Jerod Santo: Okay. So the version 3 release was definitely when it crossed my radar. Do you have – I mean, you have some other open source stuff. Do you have a GitHub Sponsors, do you have an Open Collective? Do you have any sort of sustainability plan? Or are you just happy to use this thing and it’s done, and maybe you’ll do another open source thing, maybe not, but you’re not really looking to maintain open source as a thing?

Luis Villa: So if you’re trying to reimplement some competitor’s API, I probably wouldn’t use Copilot, because then the output is gonna look like you took the heart of this other person’s thing. It’s probably gonna start auto-suggesting code that looks a lot like their implementation if it’s an open source implementation. So if there’s like a GPL implementation of something and you wanna write an MIT implementation of it, I suspect Copilot – I haven’t seen anybody try this yet, but I suspect Copilot is gonna start doing things that look a lot like the original implementation… And then you’re gonna have a problem. But because one of the tests for fair use is “How much of it did you take?”, if you end up with like a 5-line fragment out of somebody’s GPL code that’s like 100,000 lines – or, I mean, what’s the Linux Kernel these days? 6-7 million lines of code? A court is just gonna laugh that out of court. If somebody comes after you on a GPL claim for you as a user of Copilot - again, that’s different from GitHub, because GitHub did presumably copy the entirety of the Linux kernel.

So we’ve got the “What was the nature of the taking? How much did you take?” Another thing that courts are gonna look at is the commercial impact of the copying… Again, GitHub, since they’re copying the whole thing and they’re a big corporate competitor, possibly some big…

For you as a user of Copilot - that company was not trying to sell you five lines of code… They weren’t trying to license five lines of code to you, and you weren’t looking to buy five lines of code. You were just gonna write it yourself anyway.

[43:58] So a court, again, is gonna look somewhat skeptically at – and this is something we know from the Google Book Search case, that a court is gonna say “Well, you all weren’t selling snippet search of your book.” In fact, if anything, this is a key difference from Google Book Search to Copilot… The court found in that case that actually this is gonna help you sell more books, because people are gonna find books, there’s a limitation on how much gets shown, and there’s a Buy button right there… There’s no equivalent to that in – maybe GitHub will do something like “By the way, it looks like you copied this from the Linux Kernel. Click here to do GitHub Sponsors.” That might be a little tacky, but you could see that as a thing they could do in the future, perhaps.

So that’s sort of the basic analysis of how much got taken, was it really important stuff that got taken, what was the commercial impact, is it something new and bold and different, that wasn’t gonna happen anyway? And I think looking at all those, I find a really hard time seeing that a court is gonna say that this was not a fair use… Because it’s so different, the impact is so small… The emotional impact is real, and I don’t wanna downplay that. As authors – but again, the whole point of fair use is sometimes authors are pissed, and we ignore that as a policy matter.

By the way, I should say again, this is all in the U.S. E.U. has different sets of rules about this, and I really think one of the interesting things that is under-discussed that I would love to see more of is commentary from the European Union lawyers, Japanese lawyers… Because I don’t think we have as good a sense yet of what that would look like in other places, other legal regimes.

Matt Holt: We do see some sponsorships come through from businesses on GitHub Sponsors, yeah. On GitHub, an organization can be a sponsor to an individual or an organization, I think, and we also see some just representatives from the company’s I guess personal or professional GitHub accounts as the channel for that sponsorship… That’s definitely a thing.

I would also recommend too that other developers looking to get sponsorships - I mean, know your audience for one thing, but also don’t underestimate your audience. I see a lot of sponsorship profiles that have tiers really low, like a dollar a month, five dollars a month… And that’s fine. It depends what your goals are. If you’re trying to be full-time sustainable, like I am, so that I can keep working on Caddy full-time, a dollar a month, five dollars a month isn’t really gonna cut it, to be frank. I mean, it’s appreciated, definitely. I appreciate being able to go grab lunch, for example, once…

So there’s like one-time donations, and recurring. If we’re talking about sustainability though, typically you’ll need professionals or companies to sponsor you at a tier that is actually sustainable. If you’re gonna do $5/month, you’re gonna need hundreds of sponsors, maybe thousands to be sustainable, depending on where you live.

I live in an area that’s kind of expensive… I guess everywhere is kind of expensive right now, but – I mean, this is not California, but it’s still expensive. So I would need thousands of $5/month sponsors; or you know, one, two, five dollars a month. It’s insane.

[43:42] My lowest tier I think is $25/month, and that’s like the baseline for sustainability. I still need hundreds of those. But if you can find companies who can sponsor you at a tier that’s comparable to the amount that they’re benefitting from Caddy, or from your project in general I should say, then that’s a much better arrangement. And I can also give those companies - like ZeroSSL, my executive sponsor - much more attention if they need it, than the $25/month sponsors, who are still helping, but they don’t need maybe as much attention.

A lot of sponsors don’t necessarily need the involvement. Some just want to support the project and see it keep going, they wanna keep getting software updates, they wanna see the community grow… And those are all valuable things that are worth companies paying for.

Luis Villa: Yeah, by the AI. It’s still sort of weird to talk about things being created by an AI, right…? So if you’re trying to reimplement some competitor’s API, I probably wouldn’t use Copilot… Because then the output is gonna look like you took the heart of this other person’s thing. It’s probably gonna start autosuggesting code that looks a lot like their implementation, if it’s an open source implementation… So if there’s like a GPL implementation of something and you wanna write an MIT implementation of it, I suspect Copilot – I haven’t seen anybody try this yet, but I suspect Copilot is gonna start doing things that look a lot like the original implementation, and then you’re gonna have a problem.

But because one of the tests for fair use is “How much of it did you take?”, if you end up with like a five-line fragment out of somebody’s GPL code that’s like 100,000 lines of – or, you know, what’s the Linux Kernel these days? 6-7 million lines of code? A court is just gonna laugh that out of court. If somebdoy comes after you on a GPL claim for you as a user of Copilot - again, that’s different from GitHub, because GitHub did presumably copy the entirety of the Linux Kernel.

So we’ve got the “What was the nature of the taking? How much did you take?” Another thing that courts are gonna look at is the commercial impact of this copying. So again, GitHub, since they’re copying the whole thing and they’re a big corporate competitor, possibly some big – for you as a user of Copilot… Like, that company was not trying to sell you five lines of code. They weren’t trying to license five lines of code to you, and you weren’t looking to buy five lines of code. You were just gonna write it yourself anyway.

So a court, again, is gonna look somewhat skeptically at – and this is something we know from the Google Book Search case, that a court is gonna say “Well, you all were selling snippet search of your book, so in fact, if anything…” and this is a key difference from Google Book Search to Copilot… The court found in that case that “Actually, this is gonna help you sell more books.” Because people are gonna find books, there’s a limitation on how much gets shown, and there’s a Buy button right there… There’s no equivalent to that in – maybe GitHub will do something like “By the way, it looks like you copied this from the Linux Kernel. Click here to do GitHub Sponsors.” That might be a little tacky, but you could see that as a thing that they could do in the future perhaps.

[44:13] So that’s sort of the basic analysis of how much got taken, was it really important stuff that got taken, what was the commercial impact, is it something new and bold and different, that wasn’t gonna happen anyway? And I think looking at all those – I find a really hard time seeing that a court is gonna say that this was not a fair use… Because it’s so different, the impact is so small… The emotional impact is real, and I don’t wanna downplay that. As authors – but again, the whole point of fair use is sometimes authors are pissed, and we ignore that as a policy matter. By the way, I should say again, this is all in the U.S. The E.U. has different sets of rules about this, and I really think one of the interesting things that is under-discussed, that I would love to see more of, is commentary from the European Union lawyers, Japanese lawyers… Because I don’t think we have as good a sense yet of what that would look like in other places, other legal regimes.

Ashley Jeffs: Yeah, so as an open source author, I think I’ll probably get to say this, but I kind of feel like there’s been a lot of noise… Well, not noise. Meaningful articles and meaningful stuff out there, people who kind of write open source projects on the fact that businesses kind of rely on them, and they don’t contribute back, and it’s not a particularly healthy ecosystem… Personally, I think open source is a form of business, and I think that a lot of the discussions around open source ethics and how we should model things I feel like doesn’t kind of follow that logic…

I feel like as software engineers we tend to see businesses as rapid-growth funded, massively huge corporations that are designed to dominate the planet… But the reality is most businesses are very small, maybe just one-person, two-person organizations. Maybe they’re a dry cleaners, maybe they’re a pie shop… And I feel like open source is very similar to that, where you’re not necessarily making money directly at this point; you’re just trying to grow something because you enjoy working on it… And there is a prospect at some point of maybe making money from it, and turning it into a living, and growing it, but I feel like we don’t really treat open source developers like that. We tend to treat them like they’re already this big corporation that I can use as much as I want and not give anything back… Or we see them as kind of like charity cases.

GitHub Sponsors is great, I feel like that’s a great avenue, but I don’t feel like it’s the only one. I don’t think we should be treating everybody who’s working in open source as if they’re a charity case and that we need to rescue them necessarily. I feel like we should be seeing them as people who have lifestyle businesses, and maybe it’s gonna grow, maybe it doesn’t… I feel like there’s a lot of projects that are very akin to maybe a niche burger joint in San Francisco, and then overnight they’re a social media sensation and they’re feeding the entirety of San Francisco, and they just can’t cope with it, and the business that they’d really enjoyed working on is no longer enjoyable… But we wouldn’t say the solution to that is to throw donations at them. The solution is – I don’t know what the solution is. I see open source as kind of like a Business Lite.

Mat Ryer: Yeah, it’s interesting. Actually, it was Nat Friedman that said “You should set up Sponsors on GitHub.” When the project was first around, there was no such thing as GitHub Sponsors.

Nick Nisi: That’s great. I’m glad you brought this up. It is kind of a whole other topic to talk about, but it is something that I’m glad that you’re exploring. Sustainability in open source is something that is obviously a problem that we need to experiment with and to solve, and to just become more comfortable with. Open source doesn’t necessarily just mean it’s free forever and that you should just work on it for free, and give up all of this time, because it’s just not sustainable, it’ll lead to burnout, and overall, packages will get abandoned, or they just won’t keep up, which is not great for anyone. So I’m glad that you’re exploring this. Where would people go to sponsor that? Is that your GitHub Sponsors page?

Brett Cannon: They’re gonna take it in the direction that they think makes sense, just like Python’s gonna be taking the direction that the dev team thinks makes sense, and everyone’s gonna do it their own way. And I don’t wanna say that you can’t rely on community open source versus corporate, but you can know the motivations behind it and what that means for you. You might be able to convince people more in community just because the discussions might be more in the open, or they might just not have any pre-planned anything and you can just come in [unintelligible 00:51:14.18] Versus corporate, where you don’t know about some planning that might be happening every quarter, or semester. We try to plan out the quarter and semester and we communicate it out as best we can… But stuff comes up, and we work with it, and it just means we have different priorities potentially from what you may expect, and that’s just part of life. They both have pros and cons, but that’s very different.

But even community-based, you have people who are getting GitHub sponsorships to keep stuff going, or Patreon potentially, or Tidelift, or whatever… Which, once again, also potentially changes things. Tidelift is very explicit about what that means. GitHub Sponsors - the person you’re sponsoring says they will do because of this, but it very much varies. And there’s no standard at all. I don’t think that there probably will be, because it’s a very squishy – how do you say, like “Oh, I’m corporate-backed, so I am not going anywhere” versus “I am community-based” or whatever. Or “I publish everything publicly and there’s nothing behind closed doors that you will never know about” versus “We have certain things that will come up that we’ll have to prioritize. Sorry” versus “I’m getting paid to make these promises versus not.” There’s no way to really communicate any of this well, so you kind of have to do your research.

And I know a lot of people go “Well, I can’t do that, I don’t know.” Like, if you’re in the Node world, “I can’t go through my 365 dependencies to see what their promises are.”

Jerod Santo: Don’t you have a GitHub Sponsors or a donation button, man? Let’s get this man a GPU. Someone’s gotta get you a GPU.

Jerod Santo: Don’t you have a GitHub Sponsors or a donation button, man? Let’s get this man a GPU. Someone’s gotta get you a GPU.

Carlos Becker: The Open Collective is mostly if you want to support the project itself, because that money is spent mostly on stickers, buying domains, and things like that… Buying domains - actually, just renewing the only domain it has.

And if you want to support me as a developer that works on GoReleaser, then I like GitHub Sponsors better, because I can just transfer the money to my bank account and do whatever I need or want to do.

Adam Stacoviak: I think the framing of the sponsorship is really where it gets, as you said, weird. Even, I would say, at a company level. I would personally much prefer it if you just offered a product, and that one product was just simply support, and it was only open to corporations or businesses. LLC, corporation, whatever you wanna be; just not an individual.

So an individual software maintainer like yourself, doing business with corporations - I might personally prefer to just do the business with that business personally, rather than leverage GitHub, but I think if GitHub could produce tooling, the framing of it being GitHub Sponsors, that’s where it gets, in my mind, weird. Even for us as a podcast network and a podcast business, a media company, we sell sponsorships. But once we pass that threshold of relationship, we begin to call them and treat them much like partners, because we’re not looking for sponsors and transactions, we’re looking for people who care about us as a business, the community we serve, which is software developers… And they get in the door with the word “sponsorship”, but we soon after help them understand our own lexicon, which is “We treat you like a partner, and not so much like a sponsor, and at that point we’d prefer you to not be transactional and prefer to lean on relationship.” I’m kind of going in the weeds on our own business, but I think the word “sponsorship” is what gets a little murky, in my opinion.

Christopher Hiller: Yeah, I don’t think we’re actually using GitHub Sponsors. I think it just goes to our Open Collective page. Mocha was one of the first collectives on Open Collective, so we get donations through that platform. Right now we are in the process of finding a UX/UI designer-type person to work on our website and help us with our documentation, and organization thereof, and all sorts of cool stuff… So we’re gonna use some of the donations to fund that work. It’s work that nobody’s gonna come along and just do for us.

[44:01] So GitHub Sponsors - no, we haven’t really used it. I think we added the link to Open Collective there. But yeah, donations are cool, and they help us do stuff like that. None of us are trying to make a living off of – not like Evan You. We’re not trying to live off of the work we do on this project.

Jerod Santo: Well, we’ve been talking about business models, but each time you bring up a business model you say “Well, this one might not make money, but it’s exciting.” Are there any money-makers? Like, advertising… You named a few. But is there a money-maker in here, and if not, could this be a thing supported by the community through GitHub Sponsors, through Open Collective? I mean, you could go that traditional/non-traditional route.

Nadia Eghbal: Yeah, I’m a huge fan. It’s definitely the brainchild of Devon Zuegel, so I’m not gonna take credit for it… But yeah, definitely, we were having a lot of those really active conversations while I was at GitHub.

One thing I will say is really cool about my experience with Sponsors so far has just been that - especially as I’ve been starting to do more non-open source things - a surprising number of people that are not developers and not involved in open source know about GitHub Sponsors, which I think is really cool. So it’s clearly making itself known more broadly, beyond just developers.

So yeah, I think it’s a really great experiment to have, for everybody to see and to learn from. There should be more examples of platforms that build funding or subscription mechanisms directly into the platform itself, since you can always raise money on Patreon separately, for example, but having sponsorship information appear right alongside your issues or your profile, so you could theoretically see – if someone sponsors you, you should be able to see that in your issue thread, and only really a platform could offer that end-to-end solution altogether.

I really like that it’s very developer-centric and not just project-centric, which I think was another thing that I’ve just sort of found in talking to open source developers. Historically, we talk a lot about open source as project-centric, and not so much as developer-centric, because presumably there are just fewer open source projects in the early days, and they’re much, much bigger… So you can picture – like, Linus Torvalds is known for Linux or Git; there are just these big projects… Whereas someone like Sindre Sorhus today is just known for doing a lot of cool stuff on the internet. He has literally like thousands of projects (I don’t even know; hundreds, thousands) that he’s written and published, that are widely used… So I think GitHub Sponsors is taking a step in the direction of saying “This isn’t just about sponsoring open source projects themselves, but it’s about sponsoring the individual people behind it.” It really helps highlight that a lot of projects do just have a couple of critical people at the helm, and those people deserve our attention and support.

Nikita Prokopov: I would say that the idea of Patreon is the best, because you can have posts, you have extra material, and stuff like that. You can hide something for Patreons only, stuff like that. All the features.

On GitHub Sponsors I don’t think you can do that. You just give money and forget about it. You don’t get [unintelligible 00:51:57.22] So in terms of Patreon, it’s probably the best. I don’t like the UI of Patreon; I think it’s terrible. Everything is of the wrong size, and you can never find anything, stuff like that… It’s hard to write a post, and stuff like that. But conceptually, the idea is better, certainly.

Tobias Koppers: Yeah, yeah. That’s the idea, Open Collective is the fiscal or legal entity behind GitHub Sponsors which can receive the money.

Jerod Santo: I can name five if you want me to… So these last two are paired insofar as I met both of these people at Open Core Summit this fall, in San Francisco - Devon Zuegel and Chris Anderson. So I loved the episodes we made just recently with the two of them.

With Devon we talked about the making of GitHub Sponsors, episode 370. GitHub Sponsors I think is a big deal; maybe it’s the next big thing…

Adam Stacoviak: I see, I see. Well, that’s what we’re trying to drive to with this particular show - a pique into not only the projects that we speak to on this show around open source, but also the maintainers behind those open source projects, their lifestyle, what they’re involved in, their values, as you’ve talked about… The reasonings why they do what they do, and maybe what you like most and what you don’t like as much… But then also, as we try to find ways to sustain, that being an open source software maintainer, as you’ve said - one of the things you said you like least about it was that people feel as if they can ask you or ask of the project maintainers something and expect the answer today.

That’s a skewed expectation from a user’s standpoint, but it doesn’t help you be able to show up every day. It doesn’t help you to cover rent, or to – for lack of better terms, to make being an open source software maintainer your thing, what you do… And the reason why I say that is because when we spoke with Devon Zuegel on a recent episode of the Changelog, and we talked about GitHub Sponsors, near the end of the show we asked her “What’s success for you, for GitHub Sponsors?” And I was quite surprised by her answer. Her answer was “Just like someone would say they wanna be a firefighter, or a lawyer, or a doctor, I want someone who’s young, who’s aspiring to their future, to say “I wanna be an open source software maintainer.”

So one of our reasonings for doing this show, this maintainers spotlight series, is to get an understanding of everyone’s thought around that particular subject, because it’s becoming so much more of a concern to figure out how to sustain - not just the projects, but the people behind them. What are your thoughts on that?