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at Patreon dot dot net rocks dot com. Hey Carlin Richard here. As
you may have heard, NDC is back offering their incredible in person conferences around
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com. Hey there, this is Jeff Fritz, the purple blazer guy from
Microsoft, letting you in on a little secret about my friend Carl Franklin.
You know, the guy who started dot net rocks. The first podcast about
dot Net in two thousand and two. The guy who's been teaching Blazer on
YouTube since twenty twenty, Yeah, that Carl Franklin. Well, Carl's joined
up with the folks from Code in a Castle to teach a week long hands
on Blazer class. Are you ready to get this? At a castle slash
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Carl's calling it the Blazer Master Class. You'll learn Blazer from the ground
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Since the training happens for only four hours in the morning over six days,
you can bring your significant other, your partner with you and you should right
This part of Italy's absolutely beautiful. There's so much to see and do,
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is quality training in a beautiful setting. Go to code in Acastle dot com
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take advantage of this amazing opportunity to join Carl in Tuscany for an unforgettable week
of La dolce vita while advancing your programming skills in this important new technology.
Welcome back to dot net Rocks. Is Carl Franklin, and this is Richard
Cavill. And uh, we're starting like a five show recording run, aren't
we. I think we've already done part of it, just been the next
one days carry us down through into into July. So I really do enjoy
to any shows with you and our guests over the years. It's been a
it's been an amazing ride in a long time. And I have a better
no framework for us all guys. Oh by yeah, so roll the music
awesome at well Gate is still making non SSD drives. The current technology for
platter drives that they're using is h AMR spinning rusts. Yeah, I know
right. H A m R stands for Why Richard Heat assisted magnetic recording,
right, So they actually heat up the platters so that you can put more
bits on the metal or something. We just come up with new tricks ways
to align rust atoms really precisely. Pretty crazy. Thirty two terabytes they're coming
up to. Wow, they're gonna give you a thirty two terabyte regular SATA
drive, Yeah, and followed by a forty terabyte SAT. I don't have
enough stuff, I know, right, isn't that nuts? Yeah? I
think gonna I'm gonna open up a competitor to uh, you know, Dropbox.
That's what I'm gonna do. You're just gonna buy like a million of
these things. Oh man, not, that's amazing. Not anyway. I
still do use some of these drives, but only ten terabytes. As hard
as I go, a mere ten terabytes. Yeah, I think I've got
I've got four twelves in my synology. But it is interesting to consider the
idea that, yeah, you could triple that easily with four new drives.
I can't imagine they'll be all that cheap, but it is amazing to see
that they're still innovating in the space. Yep, it is cool. Anyway.
That's when I have for the old guys. Great talking to us today,
Richard. I grabbed a comment top of the show eighteen eighteen which I
don't think you'd be surprised, you know that I went back to David Whitney's
Well, of course that that show we did at INDC and OSLOW kicked off
a lot of conversation and still does to this day. I think this would
be like the fourth comment I've read from that show. So this is from
Joseph hiller Up, who said, I think the basic idea is great and
needed, but the actual and Holman will need to be refined to work,
which is how do we pay open source maintainers? One issue that comes to
mind is how funny would work when an open source library uses another open source
library. I mean, who gets paid by whom and how much? So
you know, if the funding model was based on utilization, that's an interesting
problem. Should should the one project help fund the other because they are to
have dependency on it. Another is the funding model would work fine for startups
and the like, but it wouldn't work a lot and enterprise organizations and need
contracts and possible even vendors to be located in certain countries when paying out significants
amounts of money for licenses. Yeah, I don't know that that's true.
I think every organization can approach it the way they want to. It'll be
more about the standards around what you're expected to do. But I don't see
this as payment. I see this as donation. Realistically, making contributions just
to keep that thing going. If you want certainty, hire a team and
run it yourself. But I do think the discussion is important, and like
you said, the current model is likely unsustainable, and we're going to talk
about that further. Joshua, I'm not entirely sure. Now. I don't
know that I should read this last part because there has nothing to do with
the show, but I'm going to do it anyway. Okay, here we
go. PS. I hate to say this for Richard, who's actually wrong
here. Possibly for the first time ever, VHS was technically a superior format,
just beta a lot for faster speeds so people were carrying fast speed on
Beta who use the tape in half an hour, versus a slower speed on
the VHS that would last for hours when you can pay the same amount of
tape used per secon with uni formats, VHS looked better. Yeah, so,
well, the popularity doesn't necessarily mean it's the better format. Well,
it's also that Joshua is completely wrong, like, not even close to correct.
He's reversed a bunch of the facts. That the Beta Max format was
physically smaller in the VHS format, it was more portable. The original versions
of Beta Max, which came out a couple of years before VHS, had
more length than VHS. You're remembering the later versions of VHS when they met
a tape thinner and things got longer and they slowed down the speeds. Beta
Max was higher resolution, it was faster to seek on. It was better
in every expect except one thing. Only Sony was allowed to make them.
Sony refused to allow other companies to manufacture Beta Max players, and so they
failed the inferior format and essentially every respect VHS, because it was open,
multiple manufacturers made it and so became the most popular one in the network effect
took a hold. There were more players, so more movies were released on
it, and so it dominated. But you're not going to argue technical merit
of VHS over Beta, and be right if you think VHS was a superior
technology, it wasn't. It was the winner, and Sony learned once again
because they continue to do this. If you don't open up a product line
like that to other vendors, you're going to lose. That being said Joshua,
I think you may already have a music to Code buy. I'd happily
send you another one, because you know you need to when you're that wrong.
Yeah, but contact me at Richard at pwop dot com and we'll figure
it out. Thanks so much. And if you'd like a copy of music
code By, write a comment on the website at dot at rocks dot com
or on the facebooks. We publish every show there and if I read it
on the show, we'll send you copy of music go By. And you
know you can follow us on Twitter. But the real fund is happening over
on Mastodon. I'm at Carl Franklin at tech Hub dot social and now I'm
rich Campbell at Mastodon dot social. Send us a two. We like him.
By the way, I just got my blue Sky account too, because
if I don't have enough social media accounts, what's blue Sky just another one?
Really, it's another Twitter alternative. Okay, as soon as I get
an invite, all send you one, then we can have even more,
because you know, you can't have enough bay at least barely functional social media.
And if you say so, all right, Well, before we leave
the whole VHS beta thing, do you remember the format that was competing with
Blu Ray was hd DV HDDVD. That's right, So before I knew that
that Blu Ray was going to be the and it was probably like the week
before, I ordered an HDDVD player right right, and and it sat in
the box because Blu Ray one, and it was completely unusable, and so
I kept it in storage and kept in storage. And finally we're cleaning out
the garage and my wife goose, what is this and can we sell that?
And I'm like, no, we cannot sell that. Nobody will buy
it. Nobody wants that. It's going in the garbage. Not a thing.
Yeah, Unfortunately, I think I had an HDDVD player. I think
it was in the old Xbox. Actually, huh, that's the only one
we had, and then of course the new ones had Blu Ray. And
who uses spinning media at all anymore? Yeah? I really don't. Yeah,
other than other than those really large hard drives in your mass storage device.
Yeah, it's about it for spinning media of any thirty two terabytes.
Okay, let's bring back Sean Walker to the program. Sean is the original
creator of Octane and before that, dot Net Nuke Yay. Both of those
are web application frameworks that have earned the recognition of being amongst the most pioneering
and widely adopted open source projects native to the Microsoft platform. He has over
thirty years of professional experience in architecting and implementing enterprise software solutions for private and
public organizations and based on significant community contributions, He's been recognized as a Microsoft
MVP for over fourteen years and was recognized in twenty eleven as a Leading Entrepreneur
and the BIV forty under forty Business Awards, and is currently the chair of
the Project committee for the dot Net Foundation. Wow by busy Man. Every
time I'm on the show, I think I better reduced my bio. That's
too long winded, but I always forget to do that, so I replaced
it. I'd replaced the longer one with this one. Actually this is the
short one. Yeah, oh boy, I mean, how many more stories
could I tell about you, Sean? Like we've known each other a really
long time? Yeah, yeah, going back to the eclipse days. Hey,
can we take like a minute and talk a bit about the dot Net
Foundation, Like, how are things going? Yeah? Yeah, I've been
on the Foundation as a volunteer for a long time, since twenty fourteen.
In fact, lately have been focused on the Project Committee. I'm glad a
lot. We're coming up to another election actually for the Board of Directors,
so there's going to be I think I have voted excellent. Yeah. I
think there's three seats that have opened up, so there'll be three new members
joining and three existing members rolling off the current board. At least the members
that have been interacting with regularly are very invested in trying to move the needle
forward when it comes to the foundation initiatives, and also the professional services company
that we're working with, Virtual Inc, Is also helping us get organized better,
trying to hone in on what the value proposition is better or trying to
identify the benefits. So a lot of progress is being made behind the scenes
that isn't exactly visible yet, but I'm excited about where it's going. It
seems to me that Microsoft has been a lot more hands off on the dot
Net Foundation these days since the departure of the last executive director, and it's
just not really been replaced, And I kind of see that as a good
thing, but I don't know that everybody sees it that way. Yeah,
that was a big change. Up until last fall, the executive director had
always been a Microsoft employee and that wasn't part of the by laws or anything
that was a requirement. It was more that Microsoft was willing to provide a
resource to the foundation to fill that role. And usually that person was sort
of doing two roles, right they were doing work for Microsoft still and working
on the foundation. But after Claire Nevotney left there was actually a professional firm
that was hired to help with or like managing the foundation, and since then
there's been a couple of folks from that firm that have filled the role of
executive director. And it does it definitely right. It feels more objective,
more impartial a little and you're right, a little bit more arms length from
Microsoft. Yeah, well, I mean I want dot net to be bigger
than Microsoft. Really, you know, that's my thinking when I when I
think about what the potential of the foundation is, it's like, hey,
look, dot net can live in a lot of places, does live in
a lot of places, and it doesn't have to all be driven by Microsoft.
If there's any possibility this is going to come true, it's going to
come from the Foundation. Yeah. Yeah. And of course with any foundation,
the challenge is most of the resources, if not all, are volunteer,
and so it's just it's hard to get consensus in a sort of a
volunteer structure and to make significant progress. A lot of folks are putting in
a lot of effort. Yeah, So I hope that, you know,
people will start to see the results soon. Well, I'm glad you're involved
in the project side. Any particular projects you want to call out before we
move on. One thing I guess I would like to mention is that it's
been a little bit slow in terms of new projects making applications to become members
of the Foundation. That's been the case for probably the last six months.
Prior to that, there was always a regular flow of new project applications.
I think there's more than one hundred projects that are part of the Foundation at
this point, and that includes Microsoft projects as well as community projects. But
if there's any projects that are, you know, dot net based, that
are looking to become members of the Foundation, they should definitely consider submitting the
application and going through the process. Awesome. I'm looking at the website dot
Net Foundation Project Trends, which has some nice graphs and stuff, and apparently
that was written with Octane who knew. Yes, yeah, should think have
happened? How good that have happened? Yes, I know, Yeah,
we needed a way to track like which projects were the most active, and
in fact you weren't at the next Pauli's on that, yeah as well.
A lot of great work going on in Polly. Yeah, amazing stuff happening
now that the dot net team got involved, and really um is making a
new version that's kind of completely blow away the old stuff and be completely backward
compatible. We talked about that before. I think I think we're getting Joel
on the show at some point. Richard too. Yeah, they wanted to
wait a little bit till the new bits were closer to ready before we record,
but yeah, it's on the radar. I think it's will be involved
as well. Yes, yes, so speaking of Voctane, because we were
Yeah, let's you. You talked about it a little bit on the last
show here in twenty nineteen that you did that you were working on this thing.
But I guess now it's there, it's done, growed up, it's
all ye nineteen. At early stage, it was just getting started. At
that point, I think I had just released the first version as an open
source project on the hub. Well what is it? Let's start at the
top. Okay, So I mean I've kind of changed the messaging around it
a little bit over time. It's one of those things where I wanted to
position it as a web application framework focused on developers, and I really was
trying to avoid the term CMS because there's a lot of CMSs and I felt
like there's no need for another CMS. However, the more I talked to
developers, they tell me Octane is a CMS. So I'm like, if
it walks like a duck quacks like a duck, I guess it is a
duck like in some respects and some stop resisting it, and so now I've
been referring to it as a CMS and application framework. And obviously it's built
on Blazer. Started with the very early previews of Blazer and has grown up
since then with every successive version. And we'll be having a like a dot
in at seven version coming out later this month. So it's a it's a
it's a Blazer thing though right in particularly so it fully like so it's a
headless model where it's got the full back end API to manage users and sites
and all of the standard sort of entities you would expect in a in a
common sort of web application, but the front end is all Blazer um.
Yeah, so it took it. It's taking advantage of the Blazer component model
to build a very composable UI, which is wonderful. By the way.
I know you're a big fan of the best thing that's happened web development since
I can remember. Yeah, I was never a big fan of javascripts.
So the fact that you can kind of put that to the background and you
can really be productive in writing like front end c sharp UI is amazing.
Yep, great, Yeah, for the way you want to work, right,
I mean, that's the whole thing. This will this will work with
you. I do I know why you want to avoid CMS. I mean,
it is an overblown term, and it's one of those great things where
if it's simple enough to be easy to use, and it's not powerful enough,
and if it's sophisticated enough to do all the things you want, then
it's too bloody complicated. But I do think you hit this point of it's
a dev tool, it's a framework, but writing your own how do I
let non dev's add content code is just not smart. That's a solved problem.
So to me, the CMS part of Octane is the and when the
user wants to add content, here's your mechanism ready to go. Right.
So do people drop parallels between this and dot neet nuke old dot neet nuke
users? Do they like this? Is this like their new version? So
it's a good question because early on I wanted to make it clear that this
was quite differentiated right from dot net nuke, because obviously I created dot neet
nuke way back and web forms days whatever it was two thousand and three.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the reality is, I guess a lot
of the concepts for developing components and how users would interact with the application.
Those are all very similar to the way that dot neet Nuke worked, and
even the underlying data model is very similar to the dotet new data model,
at least the core data model. So it's really the implementation which is completely
different, right, like built from the ground up using all the latest technology
dotnet core Blaser. So it really has no resemblance at all to the way
that dotnet nuke was was built. Yeah, but from a usability standpoint though,
from is it it does fill a similar need? It does. Yeah,
it's very similar because it has a lot of the same concepts, like
multi tendency, meaning you can have multiple sites that are hosted out of the
same installation. Each site has its own set of users and roles and content
and things that you can manage. So a lot of that existed in dott
who as well. So you just said the magic word roles, And I
know that role based authorization has kind of fallen out of favor in the last
few years, I guess, And you know now it's all about claims and
all this stuff, But what are you using for that mechanism on the back
end? So I'm using the the dot net identity service like that the library
that Microsoft provides for self hosted off scenarios, Yeah, because that was one
thing that I felt was like really lacking in a lot of the templates is
a self hosted model. Like, yes, you can use things like identity
server and third party tools to get remote off working, but a lot of
the time in development scenarios, you just want to self host it off.
I'm actually really happy to see Microsoft's going to deliver something in dot neet aid
in this regard. Yeah, me too. But yeah, so it's self
host using the standard Microsoft bits there um, and then it also has open
id and DC or OIDC like connections, right, so you can have remote
authentication yeah sickond logging with Google and Twitter and Facebook and yeah, and I
did that using no third party like libraries or extensions because basically Microsoft already provided
all the bits that are necessary to interface with those different remote services without using
an identity server or open id, dick or any of these other you know,
third party options. Yeah, that's great, it's yeah. It's interesting
how many projects you've been involved in that it basically been open source projects that
had then been gone on to be successful, like and making money, Like,
is octained profitable in any way? How does it sustain itself? Yeah,
so that's sort of a good lead into the whole commercialization of open source.
But um so, I only recently, within the last month, actually
stepped away from my full time job a bit Cognizant, where I was leading
professional services team, and with the intent of going fully um like fully focused
on Octane, both developing out the product commercially and offering services around it commercially.
But I'm only doing this because I have confidence that I can succeed based
on the fact that I was able to do this with dot mat Nuke as
well. Yeah, I was thinking, you should have some confidence. You've
got a bunch of decades of succeeding at this stuff. So yeah, yeah,
And I also yeah, so I kind of under And this is where
I think a lot of people don't really understand some of the fundamentals of open
source UM and these things came up in some of the prior prior shows,
which is why I reached out and said, there's an alternate perspective I think
that could be shared about some of the ideas that David Whitney shared in that
session. And so Nevotney as well. Yeah, and they are they are
well okay, So I mean David's whole perspective was that package managers like newged
and GitHub could provide probably an ability for maintainers to make money off of their
open source projects. Right, It's an interesting idea. Obviously, Carl lapsed
onto that idea really quickly, thought it was a great idea. But then
when Sarah came on the show, she kind of explained that it doesn't really
conform to the ideals of open source. Right, And I would say that
they're both correct, but they're both incorrect at the same time. And I
did a presentation in January at the last dot Net Foundations summit and it was
the title of the presentation was open Source Sustainability, but really what it was
focused on was commercial open source. And I think what you really have to
understand about open source is that is when it comes to licensing. So if
you are the copyright holder of an open source project, then you have the
ability to specify whatever license you would like to provide so that users can take
advantage of your IP right. If you choose an open source license, it
offers a lot of freedom and a lot of abilities for people to use it,
but it also restricts your ability to make money directly off of that IP.
However, it's completely possible for you to dual license your IP, so
you can have an open source license and a commercial license, and people can
choose the license that they want. And it's the same way that when you
go to buy a cell phone today or rent a car whatever, right,
you can choose to get the insurance or not get the insurance. Yeah,
right, A lot of people choose to get the insurance because they're worried about
mitigating the risk if something goes wrong. Same exact thing with open source,
and don't people actually switch halfway through? It's like, hey, start with
the open source product absolutely to a certain point where you either run into obstacles
or it becomes critical where it's like, how are we going to protect ourselves?
Hey, let's flip to the commercial license comes with the protection. Yeah.
I'm thinking of Identity Server as the sort of the iconic example of that
and all the heartache that they went through with their customers. You know about
Andy and Microsoft too over that, and I think that that's maybe there's there
really shouldn't be that much resistance to it as long the resistance and I actually
faced this at Dot and nukes if you neglect the open source version in favor
of the commercial version, because there's dual licensing where you offer the same exact
piece of IP under two different licenses, and then there's things like open coore
where you add extra functionality to the commercial version, which makes it clear that
one version is better than the other. And then you're you know, you're
forcing people to make a decision, and that's where the open source community starts
to get a little bit anxious. Kay Growley, Well, the reason I
was so excited about David Whitney's idea is that it was an option. You
know. It wasn't like, um, you know, you're it wasn't like
you're abandoning one one project for another or one other thing. It's that,
you know, I've I've got these core this core set of features in this
thing, and I'm now building a version that I'm going to charge for that
has these features added to it. Right, It's it's an option, and
if you don't want to buy it, you don't have to. But I
think that it may not, you know, be open source. Um,
why should I say, yeah, I think you said it best. It's
like, that's not the open source you way to do things right, but
be at GitHub or whatever is the perfect place to to to put that hook.
I think, you know, but it's still an option. I saw
no downside in that idea. Yeah, and I think that if you had
even just even if you just took the standard dual license approach, let's say
you had. Let let's pick a project like image sharp, that's a popular
image library rate in the dot in an ecosystem. That project could have an
open source license, very pure open source license, and a commercial license and
the commercial and they could offer two packages of it, one under one license,
one under the other, and people could choose to opt for the commercial
license. And they would need a way to pay for it. And that's
why I think what David was suggesting, right, is something like newget or
get hub could facilitate that financial transaction. However, you have to realize then
the maintainer of that open source project is on the hook to provide value,
right, because people aren't paying for the IP, they're paying for the service
they get around the IP. Yeah, yeah, they're not doing they're not
doing it for fun. I also think you're there's different classes of project,
like clearly Octane, while it has a developer component, has a feature set
that some enterprises are going to value. I would argue that's where your differentiation
comes in. Is often with a paid product, you can add features to
have license or requirements on it for from third parties, or have cloud dependencies,
things that would be valuable to an enterprise but cost money and so only
appear in the commercial license. But I also think you have projects that are
pure internal code libraries that largely aren't licensable or make don't make sense in that
space, and that's where maybe some of these other mechanisms would be more credible.
Although that basically I think this was more Sarah's position. It's like,
listen, if you've taken a dependency on a piece of software chip the guy
twenty bucks, like, come on, I know, yeah, yeah,
especially if it's providing sort of critical functionality. Yeah yeah, because one day
that person has to move on work on other things or job calls, and
there's there's no cycles for it, and you need something and it's not going
to happen. Right. You certainly weren't willing to take on or at least
contribute, Like that's the whole Thing's like a it doesn't have to be money.
It could also be time. Like there are a bunch of ways to
do this. Yeah. One thing that we did here at dot and Nick
when it was just a pure open source project is we would say, like
you could donate. There was there wasn't options for people to donate to the
project, and they would say, well, my company can't really donate,
you know, if you had a commercial license and we'd buy it, because
that's like a traditional sort of procurement purchasing kind of process that companies can do.
Donating to things is not. It's kind of like a foreign concept for
a lot of corporate entity. Yeah, I don't know how to put that
through my payment chain. Now, that's more of a question of getting up
to the CFO and saying, let's build a mechanism for this, which can
be done. It's just that most people think the CFO, you know,
lives on clouds and is unapproachable. Right, there's a palace guard there that
will stab you, and so you know, you just follow the practices or
replace. The idea of creating new business flows is beyond most folks. That's
not what they want to do. And yeah, so I appreciate the idea
of just creating a something that will fit into the existing payment system, makes
life better. It's just easy to do, Sean, when I maybe we
should take a break now, but I have a question for us. Let's
do that. Let's take a break, and we'll be right back with Sean
Walker after this very important message, and we're back stottnet Rocks. I'm Carl
Franklin. That's Richard Campbell, hey, and that's Sean Walker. We're talking
about Octane and open source and all that good stuff. I was looking at
the website earlier this morning and looking for a documentation that a developer would use,
and I ended up in a repo that wasn't like an MD files or
anything that I could read. It was code, And then it said something
about the documentation is generated, and I wondered, if that is generated for
my app that I'm going to build with Octane, or if that's the Octane
docs and how do I actually figure out how to use this thing? Yeah,
so that's a good example of where open source projects often fall short in
providing sort of the services around the project that some people are looking for and
it's very difficult to encourage people to contribute to documentation. For whatever reason,
I've been on the Octane project. I've been hoping for you know, the
last three or four years, that people could step up and provide assistance in
that area, but nobody does. And it was the same without and new.
So I feel like this is just an area where, you know,
in open source, it attracts more of a developer crowd. They want to
write code, they want to maybe test code, they don't want to write
docs. So this is another reason why I feel like I need to create.
In order to get serious with an open source project, you do need
to provide dedicated, paid resources to do some of this work. Right,
I'm going to pay a tech writer to write docs ultimately, and that's just
what's going to be required in order to move the next level or yeah,
or it's just not going to happen. I mean, there's just reality.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right. I mean it's a it's a
it's a limitation. And if you look at a lot of open source projects,
yeah, you're going to read I'm finding goods. Yeah yeah. But
but and to that point, it's like you often see this absurdity in the
open source community. It's like, why would I pay that guy you know,
just going to spend the money. It's like, now the most likely
thing is going to do is go spend it on people that will do stuff
they're not going to do, right, Yeah, yeah, like invested into
their product to make it better for everyone. Yeah yeah. Yeah. This
isn't buy me a cup of coffee kind of thing. Yeah yeah. But
it's the point, like there's a lot They've always got this long list list
of things that need to get done, and you can only do so many
of them, and there's only certain ones that you're good at too, you
know, like especially if it's a sole maintainer, like they have a particular
skill set. It's not necessarily comprehensive. Writing Documentation is a separate skill and
almost incompatible in some respects. It's hard to be you know, effective at
running a project and also be effective at that much less you know, training
materials and demos and samples, like all of these different skills that come into
play. Yeah. I think that was a large topic of my presentation that
in January was if you're approaching an open source project, you should be thinking
about it as if you were starting a business. Think about all the things
that go into starting a business, right if you're not prepared to follow through
on those things, And maybe starting an open source project is also not a
great idea. Yeah, otherwise you're just going to get buried. Yeah,
and they and the open source maintainer again it can do all the thing is
just as mythical as the full stack developer, right, like you, nobody's
good at everything. It shouldn't work that way, So what some parts of
it are going to fall down unless you get some help. Yeah. You
run into time constraints as well, which is you can't do it. He
be everywhere, You can't do all things. Yeah. And it's also interesting
because even if you do start attracting a decent group of contributors, like Octane
has had more than forty contributors over time. Now, some of them,
you know, just submit you know, a few little poll requests here and
there. Others have done more significant work. But in all those cases it's
on It's up to the maintainer to really vet all those poll requests right interact
with the community. It actually creates a large amount of management work for the
maintainer as you increase the number of contributors, right, because it takes a
long time before a contributor gets to the point where you can trust that they're
going to make all the same decisions that you would make as a maintainer.
Yeah. Well, and they almost certainly won't, even when even when you
do trust them, it's like, I know this person take approaches this differently.
Is that going to be a problem here? And odd? Yeah,
And there's a lot of people out there. We're having this question in the
dot net Foundation right now. People are becoming members of the Foundation and they're
like, we would really like to contribute to the projects. How do we
do that? And it's like, well, first of all, it would
be great if you actually, if if there's a certain project you want to
contribute to, start using that project, like, become a user of it,
understand how it works, Like don't just show up and say I want
to write some code. Yeah, like really understand the use cases that are
involved here, and then you'll start to see whether there are limitations in certain
areas and then and then submit something that's valuable right yeah, so yeah,
well, and getting to that point, it's also a rush when you actually
make those contributions successfully, like it won't be confusing once you've done it,
You know, like that that you're because the amount of engagement it takes you
get to that point where that pr makes sense and makes contribution to the code
base and so forth. That's the hill you climb to be successful. Did
you write Octane all by yourself? A large portion of the code has been
written by me. Yeah, there has been a like I said, a
number of other contributors as well that have contributed in more, some of them
over like over time, some of them in bursts, like one of my
colleagues that I worked with on dot net Newke in fact, Charles Nurse,
helped in making it support multiple databases and so he did a bunch of work
for a couple of months to get that to happen. So that was very
appreciated. And there's been other folks who have been more consistent over time.
But yeah, largely I've written a lot of code, and these contributors are
like, did they come in needing a feature and so write it themselves?
Like shape of the contributors. Yeah, sometimes that's the case. Sometimes you
know they were trying to do something quite unique, and the framework won't have
the specific feature they're looking for, so they'll create it themselves. Other times
it'll be more that maybe I've observed that there's, you know, a gap
in some area, and I'll ask if somebody's interested in filling that gap,
right with a within some some parameters. So yeah, there's there's a few
different ways that people can contribute. So there is a retail version of Octane.
There is not yet that is coming because I only just formed Octane Labs
just within the last month. Now, did you have customers asking you for
a retail version of it? Like? What was the catalyst of this?
Yeah? Yeah, so there were folks reaching out and asking if they could
have like support, like a licensed version that it included support and other kind
of features like that, or could have assistance with implementations, right, so
system integrator type health as well s side side, the tech support side,
like all valid things. So you and that's melis must have been going on
for quite some time that you finally built at the point where it's like,
I think there's a business here. Yeah. Yeah. And then also I
think and Carl would understand this. Microsoft's really done a great job with this
with Blazer, right. This journey with Blazer has been incredible, and they
keep adding on more capabilities as time goes on, and so Octane has been
able to kind of build on top of that ride the wave sort of speak
right, and it's sort of got to a point now where there's a lot
of there's a lot of interesting value right in this, in this product,
and I think it's like the optimal time kind of to you know, create
a commercial entity around it. I am have created a I create a lot
of repos for Blazer Train and the dot net show just a little projects that
I show off. And sometimes I think to myself, should I like put
an MIT license on this, or you know, should I do like it
officially? And I just never do And I'm just wondering if that's a that's
a good idea. I mean, I I basically show them off in YouTube
videos and I bring people to that, and I don't really get a lot
of people contributing back once in a while, but they essentially sort of public
access then people can average the ideas in the code. Absolutely yeah, I
mean I'm doing it for public good, you know, I just want people
to use it and modify it. If they have some modifications, send it
back. And I don't really think anybody's going to say, you know,
steal it and say, hey, look at this great thing. Then I
wrote, you know, I don't care. I don't care about that.
Yeah. I mean, if they're an example and not intended to be a
full blown product, right, then I think you're probably taking the right path
there and providing the most value you can to developers. Right. They're free
to use your ideas however they exactly. Yeah, and if they go to
the trouble of actually turning it into a product, well, fully on them.
That's a lot of work. Yeah, go for it. I'm certainly
not going to do that for a living. Yeah, I mean, who
would do that? Sean write software and for a living, and that's crazy
talk. It does feel that way sometimes, and I did after I got
done with dot at Nuke. I think I did tell myself at one point,
yeah, I'm not doing that again. So. I mean, you
did your blog posts just a few days ago about creating octane labs and yeah
and dead answers and so forth. Have you had much response yet, had
the pitchforks come out? No pitchforks at all actually, and that's one thing
that's been interesting. Yeah. So I don't know if it's just the general
feeling around open sources starting to shift, right. So, I remember the
commercialization of dotnet Nuke was much more tense, more that there was more resistance
in the community. Um this the idea of having a company that was somehow
associated with this open source project was like it really rubbed people the wrong way.
But in this case it's been very fluid. Um. Yeah. I
think that people are maybe it's coming to the realization that in order to have
great software, you sometimes need to have a resource model for it, right,
so that it can provide the services people need to make a living.
Yeah, like con and it's reasonable to do so. And arguably like Octane's
about to get better because it's got the full attention of Sean Walker, and
you're also going to get As people pay for this product, they're going to
put new pressures on you as well, and that will shape the product also,
it'll make the product better. That definitely happened in DNN. So as
soon as we had a commercial license, then there were certain types of companies
that maybe had been toying with the idea of using it. But then they
became real users and they they don't want to share their ideas about how to
make the product better in a public form, so they would like to have
a private place right to interact with you. And so a lot of great
ideas came through those channels, right yeah, and they were real ideas that
could be put into the field. Like this is no speculation. This is
you know, not just dashing an issue. It's like, Okay, we've
gone this far with your product. Here's the walls we're hitting. How do
we get past these? Exactly? Yeah, just like any commercial software product,
right, they get better based on the usage and based on the feedback
that you get from the community. And you don't always get the full feedback
in an open source project. A lot of people are just driving by.
They'll use it, they'll run into a wall, and then they won't tell
you that they don't. They just move on. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
next thing. So yeah, it's interesting. The financial commitment is an
interesting element of engagement. You know. I've certainly run into that on the
ht box side, where giving away the software is as much a problem as
a benefit, because it's hard for people to value free software. Yeah,
it's the same as with your conference activities. To a free conference versus a
paid conference, you get a whole different type of attendee. I get it.
You had fifty percent fall off, right Like, so you know you've
gone and gotten food through sponsorship and then half of it doesn't get eaten when
when things are free, like in some ways, I'm like, at least
charge one hundred bucks enough that people will show up, right just because of
you know that kind of pain. Um, yeah, I'm I'm with you.
It's like money is also an expression of intent. It is. It's
like, if you're gonna have a you know, a party, and you
put an event right thing out there something like that, and you want to
charge money, don't say, you know, twenty dollars at the door or
ten dollars at the door, because people will reserve a spot, you'll go
buy all your food and party stuff, and then nobody will show up because
they didn't have any commitment in any skin in the game ticket not enough.
Well, sell tickets ahead of time. Just don't say bring the money at
the door, right Yeah. I learned that the hard way too, Yeah
yeah, yeah. And again it's like, how do you get the commitment
from it. The real the real question is how the product ultimately gets shaped
and things have changed, Like I gotta think there's areas of development that you
wouldn't do unless you had the commercial aspects, just because they invariably have an
expense, right, like the old cloud proxy thing. Like and I'm an
admirer of the home Assistant open source project and how they transform themselves because it
became apparent they needed a cloud proxy and charging people five bucks a month for
the cloud proxy change the whole dynamic. It brought a lot of money to
the equation because it made and it made a huge difference there, Like it
doesn't have to be a complicated thing, but it's also a thing that is
not free because it can't be operated for free, and that sort of just
shapes the equation. Now. It's like your customer relationship changes, the opportunity
space changes, the expectations change, and generally for the better if you're prepared,
Like I have every confidence in you, Sean. We've don't showed it
a long time, You've been down this road before, but I think a
lot of maintainers looking for I really want to do this project as a living
just don't have an idea of what's going to happen to you right when you
turn when you switch commercial, right, yeah, Yeah, And it is
a matter of thinking about creating a real business around it and and what's entailed
in doing that. And I guess you're right A lot of a lot of
maintainers are just developers who have always just worked for other companies, yeah,
and don't have any insight into, you know, the business aspects of that.
Yeah. And I would have to say even when I got like when
I transitioned in Dot and Nuke, I was pretty naive, right too,
all that was involved. It was a lot. It was also very early
days, like open source wasn't really a thing in the in the Microsoft community
when you guys were first headed down that like that was part of the problem,
I thought, and you make mistakes, Yeah, yeah, it was.
It wasn't a friendly environment towards open source at all, definitely from Microsoft,
although there was certain pockets, right, Like there was always the folks
like Scott Guthrie, that team that was very pro open source, right,
and so they're the ones who sponsored gotten that knuke great in the early days,
Hanselman and Hack and Connery and like the Ninja Army. Yeah, yeah,
they transformed the company kind of from the inside out, right, Yeah,
some ways. You know, someday I might actually finish the book that
explains a lot of that stuff. It's a very interesting set of forces,
Like Richard, I am to come there and like, babysit you to write
this book. Do I need to bring some whiskey? I think I need
riddle it actually, But you know, there's this great moment and I've never
fully written this part out where leadership has figured out that it's essential, and
there's folks down in the trenches that have figured out that it's essential, but
the folks in the middle still haven't gotten it yet. And there's this sort
of pressure. How do you push in, Like you don't want to dictate
from on high, You wanted to come from grass roots, but they were
resisting all that time. Like this is this fascinating moment where it's like,
you know, two thirds of you guys are on the same side. You
just don't know. Interesting, but that seemed to happen when Satya kind of
came in right that maybe it was coincidental that had happened at that time,
but that seemed to be there was a big shift that happened. Yeah,
we definitely then the leadership was in that space. And one would argue that
that Bomber realized that he was an obstacle to the new company and so needed
to move on too. But this really comes down to the shift of the
cloud, because the shift of the cloud means I just want workloads and if
some of them are open source whatever, Right, We're not a Windows companymore,
We're a cloud company. And so you know, and you look at
it now, like forty percent of there were cloathes or Linux. Yeah,
because who cares? They make their own flavor or Linux. For crying out
loud, there's like half a diven different flavors of Linus you can download from
the Windows Store. The Windows Store at a different time it is from when
we started. I was actually talking to my brother yesterday because and he worked
with me in DNN Corp. And we got a lot of partnership value from
Microsoft in like the twenty like two thousand and nine through twenty and twelve era
because they were still fixated on competing with Linux and Php and WordPress, you
know, all of those, yes, and they wanted to showcase that there
were options available on Windows, like native options, right. Dot Nuke was
one of those options, and so we got a lot of marketing visibility as
a result of that. Right, But yeah, that is not the world
we're in anymore. No, not at all. Right now, it's embrace
everyone, which is great. Well I'm not saying that's a bad thing.
And also trying to interoperate too, That's all part of it is like can
we all work and play well with each other? Like in some ways the
operating systems just kind of become irrelevant. I don't care. Just can you
can you consume my Jason feter or not? You know? That's what that's
what as matters. I had the surreal experience of having this conversation with my
wife which culminated in her admitting she didn't know what the operating system was,
you know, and and I think most users don't know Windows. What's Windows?
Kind of a it's a good day, isn't it? Yeah? Because
it is a releavant. Well, what's what's Windows? Windows? You know?
The operating system? What's that? I mean? Is that the my
tabs? Or is it the things on my desktop? Is that Windows?
Yeah? You know, it's hard it's hard to know. Yeah, you
know that desktop Windows. If you weren't around you know, and you didn't
understand what part of the technical terms the hardcore Mac users that's Windows. Yeah,
that's true. I love telling this story when I when I was younger,
um, because I was a PC guy in this Mac guy came up
to me, was learning programming stuff. What what are these things called files?
What's a file? You didn't know because you know his environment was draggy,
droppy and documents and whatever. Well, that's dial the norm. Most
people don't know where they're stuff stored anymore because it just gets stored and they
can find it when they need it. Yeah. The idea that lives on
a Google drive or a one drive or any of those. How many Who
doesn't matter? Who makes good hard disk hierarchies anymore? Right, Yeah,
nobody sort of thing. Yeah, even when I had folders to Google Drive
or something like that, I don't. I don't make folders and subfolders and
stuff. I just make documents because you can just find him by searching.
Yeah, it doesn't matter, It doesn't matter. On the on the topic
of books, So you've been working on a book a long time, Richard.
Yeah, but um, have you noticed that there seems to be a
lot more technical books coming out again? Like it felt like I thought books
were going away, but I keep seeing more and more announcements on things like
LinkedIn about people writing books. I think the publication costs have dropped enough now
that they the then minimum number of sales for it to be worthwhile for the
publisher is small. Well, when you say publisher, are most people self
publishing? Now? Some folks are, But the drive you're seeing right now,
it's like I get a lot of messages from different publishers that now have
new engines and are keen to find authors of things. Yeah, I mean
I most likely will self published the history of dot net. Yeah, I
hadn't really excited. I think it's become pretty clear that most people just want
the audiobook anyway, I want the coffee table book with the glossy photos and
everything, totally. Yeah, they reaction to Really, nobody's going to read
the physical book. What they want is to spine in their video shop behind
them, right that it says history down, that's what the library. Yeah,
and then it may be on their kindle and it might be you know,
in there and on their phone. Yeah, and that's really what's going
to happen, and that and the director's commentary, I'll tell all the ridiculous
stories of trying to assemble the stupid Yeah. All right, well, where
where are we going next? Here? Sean? What's what's next for you?
Like? So this release for dot at seven obviously coming up this month,
but then moving towards course dotin at eight. There's a lot of changes
coming with Blazer, a lot of interesting possibilities with this new server side rendering
model, right, So I'm trying to wrap my head around that because there's
some things that we did in Octane which are you know, pushing the envelope
a little, Like, for example, we don't use the default Blazer router.
We have our own custom router, and there are you know, certain
dependencies that have kind of emerged over time that are dependent on the default routers.
So we have to figure out how to reconcile those differences to unleash this
new functionality. So how have you found the process of updating Blazer projects or
any project for that matter. M one version of dot net to the next,
and I don't mean dot Net Windows Framework. Um, you know,
done Core from say done or three to five to six to seven? How
many of those have you done? And have you found them as easy as
everybody says they are. Yeah, so I've done all the full sort of
you know, version upgrades, and it's been seamless, to be honest,
like, and that's pretty amazing considering that Octane is a pretty large codebase at
this point. UM. But like, for example, moving from six to
seven was like just changing the references. That's there was not a single breaking
change. Wow, And yeah there was, and I think even from five
to six it was like very minimal animal yeah, yeah, yeah, So
Microsoft's done a very good job at that um And in fact, it's it's
interesting because when I talk to other folks that are in other ecosystems like Angular,
especially Angular, they seem to be really frustrated at the breaking changes that
happened constantly in every release. Right, So this is a real advantage I
think for Blazer, certainly, Angular one to two was the most painful,
I think, wasn't it. I think lately it's been super painful even with
recent versions. Jeez, what are they out at sixteen? Like this should
be smoothed that by now, but I would argue that Blazer being such a
young product, it would be more likely to twitch more. Agreed, But
I think you're also dealing with a very experienced team that does know how to
smooth a lot of this. Yes, I was going to say that,
you know, when Steve Sanderson had that first demo, you look at the
first demo, not a whole lot has changed in the component model since that
very first demo he did at NDC. Granted it was pretty simple, but
I mean, and things have been added to it, but it still kind
of looks the same, and the underlying cobase has been completely changed, but
they have not moved away from the core meta. Yes, I don't know
the Blazer United is even on your radar, you Sean, because it's not
really Yeah no, that's what I was talking to about the servers, Yeah,
because I think they're moving away from that United name. Yeah, it's
like a United concept now it's going to be yeah yeah, yeah, But
yeah, I'm excited about that because like in a in an application like Octane,
there are certainly pages where there is just content that could be rendered and
not necessarily anything that's interacting, and that's a perfect candidate for server side rendering.
Yeah, so yeah, I think it's a good fit. Yeah.
Why I push that stuff to the client, you'll get you'll get good results
without doing that. So just it's just the ability for you as the manager
of that CMS to go through today, how that can be server that's best
client, you know, and so on and yeahs and that should produce better
performance of the application in general because it doesn't have to render things twice.
Yeah. Yeah. And it's to be interesting. Yeah, it's going to
be. It's a good ride. And do you think people are finally gotten
past the idea that this is the next silver Light Yeah? God, thank
god for that. You still every once in a while I still get some
pushback on that and I have to explain it all over again. Yeah,
I mean people are still angry. It's remarkable as long ago as it was,
But that's because Microsoft has a history of always building paths for developers going
forward, and silver LIGHTY is just glaring hole of except there where you did
nothing. You basically abandoned us. We're five or six years into this now,
so it's pretty clear that there's like a roadmap. Yeah, And of
course the difference between the plug in model and web assembly is remarkable. And
you know, the thing is is that maybe the real thing about silver Light
to what would have prevented that was making it in the first place, because
at the time, the plug in model was the only way to do it
in the browser, and it wasn't secure and it wasn't safe. And should
they have known that, you know that, I don't know. Yeah,
they were competing for against flash, right, like that was what they're right,
we're concerned about it, and it got transformed into something more. But
I mean, you know, that's in twenty ten. In April, it
was the way to build enterprise out and by November it was nowhere, basically
disappeared, but not even announce just yeah, there were no sessions at PDC
like that was a thing. But that's also when they were freaking out about
what would become win A, so they were all pretty locked out. I
mean, it was a very bizarre time. I don't expect to be repeated,
No, I don't. I don't see that happening again. But I
mean, look at the differences in Blazer too. Ye open source right,
like Microsoft could walk away from it, but the code ain't going to disappear
and everybody uses everybody embraces web assembly, everybody even Safari. Yeah finally,
but yes, and all of that is true. I still think a lot
out of the folks that came up are coming out of web Forms are enamtor
Blazer because it's the all C sharp experience. Y Yeah. It's surprising how
many web forms applications are still out there yep. And millions don't have I
don't think really a good path forwards. No, I just wonder how many
of them are no longer buildable. Why, like the companies depend on them,
but yeah, the code basis, they don't have a working de environment
for We did a new version of an app for that was a web forms
app for a customer and when you know, I said, so, so
what's your timeline? He's like, well, I'm not so sure this is
gonna make it through the winter. Like you know, it's running with duct
tape and bailing wire crashes often, and you know, we may not see
it towards the end of the couple of months. There's a couple of assists
admins that have written a whole bunch of scripts to keep rebooting things or restarting
repairing stuff and so forth, and they're all tired. Yeah I know,
yeah, I feel sorry for the people and had to deal with that stuff
back then. Now it's a kickwalk compared to that. I still keep running
across dot at nukes sites out in the wild. In fact, like my
local municipality where I live, they have a dotinet nukes site running their public
utilities site still and probably a vintage site like A four like probably yeah,
yeah, so well, any this the thing is you find these little nooks
and crannies of unmaintained software that the company has a dependency on there, you
know, way out of date on versions, probably don't have a working dev
environment, more that they couldn't build it if they even wanted to, much
less that you'd have any chance I'm doing. Do you have an upgrade path
for dot net nuke users to get their content running and octane. Not a
automated one, but I believe there could definitely be one created because, like
I said, the data models are very similar, so the data would move
across. But the apps, like if you have custom modules that you wrote
for of course web forms, they would have to be rewrit shirtleaser components.
No, we do way to do that. Yeah, well, congratulations man,
I mean I'm hoping we'll you'll help me back to talk about how the
commercialization side is going on and the land mines you haven't seen yet. I'd
be happy to be back you two, Sean, take care and thanks for
listening, and we'll see you next time. I'm dot net Rocks. Dot
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