Mike Fix: [23:54] Yeah… So as a product, it’s kind of doing its job, and if it never changed again, I think I would still be happy with it. And the reason I keep wanting to change it and maintaining it and pushing it forward is to act as like a public staple of open source. The fact that there’s not too many products that are fully open source… I want it to act as that figure, that symbol for people that want to operate their business or their product in a different way, and still show that it can have reach, that it can have impact; that maybe in the future I can make money.

We’re not making money with Carbon not because it’s open source, we’re not making money because there’s not really potentially the right business model yet, or something like that. But that’s always the goal with Carbon - to show a different way of making progress on something while being transparent, while utilizing these mechanisms that don’t really translate well in a closed source business. People can see all of our thought processes in public, they can see all the mistakes we’ve made, they can see the trade-offs that we’re making explicitly in the code. And those sorts of things just don’t come about when you have a closed source thing. We wanna be a staple that people can point to when they’re considering “Hey, I’m building a service. Maybe my frontend should be open source, so that people can understand how it’s being used”, that sort of thing. Lots of different goals wrapped up, and a lot of it is just evangelizing open source as the right mechanism for getting things done.

Jerod Santo: So there’s lots of different ways that people can bring in money around or with their open source work. And we’ve covered many of them over the years. I think even in one of your blog posts you were talking about Caleb Porzio’s Sponsorware, I remember talking with Caleb when he first kind of invented the thing and realized that it might work for certain things… And that was very exciting, because it was like “Okay, here’s a new avenue.” But there’s no great one where it’s like “Everyone should just do this.” And it seems like your strategy with Polar is “We’re going to provide tooling for all of them, and you just pick and choose which one you want to do.” Because you’ve got newsletters, you’ve got private stuff, you’ve got what looks like sponsorware perhaps… There’s just a lot of different ways that you can execute currently inside Polar. Maybe talk about the current ways people can make money with Polar, and then we can talk about the strategy that you’re employing there to build it out.

Saron Yitbarek: It’s really pricey. And back then there were no payment plans, there were no loans… You had the money or you didn’t. And even I didn’t have the money; I had to borrow some of the money from my mom to help me pay for that program. And so I felt like if you didn’t have a bootcamp, it was really hard to find that support system that to me was so crucial to me learning how to code. And I wanted to create a community for people who were learning, and so I started doing these Twitter chats; this was back when Twitter chats were all the rage, everyone had one… And you’d pick the hashtag, or hashtag was codenewbie, and I would tweet out questions every Wednesday night at 9pm Eastern Time, and I would ask “What are you excited about? What are you learning? What are you stuck on?” and people would respond, and kind of talk to me, and really talk with each other and get to know each other. And there’d be a lot of just this love in these Twitter chats, and this support, and just really good vibes all around.

And I did that week after week, and after about six months of doing that, I said “I think we have something here, but I really want to dig deeper into the stories. I really want to focus in on these developers and inspire people in a deeper way.” And I thought “Podcast. Audio. That’s the right way to do it. That’s a great medium for that.” And so we launched The Code Newbie Podcast. And I think it was maybe two months into doing the podcast, that I got an email from a company who said “Hey, I’ll give you 200 bucks if you run an ad on your show”, and I was like “Whoa, I can make money from this?!” So that was really the first time I started thinking of it not just as this fun side hustle I was doing while I was a developer full-time, but actually had the potential to be a sustainable business.

[08:04] So that launched just – my thinking shifted from that, from “How do I make this into a media company?” It’s kind of funny, because I guess content creator was the right term, but I never thought of myself as a content creator, because my content was never centered around me. It was never about me being in front of the video camera, or me talking about my opinions. I wasn’t trying to be a thought leader. It was really about shining a light on other people and bringing people together. So I thought of myself as more of a community/media company than a content creator.

And so we did the podcast, and then over the years launched another podcast called The BaseCS Podcast, which was me and a good friend of mine, Vaidehi Joshi, who did this series on computer science, and we basically turned her blog posts into an audio format, into a podcast. And that went really well, that got really popular. We launched a conference called Codeland that we do every year, we had meetup groups all over the US… And so just trying to listen to the community and figure out what’s needed and what people wanted support on, and trying to turn those into some type of content, some type of product to help people has been kind of the name of the game.

And so I ran that for three years part-time while I worked as a developer, and then three years full-time, and then I sold it a couple years ago to Dev.to, which was renamed Forum, is the official company name… But they run the Dev.to platform. And after I sold that, I thought “I think I want to stay on the business side of things. Let me go to business school, so I can learn business things, and I can learn the proper way to do business.” And I got into Colombia and did the Executive MBA program for two years, and I think it was like six months into the program I was like “I think I just wanna start another business.” [laughs] And so after spending a ton of money on this degree that I didn’t really need to start a business, I ended up launching Disco as part of a class that I took, this entrepreneurship class. And Disco was meant to be audio courses. So it was taking my love of podcasting and my love of audio - and audio at that time, if you remember, Clubhouse was poppin’. They raised like billions of dollars…

Christina Warren: Exactly, exactly. If you have to advertise it, you’re not it. So there was impostor syndrome with that. And one of the things that helped me a little bit, a) was just continuing to learn and to improve, and to play around, and to be okay with things breaking. And even making that public sometimes. Because everybody goes through a journey, whether you’ve been at this for 20 years, or 20 weeks. But b) was talking and meeting so many amazing people who are so good at what they do… And when they would share with me their imposter syndrome, I would go – and weirdly, that would almost make me feel better, because I would go “Man… If Sarah Drasner, who is one of the smartest and most talented people I’ve ever met”, she’s just a friend of mine, and I love her… If she feels not good enough, and not strong enough, then you can’t win, right? So why bother holding yourself to these things? If everybody feels this way, then it’s okay. And I think that – you know, when we think about what is a developer, and we kind of ask that question, I think that if you are building or are excited about contributing to things, or playing around with things, you can be a developer, because so many people… You know, the lines get blurred all the time, and I think that trying to hold anybody to any specific definition really lessens people experimenting… Because how most of us got into this was that we had an – look, some people were very pragmatic and said, “This is how I can make money, and this is what I’m studying in school.” But I think for a lot of us - I don’t know if I can say most, but definitely a lot of us, it was because we were passionate about something, and wanted to build something and do it, or needed to figure out a problem, and so we looked into “How can I do this?” and we experimented and we played and we tried, right? Maybe it was “I love video games and I want to know how can I build my own?”

Segun Adebayo: To be honest, right now I have a dayjob. I currently work at a company called Tradeling in Dubai. I work as the UI engineer, so I help build components for – Tradeling is sort of an e-commerce B2B application, so I help them build components for the e-commerce app. Definitely using Chakra UI, so there’s a lot of this I can do really for us. I get to have the privilege of building those components super-fast, because I made Chakra UI… And if I have project to do – I mean, it would normally take me two days, but because I’m using Chakra UI that I made myself, I can literally build it off in maybe 5-6 hours, and I’m done… Because I also know the fundamentals, it helps me…

The reason why I said that is it gives me the privilege to have some more free time to do other stuff. By other stuff I mean taking on freelance projects, just consulting with other people who need help with their products… And it even frees up time for me to also think of other business opportunities… Because I feel like when it comes to open source projects, the consistent theme is that most open source projects are under-funded, so you don’t want to rely on the funding you get from other people. And even if it gets to be funded well, it’s most likely for the project, not for personal gains… But I feel like I’m going to think of other business ideas or business products I can make with this skill I have, to actually make a profit off that.

There are two key principles I think I have somewhere in my head - you have to make something that gets you known, and then you have to make something that makes you money. So you can literally leverage off the attention that you get from the fact that you are known, and then use that to make something that makes you money at the end. So the open source cycle doesn’t just end in “I just made an open source library. I’m excited.” There’s no money coming off that at the end of the day… And money is something we don’t like to talk about a lot in open source; we have to talk about money, because - come on, Chakra UI is not going to feed me at the end of the day.

I literally have to fend for myself and my family as well, so… It affords me some time; my work is quite flexible, which is one of the things I like about it… So I get to also focus on other projects, and even improve the product I already have, which is the resume application. I already have paid customers, so there are people we already serve. If people can literally pay for a product I built, maybe I can build more products and make some more money for myself.

Joseph Jacks: …physics-intense type of company. When you’re talking about the world of bits, raising tons of venture capital, in my opinion, is a scam. I’ve actually said that publicly. And I think that if you were to just siphon the size of venture capital and focus it on the bits companies - not the ones that are doing hard atoms type stuff, but just bits - it should be 95 percent smaller of an asset class, a cottage industry, a service industry, very much focused on the absolute best possible founders. And you do not need a lot of capital to make a huge, huge, huge, huge impact. That’s my learning. Can you make money with open source companies? Absolutely. Will there be more of them in all these different categories? Yes. Will there be 10 or 20 false positives in each possible category? Probably. Perhaps because maybe we overhyped the category. Because I’ve been doing a conference, and blogging, and tweeting about it, and there’s more funding going into these companies now, and all the VCs love it now too, and all this. That’s overfunding. That’s inefficient. That’s bad. It’s actually bad. In fact, open source companies, if they’re, again, focused on a pure bits business and not shipping a hardware product or something, they can be the most capital-efficient companies you can imagine.

Because if you have a huge open source community that is like – this is kind of a bad way of saying it, it’s kind of distasteful or whatever, but it’s true… Like, effectively subsidizing massive engineering costs that don’t have to show up on the balance sheet of the company, and also subsidizing go to market, marketing, lead gen, customer acquisition… Because the moment you flip the switch on a product that solves a customer problem, you have a huge amount of that user base that experiences the pain of that problem saying “Look, sign me up. I love your product, and I’ve been using your open source thing for the last five or six years. It solves a fundamental problem in our business, and we’ve been looking for the thing that you are selling for the last five years. We’ve just discovered it. Please sell it to us. Take our money.” That is an extremely efficient sales process, that rivals any other type of sales process you see with proprietary technology companies, that have to spend a ton of money on advertising, on sales, go to market, and all this kind of stuff.

And there’s a lot of other aspects to it too, that I didn’t even talk about. But it is very hard, and it’s very nuanced as well. One thing I think that is still very unsolved, frustratingly, and painful, is that I continue to see people who are not philosophically aligned, or remotely as interested in sort of the essence of this stuff as I am, who are very successful VCs, take the exact same playbook that we have, and then when the companies get to a point of 50, 100 million in revenue, a few hundred million in revenue, they really start to heavily encourage the founders to change the license of the core technology. I find that to be unnecessary, duplicitous, harmful, two-faced, and despicable, to say the least. I could probably talk a lot longer.

Paul Orlando: Yeah. The crisis driver - I included that there because there’s a crisis that’s happening somewhere in the world every single day. So you should think of crises in a broad sense. But yeah, there are some businesses that benefit, say, from a crisis, like the Zoom example, just because they were already around for years before that, and they were just well positioned to take advantage of that. And they made that their new, secondary go to market, like “Okay, everything is remote. I need to reach out to all these businesses, universities, all the places that previously were bringing people together in-person, to work together, and now I’m gonna sell to them… Because they have no choice but to be remote.” Yeah, so a company like Zoom can really benefit from that.

[00:41:55.28] But one of the other ways that you could think of a crisis is - so if you are the type of organization that can move really quickly, you might see this crisis emerging, and you even might say “I don’t know how long this is going to last. Maybe this blows over in six months.” Like, people didn’t really know with COVID, in 2020. Maybe this blows over in 6 months or so… But I can move really fast, so I can enter this new market that was created because of this crisis, I can make some money, or I can benefit from that. I can be on to the next thing, and it’s worth it for me to go for that.

But then - I mean, there are a lot of other organizations, or maybe more of the more mature, older, bigger organizations that might say “We’re not going to be able to push out anything in a few months. Better for us to just wait. Or if this is an enduring change in the world, let’s learn from the mistakes that the early entrants made, and maybe we come in later on… But we’ll have to take a different approach, because we’re just a different organization type.”

But you’re right, the crisis ones - definitely not predictable. Even some things related to the social or behavioral side. These new social trends kind of come up, and you might get some hints by looking at niches, where different communities, with different types of behavior kind of are emerging… So yeah, so they all function a little differently, and that’s where I kind of say this is influencing your perspective. You’re kind of like learning from these areas, where those 12 timing drivers give you places to look… And then if you’re making that decision, and you’re coupling that with the business model question, you’re coupling that with what kind of organization are you… Like, can you move really fast? Is it better for you to hang back? You put that together, and then it gives you some direction… And it might be a different direction than you would have expected if you hadn’t kind of gone through the process.

Louis Pilfold: Well, it’s because that’s the – I mean, games because it’s cool. I like when people make art. And games are a prominent form of electronic art. That’s awesome. So I like art. More art is good. But the business stuff is because that’s what I make my money with. I spend five days a week, eight hours a day making some - I don’t know, web thing, or payment processor, or something… And I was always like “I wish there was some other – the language that I want for this just isn’t quite there. I can’t find it.” And while if I was trying to mess about with some art, or some music, or something, it’s like “Oh, GDScript is really good for this.” Or like “Rust is really good for this.” And maybe that’s because I didn’t have enough experience in those worlds to say “Oh, actually, Rust isn’t very good for it. I think I can make a better video game Rust”, or something. I just didn’t feel the same need to try and like solve those problems… While Gleam is like “This is what I think people need to make their lives easier, to remove some of the stress of the work we’ve got to do every day.”

Nadia Odunayo: You just said something that reminded me of a point I wanted to hit on… When you asked me the last question, you said “I was in an enviable position.” And actually, there’s a key part of this story… So I always felt was entrepreneurial, and I always wanted to have something successful. And I remember, following all the indie developer forums and things, I was like “I need to start a b2b company, because that’s how I’m gonna make money fast. I can start charging from day one…” It suits not getting venture capital… There was a time in my past where I was all about – when I was younger, I was all about “Yeah, VC, venture capitals…” And then over the years, reading more about it and seeing certain stories, and just understanding more about that world, realizing that’s not the type of company I wanted to build… So I was like “b2b is the way.” And so I always thought I fell into a b2c company. Because a freemium b2c company used by millions of users is not what you want as a solo dev who doesn’t want funding. It’s just not what you want. And I remember when we had that first initial spike, when we had those tweets, we had all these tens of thousands of users try to use it, I felt stuck for a while. I didn’t know what to do. I just didn’t know what to do with my code, and I was worried… And I remember – I had to take a step away from my computer, I remember going into my dark bathroom, and like sitting in there, and literally saying “I thought I wanted this… I don’t want this.” And also saying to myself “Is this it? Are you going to die now, because you actually got the users you wanted, and you can’t handle it, so the other product dies?” And also, I always say that I never actually said this, but I felt like it was on the tip of my tongue, to just be like “Oh, I can’t do this.” But I wouldn’t allow myself to actually say it. So I remember saying “Nope, that’s not you. You’re not gonna say that. You’re gonna get out of this bathroom and you’re gonna go back at your desk and you’re gonna fix it.” But for a while, there was a period of time where I thought “I don’t want this. This is awful.” [laughter] “How do I end up in this situation where I’m building a company that’s not making me any money? …so I can’t survive like this, and I don’t want to get VC funding.” And I felt like I was trapped in it. And we’re all profitable now, which is great… But for years though, especially as it was growing, I was like “I feel like I’m stuck. What am I going to do? Because my money is going down, and the costs are going up…”

Jerod Santo: We didn’t really have any other stars; we had a lot of ideas, for things like helping parents control springtime, and other things that it would probably be really hard to make money with… But I think the farthest we got on any of that stuff was mainly writing out the idea, trying to determine if it’d be useful.

[11:54] One of the reasons we did Fly is I decided it’d be a good idea to go talk to our previous investors just to keep the relationships warm, just in case we ever wanted to raise money, and a lot of them actually – I was just talking through ideas, and we actually had several people offer to invest purely on the basis of Fly, basically, the one infrastructure idea we had… I was like, “That’s interesting…” That’s a big shortcut to save a lot of money fundraising and just be able to do something.

I feel like that was fortunate, and we probably won’t ever get that experience again, but we basically got an easy round of money out of it, which is never something that happens as far as I can tell.

Feross Aboukhadijeh: [19:57] Sure. Study Notes is a site I started when I was in high-school. Basically, I was taking some classes - advanced placement classes is what they’re called. They’re basically just this common type of class that high-schoolers in the US take that gives you college credit so you don’t have to take as many classes in college. I just took the notes that I wrote up while reading the chapters in the book and posted them online, so if you wanted to, you could read my notes and they would be more succinct than the textbook. Mine were like ten pages and the textbook was like 30 pages.

That kind of started out as just a way to play around with making more websites, but in the years since I created it, it’s just been getting slowly more and more traffic, growing like 25% each year. I’ve just maintained it, kept the site online basically - not shut it down, not completely neglected it, and I think about four years ago I was forced to basically just… I looked at the traffic and I was like, “Whoah! There’s a decent number of people using this. Maybe I should spend a little bit more time working on it. Maybe I can make some money from this.”

I was like, “I’m not gonna go back now and try to add more notes to this site, because I’m not in high-school anymore, and that just doesn’t sound very fun.” So I went around and paid people to give me their notes and I posted them to the site, and expanded the number of classes that I could give people notes for, and put a couple of ads up on the page. From there, it’s continued to grow, because I made the site better.

I even added a section a couple years ago where I got a bunch of people to give me their college essays that they used when they applied for college, and I posted those up there. I think the longer your site’s around, the more Google trusts it, so the SEO has just kind of gotten better and better over the years. Also, teachers are linking to it now from their teacher web pages.

So just from mostly Google traffic, I’m able to make a decent amount of money where I can basically sustain myself while I work on open source and travel. That’s been really cool.

It’s actually a huge lesson, I think, in not abandoning projects that you’re not interested in anymore. Just putting in a little bit of time to maintain them and keep them online for the few people who are finding value in them is a great idea, because you might change your mind later and wish that you didn’t shut that project down.

I basically never shut down things, I just keep them up in case that I decide that I wanna work on them later, in case they continue to grow on their own.

Julian Shapiro: I could, yeah. In British Columbia, Canada at 14 you get something called the trainer and N licence, so I was able to fool around. That was definitely the spark of “Okay, let’s switch off of building trojans to fool around with friends’ computers [laughter] and let’s see if I can systematically make money through a business here.”

Adam Wiggins: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, well, I guess coming back to that timing of that first year, you asked about the pivot, there’s the Git and GitHub piece of the story as well… If you put it all together, you end up with this thing where, you know, we had been working on this open source project on the side, went to RailsConf, felt like we really wanted to make that a business, also had been reading Paul Graham’s essays… Y Combinator was not very well known at the time, but we kind of felt like maybe we should move to San Francisco and do this YC thing. We did end up doing that, joined in the winter 2008 batch… And then it was shortly after that that we raised money, and shortly after that that we realized that our core product of the web editor, while sort of impressive, wasn’t really sticky, and we needed to pivot to this platform.

So all of this happened between – I don’t know, RailsConf was in like the summer, late summer of 2007, we were in YC in 2008, and then we started to work on this pivot sometime in mid-2008.

[26:11] And coincidentally, or not coincidentally, around that time was when we had started to experiment with what an API would look like, and I sort of ended up doing this essentially as a – I wouldn’t call it a side project exactly, but it didn’t seem to be related to the main development of the product. I just had this idea that we could make a command line tool that you could install with Ruby gems, so gem install heroku, and that furthermore, that we could integrate to your version control, because it’s already the case that you want to ship changes to your host. And uploading a whole zip file of your entire app every time, as we were doing through our import panel, obviously didn’t seem to make sense. I thought, “Well, you’re already in your version control.” And I actually did build the first version using Subversion, because that was what was popular at the time, but it really didn’t work. There were just so many ways that the centralized revision control just didn’t fit together with the vision I had in my mind.

And I’d gotten interested in decentralized revision control previously, and I said, “Well, let me let me see if I can make this work with Git”, and that just fit beautifully; completely beautifully. But I remember having a debate with my partners at the time, which is like “No one uses us. What is the point of integrating to a thing that no one uses?” He said, “Well, I don’t know, it seems like it’s getting more popular. Maybe they can use it – because you can use it alongside Subversion if you really want to, and you can just use it for shipping changes…” And anyways, we debated that quite a bit.

But anyways, this Ruby gem, that gave you this Heroku command line tool, and the publishing things with Git - that was just a weird thing on the side that existed for quite a while, and wasn’t part of the main product, and not even that many people used. So it was kind of just a little experiment, sitting off to the side.

And the Git thing ended up being also, again, coming back to that timing thing, ended up being quite good, in the sense that that’s when I met Chris Wanstrath and some of the other GitHub founders, and they had basically just started on this project, and they said, “We think Git’s really exciting. We want to make a painless way to host it.” And yeah, I ended up getting to try out their early product. Actually, I think we were in Engine Yard’s office in South Park, so it was… They basically said, “Hey, I’m working on this Git hosting project; I see you’re using Git… Do you want to put some projects on our thing?” I said, “Yeah, sure. Why not?” and I was kind of explaining what we were doing. And so again, very, very serendipitous, but in no way did it seem strategic, in the sense of “Here’s what developers are using.” We were just drawn to this different way of doing things.

Jerod Santo: It makes sense, because if you’re going to be working on something privately, it’s probably proprietary software that you’re making money off of… So you can pay some money to make some money. But if you’re willing to open source it and let it be in the world, or if it’s for other people, as well as yourself, then it’s open source already, and it’s free in that sense. So I think it scales alongside usually the way people make money with software… So I think it’s a good model.

Stuart Russell: It could affect the world in any way. So those kinds of systems, I think, should absolutely be carefully regulated. And I think – for example, we talked earlier about how social media algorithms work. I think you can distinguish between reinforcement learning algorithms in that context, and supervised learning algorithms. A supervised learning algorithm, roughly speaking, will learn what people want… Whereas a reinforcement learning algorithm will learn to manipulate people to change what they want, so that the algorithm can make more money.

So I really think that algorithms that are facing the general public in that way need to be regulated, not in exactly the same way, but in some way analogous to the way we regulate pharmaceuticals. We don’t just get to spit out new pharmaceuticals to billions of people whenever we feel like it, right? They have to be carefully tested on animals, and on all control groups of humans… Because if it goes wrong, it’s really bad. And the same, as we learned, is true with these social media algorithms.

Feross Aboukhadijeh: I think obviously getting money from companies has to be the strategy that we adopt going forward. So one route is contacting companies directly, and that’s what I’ve sort of tried. It sort of works if you are persistent and you’re willing to email a lot of people and explain to them the benefits of getting their logo on your open source projects page. You can sort of end up getting a few thousand dollars a month if you really work hard at it.

Obviously, the downside to that is now you’re spending a bunch of time emailing people and having meetings about sponsorship issues, instead of coding. And I think a lot of maintainers just don’t wanna do that. So I think that’s where the promise of something like Tidelift comes in.

The idea there is instead of maintainers having to interface with all these companies and trying to explain to them why they should be caring about their dependencies and the shape that those dependencies are in, Tidelift can just go out and do that, and they have a sales team of people who are just basically going out and talking to companies and trying to convince them to pay for open source.

[43:58] And then they turn around and they give half of the money that they collect from those companies straight to the maintainers. I think they’ve promised that they’re always gonna give at least half of their profits indefinitely.

That’s a cool model, because now suddenly I don’t have to worry about talking to people, I don’t have to worry about emailing people and doing all this sort of salesy stuff, which – I mean, I don’t mind doing it, because I like to push myself to learn new skills and to go outside my comfort zone, but I know a lot of maintainers don’t wanna be spending their time basically being a salesperson… So this is actually a promising model.

The way Tidelift does it is they look at what their customers/subscribers are using, they look at what packages are their customers relying on, and then they have some kind of an algorithm that tries to calculate how much of the money that they’ve collected should go to the different dependencies. As a maintainer, you just sign up and collect that every month, and there’s really very little you have to do in return at the moment. You just sort of collect it.

I’m right now making about $500/month from Tidelift. So it’s great, but all these things are all just – the thing that’s not ideal about all these different approaches is just that if I were to go just get a job at Google, I can make way more money.

Jerod Santo: A lot of our advertisers are venture-backed, and that’s why they have some money to spend on getting their name out there, right? And so that’s a straightforward thing. I don’t know if Raycast is a freemium based on a pro version, right? But a lot of these are going teams. When you have a team, there’s our business model. Warp is doing that, Zed is doing that, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that’s a pretty straightforward line. That doesn’t bug me.

Of course, there’s still the question of “Can you actually make enough money with that model, to make money for your investors and thrive, and all that?” But at least it’s there, and it’s obvious, and it’s not like “Well, we’ll just figure it out later.” That’s my biggest concern with venture-backed.

Jerod Santo: I doubt that that’s true. Can they continue to make money with that being true?

Luis Villa: Well, it’s been a long time since I wrote anything approaching useful code… But I have been involved – I had an interviewer ask me while I was interviewing for my first law school job out of law school, law firm job out of law school, and they said, “Well, you seem to really like tech. Why did you leave tech?” and I said, “Look, I’m not leaving tech. I am only interviewing with law firms that are very much tech-forward, tech-first kind of law firms.” So the goal was never to leave tech. The goal was – I was at a startup, open source… Back in the first year of Linux desktop, I was at a small startup, we got acquired; during that acquisition process I worked with the attorneys, and I was arrogant, I was young, I was “Oh, I can do a better job than these people.” So I decided after a little bit of experimenting, and I took like a night school law class that I enjoyed, a couple of night school law classes that I enjoyed, and so I decided to go to law school. But the goal was always, all along, to continue to focus on tech, and specifically very much to focus on open law, because there seemed to me at the time to be a body of lawyers who were sophisticated about technology, but they came at it very much from a patent-first, control-first kind of mindset. And that was something that was already starting to break down at the time… So I was in law school 2006-2009, and it was beginning to be an understanding amongst legal academics that open was a thing.

I had attended a conference of legal academics where Creative Commons was announced; that was 2001. So there were some legal academics who got it. And in fact, I pretty only applied to law schools that had at least one faculty member who had written something that indicated that they got it in the slightest amount. So that meant applications were easier, because there wasn’t that many schools to apply to. And I think that has worked out well. It’s been a good career, it’s been a fun career, because I very much – the point was not that “Oh, I can make my piles of money and work 3,000 hours a year, or whatever.” It was, “I have friends who are open lawyers, who deserve better lawyering than the lawyering that they were getting at the time.”

[06:19] I think that’s been that sense of, “Hey, I’m doing this to help open people get better lawyering” has served me well as a sort of motto and mission, and has led to a lot of fun outcomes… Because open people are doing a lot of fun projects, have been doing a lot of fun projects, and that hasn’t changed, and I certainly don’t think it’s going to change anytime soon.

But a lot of it does come back to this question of “Who owns the thing?” And I admit, I have enough lawyer brainworms at this point that my immediate thought goes to “Okay, well, the contract of the–” and then one of you during the top prep said, “Well, what about like team ownership?” and I was “Oh, right.” We talk in law school about this analogy that ownership is – for reasons I don’t remember, or maybe never knew, we talk about ownership being a bundle of sticks. And the idea is that we sort of – we talk about it as if it’s like one big trunk. But it’s actually a lot of different small things. And ownership in the code world is very fragmented, because there’s this sense of well, okay, for almost all of you, if you’re working for a company, at the end of the day your company owns the code that you are writing, at least on the company time, unless you’re very careful to not do it on company time, not do it on company hardware, and to do it in areas that are unrelated to what the company is working on. If you’re doing those things, then you keep it, but otherwise, as a general rule of thumb, the company owns it.

So that’s like the sort of lawyer brain answer, like “Well, yeah, okay, we’re done here. It’s been a nice podcast. Glad to talk to you all.” But there’s very much of, course, all these fractal little senses of “Well, okay, but what does it mean when the team – team versus individual ownership?” Because in a lawyerly sense, the company is the one who can sell it; but who has responsibility for it within the company? Like, that’s not a legal question. That’s a team norms, team behaviors, kind of question.

And there’s also these questions of what exactly is it that you own? Because I spent several years of my career – I am what we call a transactional lawyer. Basically, I do contracts. If the contract goes wrong, for some reason, that is somebody else’s problem to argue about it in court. And so I’ve only ever been to court for work once, which was a little case called Oracle v. Google, and you might have heard of that one… And the question at some level was about who owns, or can anyone own the idea of an API? And that’s probably not something you’re thinking about too much in your day to day, right? And your corporate lawyers probably aren’t most of the time, either. They’re not thinking about who owns the API. They’re just thinking about this file, or this binary that we’re distributing, or these days, often, this SaaS that we’re putting out over the internet. Your customers never actually see code, except for whatever’s JavaScripted, or WASMed, or whatever. And of course, that’s a whole other thing. Anyway, it’s just fractal, and we could talk about it for way more than an hour, but sort of my 10,000-foot overview is that there’s both this ownership in the legal sense, but very much also in the code and culture sense, and we can talk about any or all of those, including to some extent how Go is different. its packaging system is one of those things that occasionally makes lawyers tear their hairs out a little bit, because it’s not something – so many of our lawyers… Not our lawyers. Well, our lawyers too, but our licenses predate Go; they predate some modern language distribution practices, and sometimes that shows up. We wrote technology-specific things for like C or C++ into our licenses, and then somebody says, “Well, how does that work in the case of Go?” and the answer is, “I have no idea.”

[10:10] I guess those of you listening to this as a podcast can’t see the face I just made… So just assume, like, perplexed; search Giffy for your favorite perplexed GIF, and that was me just now. So yeah, so where do you all want to start with that? [laughs]

Nader Dabit: Yeah, someone basically sent – you know, they hacked that facility in the United States a few months ago, and they got Bitcoin, and they found those people somehow… I don’t know how they did that; maybe they tried to cash some of it out. But yeah, ultimately, if you send it to an exchange, then the exchange can kind of identify you. There’s definitely drawbacks, again, around kind of like the scammer type of thing. When you’re dealing with any type of money, when you’re dealing with ways that people can make money, you’re gonna automatically get people that are in it just for the money, and you’re gonna get scammers… You’re gonna have all these people all in the same discussions sometimes, and all working for the same goals. We’re trying to make things successful, but these scammers are just trying to just get rich off of it… So you have new dynamics.

Ron Evans: So that’s really cool. Then there’s actual people doing the same thing, but in hardware. One of the coolest articles I saw recently was writing a Gameboy Advanced game in Go. And naturally, they had to actually run it on their actual Gameboy Advanced hardware, not just in a WebAssembly simulator… So naturally, I had to go and get some hardware to do exactly that myself. So in an upcoming episode of my stream that I do on Fridays from here at la peep, I’m gonna be doing some GBA hacking, just because – I just wanna do it. It’s just too cool.

But those are some of the things that are happening right now as far as places where the TinyGo communities already surpassed the wider body of the Go community… Although I will say, we do not view TinyGo as separate from Go. TinyGo is Go. I know cgo is not Go, but TinyGo is Go, because Go is a programming language. There’s also a runtime, there’s also a standard library… But ultimately, it’s a programming language, and if you have a compiler from a programming language, it’s not a different programming language unless it’s a different programming language. I mean, there’s many C compilers.

And ARM, that little company that’s had a small influence on the world of technology… So there’s a very interesting project that I’ve just heard about coming out of ARM, which is providing really great support on ARM-based microcontrollers for LLVM. And their first target is C, because the idea is they wanna replace the GCC compiler with something that’s a bit more open. By open I mean somebody can make some money, since you need a job that pays you to actually work on some of these things, or else you just can’t spend the time necessary to do it. That’s why Go is so great - there are full-time paid maintainers. That’s why LLVM is so great; there are people who work at Apple, there’s people who work at Google, there’s people who work at Intel - their full-time job is to do nothing but work on LLVM. If it wasn’t for all of those people, we couldn’t do the things we do… So kudos.

But there’s another unpopular opinion… [laughter]

Brendan Burns: I think it’s a long-term goal. I think it’s a focus for Azure to build an environment in which our partners can be financially successful, invested in their success. I think historically that’s always been something that Microsoft has been good at - partnering well with companies, ensuring that they can make money on our platform… I think it’s an important differentiator for our cloud, for sure.

Adam Stacoviak: That’s cool, it’s like Vault++. If you’ve used Vault in its open sourced state where you’re primarily focused on a command line GUI for interfacing with Vault, accessing and revoking machines and passwords and key phrases and all that stuff, but you wanna go one step further to a web GUI or even further to something that supports better enterprise scenarios. That’s HashiCorp’s business model, right? That’s what Vagrant was built on - it was built on this open source tool that then I think Mitchell got a call from VMware; he wanted to do something with VMware and you’re like, “Well, that’s something I can actually release as AP plugin or something like that and actually make money from it, so I can sustain this and build this.” If he hadn’t made that choice or learned that early on in the early days of HashiCorp, then we wouldn’t be talking right now about Vault.

Sid Sijbrandij: Well, one lesson we had to learn - and I think you can learn that in software as well - is that outsourcing to lower wage countries is not always a good strategy… [laughter] The other thing is that even though there might be no government rules for things, that doesn’t mean that there are no rules. There are all kinds of implicit rules and we figured out… We had to learn that for submarines. Although the government doesn’t require anything, the insurance company does require things and people kind of what to be able to ensure their submarine.

It was a very interesting time. I did Applied Physics only for a year, so I hired one of my friends from college to actually do the mechanics and I focused on the electronics and the automation, building my first computer board and programming chip. I was really, really beyond joy when that chip booted up the first time, because I would have no idea to troubleshoot it.

But at the end of those five years I saw Ruby, the programming language, and I said, “Wow, instead of tedious, this looks beautiful. This looks great. This is what I’ve always wanted.” I started learning Ruby and became a developer and after a few years of consulting for various companies, I saw GitLab and I thought, “Wow, this is amazing.” It makes so much sense that our collaboration tool is something you can contribute to, that it’s open source and I thought SaaS and dotcoms are the future. That’s the way to make money, so I got started with that.

Adam Stacoviak: It certainly shows that you have a good commanding skillset of writing stuff back and forth in a database and dealing with user interaction. I think you did Cheddar well; I think it was certainly what you tried to make it be, where “Hey, I can build this and make money at it, but give me money for real and I’ll make something for real.”

Jon Calhoun: I mean, the hard part about any business is finding that balance. What is the right balance of the price point that we can support the way we want to support it, and it’s not so astronomically high that we can’t make sales, or anything? And every business tries with different things, but I think it’s about finding that right level. And I think Google is one of the ones that historically has been like “Oh, we give everything away for free, and make our money with other stuff”, so I think people got used to that. But then now we see all these products they make that just get shut down, and it’s like “Well, clearly, there is a downside to this approach.”

Kris Brandow: I was just kind of thinking in my mind about – I feel like that’s a very… I see that view from like a VP, as VP of engineering, maybe CTO, but not from a business owner. I think the problem is I don’t think business owners think rationally, even about money. A prime example of this is why is there this huge rush to do return to office? Why are companies not just offloading all of their office space? It’s expensive, the past few years have proven that they can be extremely profitable, make more money than they were before by not having these offices, it makes their employees wind up working more hours, ironically… Like, it hits all of those things that are like, you know, “Money, money, money, money, ching, ching, ching, ching. I can make all of my things look good”, and yet they’re still like “No, you must come back to the office. We have to have it this way. We have to do things the way we were before.” And I think there’s a lot of nuance, and there’s a lot of stuff that goes into that. But I think it’s the same sort of thing with this, where there is this argument of “Well, we can just replace all the people with this AI.” But I also think, like, isn’t that just outsourcing again? Haven’t we done this before? We’ll just go replace all these expensive Americans with some other people, someplace else, and you forget… Yeah, you can do that, and it’ll be cheaper, but there’s a whole bunch of other logistics around that that you need to now handle and deal with. And do you have the ability to actually implement those logistics well?

Jerod Santo: Right. That’s why I think it’s fundamentally a little bit different conversations at the consumer level versus maybe the open source level. This npmUninstallFacebook - these are open source project alternatives, so it’s really just at a much deeper, higher level… Deep and higher level are opposites, but really, speaking to developers, what we can do potentially to disassociate from these projects, the consumer-level conversation - I know, Adam, you’ve been thinking about this a lot - is much more broad-sweeping, is much more difficult, and a lot of it I think plays into… It’s very difficult to compete with free, especially when you can’t afford to choose something that costs; like free Gmail versus “pay money for FastMail” or for an email service that will protect your privacy, just for one example. As a person who has means, I can make that decision, because I can deal with the $5, the $20/month or whatever it is, but for a huge group of humanity free is the only choice, and when they aren’t informed about what they’re actually trading for that free, then they’re undermined.

Paul Frazee: I’m all about getting payments into the network, so that people that make content can make money. I’m completely on board with that. And when a blockchain gets to the level of maturity that I feel like it’s worth using, I’m all about it, but I don’t think that the infrastructure itself has to be driven by payments. I think that might be a step in the wrong direction.

Max Howell: That’s all I’m gonna say. [laughs] And I’m working on something for Homebrew. I don’t think I’m gonna go back to the core, but I always have a notebook full of ideas, tools I need, and that’s why that tweet is still pinned, even though I’m not working at developer tools with Apple anymore - “The foundation of the modern world is developer tools”, because I believe it, it is. And I love being a developer because we can make our own tools. It’s like the only industry apart from maybe blacksmithing - and I’m not sure if they even do make their own tools - that we can make our own tools to improve our workflows, to make ourselves more efficient and productive. So I always have a notebook full of ideas for stuff, and this is one that I’ve been toying around with for a couple of years and I’m really trying to make it now. And yes, it has growlers in it, and I don’t wanna say anything more about it because I don’t like to jinx myself. I feel like if I say things about some new ideas I have that I then don’t finish them. I really wanna finish this one though, also because I’m thinking about how to make money with it, and that’s what I want: I wanna be able to work on open source full-time.