Derek Collison: Yeah. And I think that’s great. I really do. And like I said, my hope for all of this is that we can have an open dialogue about “Are there things that we can prove upon?” Outside of Synadia, outside of the CNCF, but just as a broader spectrum. And I think there’s some interesting questions that should be discussed on “How we we want to go about that?” and what role the CNCF and the Linux Foundation plays, what role maintainers play… Because one of the other things that we got a lot of pushback from is I feel deeply that the lifeblood of a project is in the maintainers. It’s - yes, people want to concentrate on license, what foundation are you part of, all of that other stuff. And I think they do play a role. But at the end of the day, it’s the maintainers. And if all of a sudden the maintainers withdraw their support from a project, I think a lot of projects that have a tremendous amount of investment and are not just a simple weekend toy, if that makes sense… You know, saying “Oh, we’ll just get some maintainers and they’ll spend a weekend and then they’ll know how to program, let’s say, a NATS server.” Right? I think that’s maybe a little short-sighted.

We have someone who’s awesome internally that just got promoted, and is now running the server team… They graciously took that from me so that I can do other things. That person came in and was under our tutelage, and specifically under my tutelage, and it still took them about eight months or so. So we were paying them, and we were tutoring them… And most of the server’s infrastructure was built by myself and someone named Ivan, and we were tutoring this person. And it still took them about eight months, almost a year to become like “Oh, I can go anywhere in the server code and be effective, be productive.”

And so when you get statements that “Oh, fork it. You guys go do your own thing and then we’ll archive it, or try to find new maintainers” - again, I want folks to kind of really think through that and say “Is that the best outcome for the ecosystem?” I don’t think it necessarily is, but someone from the CNCF might say “Yes, that’s absolutely the way it’s supposed to work.” But what people are looking at to the CNCF around stability for projects, and longevity… You know, if the maintainers leave, there’s going to be some level of disruption, for sure. It depends on the project, but it’s not going to be zero. And in some cases, in our point of view - which people might disagree - NATS thrives when Synadia thrives. Because we’re driving all of that stuff. At least that’s my opinion. And again, not all projects look like that, and that’s totally fine as well. But that’s another one where I was like “That doesn’t feel like it should be the only answer.” That there could be a dialogue of “How do we better support these types of projects? What if they’re not necessarily a good fit as a foundation evolves? What options are there for doing that?”

And again, I think prior to the dust-up, but also going forward - and again, we’ll release a statement next week, probably about whenever the podcast goes out, around our commitment… You know, most people might not understand, of our total R&D budget, 70% is going into open source. And it’s funded by the VCs who fund Synadia, and it’s funded by our customers. And the ones that can pay, that aren’t paying, that are like “Give me, give me, give me. I’m entitled to this. Hey, get off your ass and change this thing for me”, which we see every once in a while in GitHub issues… That’s kind of when I’m like “Maybe we need to figure out a way to have them change their perspectives a little bit.” I’m not saying I don’t want hobbyists to be able to use our stuff for free, or embed it all over the place. My original tagline for NATS was “Connect everything”, meaning it had to run everywhere, and was openly accessible. But again, it’s that production problem, which is non-zero. It’s like “How do we solve that problem for different levels of projects and open source?”

Birk Jernström: No, I’ll definitely tell you… But I just want to make clear that I’m not in this case speaking about where Andreas keeps his money, so to speak. So on Polar, in this scenario that I painted, let’s say, Jerod, you’re funding an issue, $500. As I mentioned, Polar is the merchant of record, so that $500 is paid to Polar, and arrives into our platform account on Stripe. That’s where it sits, and that’s a liability on our books. And for you as a maintainer, and any eventual contributors, once that issue is closed out, that money becomes something that you can get and withdraw. We have our own ledger internally where we keep track of like “Who do we owe money from this liability that we have?” So the moments when you say “This issue is completed, I want to split the funding.” Then in our ledger we basically say “Jerod –” Like, if you said 50/50 split, Jerod, you’re gonna get $250. Adam, you’re gonna get $250, minus our 5% fees. And that then is showed up in your Finance tab on Polar, where you at any given point can just hit Withdraw, and that’s when we issue a payout or a transfer and payout to your connected Stripe account.

Annie Sexton: [13:47] Yeah, absolutely. And I would also say – so I quit that job, because it was… I can remember very few times in my life when I was that low. And also just realizing that I had taken a risk, I had taken a leap, a financial leap, a creative leap, trying to get into an industry that I thought would be fulfilling, and then realizing as I was slowly running out of money that this was not the industry for me. Very, very humbling, very scary as I started to see my savings dwindle. That was around the time that I had to withdraw from my Roth IRA – I had to drain my Roth IRA, and then later I had to ask my parents for money… And you know, at 34 that’s a bit humiliating. That feels really humiliating. And I was able to carve out some amount of compassion for myself, but it was still not great. It was not a great feeling.

And I managed to land a couple of - let’s say, I landed a job, a contractor position with Daily.dev. They’re fantastic. They are a WebRTC company, and I was doing some dev rel for them. I did a couple of videos, working with my old buddy Chad from Heroku. I think he’s their dev rel person. I don’t know his exact position… But finding – again, it was my connections that eventually landed me that first waypoint on my journey back to tech. And I was very grateful for that. And that was a really fun position, because I had never done video content for tech companies before, I had never had that level of creative freedom before… And I really excelled at it. So I was very, very grateful to have that stop, to work for them for a couple of months, and do a bit of video developer relations work.

Mat Ryer: I accept that challenge… I will withdraw. I withdraw it. It’s famously not particularly – I don’t know. It doesn’t count as one of your five a day fruit and veg. Like, normal potatoes don’t count. So I don’t know what it is.

David Wickes: Because I think a big downside of the fat client approach is - yeah, you have to put these rules on the client, but quite often you have to put it on the server as well, just in case there’s some shenanigans, right? Like, I don’t know, if I have a bank account thing that has like a zero balance, I may not show a Withdraw button. Right? But I need to have that logic sealed up in the server AND in the client.

John K. Thompson: That was put into law six years ago. And GDPR has been a huge success. It has really been a great movement for the people of Europe. And we all know, Britain is no longer in Europe, they’re on their own, they’re outside the EU at this point… So GDPR has been a boon for the citizens of Europe. They can go in, they can access their data, they can delete their data, they can take it off platforms… They can do all sorts of things with it. And based on the success of GDPR, the EU has now passed the DATA Act, the Data Governance Act, and the Digital Markets Act. And all of those acts have been passed, and they are now going into effect. And those laws now put together data pools, data unions, data exchanges… All the structures that I talk about in the book, that if you and I, or any of us want to go to Google, Facebook, Amazon, United Airlines, American Airlines and say, “I want all my data”, they have to give it to you. That’s number one. But number two is it goes on - these data exchanges and data pools are going to be the intermediaries that we work with, that we go in and say – we can withdraw your data. Let’s say that you’re really worried about climate change. Any company that you feel contributes to climate change in a negative way, you can say, “You can’t have my data at all.” You can just say “United Airlines, or Exxon, or Mobil, or Rosneft, or whoever you want to block, you can. But my point is, why block them? My point is, if you’re going to say – the music royalty system is the system that makes the most sense to me when you’re thinking about data monetization… You know, “You may take all my browsing data, and I’ll let you use it. Every time you touch it, you’ve got to pay me a penny, or a half a penny, or a tenth of a penny, or whatever it is.” For these companies, you say “Every time you touch my data, you have to pay me a million dollars.” That sends a pretty strong signal that you really don’t like what they do. And if they pick you up on it and say they want to use your data, either intentionally or by mistake, and they use it four times, they’ve got to pay you $4 million. So you know, stay in the game.

Kevin Ball: Yup, 100%. You’ve done it well. Chris, I withdraw my objection; given the nonsense that is hoisting, your explanation is perfect.

Mireille Reece, PsyD: So then lastly is this avoiding style. These people who avoid conflict tend to be both unassertive and uncooperative, while they diplomatically side-step or withdraw from threatening things. It’s like the procrastination style at its finest. You just avoid. “I didn’t see it, I didn’t hear it. Whatever. We’ll just move on.”

Kevin Ball: Alright, I withdraw my objection.

Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D: So in those moments when your brain has other things going on, the retrieval - not because of something that’s personal to you, but rather because you’re human - you’re not going to be apt to withdraw in that moment.

Suz Hinton: …and withdraw from the community, or to withdraw from having a tech job in general?

Frannie Zlotnick: Yeah, people might withdraw from a project, they might keep working on the project, but start working in kind of backchannels; instead of working publicly in the repo, they may start pinging people through email, Slack, or other methods, to avoid the public microscope of attention on the work, or maybe risk somebody saying something really critical and that ending up being part of their public professional record.

Don Beyer: The chairs of our intelligence committees, the chairs of our armed services committees, they very much do not want us to be behind China. There’s a lot of debate about how much human agency should there be in the use of kinetic force. Can you have machines deciding who to target, rather than an Air Force pilot, even be sitting in a room with levers, in Colorado Springs? …at least that’s a human being saying “Let’s take out that car” or “Take out that building”, rather than letting a drone decide who to attack, and the like. And then there’s space, and the weaponization of space, and the role that AI plays in that.

My hope is that we will have some renewed arms control in the days ahead. It’s been pretty sad the last couple of years, as Russia has progressively withdrawn from arms control agreements, and China has been unwilling even to sit down and talk to us. But sooner or later, if we’re going to make the world a safer place, we need to talk about all the nuclear weapons on the planet, and at the same time talk about artificial intelligence, too.

One of the very first pieces of legislation introduced was Ted Lou, Ken Block and I on prohibiting letting an artificial intelligence algorithm make the decision to launch a nuclear attack on another country. That has to be the president of the United States, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Secretary of State; human beings making decisions of that magnitude. And yes, they can use all the data they want, but a machine can’t decide.

Cory Doctorow: So we need to think about where the high switching costs come from, and we need to acknowledge that they are a mix of two things. One is countermeasures… So think about that weekend where Twitter said “If we find a Mastodon handle in your bio, or in your stream, we’ll suspend you from the service.” That’s like a technical countermeasure. But then there’s like the legal countermeasures. Because you could just write a bot to scrape Twitter and figure out links to Mastodon, just like make it happen. A bunch of people do that with the API right now, but the API keeps getting nerfed… And so you could do it without the API. You can just do it manually, with like a bit, with a scraper.

And in fact, if there was the potential for a bot to be built without a legal remedy, without being able to go in and say, “Hey, you’re violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. It’s a felony”, blah, blah, blah, when they contemplate nerfing the API, they would have to go “Ah, are we gonna have to pay like 100 engineers to fight bots now? Because they’re all just going to switch over from using the API to using bots. Are we going to have this unquantifiable risk that arises from having to just take scarce engineering resource and devote it to fighting on the blue team, where we have to be perfect and they just have to find one mistake we’ve made? Because we can’t sue them”, because we’ve withdrawn the legal protection that would allow Apple to stop you from doing Apple what Apple did to Microsoft.

So this is why in both Chokepoint Capitalism and “The Internet Con” I get into a lot of detail about what legal reforms would allow technologists to do good, and what new law, like privacy law would stop them from doing evil. Because it’s true, bots and scraping stuff - they can do bad privacy stuff. The answer to that isn’t to say to Facebook, “Hey, guess what? You have unlimited power to wield the state, to wield its courts to stop anyone from doing anything you dislike, because we’re going to use you as our deputies to figure out when someone’s privacy is being invaded.” I mean, just think for a moment of the irony of putting Facebook in charge of deciding when someone’s privacy is being violated. And instead, we would say, “Hey, we have this democratically accountable yardstick that says “This is a privacy-invasive behavior, and these things are not. And if you’re doing this, and you’re an inter-operator, you’re on the side of the law. And if you’re doing that and you’re an inter-operator, you’re violating the privacy and we’re going to come after you, not for interoperating, but for doing something that violates people’s privacy. Not for making shareholders of Facebook sad, but for doing something that harms the public.”

Anna-Katharina Wickert: Yeah, I can jump in. Actually, I submitted only three proposals. The one you mentioned, I submitted it two times, to my shame, and therefore I withdrew one, the one you are talking about… And both were accepted. So I think it’s a pretty good success rate as well.

Yeah, and I really liked it, and one insight from me also from your feedback is that structuring your talk really helps me in thinking about “Can I deliver a talk in the timeframe?” And also, it seems that it helped you to make an assumption about it.

And one thing I realized sitting in review committees also really helped me - writing it down, because I knew what I as a reviewer want to see in a proposal, and so I could draft it easily to have at least the for me important aspects included. And the proposal we are talking about was actually my GopherCon EU talk last year, which was also my first in-person conference talk in the Go community… So I think it’s really one of my favorite ones, of the few. [unintelligible 00:12:49.28] submission because the conference was really cool. And also it was the first talk I really enjoyed more or less completely.

Brian Kernighan: Right. Well, I guess the proper way to describe it is “Present at the creation, but not responsible for it.” I was a grad student at Princeton in the mid-to-late ’60s, and I got a summer internship one year at MIT in Project MAC, which was basically building Multics, a very large information utility, so called… And then the following year, 1967, I got an internship at Bell Labs in Murray Hill. People there were still working on Multics; I had nothing to do with that. But I spent two summers of internship at Bell Labs, I had a great time, and so I went there permanently in 1969, very early 1969, and found myself in the same group as Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie.

[04:22] Ken at that point – I guess the right way to say it is they were suffering withdrawal symptoms, because they had been working on Multics, which was a very big, very interesting computing system, and they had really, really good computing facilities, but then very early in 1969 Bell Labs withdrew from the Multics project because it was clear it wasn’t gonna produce what it was supposed to produce, at least on a timescale that the Labs cared about. And so this left Ken, Dennis and a variety of other people fundamentally with a taste for a nice computing environment, but no way to satisfy it, really… So they spent a fair amount of time basically doing what you would call paper designs, sketching things on blackboards, and so on. But as part of that, very early in that year, I think Ken Thompson found what is traditionally described as a little-used PDP-7. So the people who’d been working on the Multics project at Bell Labs withdrew, as I said, in 1969, and the people who’d been working on it, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and some others were left without a very nice computing environment; you know, very large, powerful computers that they sort of had all to themselves… So they spent a lot of time basically doing what you might call paper designs, or blackboard designs of what an operating system might be like, what they could do… And they also – Ken Thompson found what is traditionally called a little-used PDP-7, a machine that was pretty obsolete already in 1969. Nobody was really using it… And he used that as a vehicle for experimenting with file systems. At some point, this famous comment that he made, that he had three weeks when his wife took their son off to California to visit the relatives, and in three weeks he put together what was basically the first Unix system. A proto-version of Unix, because you already had the file system you’d need an exact call, a shell, an assembler, things like that.

So three weeks and we have the first version of Unix. And that was in 1969, so you could argue then that 2019 would be the 50th anniversary of Unix. The Unix history book that I wrote, that you mentioned - basically, I put that together as an attempt to capture some of what I remember and what lots of other people remembered of what was really kind of a golden era in computing, and certainly the early days of Unix, very interesting; the evolution of it over the next 20-30 years is very interesting, at least to me…

Jerod Santo: What happened in that proceeding? What were the deciding factors? I guess they didn’t reject it, but it was just being debated to a certain degree, and then it was withdrawn eventually. I assume it was withdrawn because it was not going anywhere… Or was there a different reason for withdrawing it?

Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D: Yeah. So this last one is stonewalling. Imagine – it’s just like the word sounds, you’re putting a wall between you and your partner or another person by either withdrawing or shutting down, or sort of distancing. It’s interesting, because in Gottman’s research he talks about – there tends to be a pursuer and a withdrawer… So stonewalling is very much this person who withdraws and retreats. A lot of times - I wanna say his research is like 85% of the time it tends to be the make in the relationship, and I would say that’s in heterosexual couples, not that that applies across the board.

Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D: Right. Whereas the withdrawer gets to be like “Phew… I get to breathe, hang out in my shell, my cave… Like, give me 60 minutes and then I can re-engage around whatever upsetting thing occurred.”

Jeremy Fuksa: It’s pretty frightening. Luckily, over the five to seven years prior to that – you know, I had always taken… Well, I won’t say “always”, but at least since I was in college; it’s been a good almost 30 years… Antidepressants. And over the five to seven years prior to stopping taking any medicine, through doctor’s visits and so on and so forth I kind of started figuring out that it really wasn’t so much that I battled with depression as much as I’d battled with anxiety that would occasionally lead to depression.

A couple of years before I made that decision to stop the medication I had gotten off of an anti-depressant that if I would have just stopped cold turkey would have been really, really bad, because it had a lot of withdrawal side-effects, and things like that… So what I was on was really more anti-anxiety medication. I was afraid of what kind of side-effects or withdrawal symptoms might I have; luckily, there were none of that. But mostly, I was super-anxious and scared about the fact that I was having to stop this medication at a time when I felt like I really needed it the most, because I was in a very anxious and uncertain period… So I just wasn’t sure how I was gonna get through.

I’ve got a great family, a fantastic wife, two great boys - I’ve got a great support system. I wasn’t worried about going off the deep end or anything like that, but I just was worried about being healthy… Healthy to the point where I was continuing to make decent eating choices, or continuing to eat, or any of those types of things. So there was a lot of uncertainty about that, that I worried about.

There were some moments when the anxiety roiled up and was telling me that I can’t do this, I’m stupid, and I should have never tried to make this business work in the first place, or I don’t know the first thing about design, or any of those crazy things that anxiety tries to tell you… And they were rough, and you just kind of have to figure out alternative ways to do something about it.

I took some walks, I tried to get a little more into mindfulness, meditation… The Breathe app on the Apple Watch is kind of a life-saver in moments like that. Just whatever I could do to subside that anxiety. And it would never go away completely, but it was at least enough to where I could go “Okay, this is past for now. We can move forward. I know it’ll be back again”, but knowing that it will also go away again. It was a lot to work with during that time, but it was just something that frankly I just had no choice in the matter at that moment.

Kevin Owocki: Yeah, and that standard is called ERC20. Think of it like a Java-style interface that defines functions like deposit and withdrawal and transfer, and things of that nature. So you can basically mint your own token that can be used for – think of it like a software license for a product that you’re putting out there. It’s a unique, scarce asset that you can put out on the blockchain.

Erik St. Martin: Yeah, I think my guitar withdrawal has passed… Now it’s just a decoration for my office. [laughter]