Adam Stacoviak: [01:04:06.02] Saying thank you has gotta be part of it, too. People don’t say thank you often enough. They just sort of accept it and move along. I don’t know if they’re shy, or just maybe they feel like they might be bothering… I don’t know what makes somebody not say thank you, but… I was moved, and I was like “I’ve gotta email these folks and tell them hank you.” And at the time, we were really trying to do a lot more with - and we still are, of course, but at the time we were becoming more aware of like the tooling we were using, the dev tooling we were using, and trying to give back on GitHub Sponsors, because that was becoming more and more of a thing to do… And we obviously wanted to support you all in your efforts with Oban.

How do you feel about cron jobs? Do you like them? Do you hate them? How does this kind of merge into your world? Because I want to give a shout out to somebody that I love, and they’re pretty awesome, but they’re in the cron world, and I don’t want to like ruffle your feathers if I don’t have to.

Mike McQuaid: Yeah, so I mean, it was kind of a bit of both. We sort of investigated in the kind of earlier days some other stuff… We didn’t go straight into the company with kind of it being work on Homebrew. But basically, we kind of built some small other things to begin with, and then it became clear pretty early on that that wasn’t playing to our strengths… And my CEO, John Britton, who used to be my manager at GitHub, he was basically trying to convince me to make a company around Homebrew for over a decade. And him and various other kind of people said “Oh, this is a great idea”, and I’ve always been like “This a terrible idea. Why would you do this?” But the thing that is interesting for me now, what changed is that we’re in a place, I think, as an industry, and a place as a project, and stuff like that - like, I mentioned our governance structures earlier. I mean, one of the nice things about this governance structure is Homebrew is in a place that even if I wanted to somehow try and completely take over Homebrew as a corporate entity, I can’t do that. We have structures in place that prevent me or anyone else involved with the project, or not involved with the project, from doing that.

So the project’s safe, the project’s in a decent kind of financial state, and has like a decent community that kind of meets together once a year or so, and stuff like that. But we’re also in a state with like sustainability in open source where there’s more conversation about that. We’ve seen various companies try various things, GitHub Sponsors existed, we’ve seen HashiCorp do what they did and what they do, and what Elastic did and do, and all these types of kind of different models… And to me it’s kind of felt like a sort of natural solution to the problems really that I guess I’ve seen, which is that – another thing you get with like a volunteer-run open source project like Homebrew, where no one’s employed to work on it, is every so often big companies come to Homebrew and they say “Hey, we want integration for SSO, MDM”, or one of these other big company problems that small individuals and hobbyists don’t have… And the Homebrew volunteers go and look at some SAML documentation or whatever, and they’re like “Oh, no, no, no, no… I’m not spending my evenings and weekends on this. I have absolutely no interest in doing that.” So it feels like there is a kind of happy middle ground where the companies who have budgets and requirements for stuff that your average Homebrew user doesn’t care about can get us in Workbrew land to go and be like “Hey, make Homebrew play nicer with the way our company does things.” And that’s essentially what we’re doing. And that – I never really saw it floated that way until we kind of thought about it this year, and that is being like a way to look at open source sustainability through that lens, and like the prospect of kind of build a company and making Homebrew better at the same time.

Previously, when we were talking about this 10 years ago and we hadn’t seen some of the success, and less successful attempt at this stuff, it was more or less just like “Get an open source company around an open source project… Profit.” That was the business model. And I guess I’ve never thought that that was something I wanted to do. And now, we kind of have a nicer, strict separation, where it’s like Workbrew is doing stuff for money, which we will charge companies for. We also work on Homebrew stuff, but the stuff that’s in Homebrew is free, it’s open source, it’s worked on by volunteers…

[01:26:28.06] And it’s a kind of – it’s a nice world, and it requires me, as I did at GitHub, to kind of wear two hats: the open source hat and the kind of company hat. But so far it’s going pretty well. And even, like, we’ve got our first employee starting in the near future, who’s a Homebrew maintainer… And I’ve said to him, “When I send you a message on our company’s Slack, that’s me talking to you as like Mike McQuaid, CTO of Workbrew. When I send you a message on the Homebrew Slack, that’s Mike McQuaid Homebrew project leader. So anything I asked you to do on the Homebrew Slack, you can just be like “Nah, I don’t want to. I’m a volunteer. I do this in my evenings and weekends. I can’t be bothered. You would like me to review this PR? No, thanks, dude.”

And yeah, I think that way of kind of doing things and that way of thinking is maybe a little bit unusual and weird, but that kind of idea of kind of having the company and having the open source as being two separate entities that can nicely, symbiotically benefit each other I think is where my head’s at, and I don’t think that could have been done two years ago, ten years ago, whatever.

Jerod Santo: Alright, well, let’s shill your links now. GitHub Sponsors - how do they hit you up? What do we do? github.com slash what?

Jerod Santo: Yeah. I’m not against it, I just don’t have one. Okay, so you need help on the iOS side. That’s interesting. That leads me to think about money. I don’t know if that makes you think about money, but I start thinking about money when I start thinking about “I need help programming something.” What’s the money situation? So obviously, there’s a Pro Plan, you’ve got GitHub Sponsors going on, and I saw there’s a decent amount; over 30. It seems like there’s some people backing the project… But could you bring on somebody to work on the iOS, or you’re not quite there yet? Where are you at financially?

Marcin Kulik: Definitely it would help if there were some corporate sponsors. I have on GitHub Sponsors page profile, I’ve set up some monthly tiers, where I offer some perks for sponsors… So those higher-level tears would really help, because - yeah, that would allow me to focus on that, and not worry about living costs, and other things like that. Of course, individual donations are more than welcome… But yeah, I’m really new with this sponsorship thing. I never did that before… But yeah, I think monthly sponsors, not just one-time donations, would we change it. Because it compounds.

Adam Stacoviak: And many tiers there. You’ve got the monthly, obviously, and you’ve got the one-times… So if you want to give monthly, there’s five or six different tiers there. Or you can do one-time. Everybody knows how GitHub Sponsors works, I’m sure, but… They do make it pretty easy, and I’m glad that they take less fees so that they can support fun, non-commercial, non-capitalistic products like yours. The gifts. The gifts of open source.

Ben Johnson: I don’t know how unpopular this is… I was trying to think of something related to our solo devs and open source stuff… I don’t think that there’s any way to directly monetize open source software. I was a big proponent of it, and I really wanted to make it work for years, and I just don’t think it’s possible to do. So that’d be my unpopular opinion. I think there’s methods like open core… I think you’re ultimately always going to sell something that’s not your open source software; it might be private features on top of, it might be support, but you’re never going to sell the open source itself. Even the GitHub Sponsors - I think it’s a great idea, and I wanted it to work, but I think there’s just not very many people that are actually making a living wage on GitHub Sponsors. So my unpopular opinion is you can’t do it.

Adam Stacoviak: Maybe one more facet is how do maintainers get paid? How easy is it for them to extract the dollars from the donation, from GitHub Sponsors?

Chad Whitacre: To fill that out even further, one of the hardest things to do, to give money to open source projects from within a company, is honestly just the bureaucracy. So this Maintainer Month, one great thing you could do would be to go through your procurement process at your company for Open Collective and/or GitHub Sponsors. There’s some newer platforms out there, but let’s start with GitHub Sponsors, Open Collective. Go through the procurement process, get them in the system as a vendor. That’s honestly the biggest hurdle for most companies, one of the huge hurdles is just having them in the system. So even if you don’t have any budget yet, or you can’t dedicate a lot of budget to it, just go through that procurement process. That’ll be a huge win.

Jerod Santo: It’s easier for them to make you a vendor and sign a contract than it is to donate through GitHub Sponsors sometimes.

Adam Stacoviak: The point you’re making is great, though; we should support open source more. I always want to see more clarification on the how. GitHub Sponsors is one answer, but it’s an avenue. It’s not like what. The what becomes infinitely harder to define if you don’t examine the open source that’s useful to you. And then sometimes it might be corporate sponsors, and it may actually be open source, but it’s a company who’s backing you. Well, are you gonna support that thing? Well, maybe… You know, you might use it as a support, but they’re already a company; just buy the things that support them to make it. There’s no wrong way to support open source.

Christina Warren: [29:49] And then the opportunity came for me to join GitHub this past spring. And so I joined the developer relations team there, and… You mentioned that you talked to bdougie at All Things Open… He was my manager until he left, but I work with Martin Woodward, who’s fantastic. He actually originally created Microsoft’s GitHub instance, account, and was the first person to really fight and get Microsoft using GitHub, which - even before the acquisition, they were a really big customer and user, and he really fought hard for that. And I really, really enjoy it.

What we do in, developer relations, developer advocacy specifically is – bdougie used to call us like the hype house for GitHub, and I think that’s a pretty good approximation insofar as… We’re working a lot with the product and the engineering teams, and giving them feedback based on what we’re hearing from users, and from customers, and community members… But we’re also directly engaging with the community, right? when I say that I’m a developer advocate, a lot of people wonder what that means, and they’re “Oh, are you just like a paid shill for GitHub?” No, no. If anything, I kind of think it’s the inverse. I’m actually a paid shill for our users, because those are the people I care about, the community members. So if there are problems, then I want to be able to know that, and do what I can to bring it back to people who have the places that they can reach out to that… But sometimes – we all know, when you’re in the middle of a development cycle, you have your own ideas about how something is going to be used, and you might not be aware of some of the edge cases, or you might not be aware – you know, some people might use things in some ways you didn’t anticipate… And so it’s useful for people to get that feedback. We can offer that.

We can also show off cool things that we’re doing, because there’s so much stuff going on, it can be hard to keep up. So we’ll create videos, or do live streams, give talks… And then beyond that, also just trying to kind of find and celebrate all the amazing things that are happening within the broader open source community, because so many cool things are happening… And that’s my favorite part of my job, honestly, is being able to give shout-outs, and to highlight the great stuff that people are building all the time… Because I love that. I’ve always loved that. When I was a writer, I used to love to help people discover cool things. That was always my favorite thing, was to get an email from someone who said, “This article bought my car”, or “This had a big impact on how my business was able to grow.” And I’ve never tried to take that lightly in terms of what you can offer when you have an audience, and showcasing others.

So I love being able to find really cool projects happening in the community, and hopefully share those out and get them more attention, or more support through things like GitHub Sponsors, and working in other ways to try to make things more sustainable. So that’s the – longer than 30 seconds, but that was kind of the journey.

Chad Whitacre: I just think it’s so awesome to see – now it feels like status quo, right? Now it feels like GitHub Sponsors – which is awesome, right? It’s like, now we’ve got that baseline, and now what I’m seeing with thanks.dev, and with StackAid is like next-level, which is just what we need; we need to keep moving it forward, figure out how to make it easier for companies like Sentry. I’m doing a lot of gruntwork to make this work; the easier we can make it for companies… Like you said, find those simple – “Alright, here’s the simple story. Here’s the right amount. Here’s how you get it to the right dependencies…” The simpler we make it…

@hat I want to see is - I don’t want Sentry to be out front, like “Oh, good job, Sentry. You have this great program.” I want it to just be like “Of course. Everybody does this.” It has to be normal. That’s what we’re gonna really have that – this gets back to what you were asking about impact, and how we think about impact… Some of it is, yeah, the impact on the projects themselves right now. But look, let’s be honest; like $260,000 isn’t actually that much, you know what I’m saying? It’s a lot, but it’s not a lot. When you look at the Open SSF, that has like $5 million, like “Here you go”, right? The FAANGS and everybody, like Microsoft, they’re able to do these larger dollar amount things… But relative to the size of their company; that’s what we look at, and feel good about what we’re doing.

Jerod Santo: [01:14:04.08] [laughs] That’s only nominal, you know? You’re gonna have to sign up for my GitHub Sponsors if you want any bug fixes. Just kidding…

Jerod Santo: This ain’t your typical Chromium fork. Both LibWeb and LibJS that drive Ladybird are novel engines.

Andreas works on these projects full-time thanks to his generous supporters on GitHub Sponsors, Patreon and PayPal. Pitching in your hard-earned cash at this point would go towards paying other devs full-time to join him.

Check out Ladybird and if you want us to host Andreas on The Changelog, let us know (and ping him too while you’re at it.)

Josh Goldberg: I’ll let you know when I figure it out. Who knows when…? Yeah, it’s a great question. I would love to become like a Sindre Sorhus, Evan You etc. type of person, who just makes a salary doing open source. I have this annoying mental block though where I feel bad splurging on myself, like going out for a nice dinner, if I know that this is based off of people giving me what could be misinterpreted as charity. I know that’s wrong, but it’s something I’m trying to get over.

[16:07] So right now for money, in addition to just living with a person who has a full-time job, I’m doing consulting on the side, or gig economy style things, like pull request reviews. But I think a goal that I could strive towards is to have enough sustainable backers so that I earn, rather than, say, a hundred dollars or a couple hundred dollars a month, maybe like one or two thousand a month.

For reference here - if you look at the salary of a software engineer… Let’s say that you’re looking at a beginner salary, which is like three digits, a hundred bucks an hour, or some situation… Like 50 to 100 an hour, just to make the math easy… Let’s say $50 an hour, which is a really nice salary for a lot of people. In order to get yourself into the top - I think it’s like five or ten, or some single-digit percentage of GitHub Sponsors… That’s your monthly intake. $5 or $10 a month on GitHub Sponsors is a pretty impressive amount, honestly. Most people don’t get all that much. So it’s a very different kind of economy, talking about your full-time job, where people can get $200,000, $300,000 a year after a decade of experience, versus GitHub Sponsors where a percent of a percent make minimum wage.

Yeah, I think - to speak to the last point, the company sponsorship full-time is very interesting and appealing, and if Vercel or someone wants to talk to me about it, just pay me to do my open source. I’d love to hear it; happy to promote your company. But one of the reasons why I love doing open source full-time is that I get to work on the projects that I get to work on. If there’s some cool little thing that I wanna do… If let’s say I wanna work on a game engine specifically dedicated to ripping off old Nintendo games - which I plan on continuing later this year - I don’t think Vercel is gonna be too thrilled to be paying me a wage for that… So we’ll see.

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.