically in terms of what you’re receiving related to your open source project. So our goal, in other words, is to make it a lot more predictable month-to-month.

It doesn’t mean that your income could never ever go down in the Tidelift system; as I said, we pay the maintainers based on subscribers using their software, so if all of a sudden none of our subscribers are using that software anymore, the amount could go down. But in reality, once software is in place, it tends not to go anywhere; just new software gets added.

[12:01] On the other hand, we’re growing quickly, the audience of participating subscribers, so the total dollars in and the number of potential teams that might be using your project for any given maintainer is increasing. We think that what will practically happen as a result of this model is that open source maintainers will see much greater predictability and have sort of a steadier income to depend on, which is in contrast to some of the other existing models for funding open source projects that might be more episodic if they’re based on grant funding, or sort of bounty kind of mechanisms. Actually, I think all of those systems are great, and anything that is funding open source is laudable and awesome, but we just saw an interesting opportunity to contribute another model that’s additive and incremental on top of those.

Donald Fischer: This is actually one of the fundamental reasons why we started the company, and one of the fundamental contributions that we wanna make - it’s really hard to dedicate your efforts on an ongoing basis to an open source project if you’re not sure what you’re gonna be paid tomorrow, or especially if your income is swinging erratically in terms of what you’re receiving related to your open source project. So our goal, in other words, is to make it a lot more predictable month-to-month.

It doesn’t mean that your income could never ever go down in the Tidelift system; as I said, we pay the maintainers based on subscribers using their software, so if all of a sudden none of our subscribers are using that software anymore, the amount could go down. But in reality, once software is in place, it tends not to go anywhere; just new software gets added.

On the other hand, we’re growing quickly, the audience of participating subscribers, so the total dollars in and the number of potential teams that might be using your project for any given maintainer is increasing. We think that what will practically happen as a result of this model is that open source maintainers will see much greater predictability and have sort of a steadier income to depend on, which is in contrast to some of the other existing models for funding open source projects that might be more episodic if they’re based on grant funding, or sort of bounty kind of mechanisms. Actually, I think all of those systems are great, and anything that is funding open source is laudable and awesome, but we just saw an interesting opportunity to contribute another model that’s additive and incremental on top of those.

Juan Pablo Buritica: Yes… To some extent. This is something we’ll cover a little bit in our talk, but Julian was saying that we have two challenges. One of them is we need to keep our events affordable for the local population. If you are a person who makes $1,000 or $1,500/month as your income, and you have a family and all these things, you really can’t afford anything past $200, which is a ton. That’s a lot of money.

On the other hand, the cost structure for our conference in Colombia is very similar to one in the states. I know because I was a part of the organizing team for EmpireJS in New York, and I’m also the founder of JSConf Colombia. So I think there’s a 20k, 30k difference in cost structure, but local sponsorships are impossible to get. Companies initially don’t believe that you need the money, that you’re gonna spend it for something else, they don’t wanna give it to you… So that’s really limiting. And you can’t charge people locally, so you have to come up with creative ways to cut costs. For example, we don’t give food at our events, like lunch, or actual meals; we give snacks… Because food is one of the most expensive things for a conference to offer.

We do pay other speakers for trips from anywhere in the world, and we put them up in a really nice hotel because they become our ambassadors. That means that we need to come here in the States, and all our friends who work at big companies are like “Hey, can you put me in touch with your sponsor, whoever handles marketing? It’s unlikely you’re gonna hire anyone in Colombia, you probably don’t see us as a place where you market your services or your product or anything, but we can really use the money… Can you do us a favor?”

Suz Hinton: That’s right. I’m just not used to somebody being that excited about me coding. You know, we’ve talked about how Twitch is for games, and they think that that’s definitely still their model, and I’ve gone to TwitchCon, I’ve gone to their developer day, I’ve spoken to their developer advocates and their VP of developer platform, and I’ve said “I know that I’m not your main target, but there is a very unique ecosystem and a very amazing community happening right under your noses.”

A lot of these income avenues are supposed to be much more sustainable for people who play games, because you have a very insatiable audience in gamers. They’re a very intense community, so they bring a lot of monetary support and fandom to that. I’m not quite sure we’ve hit that point with open source fandom, so when somebody donated 10,000 Bits it was such a huge deal to me, because it’s not really in the same vein as gaming, where 10,000 Bits might actually be much less of a deal. So it just blew my mind that someone appreciated the stream so much that they wanted to donate that sum of money.

Danese Cooper: Well, I don’t think he enforced anything. It was sort of the anti-free software movement, if you will, and I don’t mean that in the sense that they were pitting themselves against free software; I mean they were using different tactics. Tim and others like him saw amazing software coming out of the free software movement that was being hampered by the political attachment that the authors of the GPL had. Basically, in GPL v.2 the first page and a half of the license is a political manifesto, before you ever get into any legal terms. That made a lot of people uncomfortable in the straight corporate world, and also governments and places like that.

Tim saw an opportunity to reframe the whole thing under a new term that, first of all, didn’t have the inherent ambiguity of ‘free’, because in English ‘free’ means both liberty and gratis, and that was a problem, because people got them confused. Free as in gratis doesn’t necessarily lend value to the endeavor, free as in liberty does. Free as in liberty is very definitely the message that the Free Software Foundation was pushing, free as in gratis was what was driving people’s adoption, so there was an ambiguity… Not all people, but certainly corporations were picking things up for that reason. So open source was a little more honest; it wasn’t ambiguous, I guess, would be the answer.

So he came up with the term, and then there was a Perl conference that was pretty successful, that he’d been running for a while, and he started it around the time that there was a lot of contention in the Perl community because of the work of ActiveState to creative a Windows-native version of Perl, which felt like crossing the streams, if you will, of loyalty, since Microsoft was a pretty vocal critic of open source (or free software) generally.

[08:06] He changed that to be the first open source conference, OSCON, and invited everybody, and used the fact that the publishing industry gave him disposable income to push memes to get more people thinking about open source; he wrote extensively about it. His blog was well read – actually, pre-blog, his writings were well-read, and he had a venue to write. Before blogs, all of that was rare, right?

And almost exactly at the same time we started to see the rise of peer-to-peer computing. It was only maybe a year later that the first peer-to-peer conference happened, which was also one of his… That was both attempting to address some social ills, which is interesting, given the separation or apparent separation between open source and free software. I actually think they’re the same thing, just trying to express themselves in a different way, but free software led with social responsibility, but I think most open source people had that bent as well at that point… So in the peer-to-peer movement there was a whole lot of helping political activists, and using the lightweight, importable nature of peer-to-peer networks to do interesting things, starting with sharing music more widely.

Famously, there were early music sharing platforms that the music industry really disliked, and one of the really successful ones was Gnutella. Gnutella was written by a bunch of people who saw the central architecture of the first experiments in music sharing and decided that a massively decentralized architecture was gonna be harder to quash, because there would not be a single point of failure, or a single throat to choke, so they created this endlessly replicating “everybody is a server” or “everybody is a client” architecture for music sharing.

Almost immediately, Larry Lessig showed up and started talking about copyright problems, and the confluence of the change in the music industry and the attempted change in copyright law and open source - they all converged at the same moment. So for a really long time there, every open source conference had a huge component about music sharing and media sharing generally, and that gave Tim a much bigger springboard for his message about open source. So some of it was his cleverness, and some of it was just a lucky confluence of time and place.