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up now at Patreon dot dot NetRocks dot com. Hey, welcome back to
dot net rocks. This is Carl Franklin, it is Richard Capell and we're
in Portugal again and get here. It's nice. We love it here.
It was supposed to be raining all day today and the sun came out while
we're in here waiting. We're indoors all day. I was ready to be
soaking wet by the time I got here, because it's about a what a
half a mile walk or something like that from the hotel. So I packed
in my bag like an underwear shirt, another pair of shoes, which,
by the way, is kind of funny, Kelly, My wife packed my
other pair of shoes, except that she packed two left feet downside to keep
buying the same shita and yeah, the downside right, Apparently I had two
pairs of old shoes hanging out by the door anyway. That's not important.
What's important is dot net rocks. Victoria Melnikova is with us today. But
before we introduce her, let's roll the music for Better Know a Framework.
Awesome oos. This being Show eighteen seventy one. If you go to one
eight seven to one dot pwop, dot me, pop dot me, that'll
bring you to this article in the bite, which is futurism dot com blog,
and it's this. Microsoft will pay you fifteen thousand dollars if you can
get bing ai to go off the rails. Oh man, sounds pretty good.
All that. Being the bounty hunter, you think you can outsmart an
Ai into saying stuff it's not supposed to. Microsoft is betting big that you
can't and willing to pay up if it's wrong. In a blog update,
Microsoft announced a new bug bounty program, vowing to reward security researchers between two
thousand and fifteen thousand dollars if they're able to find vulnerabilities in its bing ai
products, including jail break prompts, that make it produce responses that go against
the guardrails that are supposed to bart from being bigoted or otherwise problematic and otherwise
problematic is underline, meaning there's a link to it. I don't even want
to know that link goes to. But you'll have to figure that out for
yourself. To be eligible for submission being users must inform Microsoft but a previously
unknown vulnerability that is per criteria outlined by the company, either important or critical
to security. They must also be able to reproduce the vulnerability via video or
in writing. So there you go, interesting have at it. Yeah,
I know if you can really pull it off. I mean, lots of
other llms have been breached, so to speak. The guys that work with
me, Brian McKay, he was like, I could probably write a bot
that'll do that. Yeah, it's worth a coin. That's not a bad
day. Yeah, it's not a bad day. Well, anyway, that's
the story that I have. Who's talking to us today, Richard. You
grab a comment top of the show eighteen thirty, the one we did back
in the beginning of the year January of twenty three with Sarah Nevotani when we
were talking about sustainable open source. Yeah, and this comment comes from Voytech,
who has been listening to the show for a long time. It's written
a few comments. He says, Hi, guys, I have met one
major problem with contributing to open source projects which I use in my work.
Large companies add firewall rules to block get pushed commands to get hub. Why
would they do that? It's pretty strange. Huh. So if I find
a bug or when implement a feature, I'm not able to deliver it back
properly, so I have to Now he's found a workaround and get this,
create a fork in my private Git server and maintain the project privately at the
time that I would leave the company. That's one workaround. Would you say,
just fork it and hold your changes until until you go home at the
end of the day, and then push it up that way? Prepare code
on a private machine, even in private time, and push it up as
a pr that way. But then I can't test it in production or copy
paste the files I've changed into the gethub WebUI, which is a little tough
if the change is significant. And patch files make this a bit easier,
but still problematic. Wow. I mean the other option would be can you
fire up a VPN and you know, go out through that. But I'm
sure if they are locking down GitHub. They're probably looking for VPN kids too,
and you'll have infosec landing on your big hurry. But imagine that this
company, I mean, I think what he's saying here is that this company
is using open source but blocking folks from contributing back to open source. That's
not right. Yeah, that's pretty messed up. Yeah, that's pretty messed
up. Foy check feel your pain, man serious. And the copy of
music Goby is on its way to you. And if you'd like a copy
of music, go buy. I write a comment on the website at dot
netroox dot com or on the facebooks. We publish every show there, and
if comment they're reading on the show, we'll send you copy of music go
by. And you can follow us on Twitter if you want. But or
X or whatever the hell they're calling it these days. But the real cool
kids are over on Mastodon. I'm at Carl Franklin at tech hub dot social,
and I'm Rich Campbell at Masterdon dot social. And send us a two
and we will read them. Mm hm. We may not answer, but
we will read. We do the best we can. Yeah, I should
be reading comments from Masterdon. Yeah yeah, yeah, absolutely, Okay,
So let's bring on Victoria Melnikova, and she works for a company named Evil
Martians. Are there any other kind of martians? Really? I mean really
if you think about it, No, you know, maybe we're talking microbes
or microbes evil. I don't know if you could call them they are,
okay, So alongside Evil Martians, Victoria Melnikova connects with technical leaders, particularly
in developer productivity space, and empowers growth stage startups on their journeys to success.
Victoria is the author and creator of dev Propulsion Labs, a podcast about
building successful developer tools. Welcome to the show. That is correct, and
thank you. I'm very happy to be here. We are happy to have
you. What do you think about blocking pushes to get hub? That's one
way to block innovation in a company, That's what I think. At the
same time, maybe we should you know, get being AI to do that
task, and maybe that's how we get to rate well split the money,
okay. So that yeah. We have done quite a few shows on open
source and commercial interests, and it seems like the landscape is getting more and
more screwed up right because of commercial interests. The big companies are getting involved
now and nobody really has a I don't know. It seems to me like
nobody really has a plan of how to do this right. What do you
think? It's interesting because I'm more familiar with the other side of open source,
with the indie side and startup side of open source, and that space
is growing and thriving and it's as beautiful as ever. So I'm sure that
on the big company side, on the enterprise side, it's quite challenging and
there are a lot of limitations, and you know, I don't know what
the landscape is looking like. But overall in the tool industry, I feel
like we're doing great. But you're working with startups. Yes, so they're
almost certainly using open source software. Yes, But are they making open source
software too? Yes? And yet their startups so they're being funded by investors
who want to see a return. How do those investors feel about open source
software? That's actually a great question, And I think we see a surge
of very exciting startups like superbase, call dot Com, Neon Database, and
other companies that are actually profitent hugely by open sourcing. So they offer a
free offering to their users, getting a huge kind of user base, getting
feedback, tightening those feedback loops. So in the end they end up with
the great product and they sell enterprise plans to big companies and they still make
a ton of money with that. So this is sort of the classic open
source model. Up there's a free product with animal support, and if you
are using it at a pro level, then by the support content exactly.
It's kind of like the open core business model when you have free open core
that's available to everybody, dependent on the license their limitations, but still and
the pro features or support, as you mentioned, comes at a price.
Sure, I mean there's always a wrestling match then with are there features in
the pro edition only or the enterprise version only? You know, how do
you do you keep them in syncl like is it a common code base?
Is I always worry that the open product gets left behind? Yeah? Well,
the you know, a smart way to do it is to limit it
by the number of users that you're supporting, right, yeah, because then
you have full you have the full product with all of its features. You're
not limited. You're only limited in scope by the size of the audience that's
using it. It's an interesting question. I think I have a couple of
great examples. So for example, even Martians also, So we create a
lot of open source projects, and historically we've been Ruby and Rail's development shop,
but over the years we really delved into other languages like Go and Russ
and others. But in Ruby and rails specifically, we uh, you know,
create a lot of projects that are forever open source. They're free.
People use them all the time. But there is an example. Any cable
for example, it has a free you know, a free version, free
tier, and you would only need any cable pro if you need to do
something really advanced. Any cable is real time in rogun Rail's applications, real
time, real time everything cleration. Yeah, sort of a web socket kind
of thing, kind of yeah, so it's chats notifications, that sort of
thing uses any cable h And do you set a limit on the free version
the like, what would make people upgrade pro if they need some custom development
for example, or they need some custom configuration and they cannot resolve the situation.
Another example is image proxy. It's image optimization on the fly, So
image optimization basically image optimization will forever be free, but custom watermarks is not.
So that's a very clear kind of like what right does the free version
put a watermark in there? No? No, no. For example,
you have a business and you want to want watermarks to all your images,
So if you pay whatever it is, you know, for image proxy,
then you get that functionality. Well, for example, smart object detection,
is that a client side technology or a service side services service? SI?
Yeah, okay, And in both cases it's like the customer option OPS to
buy the pro product. There's no limits on, no limits, yeah,
I mean, these are cases where the limit makes sense, perhaps if it's
very expensive to run it, like for example, if it's something that if
we host an image proxy sauce, that would be perhaps a question, you
know, how many people would want to let on for free. But since
people just spin up a doctor container and do it on their own, you
know cloud, it's not a big deal. Not a big deal for us.
Yeah. We've recently had this controversy with Unity where I mean, and
it very much read to me as much as it went poorly with the Hey,
if you're making money, we want to cut kind of mindset. And
I think it's an interesting there's sam if anything ever happened to your software,
you know what? Yeah, Well, and now the CEO is decided to
retire, Like obviously this did not go well for Unity. But I don't
know if you've run into these models like there's some there's one thing of you're
building it for your company, your company makes money some other way, and
it grows to a certain size and it costs you overhead. It's like,
hey, we need to charge you or you want some there as opposed to
you create a tool that's inside of our product and we sell that product and
we're making millions. Yeah, it's interesting, So I want to approach it
from two ends. I recently had a guest on my show I'm soon launching
a second season of Death Propulsion Labs, and in that season, I have
ten deftool founders that are doing Some of them are doing commercial open source and
some are not differs. But one of my guests is Mishko Heavry and he's
the creator of Angular, jass and quick and now he is working as a
ctoed builder that I own. So he created Angular within a big company,
right, and you get access to resources you wouldn't have otherwise, you know,
and yes it exists within a big enterprise, but it so many people
benefit from Angular js just being available as a framework, So I don't see
a problem with it per se, but sometimes it could be problematic, right,
So yeah, I know, I think it's a great schism, and
it's one of always our aspects we've been exploring, is trying to figure out,
like, what are the right ways to go about this for folks,
because they it does seem reasonable to want to make money from your work,
yeah, and at the same time not be seen to be deceiving anyone either.
I actually have a very hot take on this because I believe that the
only way to do open source sustainably is to commercialize it. And the reason
for that is because I work with engineers all the time, right, and
I know that in the open source industry the burnout is very material. And
if you're not being sustained by the project that you're investing your time and then
like every single day base, how are you going to do it for ten
years, for fifteen years? It's impossible, you know. And I've seen
really amazing examples. For example, Mike Perham in robyin rail Space, he
created Sidekick and Sidekick is the background jobs for Ryan Rails. It's very kind
of well known in the Robin Rail's community, and so basically his approach I
think is kind of the ideal situation for commercializing open source. He was working
with Robyn Rails a lot. He found a problem and he's like, I
want to create a solution for this, but in order to make it sustainable,
I need to be smart about how I approach this. So what I
want to do is, I want to make sure that it pays for my
living so I can invest eight hours per day into creating an awesome product.
And he started documenting his steps every single day, so at some point he
created a product that was great. He is a great rogun Rail's engineer.
Hey, you know, did a great product, and he kind of told
his audience, look, guys, it's available for free right now. But
to make sure that I'm able to do this for many years to come,
I'm going to turn it into paid product. You can choose to stay on
this free tier, but you know, I'm not going to maintain it anymore.
And if you have any issues, you'll have to resolve them by yourself,
right, But my capacity is limited and I want to make sure that
my project, the Sidekick product, is amazing for years to come, and
basically that's how he did it. And he is a one person show still
and I think he is at like five million ARR at this point, and
it's extremely impressive. He is able to do what he loves and it's you
know, transparency in the way you approach it was important. Extremely h I
would say extremely So. The two things that I notice that are extremely important
boundaries setting various boundaries and being transparent about it. I think those are the
two core values in commercial open source, right. I mean, we've certainly
talked to folks who started out just making an open source thing and then hit
this point where it's like, oh, I need to charge for this,
and then people get really angry with it, like you but you know,
at the same time, like the alternative is I abandon it? Like what
do you want? It's actually crazy. Sou the principal front end engineer at
Evil Martians, created posts. I don't know if you've heard about this,
but it's it's it's a pretty well known framework in the front end world.
What's it called post CSS? Okay, yeah, pretty much. I don't
want to say all the frontenders use it, but it's a lot do and
so it's not monetized, right, it's completely free, and he spends a
lot of time maintaining this project along with others. And you know, the
main source for folks like Andrea to receive money on that is to get donations
from people you know that support his project, that use his project and their
commercial products or whatever. And it's just twelve k a year, like you
cannot you cannot survive. It's not sustainable. And one of the things about
open source is that people are very vocal, but they're particularly vocal about things
that don't work. So if you read negative comments, you if something breaks,
you know about it down and it's really hard to stay motivated when you're
drowning in this negative feedback. There's very little support that you get, you
know, and the of the years, it's just becoming this burden. So
I do believe that monetizing open source is the way to go, certainly way
to support it. I mean, I'm looking at at post CSS and he
has had a bunch of contributors over the years. I mean, clearly he
does the vast majority of them. Yeah, I got to think that having
some contributors helps. Yeah, I mean, people also help to adapt it
to different frameworks. So it's kind of like the ecosystem is growing, but
the core, the core code is mostly him. Yeah, and so a
lot of these, you know, I'm surprised at how we used to looking
at like a contributed graph, and so I had gotten to now it's like,
how is this being worked on? It's like, oh, it's clearly
one person. And then there's a dozen people that built something in a narrow
period of time, probably you know, some of the cross platform inmentations and
then went away. Yeah, you know, little spikes like that. It's
it's a signature exactly. Yeah, for better or worse. You know,
ten years, ten years he spent on POSTSS. Yeah, it takes a
long time. Well, and also just the commitment. H and of course
the answer to half the cursing and yelling is like would you like your money
back? Really? You know it's free. What are you doing? Yeah,
And he has a handful of projects. It's not just postess, it's
a lot, So it really is, you know, a second job,
yeah, easily. And but also I mean, I don't know that I've
ever met Yeah, I don't think I've ever met Andre, but I have
a sneaking suspicion of the kind of personality, like, because we've certainly met
a few the folks that can do that and then tolerate a lot of abuse,
Yeah, and still keep making a thing like they're an unusual breed.
Yeah. I admire him. He's very strong. Sure, Yeah, keep
doing the things that are important that you value and making a tremendous amount of
software along the way. Yeah. But also, like how does he make
a living? He works out of ill Martians, right, so that he
also has a job on top of all. Exactly do you think sometime in
the future, the way AI innovation is going that GitHub will have some or
you know what, other repositories will have some sort of intelligence assistant that will
suggest ways that you can improve your project, maybe even find bugs, maybe
help as that sort of you know, help that maintainer do their job better
or more productively. You know, there's one thing that AI lacks is the
creative thinking, you know, the critical creative thinking. And I feel like
engineers are really good at that. Like great engineers are really good at creating
elegant, simple solutions for very complex problems. And I think the more advanced
the engineer is, the simpler. The solution is so and I'm not sure
if AI at this stage is capable of that per se. I don't think
it is right now, but I mean, yeah, the way it's going,
it's innovating it at quite a clip hopefully in the future. I mean,
I don't know if it's a good thing, to be honest, I'm
like, that's scared. I mean, I would also counter that concept of
we've hit a wall, it seems with the large language model. Yeah,
it's now big enough that there's very few places capable of running making a new
one. You know, there's really no GPT five on the horizon. We
need a new algorithm. I suspect I appreciate the tool for its idea to
stimulate creativity in me. For sure that going from a blank screen to a
bunch of copy, however messed up that copy may be, at least is
stimulus for you know, how would you shape this up? What would you
do with it, whether that's code or copy or whatever it may be.
It's like, that's what these tools seem to be good at so far.
Yeah, I'm also really hopeful about the image manipulations because, for example,
my husband and I were creating an illustration book for kids, and we've used
Judge Pity, you know, for some sense of direction for the text,
but for the illustrations to get inspiration, to get quick kind of back and
forth exploring, explore ideas quickly, cheaply. You know, mid Journey is
like the perfect thing, and so at Evil Martians once again, we have
a new product. It's called can Fi and basically you can think about it
as ais system for documentation and support for the tools. So you know,
some companies, especially when they deal with a different with a bunch of different
languages, their support have to deal with a lot of tickets that are very
time consuming because they're different, and they cover vast majority of questions and training
a model to do that efficiently use previous experience, and you know, responses
makes a lot of sense, especially when people take a screenshot of the code
and they're like, what, you know, I run into a problem.
How can you resolve this? I've had a lot of experience with GPT in
various male us and I find that it does its best work at writing code,
and you know, when you ask it to be an authority on something,
it falls short and it can hallucinate, but code is something that it
does very well, and it's very easy to verify and it's easy to test,
and so I kind of think that there's a lot more innovation coming in
in code writing and in code whatever you want to call it. Copilot is
a great example of that, but I think that's where the real innovation is
going to happen, hopefully in the future. I don't know the answer to
that. I don't know the answer either, but that's that's my thought.
I really like using AI. Should I even say AI? No, I
don't know, GPT, I don't know. I don't know how to refer
to the products because it's such a generalize yeah, and it doesn't mean anything.
It's just like I'm so used to using it as a day to day
kind of term, you know, but I understand that it's not the proper
name for it, And a big concern for me is that everybody has a
different interpretation of it. So it's like we're creating a larger delusion when we
use these in precise names. And now cars are built with AI. It's
kind of like the refrigerators with AI. It's like, come on, yeah,
it's kind of like the craze with the web three. It's kind of
the same thing, like nobody understands what it is, and people throw this
word around not knowing what it really is. But anyways, I was going
to say that I use language models and charge it between particular to actually save
time on tedious tasks. That's what I prefer to use it for. And
I think we can get a lot of help with that, you know,
for developers, Yeah, saving time on task is always a good thing.
Then it just makes it another tool, but they're still your tasks. Yeah,
and these tools make it a little faster. I mean, I really
appreciate your point of view on the image thing. And I've seen a few
different types of projects where they use the generators to do the prototype imaging and
then ultimately went to graphic artists to get originals drone that they can control the
copyright on and all those sorts of things. But it was at least a
tool to help you explore these ideas. And I got interrupt for one moment
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And we're back. It's dot at Rocks. I'm Richard Campbell. Let's call
Franklin. Hey, Hey, hey, we're talking to Victoria melnik Kova.
Sorry, a bit about evil Martians and this getting commercialized open source. So
it's sort of a pattern then, of these startup companies building is it really
open source tooling or building products that there happen to also be open source I
think that the open source is just the philosophy or building products these days.
I think it's just a more open, transparent, and I don't know,
perhaps ideaitistic way to build products. Yeah, I mean, because the big
texts now are mostly making a source product the same way like it's table stakes.
I can't really sell this product if I don't like the source code.
Open Yeah, for a lot of product anyway, not everything we sort of
talked about the model of you're obviously about commercialization of open source. We've talked
about the model of you know, limited by users, but that's not always
the right model. What what are some of the other models that we haven't
talked about of commercialization. So I think that like, for example, with
image proxy, you can limit the number of instances. So if it's image
optimization, you know, you can limit the amount of requests or whatever it
is right that people can make. Because if a huge company uses image proxy
you know, I don't know, yeah, for free, then it's a
little bit of a poor example because I think with image proxy, the free
option is limitless, but when it comes to the paid tiers, then the
tiers are based on the number of instances that you spin up so and that
relationship there with overhead for the company too, Like all of those things are
being processed on their cloud account and they're paying for them. So you might
call throttling one model, whether it's throttling by number of users or number of
instances or a number of times that you can access that you can process an
image. Yeah, then there is the consulting kind of model, kind of
like red had. What red Head did does is when the product is free,
but all the support and all the service around it is not right,
and they're kind of incented to write bad documentation or make the products so complex
that it requires your out in order to it's counterintuitive. Yeah, yeah,
I'm always and I'm always looking for the righteous cycle there. Like we know
why Microsoft gives away dot net and all those things because they want it to
run on their cloud. And so if you're if you have access to all
that product, you'll run it on the cloud and they've got to make money
that way. It's not altruistic, it's a business. It is. And
the same Google is the same thing with a bunch of their stack and at
Google dot net there's not down on the Google cloud, yeah for sure.
And Amazon of course. Yeah, I'm trying to think what other models are
because I'm thinking about like sauce and but fast is an easy one. I
mean you use it on our servers and we meter it and you pay for
it. Yeah, and that it makes sense to limit the number of users
number whatever. You know, you have a lot of control that way.
Yeah. Yeah, And it gets more complicated to me when when you're writing
a tool that lives inside of somebody else's product and you know, maybe they
only use it a little bit and they don't need support because they're good at
it and you haven't, and now it's ingraded into their product and helping them
make money. Yeah. I hate to think it's like a resentment model.
It's interesting because it has to deal with licenses, right, so you can't
actually limit that capability with licensing. I'm not going to go into detail about
that because they don't want to mess like any definition of license because you know,
I was walking the words GTL too, right, because that's kind of
what we're talking about. Yeah. The two typical ones that I hear about
MIT license and aparty license, and MIT is the one that you can build
on top of actually, so so with image proxy for example, somebody can
buy a paid image proxy image proxy pro and actually build a product on top
of it, and nothing is stop in them because that's the license. That's
license, that's thet license. Yes, and I'm actually not sure. I
think Apache is more restrictive, so Apache would not allow you to build on
top of that, or I don't know, don't quote me on that.
I'm not an expert in licenses, but if you are considering commercializing open source,
you have to research those and choose the right model. Yeah, And
I just wonder if we're not coming back around to some of these copy left
conversations where it's like, listen, if you're going to include this, you
need to make a deal. Yeah, you have to contribute and so on.
And I think about again our listener at the beginning of the show,
who wants to do the right thing in the open source It's like, I'm
using open source product. I want to contribute back for the changes I need
to make that will be value by the people in my company's impairing me.
So you know, Jeff Atwood, the guy who one of our guys behind
stack overflow, he branched off and wrote from scratch a version of that engine,
that community forum engine called Discourse. And when we set it up,
and by we, I mean Richard Morris and I for the Ketogenic forum,
the license was if you want it, just download it. You can run
it on your hardware, on your metal, completely free, no problem.
But you'll have to, you know, manage it. And then they have
various other levels of management as a SaaS product, right, and so we
went we opted for that when money was coming in, and then when the
money stopped, we went towards we we we put it on a box and
so we have to manage it ourselves. But that you know, it requires
care and feeding. Somebody's got to do that, trading time for money.
But it's a great product. And I think you know that whole SaaS model
of commercialization is really good. It's like, look, it's free if you
want to run it, but if you don't want the headache, just caught
up some money. Yeah, and it's convenient, but it's tricky for the
engineers to figure it out. I think. So if you are just starting
out your open source project and you want to commercialize it, I guess open
core is the most straightforward solution or consulting. You mentioned open core before,
but tell tell everybody what that is. So open core is when you have
a free offering, something that's completely free and forever will be free, and
that's open source. A great example of that is cal dot com. They
have free tier for everybody who wants to use it. But if you want
to use some i don't know, more advanced features that you need for sales
or something else, or you need like a huge enterprise plan where you need
to manage a team, then you would pay for it. Okay, So
yeah, and it's you know, you think about cal dot com, it's
about a shared calendar, and that's a pay product. So it's the obvious
one. It's that's hugely valued, you know doing share calendar. Well it
is hard. Yeah, that's you know, you pay for that capability for
sure. And I always hope it's like and there's a common code base,
the thing's passionate at the same time and so forth. It's just that the
pro versions have more features. Yeah, they're all taking care of Yeah.
That's the other model that we didn't talk about that tends to make people angry
is when the free version is crippled in some way. And doesn't do all
the things that everybody needs to do. I think that's just poor open core.
I think that's just like, you know, a bad example of open
core. Yeah, not even bad, it's like intentionally bad. Right.
So do you remember when Microsoft did Visual Studio that way, like they crippled
the free product, the community edition. Yeah, the Community Edition wasn't always
as good as it is now. No. No, at one point it
did you couldn't do well. I can't remember what it was. But there
are some things that you just needed to do that you could and now the
Community Edition you could do everything. It's perfectly capable, perfectly capable of doing
everything. But yeah, you know, it's cripple wears and note of data
concept. It's just not a good idea. Another example is platform or cloud
offering. I think this is the newest one, like the hottest one,
and one of the great examples is versaill. They have the cloud that you
can use, but they also have I don't know, next JS and some
other frameworks that you can use for free. So so not quite as turnkey
as SAD, but it's interesting because it's kind of like neighboring products under the
same umbrella. But one put them together. Yeah, yeah, and they're
they're like a perfect match, so you're inclined to use them together, but
it's not expected. Yeah, you know, And it's one of those things
where you go down a certain path and gets some traction, get successful,
and then you bump up to a paid version to get some more features,
more capabilities. So yeah, it does make awful lot of sense. I
just think that just because you're able to build good software doesn't mean you're able
to manage open source project well less be able to manage the expectations of folks
when you come to realize limitations like I'm going to need some money here.
Yeah, I would even take it a step further because engineers left to engineer.
They love to solve problems, and sometimes it's such a sweet path to
take, you know, you can just be engineering, developing God in a
way, you know, and then when you're if you're trying to monetize it,
some challenges are very uncomfortable, Like you have to figure out sales,
you have to figure out talking to people, getting feedback, uncomfortable conversations support,
you know, people taking your open source project directions you don't want to
take to take it, etc. So it's an interesting mental exercise. I
think for many engineers to try to open source their projects, to try to
commercialize their projects, and I think the best way to approach it is by
building a community around it. And I think that the community shares the DNA
of the creator a lot. So we spoke in the beginning. We spoke
about boundaries and transparency, and I think those are the core features of open
source too without having, you know, to be commercialized, because the way
founder says the tone in the beginning of the community building will define the community
itself. Yeah, it does. Again, we're asking people to plan for
something they're necessarily planned for. But I es the just being open with your
community is enough that you can change your mind and show why you're changing your
mind and have a conversation with a be open to being persuaded to other methods
exactly, and being kind because I think people who create open source are often
more advanced engineers, but people who will be using your open source projects not
necessarily advanced engineers, and haven't that mindset that things need to be explicit,
things need to be digustible. You know, it's not you who is your
core user perhaps almost certainly not. Yeah, and a great way to start
that is to write a good read me. Yeah. Yeah. But you
know, you bring an interesting point, which is the skill that grows you
into a good open source maintainer and leader then also starts you down the path
of a commercialization path too. Exactly. You're already being affected by the consumers
of your product, and you're talking to them and interacting with them, and
so you can add this other layer of conversation. I mean, the distinction
being you are the expert in your own product, and you've got more confidence
there to have a conversation about building a business planet so forth, where you're
probably going to have less confidence. But it's still the same community, you
know. I think there's there's an honesty to be had there too, to
say I need to find and fix this, you know, in feedback.
Yeah. And it's interesting because I think a good open source project starts with
the real problem, with the painful problem, and if you actually are able
to resolve it well and talk about it, then people will be inclined to
support you and to even want to pay for that product. Yeah, give
you room, you know, because once again I have conversations with deftil founders,
and they talk about it all the time. Sometimes they start a project
while they're working full time on another job. They just start an open source
project and they get requests from users. Can I get this feature? Can
you do this for me? Please? Can I pay you for this?
Like this is so great? I'm happy with what it's doing. So it's
definitely those two things go hand and hand. But you know, you also
imply the contributor model for compensation doesn't seem to be enough money to matter,
honestly, Like, okay, think about a huge project that has that uses
I don't know, twenty thirty forty open source projects their dependencies, how to
distribute those nations, Like it's such a such a tricky question actually to figure
out, and I think there is no working solution for that. Maybe that's
a good idea for a startup. I mean, I would like get hub
to take charge of this in a meaningful way. Yeah, you know,
yeah, there is a problem also that the analytics for open source projects is
lacking. So actually, creators of open source they don't know how many people
use their project right, how they use it, et cetera. So well,
and when they've tried to find out they've gotten into trouble with their community
because sure they're collecting data, they haven't got a right to reflect exactly.
So it's kind of like a tricky situation. But GitHub does have that information,
probably some of it anyway, some of it. Yeah, so GitHub
is probably the only resource that could figure out monetization for it. I think
they do sit in a special place. But also see, you know,
we're headed down the path of a sort of GitHub enterprise mindset where we could
make it easier for our company to see how much open source they depend on
and how much they depend on it, and then they start putting some math
around making contributions back to those projects they depend on. Yeah. You know,
if you've got a library spread throughout your various internal applications, you want
that product, that that library to stay healthy because it's gonna be a lot
of work for you, for sure. You know, there's an ROI there
that says a reasonable contribution will increase the likelihood you're not going to have problems.
Yeah, another question is how do you reward contributors, you know,
because okay, you're the author and creator, the main maintainer, but there
are a bunch of other people that also contribute. How do you reward that?
Yeah, Now, I would like it to get us to a situation
where the original creator is making so much money that those contributors were annoyed with
them. Yeah, because I would see that as progress. It's oh,
good, we have a new problem because we are addressing the old problem.
Yea, the good problem. Yeah, that would be a good problem to
deal with about being generous to your contributors. And this little thing is like,
I don't want us to stop me because that isn't solved. I'd like
to create the next problem here. Yeah, so at least we can start
hitting down that path and saying, wait, you know, what's the right
things to do? Well hopefully. I mean my experience, people contribute to
an open source project because they want attention, you know, they want to
get noticed. Yeah, you know, and that's a good way to get
noticed. Yeah, I mean, heaven, great open source on your portfolio
is a great sign, right, I know that. For example, and
j Son that I mentioned in the beginning of this conversation, he actually sends
handwritten cards to his main contributors. I love that. It's nice. It's
a nice touch, and it's not that many people like this. You know,
he's not spending it a handful, it's probably like a hundred. Oh
wow, Okay, let's getting up there. Yeah. I've a couple of
trips to the stationary store. I've been contributing to a bunch of pat through
Patreon to a bunch of things, and a few of them have done stuff
like that where it's like he hop on my schedule for a half hour chat
kind of thing. One on one. I'd like to ask you why you're
contributing, you know, and I'm just like, that's really clever. Yeah.
You know, somebody is going to go out of their way to make
an effort towards your project to you go out of your way to take a
back to them too. That's smart. That's a good community. Also,
stickers work great, and the power of stickers collectibles, you know, laptop
graffiti. I have sent pizza to a shop I have to that that kicked
ass and took names from me on a thing and I made a couple of
calls. You were a It's not how many people was It's like I just
ordered a bunch of pizza, like thanks man, that's a nice touch.
It's a good thing to do. It's you know, you're not going to
do it every day. It's a lot of pizza, and the pizza shows
up while they're eating their curry, you know. So it's a way to
make make it. Try and make a contribution, do something to remind them
you're grateful. So tell us about a recent victory that happened at Evil Martians.
There's so many great things. Actually, today we have a launch and
product hunt. Today we're launching, so I want to explain a little bit.
So our designers are heavily invested in pushing the envelopes of working with color
on web, and they have been really strong advocates of OKLSH color system.
Basically, it's it's the new, most progressive way to work with color on
the web. It allows you to use three gamu colors, which means that
you get access to like thirty percent more colors on the web, and it's
very easy to create accessible and colorful interfaces because you can just use numbers.
So it's a very like predictable way to work with colors. And they have
been creating awesome plug ins for Figma and palettes for people to use and break
that barrier to entry. Nice for other designers and engineers to start using okao
sh. So today we have a product hunt launch of Harmony Palette, which
is the UI accessible palette based on okao sh. Wow. Congratulations, thanks
cool. I just launched today. Wow, it's on right now, so
wow, where can we go check that out? It's amy palette dot com.
It's you can search Harmony Accessible Palette figma and it will give you the
pigma file. Because it's available on I think Richard is busy finding it right
now. It's also tailwind compatible and is available as an NPM package, so
you can download it and play with it if you're a front and engineers.
Cool. Awesome, So what's in your inbox? What's next for you?
That Propulsion Labs Season two? I have some I can't even believe the guests
that I got to have at this podcast, and I'm very excited about that.
You like podcasting, it's interesting. Yeah, it's fun. It's fun
to have conversations, sure is for sure. Yeah. Wow, that's great.
Victoria mel Nakova, thanks for spending this time with us, and it's
great to hear about your successes and we you know, we need to keep
this conversation going about open source and commercialization and all of those good things.
So thank you, thank you for him. You bet all right, We'll
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Now go write some code. See you next time. You got your middle
Vans and tip at his home in a Texas line as