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to EDDC Porto dot call them to register and check out the full lineup of
conferences at NDC Conferences dot com. Day it's done, that rocks. You're
not that. I'm Carl Franklin. I'm Richard Gamble. Yes I did that,
you know, because the last show of the day, we're getting a
little little punch fun loose. I hope you are too. Yeah, and
Joe Finney's here. We're gonna be talking to him in a few minutes.
But first, man, what is up with you? Richard? What's happening
in your neck of the woods? Too much? You know, spring springs
sprung, the grass's ribs. I wonder is where the birdies is? Okay?
So you know what. I saw a picture that your wife posted on
Facebook today of a bunch of you guys walk you and a couple of your
friends and your wife getting the dog somewhere. That's just walking down the street
with the sun behind us. Yeah, yeah, and Richard's on his phone.
Yes, beautiful landscape everywhere. Richards looking at his phone, was just
walking down the street and I'm thinking, oh, he's playing own this world
again. It doesn't exist. I was looking up the price of the house
that works for sale on that street. Ah, okay, it was three
point two million. It's ridiculous. Somewhere like these guys are delusional. Now
that was actually my younger daughter and her husband and their their new dog.
Because you know, those two are planners and they you know, there's a
spreadsheet somewhere with their plan. I'm just not privy to that spreadsheet. Did
you get dog envy? But apparently they hit the line where it's like time
to get a dog. So this was actually the dog is lovely, and
this that particular visit was they brought the dog over to hang with us to
see could they leave her with us for a week while they went on vacation
or something. Not that there's anything planned, but that was the test case.
So we went up for a walk. The dog immediately adored my wife,
so not surprising. How are you doing dogless these days? Did you
get a little WinCE of Oh, I wish I had one of them.
The old man's been gone for more than a year, and I don't miss
that dog the last two years when he was dealing with seizures and the brain
cancer was slowly killing him. Yeah, but you miss him. I missed
a dog from like five years ago when he was awesome. Yeah, but
I don't want another dog. I want my old dog back, and I
can't have that so don't you know, what are you gonna do? Well?
On that note, we are going to roll the crazy music for better
no framework. All right, man, what do you got speaking of crazy
music? Wavtool dot com wavtool dot com? Oh wow, what's a wave
tool? Wave tool, wave tool whatever? It is a browser based digital
audio workstation. It's sample accurate, meaning you can zoom into the sample level.
It has synthesizers, and it has processors and effects and you can wire
them up with little you know whatever whatever you call these things. I don't
know, dude. It looks like a flow chart right around the digital version
of it. Und Yeah, And what's different about this is it's browser based
and that's interesting enough. But there's a AI chatbot built in. Oh no,
there's a large language model in my way, there's a large language model
inside it, and so you can ask its stuff like hey, what's a
side chain? And I'll tell you it's like, hey, do you I
think I need some compression here? How much? Well, you probably want
a compression ratio for vocals of about four to one. Whatever. You know,
it's gonna funny, it's gonna help you not be stupid well about audio.
I mean, you still have you still spat out words that a lot
of people don't know, Like, yeah, that's true. But you know,
you could probably say how do I make this vocal track sound better?
And it'll probably tell you is there a remove suck button? That's what we're
looking for. Ultimately, the issue isn't it? Yeah, get down to
brass tacks. How can I make suck suck exactly less suck on this track?
Yea, like a low suck version of this, a look suck filter.
I warned you people there you go, it's gonna be one of those
days. Anyway, I haven't really tried it. I loaded up the demo
project. Um, it doesn't have a whole lot of features that expect from
something like Adobe Audition, you know, zooming in and following and moving along
with I can zoom in and zoom out, but I can't make it follow
along when it moves off the screen to keep it in the middle, that
little stuff like that, And there doesn't seem to be any control right for
that kind of stuff. So it's just kind of like it reminds me of
like version one of something where somebody said, hey, it's audio and the
browser check it out right? Yeah, you know, like a demo that
just came to life. Well, do you remember the original version of Cakewalkers?
Like, hey, it's audio in the PC. Check it out because
I should be impossible too. That's right, right, It's just a progression
of layers. I love it. It is interesting and we'll see how it
goes. So I don't want to make Donnett roxy all Ai show. But
boy, oh boy, it's hard. It's a big talking point and a
lot of angles. Yeah, I agree, I agree, man, all
right, So that's what I got today. Who's talking to us? Richard
Grady commendov show eighteen eighteen, the one we did back last fall with David
Whitney. Oh good one at the the Ndclow. Too many F bombs in
that show, and that's one of the you know, we got a lot
of comments on that show, including a comment from our guest which I'm not
going to read because I've already done that. And there was the hey,
too many F bombs comment. That's not gonna read that one either. There's
no reason that I'm going to read this comment from Jim who said, I
love the insight and I'm equally frustrated the lack of real support for open source.
However, while those reasons they hate on Microsoft and Google and others for
using open sources of backboat of their own services. I have to say,
let the licenser beware. If you slap MT licenses on something, you are
giving anyone permission to use it. However they see fit. Someone's making a
billion dollars off as something you gave them for free, and if that's going
to bother you, you shouldn't have given to them for free. I don't
agree. I'm careful about these licenses I put on things for exactly that reason,
not that I think that Microsoft and Google and them are doing that all
that often. They are licensing their stuff up pretty openly. I also tend
to think that Microsoft and Google take too much heat compared to the others.
I can at least point to some projects they released to the wilds open source.
In other ways, they support community development. They aren't great, but
they don't get a big goose egg either. It's the companies that are quietly
doing nothing at all to give back to that need to get the most invective.
Giving back to the technology community needs to be on the corporate responsibility and
environmental society and governance radar, even if it's a smaller thing than the deeper
issues that all those business bug words are lining up behind. Yeah, and
let's not forget that the innutrenious techies that are introducing these open source solutions to
their companies. That's most of your listeners, my self included, and we're
just as complicit and not giving back enough or making an issue within our span
of influence. Look, I don't really comment on these things often, as
you know, right, But if I was working for a company and in
my spare time in between tech support calls, I was building a little widget
or something like that, and the company said, hey, that's pretty cool,
let's publish that. Blah blah blah, you know, and then they
went on to make millions of dollars on it. I can understand that because
it's a work for hire. I wasn't hired to do that, you know.
I basically was doing my job, and at my job that came out
and blah blah blah. But if I'm just a guy, you know,
or a lady, or are they, and I'm sitting at my desk and
I'm writing something and I publish it and it's open source, and then some
company comes along and takes it and sells it and makes millions of dollars with
modifications or whatever. Damn right, I want some some of that, you
know, I deserve some of that. Well, it's it's never what you
deserve, it's what you negotiate. And you kind of gave away your negotiation
with an open license. But I think I would think most companies are a
little more careful than that too. If they're really going to run with a
chunk of code like that, at least they'd hire you at least, right,
Yeah, yeah, you see what happens. I mean. And I'm
not gonna dump too much on individual developers on this. I think a lot
of people do contribute to open source, but often there's developers that are utilizing
opensource libraries not because they chose them, but because somebody else chose them,
right, and they're kind of forced to use them, and you're not going
to get passion from them around that library. Now, of course that I
do think there's a schism here of using open source because you don't want to
pay for things, rather than you've been using open source because it's the best
tool in the toolkit, because it really is that good of a tool,
then you should be supporting it. Yes, I do think, and I
think David hit on this heart in that particular show that there is a corporate
level of responsibility here that if your company is depending on open source software,
you should be supporting that software. I agree. I think I agreed then
and I still agree now. Well, thank goodness for that. What would
we do if you didn't, I really don't know. We wouldn't have a
show. So, Jim, thank you so much for your comment, and
a copy us to go buy. It's on its way to you, and
if you'd like a copybius to go by. I write a comment on the
website at dot net rocks dot com or on the facebooks. We publish every
show there, and if you comment there and I read in the show,
will send you a copy means to go buy. And hey, you know
you can follow us on Twitter all day long, but we'd really like you
to follow us on Mastodon. I'm at Carl Franklin at tech hub dot social
and I'm Rich Campbell at mastodon do social, So send us a toot and
join us there, because it's more fun over there. I think the great
community and that brings us to our guest, Joseph Finney, welcoming him back
to dot net rocks. He is a mobile product owner by day, the
builds productivity apps for windows. At night, when he's not programming, he
is birding, running and enjoying tasty coffee and beer in Milwaukee. Welcome back,
Joe, excellent bio. Yeah, it's good to be back birding.
Good to have you back. Man Birding, birding, Birdie. Tell me
about birding. Are you talking about going out in the wild with a camera
and trying to document every kind of bird in the world. Um. Yeah,
Sometimes you have a camera, sometimes you just have binoculars. It's a
great hobby. I think a lot of tech minded people could would love it.
It's very portable. Where you go, they're her birds. There's opportunities.
Yeah, you can. Yeah, it's it's almost got that that church
you're hunting kind of element to it, right for sure. It gets you
outside. It pokes the whole hoarding obsessiveness thing without actually having to put boxes
of stuff in your house. Yeah, my kids stay pick on us terribly.
You know, you're such old bird people, you know, like we
have a bird feeder. We just like to look at that look at the
birds they send helpfully you know. Yeah, no, I'm with you hundred
percent. I mean. And there's an app called eBird right that and you
can kind of go on a walk and then document all the birds that you
see in here and upload it and you get a little dashboard of where you
saw, what you saw and if you travel internationally, you you know,
the different countries light up. Now. Isn't that part of the Audubon society
as well? Like they're literally using that to help understand where birds are.
Yeah, I think Cornell University, right is like the research that where it
all goes through. But yeah, the Audubon is definitely a big partner.
It's awesome does that app identify birds from the pictures like with Ai so e
bird is just for documenting what birds like recording what birds you see and where
you are it okay, attracts your walk and everything. But Cornell makes an
app called Merlin Bird I d as in The Wizard and the Bird, And
that app has some awesome image recognition, which is not super useful because getting
a good picture of our bird is that's really the magical ability. It's hard.
It does sound recognition. So if you're on a walk in the woods,
you just turn it on and it'll be like, oh, there's that
birds. One more little story and then we're going to get off birds,
I promise, all right. Um. I have a little camera that's set
up right in the kitchen pointing at the bird feeder, and I broadcast it
through wireless to a screen that's just up to the left in my my office.
Here. I got the big like Richard, I've got the big chickgun
toty what is it forty nine in Samsung like that, Yeah, And then
right above that, I've got the other screen. It's it's just there.
And I love that because I can sort of bring the outside in, you
know. And whenever I'm feeling like, you know, I'm in a box
and I really want to be outside, I just look up and oh,
yeah, there's a cardinal or there's a squirrel out in the world, out
in the world. Yea, yeah, a squirrel. I do have a
friend with a merlin who brought it over to my place up on the coast,
put her phone outside and just left it there for twenty minutes, and
then it just gave us a list of all the bird calls that it had
heard. Oh wow, yeah, it's pretty amazing and sometimes even like definitely
it's spring migration very soon and luckey and like there are just an insane amount
of birds that come through and you can catch a lot of them, but
some of them you just never see. Some secret birds you can't catch them.
But that sound is the easiest way to I d birds and oh yeah,
great gray owl is good for that. Very hard to see a great
ground, but you can hear them at night. They sound like I want
to get laid. I want to get laid. All right, you can't,
Oh, I guess you can. All right, let's let's quickly shift
to open source. First of all, any comments on the comment that Richard
read, Um, yeah, there's I kind of threw this in the notes
to discuss, but I think open source is complicated, and it kind of,
as you pointed out, Carl, like if somebody just made a tool
and included your open source library or use some sort of framework and it wasn't
really the end result or the product that's being sold. That is I think
one discussion, but taking and like the end product and either repackaging it or
rebranding it. Or just wholesale taking it and slapping it into your product and
reselling it. It definitely feels like those are two different things. Yeah,
but the problem is that they're all under this giant umbrella of open source and
libraries, so it gets messy and I think people get really defensive when you
say, like, oh, you you know, you need to be supporting
open source and they're like, how, you know what? It just seems
like an impossible discussion. So I think breaking it down into kind of the
who, what, why, but also like the kind of the base level
level, like what are the types of open source projects that we should be
supporting and how should we be supporting them? I think that is helpful to
shape the argument of you know, you need to be supporting, and I
think it helps people understand in their real world kind of where what type of
open source am I interacting with or am I using in my professional work and
my personal work or whatever it is, and then one of the different motivations
for why I should be supporting them. I've built an open source library that
uses another open source library before, and I fully credit that other open source
library and say this is we have a tendency on this library as well,
but it's still all open source and it's the fully you know, acceptable with
the license and everything else. And that's a that's a totally different thing,
isn't I think that that's really what open source. I mean, that's the
true calling of open source, isn't it that, Hey, you know,
you can use this, you can you can utilize it, you can build
on it, and we give each other credit, and you know, that's
the way it goes. We do build on the shoulders or giants. Yeah,
exactly, somebody built this tool, and I'm going to use that to
build something else, right, And so that is why I put that,
Like, I think the phrase that unfortunately gets brought up all the time is
all what's the cost? You know what, what's this cost of this software
or what's the etc. But ultimately, I think it's a pretty obvious reason
why we all use open source projects, and that is the benefit. So
I think we need to maybe shift a little bit of the discussion about we're
not splitting the cost of it, we're splitting the benefit, right, And
the benefit of open source is incredible, I mean it is massive. I
can a really simple example, as in text grab people requested the feature to
include reading barcodes and QR codes, which you know, pretty simple, and
I'm like, oh man, there has got to be a library out there,
right, yeah, this isn't a new idea, and obviously obviously there
is. It's there's a you know, there's a C based library. There's
a million different libraries. And so which one did I pick? I picked
one that looked healthy enough, it has you know, it's easy. They
basically looked at the really popular I think it's called z xing for like zebra
crossing. I don't know where the name comes from, but basically z xing
dot net and it, you know, makes it really easy for me to
consume a really popular QR code barcode reader in my app. And so I
was like, sweet, the benefit of that is amazing, and I rolled
it in. I think it took me a day and I had a functional
prototype, and I was like, this is great. And so I contribute
five bucks a month and I'll get hub because they say for me an incredible
amount of time, right yeah, yeah, no kidding, and just a
just a reasonable contribution, right, and you encourage your users to do the
same, Yeah, I mean, and that's where it's all called out in
They're like, oh, how does this you know, how does it work?
Well, you know, I'm not a genius. It would be impossible
for me to do all of this work. Somebody else is doing it and
the benefit is really that open source is there and if you want to see
how it works, check it out. Joe. I don't know if you're
old enough to remember this word shareware. I'm familiar you are, okay,
so old guys like Richard and I, this is our first experience with free
software was that you would download something from somebody's bbs, you know before websites,
and you use it and if it was good it and you liked it,
you would donate to the project. And I don't know of any sharewear
authors that ever made anything other than maybe a hundred bucks in a year,
well, with the exception of Doom. Okay, tell me about Doom,
right, Doom was the doom was the sharewear hit, right? That that
was we just we just did this show, right, And that was the
whole point. Was that John Carmack and co. Like when they did they
sharewear, they sold billions of copies like they sent They got sent a lot
of money. Okay, but they were the exception, right, right,
they were the exception. But all those little word processors and things like that
for dos, nobody ever paid them anything. Yeah, certainly not enough,
certainly not enough. Anyway, I just wanted to hold out for a minute.
Yeah, I mean, on the point of making money on open source.
I threw some links in there. I don't know if you're familiar as
a web pack or Yeah, it's a pretty popular tool. Uh, And
that's a really big tool. And that's one of those kind of tools people
use to build their products, and that's an open collective. And I think
they've distributed like one point three million dollars of donated I don't know how they
necessarily describe it, but that's a lot of money if you think about for
a one piece of product. But then you think webpack, what web pack?
That's huge. I mean if you think about what, you know,
what is the ballpark number of billions of dollars that are built using webpack.
I mean, it's unbelievable. And they think that they have distributed one point
three million. It should be a lot for a single individual. But if
you made it, if you made a company, that's product was that popular,
you'd be making a lot more than one point three million dollars in a
year. Yea. So it's and I think that's kind of the going back
to why do you support open source? I think a big part of when
it comes to open source tools that you use to build your products, you
want long term health, you want sustainability. Yeah, and if if,
if somebody's slept an MIT license on their project so that people would look at
it, so that Microsoft would look at it in Google and give them a
job. As soon as they get a job, that project is stale,
gone dead well, And just because you're good at building a piece of software
is it doesn't mean you're good at building a team around of contributors and supporters
so that it can function without you. Most of these projects are dependent on
their creator, and even if there are the contributors, there's nobody else in
position to delete it. So it's you're going to You're going to be in
trouble if that person's distracted, right for sure, or if their popular open
source project was mainly a intentional tool to get them a job, because the
job has stability and open source is not stable as far as income, right,
well, and I keep thinking about Glimpse. Right, that's a story
and those I mean a super nice guys built a really great thing, got
jobs at Microsoft. They worked on Glimpse for a little while and then it
got rolled into other things and now they work elsewhere inside of Microsoft. But
yeah, you know Glimpses now it's it's still an archive on GitHub, but
it's basically a retired project. But you could also say that it was instrumental
in bringing forth the web tools that we have today. Don't you think it
had an effect without a doubt? Yeah, it had an effect on the
whole ecosystem, which is good because ultimately people just want a product they can
use. But for the creators, the idea that the success of that product
results in them getting new jobs and the and the creation going away. Like
this is a that's not a sustainable model. It's not a healthy way.
It's like a kind of a lottery model where maybe you'll have this win and
then you won't have to do this stuff anymore. Like that's a that's not
a model that stays healthy for long. Right, Yeah, you have your
interview used the NPM command. Are you familiar with this? No? No,
tell me about it. It was rolled out, it looks like around
end of twenty nineteen, I think, and you'll you'll notice it kind of
pop up in your console if you run some commands I think probably NPM build
or MPM start, and it's, you know, pops up and says,
oh, you know, these packages are what you used, and some of
them are looking for funding type NPM fund for more details. And so it
is basically a field on the package that enables creators of popular packages to say,
hey, I'm looking for funding and here is my you know, funding
address, whether that's open collective or give a hub, sponsors or whatever.
And because, like you said, Carl, a lot of these tools use
other tools. Get a left pad situation going on, right, Yeah,
And so it really does need to be in the tool chain. This complicated
on rolling and like spreading out the benefit that is the benefit of it.
And if the technology makers like NPM or I don't know, Microsoft with new
get, they also have a responsibility to have avenues for creators to fund and
for people to find those creators and help them in a reasonable way. But
there is no such thing that I have noticed, at least that I have
found a new get What did you think about David's idea to roll some sort
of monetization scheme or protocol into GitHub. I think it would be very well
appreciated. I think a lot of people would love it, and I think
ultimately there's a ton of individual tool builders out there who are not entrepreneurs and
they're not business people, and they just want to make their ideas. And
if you make it really easy for people to make a living of something by
removing a lot of the barriers, then I think people will do it.
And I don't think it's a coincidence that NPM has a lot of healthy,
like big medium sized businesses that are all open source that have money flowing through,
and also NPM itself was independent for a long time. I don't think
that's a coincidence. I think that they all understand they kind of get it.
So I think GitHub being owned by Microsoft that would be suspicious if they
really have that kind of hungry attitude. But I think a lot of the
creators who make their life on GitHub, they have that hunger to actually make
a life out of it, and there are a lot of hoops you have
to jump through, So I understand why get Hub would avoid doing it,
just because it is so complicated. As soon as you start to get into
that finances, that whole tax thing comes through, and you know, corporations
and not not just that that that there's a real danger here that these the
companies that are in charge and they're helping you and all that stuff could so
take advantage of you. I'm thinking of the music business. And I don't
remember if I actually told this story when we were talking to David Whitney.
Richard, correct me if I'm wrong, But um, you know Chuck Barry
when he came on the scene, you know, the record companies are like,
okay, we can We're going to sign this record deal and we can
either give you a brand new Cadillac or we can give you, you know,
fifteen percent royalties and improp duity or whatever. And he took the Cadillac,
you know, just not realizing, not understanding. Yeah he was he
was a guitar player, yeah, not a business person. Yeah, of
course I want a Cadillac. So gidhub sponsors sounds like NPM fund, right
that, except it will actually tie to your account and say hey, here's
who's you know running the projects that your apps de pend end On like it
seems to do a pretty good job of that takes your right to the users.
Yes involved. So npm fund I believe can point back to get hub
sponsors, right, But npm fund is built into the built into NPM.
It's a command line item and it allows. But to me reading through the
docs on this, it's really about how you set up your project. You
say, if you want a sponsor, this is what you gotta do.
So you guys, we're talking about get hub sponsors. I didn't even know
about this. What what is that? It's like a Patreon you know,
I mean, like that package I mentioned that QR code. I sign up
and I just pay five dollars a month and it goes to that person who
makes that library. And it's simple. It's little, but obviously if a
ton of people use the library, it can all add up and people make
a healthy living on Patreon. So is this new since we talked to David
Whitney. I think it existed. It existed, Okay, yeah, I
think it's not quite then what we're talking about. Yeah, I think it
gets complicated. I think this is a like do what you can and get
have sponsors it's pretty straightforward, it's pretty simple, but there is no from
again what I can tell, there's no integration from a like plan. I
mean, you can't do like API keys. It's not going to handle that
kind of thing. So it's not going to handle like tokens. And you
know that would be the next level, which would be amazing but obviously incredibly
complicated and maybe beyond the scope of what GitHub is doing. And the NPM
thing you were talking about is MPM fund. Sure, well doesn't that require
NPM? What if you're not a job script tool. Yeah, So NPM
fund is a way is a command that you can run on your project to
basically say, okay, I'm using a ton of different packages in my project,
which one of these are is looking for funding? And how can I
support those creators? So it's basically a little flag that people can put up
and say, hey, you know, I'm small, I want help funding
this project. It's not free. They can put it in their packet,
in their NPM package and say hey, sponsor me i GitHub. And when
people run MBM fund on there in their own projects, they could see which
ones which creators are asking for funding. So and that's the kind of thing
that Microsoft could do with new GAT include that as an option. So people
say, oh, I have this wildly popular desktop app that's closed source,
but there's not really any way to say, you know, are these small
creators who are looking for funding? Are these big corporations? Like who makes
these packages? And it's not always super clear, But that's a way of
allowing creators to make it clear to their consumers. So it could be part
of new GAT to drive it to a little more low level. Yeah,
I mean, I think it would be useful if I was an enterprise architect
to be able to roll up that information to business right ultimately, Yeah,
here's our software bill of materials, like all of these products we use,
you know, and here's who makes them and the kind of incomes they have,
and you know, where should we apply support? If you use a
bunch of Microsoft libraries, you're okay, you're already buying Azure. But you
know, if it's if it's a small you know, individual, that kind
of thing, it doesn't take that much to cut them a little bit of
money, and certainly to work through these tools. I'm a big Patreon guy.
I spent a couple hundred dollars a month on Patreon. Just yeah,
me too, Just sending a few dollars to folks who are making things.
I think it's cool, you know, Yeah, for sure, there's no
reason we shouldn't be doing that as well. And get hub for the projects
we think you're cool. And with that, I'm going to interrupt for one
moment of this very important message. There's always something new from our sponsor,
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back. It's done. Rocks. I'm Richard Campbell. That's Carl Franklin.
Hey, Hey, and we're talking to our friend Josephiney again who has both
done a pass show and I read a comment on his on open source,
so we were talking privately about more open source concerns. Its like, yeah,
I we should just make this a show because I think, you know,
talking to someone who's who is trying to support their own open source creation
habit. Because you have a job, right, Like, you're not making
a limit off an open source you have a regular job. All these cool
projects you've got text grab and so forth, that's the stuff you're doing on
the side that you like, Yeah, yeah, that's just stuff I do
because I refuse to be sitting in front of an amazing machine and seeing text
in a picture and transcribing it. I'm like, computer, do this for
me, right, this is a solved problem. We're smarter than this that
the API literally is sitting in Windows only I could find a way to hook
into it. Belly figured it out. Yeah, and that is actually the
same base project that is the Power Toys text extractor. So earthlier familiar with
text Extractor, But I wrapped up that full screen grab mode and shipped it
into Power Toys last year. So awesome, Wow, cool. Are you
familiar with wind get heavy the of you use that tool much? Wine that
rings a bell? This is new Get for Windows, like chocolate kind of
thing. Yep. Yeah, so it's Microsoft kind of app install command line
tool which also will pull from the store and you can submit packages and you
can do all that fun stuff. But one interesting emission that I found as
a person who has apps in the store, if your app is not free,
it is not in wind get wow m which is I mean I understand,
like, oh, you're you don't want to put your credit card information
through the command line, but it is interesting to me that, you know,
if you want to be a successful app creator and Microsoft comes out with
these new tools, yeah, you have to give it away right well or
change wind get right. I mean, how hard is it to take a
password, you know, for this app and for that app or whatever that
you need, supply your passwords and let it do it for you. Honestly,
I think they're just being lazy. It's hard, more complicated to deal
with pay software, and so whoever was for small support didn't want to deal
with it. Yeah, it sounds like an intern project right or Also before
the show, I did a little bit of slothing to see if like new
get fund was even in on the roadmap, if there was an open issue.
There's not thinking about opening it up as an issue. But I just
need to go through and make sure there's not something an alternate you know,
description of that kind of feature. And then also wind Get fund the same
kind of thing. You know, if you make an open source a really
simple open source utility. I make a utility called Windows Caffeinated and it is
the most basic utility ever. It puts a little tray icon and puts a
little coffee cup in your tray. You click it, your screen does not
go to sleep. Simple, Well you're getting coffee. I love that.
Simple. It just stays away forever. So teachers or whatever, really easy.
You can get it on wind get but there's no way in wind Get
to say hey I like this, you know, can I throw this person
a few bucks or whatever? Right, that's not in the system. I
mean it's the system. Yeah, money makes the world go around. You
would think Microsoft would know that. Just make it easy, that's all.
Yeah. Yeah, And it's not for Microsoft to make money that way,
they don't need to. But to you know, you talk about ways to
support the ecosystem, right, yeah, it is interesting you think, I
mean, we don't think about developers struggling to pay the bills per se.
But it is an awful lot of code that people depend on that isn't their
main job, but maybe not to be. I mean, I guess that's
the question for you, Joseph. Would you quit your job and make just
work full time on these things if that was an option, if it was
a reasonable income, Absolutely, yeah, tomorrow I would put my job tomorrow.
Yeah, your boss is so excited, right exactly. I I would
love to do that. Partially, I just have kind of that entrepreneurial mindset
where I want to, you know, make new things and bet on stuff
and get out there. But you you also have a family, like you,
you know exactly, I have a mortgage, so you have a mortgage.
So it's it's a it's a significant risk to to try and do that
too. And ultimately that is kind of the I think a lot of creators
who have that kind of balance where they're like, I want to work on
stuff on my own. I want to be an you know, an independent
app developer, and they don't want to, you know, be seen as
saying like, oh, please give me money for this, you know,
whatever crappy piece of software I made. But at some point there there reaches
a threshold of quality where the thing that you've been working on for years is
now good enough that people maybe should be paying for it, but you just
haven't been charging and how do you start and how do you make that shift?
And well, yeah, and suddenly you get in that situation where it's
like, now you get yelled at verybody because you've changed the rules. Right,
It's like, hey, a lot of people depend on this thing I've
been given away from years and they want me to work on it more so
I need to be paid. Now you're the bad guy, right. And
we saw this happen with the identity server guys yep, right, where where
their customers were largely saying, please charge us for this. We want to
want a different relationship with you. It was others that were complaining, this
is bait and switch. It's like pretty much the opposite of bait and switch.
They were driven into it, right. And the last show I listened
to, I think it was the Fiddler Defindler guys, and they were talking
about how the original core product stays, but they did a bunch of work
on a new thing and surprise, surprise, it costs money because it should
cost money. Yeah, because it costs money. You know, Eric Lawrence
isn't even involved in Fiddler anymore. You know, he's moved on to other
things. He went to Telerek with it and they've been taking care of it
ever since. And I think for him partly it was getting out from under
an obligation too. And I think it really at the company's progress now,
so I know, keep calling it tele but they have I think wisely said
Okay, well, this came to us as open source, We're going to
keep it as open source, but we can build other things around it,
and those things they can charge for, yeah, as they should. And
I think creators, ultimately, at the end of the day, creators should
have the choice. And I think a healthy ecosystem surrounding apps and tools and
packages and frameworks, and a healthy attitude toward paying for the things that we
use. Paying for the stuff that makes us money is a good thing,
and I think it enables more people to take on more projects full time.
We shouldn't have to be working on a product nights and weekends for ten years
before we can finally make version two closed source and make a job out of
it. I just feel like that's such a long time to expect people to
be bootstrapping. And I think it will filter out a very specific kind of
individual who can do that, you know, who has free nights and weekends
for ten years while working another job. I think it will you know,
not have the largest amount of possible entrepreneurs in the space. And I think
that more people building more tools. I think it is a good thing.
Yeah, ultimately, yeah, think of how much isn't getting made because of
that particular battle, right, Yeah, that's the rub, isn't it?
So many things? And it's what have we lost out on just because somebody's
not prepared to make that leap or you know, tries and has problems Like
it's creating business is a different job. Let's talk about the benefit to a
developer for doing an open source project. I mean, I know a lot
of you know, not just beginners, but intermediate level developers who want to
own their skills. And you know, we've always said the best way to
do that is to jump into a project or or try to create something,
get it out there, and you know, see what people say, it's
a very good way to sort of sharpen your teeth, if isn't it to
build a project and fail and reiterate and have get feedback on it and all
that stuff, and before you know it, hey, this is pretty good
and you know, maybe I'm not such a bad developer after all. So
the shift becomes from it goes from you know, learning and getting feedback with
this awesome you know system to do that too. Okay now what right?
Yeah, I mean I can again say firsthand that that too. I mentioned
when it was Caffeinated that I did not make that tool. Originally. That
was an open source project that somebody made in wind forms over I don't know,
probably ten years ten plus years ago, and I saw it and I
was like, oh, it would be cool if this was in the app
store, and so I commented on the tray item right, yeah, the
right interface on it. Yeah. I was like, it would be great
if we could kind of roll this up and do it. And so that
was one of my initial forays into after development and open source, was just
saying this is a cool utility. I bet I could make a little wrapper
around this. And slowly I've evolved it more, changed some of the icons,
upgraded some of the settings. But working an open source is an amazing
way to build a lot of those job skills, a lot of those people
skills that just coding will never build for you. Do you think that in
twenty twenty three it's still possible to build an open source project if you're just
like some unknown developer and you create a giveub account and just put it out
there, that you can actually attract people who will download it and do pull
requests and offer the kind of help that people need when they're just getting into
it. It seems pretty pretty far fetched to me that that's going to happen
without some kind of publicity. Yeah, there's a lot of noise, and
right, I mean to me, that's I mean, as a person who
makes apps, I get a lot of people who come to me and say,
hey, you make apps, can you make I have an idea?
So many times yeah fifty fifty right with my idea, and you implement it
and then we'll split the profits fifty Yeah, yeah, right, right,
So I get a lot of you know, people come to me and say
that, and I'd like to say, you know, make it a spreadsheet
first, you know, make it make sure it's a thing that you a
problem that you have. So there's a bunch of like little core things there,
and I think part of that is find a community of people who have
that problem. The first step one searched the app stores to see if it
already exists, because nine times out of ten it done. Yea, yeah,
I know you mean like this, Yeah, you mean one of these,
right, it has been done. Yeah. But establishing that there is
a community of individuals who have this problem, right is you know, number
one whether or not a business will ever work. Yeah. But that also
helps for you know, go to that subreddit, go to that Twitter thread,
or find that Mastodon server and kind of poke those people and say,
hey, I made this thing for you, you know, for us here
it is. It's free, um, maybe to start, but I don't
know if it is possible. I mean, you know, if if a
new open source project gets started and get out this anyone ever here. Yeah.
In the in the world of like Silicon Valley startups, they say they
use the term minimal viable product, and often the minimum viable product is a
web page that says sign up for more and yes, right, you just
describe the problem, and when they click on the link to get it,
it says, hey, we're still working on this, but signed give us
your email address. We'll notify you when there's something to look at. It's
basically a wrapper around system dot not implemented exception, Yes, except it's you
know, pointed pointed at a mail chip account or something like that. So
you're just collecting email addresses. But you've created a threshold then for people to
at least have clicked twice and give and up some information, which gives you
some idea of an interest level and a topic based on the copy you wrote.
You know, there's another level that says, will people install your code
and actually take it out for a spin? And another level that says,
will people pay for that code? Yeah, here's another dilemma and I ran
into this too. You're using some commercial software and the file format is open,
it's XML whatever. It's easy to engineer, reverse engineer, and it
doesn't have a certain feature that you need, right, So you write a
program, an open source program that does this with an external UI or whatever,
and then you put it out there and say, hey, this is
the greatest thing because I can use an and do this in the blah blah
blah blah blah. And everybody's like, oh, yeah, that's really cool.
I'll download that and they use it, and then the next version it's
in there. It's a feature of the product, right right, You get
sherlocked? Is that the term? Man? Yeah, so you know there's
an old reference for you. Yeah. Chances if you're smart and you realize
that there's a flaw in a product, chances are they're already working on it.
Yeah, you would presume. Yeah. I mean I think that's another
element that unfortunately maybe needs to be set out loud, which is not every
open source project deserves to be someone's full time job, right right. And
I don't want to Yeah, again, I don't want to come off saying
like if you look at a piece of code, you should be paying for
it. Definitely not. But I do think that there should be. And
there's a lot of stuff that a lot of big actors in this space can
do to make doing open source easier, making it a career easier, and
being at you know, an independent creator of software whatever format is, it
should be and can be much easier, surfacing the reality to these companies that
this is the open source stuff you're depending on, These lines of code written
by a volunteer developer or run x many times per day inside of your organization.
Kick them ten bucks for crime all right, right, like come on,
and because that's enough that would add up? Right? Yeah, you
know it's but you're that tooling to make it a visibility things there would I
think help because people people, when confronted with the truth usually you know,
embrace it to some degree at least it's on their mind just right now,
it's easy to ignore. The software is free, like beer, so I
just downloaded it using it whatever, ye right, yeah, no, I
I have, you know, several different tools in the app store. I
have Textcribe, I have Caffeinated, I have a simple icon FileMaker, I
have Encounter, I have a couple. And of all those tools, the
most popular one, by a ridiculous margin, is a Windows caffeinated, the
one that keeps mind me, the little tray icon it keeps your machine awake,
is ten times more popular than the next one. It's other ways around
that, like tell your can't I just set my power, set power settings
and never turn off the screen. Sure, but the question maybe is why
are people are still so you can set it to like an eight hour timer.
So I think that's what a lot of people do right now, Okay,
say I'm going to click this at the beginning of the day. I
want my laptop to stay on for eight hours and then it can then do
its normal thing after that. Right. Well, what another problem is if
you don't keep your computer on, it won't install updates. See that's true.
So here's the problem that I have, especially with people who don't understand
computers. We get on to do a podcast, they open up their laptop
and it says, oh, you need to reinstall Windows or install some update,
and you're like, all right, we'll do that afterwards, right,
And then they don't, and then it keeps just popping up. Yeah.
Yeah, happens over and over again. If you have the option to do
it afterwards. I don't care what you're doing. Oh yeah, I'm up.
I've had that problem. Discuss you remember when you had a plan.
Yeah, you should forget about that plan. Here's your plan reboot. M
oh wait another reboot. Yeah. Well it's like, yeah, you do
all your work on your laptop as fast as you can. You're up late,
you know you need to go to bed. You slam your laptop close,
and you pick it up the next day and you're late and you whip
it open. And that's how your your laptop. It opens, it closes,
So there's no there's no window for any sort of maintenance on that machine.
No, not a bit. Have you guys had the problem where you
shut your laptop down expecting it to go sleep or whatever, You put it
in your bag and you take a flight or whatever, you pull it out,
it's like piping hot and it's been on the all time. Yep.
I've stuck a couple of eggmy muffins beside it, two to keep them warm,
you know, while I was traveling. See now that and now I
were thinking think in a nice pack. No, yeah, but that's the
bigger thing is realizing the battery has been murdered absolutely, like it's just and
you know, just what kind of cooking is going on inside that laptop that
but you know you're in a Let's be clear that this is not a problem
with Max because exactly one vendor makes the hardware and the operating system and so
forth. So Sleep on a Mac works flawless because of the mixture of vendors
and drivers and so forth in the Windows ecosystem. Ye, sleep is it's
kind of random. You just it's one layer versus twelve layers, yeah,
or something on one chain of command versus you're trying to persuade all these different
companies to do the right thing. You know, It's like, why didn't
my machine sleep? Because the nick thought it still needed to stay alive,
so it was delaying the shut down. And then the command that would normally
turn this nick off so it could have shut down, that thing did shut
down. So now it's stuck in an infinite lobertil you ribot right, like
wow, And then you add on the corporate layer, and then you get
fifteen more applications and policies and yeah, that's yeah. You don't have access
to change your power operation right, your power rules and so forth. But
it will let you install a little sistray app that bypasses all that. No
problem, your back welcome. That's great. It's a great little workaround.
Why it's such a popular download, my friend, people love it. I
don't know why, because Windows sucks because you're sticking it to the man.
I got your policy right here in a little free app. But I should
have said that guy five bucks by guy ten, I would send him ten.
It's well, it's also in power toys now, so if you use
power toys, it's power toys a week Sammy's act feature. You go,
that's great. Well, uh, have we missed anything, Joe? Is
there anything else that you want to say or any shout outs to resources or
anything, um, nothing in particular, but I was wondering maybe you guys
had some good shout outs for open source software that you use in your projects
or some good you know, classic open source software that people should check out.
Well, of course I'm going to talk about Polly. Yep, yeah,
as well you should. Polly's like amazing. Yeah, and we're getting
some feedback on a next generation version of Polly that the dot net team at
Microsoft has actually helped us create. Yeah. I have that show on my
radar with Joel. Yeah. Yeah, maybe some others too. Fantastic,
it's it keeps getting better. Polly is some policies for retry, for resilience,
you know, transient error handling, that kind of thing. It's funny
because it's just a giant wrapper around try catch, but it does so many
more things of course. Yeah, it's about smart code, right, you
guys have solved that that recovery problem. Well, so I never need to
write it ever ever ever again? Right, And the way to handle it
is very simple. So anyway, that's that's my my two cents. Of
course, he's a lot of open source software, but that's the one I
would talk about, the one, the one of the open source projects that
I support routine. I actually support it once a year. I send Christian
money. It's it's um WLED. So this is this is a pretty much
written by one guy who it is the software for controlling individually addressable LEDs for
like Christmas thing. He said around Christmas time, when I pull all that
stuff out and set it up again and I update the latest verses that I
make my house full of blinky lights, I'm like, dude, you kick
ass. Here's fifty bucks. It's just because it's so great and it's a
completely open source project now as near as I could tell, like, there's
a lot of hobbyists who do send give some money, and as well they
should. It's a brilliant product. There's no two ways about it. Yeah.
Nice. How about you, Joe? Besides your own projects, what
do you like besides Ma'm proect? Recently I've been poking around with wpf UI,
which is a fluent UI library to make wpf apps look like modern When
Ui three apps. Oh, so I've been playing around with that. I've
been trying to get it to work for text grab. I got some stuff
working. But it's great. It's open source and y'all check it out.
Isn't it funny that you have to use MAUI to get when Ui to do
when Ui app? Yeah, I mean, I mean I can't rebuild at
all, so just use a rapper. I'll include links to all three of
those in the show notes for folks that want to check them out. Good
stuff, Joe, Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure talking to
you. Yeah, thanks for having me, all right, and we'll talk
to you, dear listener next time on dot net Rocks. Dot net Rocks
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code. CNX time tread Mettle band buys summer times hard than my taxes.
I haven't gone