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Speaker 1: dot com. Hey, welcome back to dot net Rocks episode
Speaker 1: twenty ten. I'm Carl Franklin, that Chard Campbell, and we're
Speaker 1: talking to Rob Menschin today. But we'll be talking to
Speaker 1: him in just a minute. But first, how are you, Richard?
Speaker 2: I'm great, dude. I've been you know, home for a
Speaker 2: few weeks and that's always fun.
Speaker 1: Yeah, always fun. Well, let's start it off right because
Speaker 1: you know, we got to get through this intro stuff.
Speaker 1: It's going to be weird today.
Speaker 2: I point out there's only to be sixteen more of these, right,
Speaker 2: eventually we reach time.
Speaker 1: We do these sort of weekly mini geek outs and
Speaker 1: Rob feel free to join in anytime. All right, this
Speaker 1: being episode twenty ten, let's talk about what happened that year. Yeah,
Speaker 1: first of all, there was a terrible earthquake in Haiti
Speaker 1: seven point zero bigin devastated Haiti, killing an estimated get this,
Speaker 1: almost three hundred thousand people. It's crazy, and leaving more
Speaker 1: than one point five million homeless. Just absolutely devastating.
Speaker 2: Because there was there was a seven earthquake in christ
Speaker 2: Church that same year that killed.
Speaker 1: I think two people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like construction matters, although Church will go through a lot.
Speaker 1: Chile also had an earthquake. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's funny because as we're recording this in June,
Speaker 2: there's just been a whole string of earthquakes around the
Speaker 2: Pacific rim that's right, and in Venezuela.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so Venezuela was just yesterday.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's crazy.
Speaker 1: Yeah. The deep Waters an oil spill which gave dawn
Speaker 1: dishwasher detergent a new identity.
Speaker 2: I'm pretty sure that happened back in the Mesonvaldis.
Speaker 1: But okay, oh yeah, you're right, that's right. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: little duck on the down bottle. That was excellent Valdis.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: But anyway, so this was an explosion of an offshore
Speaker 1: drilling rig.
Speaker 2: VP killed a bunch of people, yeah.
Speaker 1: Eleven workers. Gulf of Mexico caused the largest marine oil
Speaker 1: spill in US history. Millions of barrels because it was.
Speaker 2: Running deep underwater, right, and it took a long time
Speaker 2: to get down there and lock it down. It was
Speaker 2: hard to do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, in New Orleans, they weren't selling so many shrimp.
Speaker 1: Let's just say that.
Speaker 2: Oh, well they're still finding that.
Speaker 4: Well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, fifteen sixteen years later.
Speaker 1: The Wiki leaks Document Leaks Julian Massage, of course, published
Speaker 1: hundreds of thousands of classified US military reports and then
Speaker 1: scooted to Russia.
Speaker 2: Yeah, ultimately ended up in England and stayed in the
Speaker 2: Ecuadorian a consulate for a decade. Like that's tough, but yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The Arab spring began in twenty ten. In December, Mohammed Bozazi, Yeah,
Speaker 1: self immolated after harassment by local authorities and that started it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was the beginning of a tremendous change.
Speaker 1: European debt crisis intensifies Greece. Remember that Greece basically went broke.
Speaker 2: This is when the challenge of the EU infrastructure really
Speaker 2: took a hold, where Greek euros aren't the same as
Speaker 2: German euros, right, and that's the reality they had to
Speaker 2: contend with all byproducts of the subprime crisis.
Speaker 1: North Korea's military aggression. They were blamed for sinking the
Speaker 1: South Korean naval ship Chionin, killing forty six sailors. And yeah,
Speaker 1: that wasn't good. Another natural disaster in Iceland, the volcanic eruption.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're going to say that name. Go ahead, say
Speaker 2: that name, Carl. I'll say it's got three j's in it.
Speaker 2: It must be easy.
Speaker 1: I falcol something like that, something like that. I actually
Speaker 1: have a bottle of the ash from that's amazing. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I bought it at the Rekuvik airport and I brought
Speaker 1: it home and I thought my kids would appreciate it,
Speaker 1: and they just left it here. That what the hell, dad, whatever? Whatever, Okay,
Speaker 1: I like it. It's on my minicle. Polish presidential plane crashed.
Speaker 1: Ninety five others, including the president died when they are aircraft
Speaker 1: crashed near Smolensk, Russia.
Speaker 2: Slensk.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Smolensk, Iran's nuclear program ambitions intensified. New sanctions were imposed.
Speaker 1: We don't know how that's going to end. Nice. The
Speaker 1: US Affordable Care Act takes effect in March, became the
Speaker 1: largest overhaul of the uslthcare system in decades and dominated
Speaker 1: American politics for years afterwards, including this day. They're still
Speaker 1: fighting over it still. Yeah, and the FIFA World Cup
Speaker 1: in South Africa.
Speaker 2: Don't forget about the Winter Olympics in Vancouver. Oh yeah, okay, yeah,
Speaker 2: and that was and that was the silver Light Olympics.
Speaker 2: Our friend Scott Stanfield had the contract to do silver
Speaker 2: Light for NBC.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right. Scott basically had a streaming video platform
Speaker 1: on silver Light and sold it to Major League Baseball eventually.
Speaker 2: Eventually by that time he was doing it for NBC
Speaker 2: and we were we were watching it, and I realized
Speaker 2: we were talking about it as he was working on it.
Speaker 2: He had no plans to come to the games, and like,
Speaker 2: what are you doing? Yeah, get on a plane, get
Speaker 2: up here. And we ended up going to a lot
Speaker 2: of currently.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so, oh, should I tell that story about Scott
Speaker 1: Stanfield We had after he sold to Major League Baseball.
Speaker 1: We were at an MVP summit. I think we were
Speaker 1: at Daniel's restaurant. Michelle was there and you were there,
Speaker 1: and Kelly was with me and we had to Kelly
Speaker 1: and I had to leave early. So we offered to
Speaker 1: you know, chip in and pay for stuff, right, And
Speaker 1: he says he's drunk. He goes, you're not paying and
Speaker 1: I said, come on, let's just you know, we can
Speaker 1: pay our way. He goes, look, I'm really really rich
Speaker 1: and I'm really really drunk, so fuck off or something
Speaker 1: like that. Yeah, good on, Scott, just honorable mentions. He
Speaker 1: attempted Times Square car bombing, record flooding in Pakistan, the
Speaker 1: UK election resulting in the Conservative Liberal Democrat coalition government
Speaker 1: in the end of the N one influenza pandemic. So
Speaker 1: it was a disastrous year for global events except for those,
Speaker 1: you know, sporting events. A right, Yeah they did, okay, Richard,
Speaker 1: tell us about space tech, the spacey stuff.
Speaker 2: There are three shuttle flights, all early in the year.
Speaker 2: February Endeavor brings No. Three in the couple up to
Speaker 2: the Space station, and April Discovery brings the Leonardo cargo carrier,
Speaker 2: and in May Atlantis brings a Russian research module, the
Speaker 2: Mini Research Module. And that's it for shuttles that year, amazingly,
Speaker 2: and this is almost it right. Next year will bee
Speaker 2: a last of the shuttle flights. Much more activity though.
Speaker 2: In May, the Japanese Space program launches Akatsuki, which is
Speaker 2: their Venus climate orbiter to Venus later that year, in December,
Speaker 2: it's supposed to do a twelve minute burn to go
Speaker 2: into orbit around Venus, and something goes wrong. The problem
Speaker 2: is that because it's trying to go into orbit around Venus,
Speaker 2: as the burn that starts, they can see the burn starts,
Speaker 2: and then the spacecraft she goes behind Venus relative to
Speaker 2: the Earth, so they have no communication with it, and
Speaker 2: then too long goes by, and when they finally get
Speaker 2: a hold of it, it's in safe mode and tumbling,
Speaker 2: and they managed to get it, communicating with it again
Speaker 2: and get it recover realized it only ran that burn
Speaker 2: only went for three minutes, so it's not in orbit,
Speaker 2: it's going to miss, it's going to fly by. It
Speaker 2: takes them a few weeks to figure out that the
Speaker 2: main engines badly damaged, that there was actually a kind
Speaker 2: of an explosion on board. Really, what had happened was
Speaker 2: there was a leak in the fuel system and too
Speaker 2: much oxtars that went to the engine and burned the
Speaker 2: engine up. This is the same thing that likely happened
Speaker 2: to Mars Observer and resulted in a total loss of
Speaker 2: Mars Observer a number of years before. So they got
Speaker 2: lucky here here's the crazy part. They still have a
Speaker 2: spacecraft and they're still trying to figure out what to
Speaker 2: do with it. So they managed to figure out a
Speaker 2: new orbit so that five years later, in twenty fifteen,
Speaker 2: they'll get close enough to Venus to attempt to go
Speaker 2: into orbit again, but they don't have the main engine. Also,
Speaker 2: the vehicle was only supposed to survive for four years,
Speaker 2: so they designed a hibernate mode for it that it
Speaker 2: didn't have, upload it, shut it down for three and
Speaker 2: a half years, and then work out all the equations
Speaker 2: for using the maneuvering thrusters to actually put it into orbit.
Speaker 2: Realize they're carrying too much fuel, so they turn it
Speaker 2: on and dump the excess oxidizer, not going to need
Speaker 2: to lower its weight enough, and in twenty fifteen managed
Speaker 2: to get it into an odd elliptical orbit around Venus
Speaker 2: so it can actually do its science and it'll operate
Speaker 2: up there till twenty twenty four. Very cool, very cool. Indeed,
Speaker 2: another amazing Japanese satellite mission, the Hyabusa, that was the
Speaker 2: one that actually touched down on Iakawa asteroid. You've seen
Speaker 2: the video of the spray of rock. Because it's like
Speaker 2: most asteroids. We've now realized their rubber piles. So this
Speaker 2: little arm touched down to grab some parts and actually
Speaker 2: jammed it because there was so much debris. But they
Speaker 2: managed to get it closed up. They got it into
Speaker 2: its container, and in twenty ten it done the rendezvous
Speaker 2: in two thousand and five. In twenty ten it actually
Speaker 2: returns part in debris from an asteroid to Earth successfully,
Speaker 2: first time we ever.
Speaker 1: Ha that wow.
Speaker 2: Also in June, SpaceX launches the very first Falcon nine
Speaker 2: with a Dragon qualification unit on board, just a test flight,
Speaker 2: and that will lead to the later flight in December,
Speaker 2: the second flight, what they call the Cotts demo flight.
Speaker 2: Once this is doing resupply to the International Space Station.
Speaker 2: All this one doesn't actually do resupply. It does go
Speaker 2: into orbit proof as it can, does carry a few microsatellites.
Speaker 2: Also a wheel of cheese because it needed some kind
Speaker 2: of payload, so they put an entire wheel of libourriere
Speaker 2: cheese and then brought it back. It was the first
Speaker 2: time that a private company put something into orbit and
Speaker 2: returned it successfully.
Speaker 1: I wonder if that improved the flavor.
Speaker 2: I don't know. It certainly photed around a little it's
Speaker 2: a great question. Also in October, Chinese launch the Change two,
Speaker 2: which goes into orbit around the Moon later that same month.
Speaker 2: It'll hang out there for a year or so. In
Speaker 2: twenty eleven, it will leave orbit of the Moon and
Speaker 2: actually go to lagrange point two, which will make the
Speaker 2: only third nation besides NASA and NISSA ever go there.
Speaker 2: And then we'll fly on from there to intercept an
Speaker 2: asteroid called it Tutatus in twenty twelve. Wow, that was
Speaker 2: an amazing mission. And again the Chinese are quite accomplishment
Speaker 2: space even by twenty ten. On the computing side, we'll
Speaker 2: lead in February with the Windows Phone seven announcement running
Speaker 2: a modified version of Civilite, and it will ship in
Speaker 2: the US in November.
Speaker 1: It's almost like a eulogy, isn't it.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, you know, the funny thing is
Speaker 2: when you like to have that phone now, with the
Speaker 2: way phones are at the moment, like I kind of
Speaker 2: miss them.
Speaker 1: I do too.
Speaker 2: Also, and in March we have the Mixed twenty ten,
Speaker 2: which is when we get NBC two point zero and
Speaker 2: a bunch of other cool announcements. March is also when
Speaker 2: Apple announces a thing they call the iPad a really
Speaker 2: big iPhone and freak everybody out, which then is followed
Speaker 2: in March by an open letter published by Steve Jobs
Speaker 2: called thoughts on Flash. Right now, what did Steve say
Speaker 2: in his Thoughts on Flash? Well, he he didn't say
Speaker 2: was the truth, which is Flash was murdering the battery
Speaker 2: of his iPad, Yeah, because that was his Flash was
Speaker 2: never made for mobile devices, right, it was for PCs
Speaker 2: and so but it was.
Speaker 1: Bigger than that. It was about the security of plugins,
Speaker 1: or the lack of security of plugins.
Speaker 2: Oh, you're absolutely right. Yeah, that the real issue here.
Speaker 2: And the thing I whenever I talk about this is
Speaker 2: I do fairly often doing the history talks. We all
Speaker 2: in you know, the two thousands. Every Christmas going to family,
Speaker 2: we're replacing people's address bars because over the course of
Speaker 2: the year, inevitably they downloaded something that swapped out their
Speaker 2: address bar with some kind of spyware, right, And so
Speaker 2: you were always fixing that because that was the nature
Speaker 2: of plugins at the time. And so Steve wasn't wrong.
Speaker 2: Plugins are a huge risk and he was going to
Speaker 2: eliminate and he said, Safari's never going to run plugins
Speaker 2: like this, is it?
Speaker 1: And that was kind of a death knell for for
Speaker 1: silver Light, but also just the lack of plugins is
Speaker 1: the death knell for silver Light. You know, if you
Speaker 1: don't silver used to plug in technology and if you
Speaker 1: don't have that, you know it's well.
Speaker 2: The problem, of course is that in April is also
Speaker 2: the launch of Visual Studio twenty ten. I helped run
Speaker 2: that event.
Speaker 1: Yeah, me too.
Speaker 2: And this is framework four. Oh, this is the WPF
Speaker 2: version of Studio. This is the release of f sharp,
Speaker 2: this is j Query and open source library bundling the box,
Speaker 2: you know, with its regular license still attached to it.
Speaker 2: And of course silver Light four the first version of
Speaker 2: support chrome and out of browser and was pitched in
Speaker 2: April as this is the way that enterprises do cross
Speaker 2: platform development.
Speaker 1: Internally, I believe my band played at the launch party,
Speaker 1: yeah in Las Vegas at the Mirage when we were there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we also have Windows Azure shipped with sql Azure,
Speaker 2: php support for Phpjava dot Net with webrolls and approles.
Speaker 2: If you remember, most of us didn't understand it. We
Speaker 2: were trying to do shows about it and noverybody was confused.
Speaker 2: And then we fast forward to the fall till October
Speaker 2: with the Larry last PDC on the campus in Redmond,
Speaker 2: Rained the whole time. It's only about a thousand people
Speaker 2: there because there's not a lot of space and exactly
Speaker 2: no silver light sessions, which is an amazing transformation from
Speaker 2: April six months later Microsoft Premier Conference. No civilight sessions. Now,
Speaker 2: I subsequentely discovered just by asking around, like why a
Speaker 2: there are no civil light sessions because there was no
Speaker 2: silver light team left. They'd essentially been dismantled. A bunch
Speaker 2: of them had gone over to win Phone seven, and
Speaker 2: a bunch of them had gone to the new version
Speaker 2: of Windows that was going to react to the iPad,
Speaker 2: and so they didn't submit any sessions. And famously, again
Speaker 2: we're talking about our history. Mary Joe Foley asked Bob
Speaker 2: Mugli at that point, the president of Server and Tools
Speaker 2: he owns Azure and oll of DEVNIV, why there was
Speaker 2: no mention of silver light, and Bob looks vaguely confused
Speaker 2: and says, well, our strategy has shifted. What Bob doesn't
Speaker 2: know is that there's been no public announcements about the
Speaker 2: impact of thoughts on flash, on silverlight and so forth,
Speaker 2: because for the most at that point when the iPad
Speaker 2: came out, there was a real lockdown in talking about
Speaker 2: how Microsoft was going to respond to the iPad. There
Speaker 2: was a lot more fear about the iPad then when
Speaker 2: it was still a mythological product than the way we
Speaker 2: feel about tablets today. And so you know, I've subsequently
Speaker 2: interviewed Bob Mugley about this and he said, point blankly,
Speaker 2: I didn't know. I was the first person to talk
Speaker 2: about it. And to MJ's credit, all she said was
Speaker 2: what Bob said, our strategy has shifted. Yeah, it was
Speaker 2: everybody else who said silverlight is dead and Microsoft really
Speaker 2: said nothing, and that upset a lot of people. Like
Speaker 2: there's lots of folks that are still not over that.
Speaker 2: Like that's that was a tough day and a tough
Speaker 2: situation to be in October, when our friend Phil Hack
Speaker 2: leads the project that becomes the first version of New Get.
Speaker 2: All these things in the same year, and then in
Speaker 2: November the Xbox Connect not the same thing at all,
Speaker 2: and I'll mention too other products. Then we wrap this up.
Speaker 2: Instagram ships this year, Kevin Seistrom and Micah Krieger, and
Speaker 2: also Facebook Messenger.
Speaker 1: I have some things to add because twenty ten marked
Speaker 1: the beginning of the streaming era in audio, streaming subscriptions
Speaker 1: became commercially viable. Spotify established the business model that most
Speaker 1: competitors would follow. Pandora familiarized millions of listeners with streaming.
Speaker 1: Smartphones made streaming convenient enough for mainstream adoption, and the
Speaker 1: music industry began shifting away from ownership towards access. And
Speaker 1: this also kind of is a death noell for musicians
Speaker 1: and recording artists.
Speaker 2: It's the final straw.
Speaker 1: It was the Yeah, it was the beginning of the
Speaker 1: end for the for the music business as far as
Speaker 1: artists being compensated for their work goes were. You know,
Speaker 1: record sales continued, you know, digital downloads continued, but really
Speaker 1: people stopped buying CDs and map and it was all
Speaker 1: about the MP three and your stream and all of
Speaker 1: that kind of stuff. Download still dominated revenue, but streaming
Speaker 1: was started on his way, on its way. So twenty
Speaker 1: ten marks the the end of the music business as we.
Speaker 2: Know it, well, at least the beginning of the end anyway,
Speaker 2: the beginning of the end. Right, So there you go. Okay,
Speaker 2: so I guess we should get onto better no framework awesome,
Speaker 2: So our friend Simon Kropi, Simon, you're us. He's the
Speaker 2: guy who said, you guys should get Rob Menching back
Speaker 2: for you know, a one year update on open source monetization,
Speaker 2: and we said sure, so that's why he's here. But
Speaker 2: he also says, hey, have you seen geo convert And
Speaker 2: I said, no, what's g convert? Geoconvert maps between gjson, topo,
Speaker 2: json flat, g O buff kml, kmz, gpx, wkt, wkb CSV,
Speaker 2: and gopark mousc entirely in your browser. So all of
Speaker 2: the formats for geographical data.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, yeah, all in the browser. So you basically
Speaker 1: choose a map file, upload.
Speaker 2: It, boom convert, and then you can dump it back
Speaker 2: out in whatever other format I want it. Yeah, that's magic,
Speaker 2: of course it is. It's awesome.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Richard, who's talking to us today?
Speaker 2: Gret A comments off a show nineteen forty eight, that's
Speaker 2: one where we talked about this open source maintenance fee
Speaker 2: with some Rob guy. And there's a lot of comments
Speaker 2: on the show, honestly, and Rob responded to most of them.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Rob. That was very kind of you because
Speaker 2: people are clearly excited and interested, and I think this
Speaker 2: recap's a really good idea, but here's one we didn't
Speaker 2: get a response to, and I thought we might take
Speaker 2: it on a little bit. Chris blithe and get asking
Speaker 2: this about a year ago. I just listened to the show.
Speaker 2: The one thing I don't understand and we'd love to
Speaker 2: hear Robs feel on it. What would be stopping a
Speaker 2: big organization just automatically building your open source repo on
Speaker 2: their build server and pushing their art effects to their
Speaker 2: internal feed and therefore you get all the project management
Speaker 2: stuff and security updates, but just not ready to go binary.
Speaker 2: Let's be honest, setting up an automate build is pretty
Speaker 2: low in terms of effort and would be you know,
Speaker 2: fit in the short term bracket or is there some
Speaker 2: secret way for maintainers to stop that from happening. I
Speaker 2: don't think there's any way to stop that from happening,
Speaker 2: and I think that's the way most organizations actually do
Speaker 2: things by design.
Speaker 4: No, I don't know that many organizations do that, but
Speaker 4: it absolutely is by design that they can't.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I've seen both things where your build
Speaker 2: process actually goes and fetches the bit from the open
Speaker 2: source repository and continues on. I've also seen versions where
Speaker 2: they maintain a local repository and decide when to push
Speaker 2: new versions in and everybody builds off of that. But
Speaker 2: I don't think that takes anything away from the open
Speaker 2: source maintainer or the project.
Speaker 3: No.
Speaker 4: His point is, I bet you can do this under
Speaker 4: two hours, right, and take care of it. And that
Speaker 4: two hours is two hours per year is the cost.
Speaker 4: We're talking costs the maintenance feedback then, and that's that's
Speaker 4: two hours per year. And depending on the project and
Speaker 4: what you have to do and what you have to
Speaker 4: keep up on, it might be two hours, it might
Speaker 4: be more than that, but it's absolutely more mind to
Speaker 4: share that you have absorbed into the company, right, and
Speaker 4: we'll talk about it. But most people don't think that
Speaker 4: way about the open source projects, which is why the
Speaker 4: open source maintenance fee is working.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so's.
Speaker 4: Talk about because it's it's but he's right, he's absolutely right.
Speaker 4: You could absolutely do all that. That's by design. That's
Speaker 4: fantastic because the idea is then hey, you're in the code,
Speaker 4: you're helping, you're being in there. There's more people then
Speaker 4: that are working at that level. Fantastic, You're maintaining the
Speaker 4: source code. There you go. Good job, but it's not
Speaker 4: very common.
Speaker 2: Awesome, So Chris, thank you so much for comment in
Speaker 2: a copy of music co buy. It is on its
Speaker 2: way to you. And if you like a copy of
Speaker 2: music cob buy, I write a comment on the website
Speaker 2: at dot NetRocks dot com or on the facebooks. We
Speaker 2: publish every show there and if you comment there and
Speaker 2: never read on the show, we'll send you a copy
Speaker 2: of music Coby.
Speaker 1: And if you don't want to do that, you can
Speaker 1: just go get it yourself. Music too, code by dot net.
Speaker 1: It's twenty two tracks of twenty five minutes long of
Speaker 1: music that is scientifically designed to keep you in a
Speaker 1: state of flow for focus, relaxing, and particularly coding. So
Speaker 1: that voice you heard before was Rob Mentioning. He is
Speaker 1: the CEO and co founder of fire Giant, a company
Speaker 1: that provides commercial support and tools for the Wicks tool set.
Speaker 1: He's also the creator and maintainer of Wicks, the most
Speaker 1: powerful set of tools for building Windows installation packages. Wicks
Speaker 1: holds the unique distinction of being the first open source
Speaker 1: project released by Microsoft, and Rob has been deeply involved
Speaker 1: in open source for over twenty five years. He's passionate
Speaker 1: about making open source sustainable and his proposal of the
Speaker 1: open source maintenance Fee. I guess it's not a proposal now,
Speaker 1: but it's the thing. The open source maintenance Fee is
Speaker 1: all about creating a better path forward for projects and
Speaker 1: their maintainers. Welcome back, Rob, and I guess you gave
Speaker 1: away the end. It seems to be working.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but there's a lot of things still to talk about. Sure,
Speaker 4: and it's working for us. I don't know, there's a
Speaker 4: lot to talk about. There's a lot of details to it.
Speaker 4: I think we should say it.
Speaker 2: Started the beginning.
Speaker 3: Then.
Speaker 2: I don't know that everybody listened to the last show,
Speaker 2: although they should.
Speaker 4: How far back do you want to go? Do you
Speaker 4: want the motivation or what it is?
Speaker 1: The elevator pitch, and.
Speaker 4: We'll do the elevator pitch. There was a time back
Speaker 4: in two thousand and twenty four that we were starting
Speaker 4: to see a escalation of pressure on open source maintainers
Speaker 4: that turned into for me, the catalyst was the exe
Speaker 4: utls attack, where we now believe state actors pressured a
Speaker 4: single maintainer into giving access to one of them so
Speaker 4: they could insert a very very subtle build system flaw
Speaker 4: or not flaw attack into Linux, which then snuck its
Speaker 4: way into almost everywhere until some engineer at Microsoft happened
Speaker 4: to notice things were running a little slow and went, hey,
Speaker 4: this seems.
Speaker 2: Like a problem, and lil So was like half a second,
Speaker 2: I don't.
Speaker 4: Know how you find it if he was doing very
Speaker 4: sensitive performance testing. So that's like the only was it. Yes,
Speaker 4: that thing could have been in. You would have a
Speaker 4: backdoor into all Linux, including those on the clouds. And
Speaker 4: where that goes is crazy. That happens, That's very exciting.
Speaker 4: That's like the things that you know Jason Bourne novels
Speaker 4: are done about or whatever. I was more interested in
Speaker 4: the people because at that point me, like many of
Speaker 4: my friends, were very frustrated. And if you listen to
Speaker 4: that episode, which I did, I went back and listen
Speaker 4: to it, you can hear the frustration, I think in
Speaker 4: my voice a bit. And I was just like that
Speaker 4: incident kind of said enough is enough, We're going to
Speaker 4: solve this problem. I'm at least going to take a
Speaker 4: shot at it. So over the next well not quite
Speaker 4: a year, six months for the summer for sure, into
Speaker 4: the fall, and then early twenty twenty five came up
Speaker 4: with this idea called the open source maintenance fee that says,
Speaker 4: there's an open source project, which means that all the
Speaker 4: source code is available under the licenses that we know
Speaker 4: very well from the OSI that specify how you can
Speaker 4: share and access that source code, and they are generally
Speaker 4: very liberal, definitely on the part that you can see
Speaker 4: the source code. Then what if we added this very
Speaker 4: common concept, a ula to the binaries the things that
Speaker 4: get built from that source code from the project maintainers.
Speaker 4: And the maintainers could say, hey, I'm going to put
Speaker 4: a ULA on this because I spend a lot of
Speaker 4: time building these projects, keeping them up to date, keeping
Speaker 4: the issue tracker free from spam, maybe answering questions, answering
Speaker 4: questions all over the place, keeping doctations like this long
Speaker 4: list of things that all maintainers do. So how about
Speaker 4: we have a small fee that we charge people compensation
Speaker 4: for all of those tasks that a maintainers do. And
Speaker 4: this idea was at that time for me very scary
Speaker 4: when we were talking about a year ago, and now
Speaker 4: I'm just like, yeah, this is this makes so much sense.
Speaker 4: We should just do this. And so that's why I'm
Speaker 4: really glad to be talking to you guys again about
Speaker 4: the idea of the source code is open source. The
Speaker 4: binaries that come from it are protected, not protected, are
Speaker 4: licensed under a separate eula, and that separation creates a
Speaker 4: space where we can have maintainers become sustainable, that they
Speaker 4: can actually find a place where hey, because there's companies
Speaker 4: paying for the maintenance fees, they can actually work on
Speaker 4: the project and stay involved in projects that might be
Speaker 4: wearing them down after all these interactions with people that
Speaker 4: have assumed that all of their interactions with them are free, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And this is back to Chris's comment at the
Speaker 2: top of the show here where hey, if just so
Speaker 2: avoid the binary, do I have no obligation? And it's
Speaker 2: like always never about that in the first place.
Speaker 4: Really, yeah, And if you enter at the source code level,
Speaker 4: you're entering in a different place. Sure, right, If you're
Speaker 4: in there and you're starting to working there, you're generally
Speaker 4: look at the code and now you're becoming part of
Speaker 4: the community that you're actually moving forward this project. What
Speaker 4: the space that I found were the people on top
Speaker 4: that were just using the binaries straight out and then expecting,
Speaker 4: like my favorite example is there's this bug that's been
Speaker 4: over for ten years. How have you not fixed this
Speaker 4: bug in ten years?
Speaker 2: Right? Yeah, I'm going to uninstall this free product.
Speaker 4: Okay exactly. And then they're like and then maybe you
Speaker 4: maybe as a maintainer, you're like, look, oh, man, I
Speaker 4: love my project. You're right, it's been ten years. I'll
Speaker 4: go back and look at that. They spend the time
Speaker 4: they fix it, and then they're in there, and then
Speaker 4: the person saying, well, how long until you get the
Speaker 4: build out? Like where's the build Why isn't that available
Speaker 4: right now? And it's like, well, I have to just
Speaker 4: go through all the work and all those sorts of things. Yeah,
Speaker 4: it's that whole space.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's and it's it is a bund It
Speaker 2: sure feels like a bunch of ungrateful wretches, you know,
Speaker 2: when they're at that level the angry issues of whis
Speaker 2: are not a built version of this. Why I don't
Speaker 2: want source code like that drives me crazy too.
Speaker 4: Yeah. And it's when you become a successful project. We
Speaker 4: talked to us a little bit last time, that you
Speaker 4: end up with a lot of people in your project. Yeah,
Speaker 4: very successful projects like you know, the wig tool sets
Speaker 4: getting millions like we're up to the almost twenty million
Speaker 4: downloads of our various parts, the primary entry points. There's
Speaker 4: like twenty million downloads almost. That's a lot of people
Speaker 4: that have been used in that product.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 4: It's cut product project, It's complex, it has lots of
Speaker 4: parts moving around in it, and you can get people
Speaker 4: that I think, it's just free and it really just
Speaker 4: keeps coming back to that same place of the attitudes
Speaker 4: as opposed to being part of a community and working
Speaker 4: on it and helping and participating. People just show up
Speaker 4: and ask their question and want an answer and download EBITs.
Speaker 1: You could buy an answer. Well, so would you like
Speaker 1: to buy an answer?
Speaker 4: Well, you know, and this is the other thing that
Speaker 4: there are. There are business models that people will then
Speaker 4: tell you, well, if you want to do open source,
Speaker 4: then you should, you know, create a company, go create
Speaker 4: a service company around it, where maybe you offer support,
Speaker 4: or you offer other additional features on top of it,
Speaker 4: or maybe you do consulting and you go customize it,
Speaker 4: work it with other people things like that.
Speaker 1: For you get on a short list of people who
Speaker 1: you can, you know, take their suggestions and make customizations
Speaker 1: for right.
Speaker 4: However you want to do that, The challenge all those
Speaker 4: are You're now putting together a business, right and there's
Speaker 4: a lot of maintainers that are like, my project is
Speaker 4: only so big and I don't necessarily want to put
Speaker 4: together a whole business behind it. So is there a
Speaker 4: space for me? The challenge was can we find something
Speaker 4: in there that meets those maintainers that are starting to
Speaker 4: get burned out on their project that they don't have
Speaker 4: to go and say I'm going to quit my job
Speaker 4: and create a whole business around this. And that was
Speaker 4: one of the key characteristics that I want to make
Speaker 4: sure that we can meet in that space.
Speaker 1: So how does the open source maintenancee work exactly right now?
Speaker 4: The easiest way to put it together that has worked
Speaker 4: out really well is we kind of co opt to
Speaker 4: Gethub sponsors, And turns out GitHub has been a really
Speaker 4: good partner through all of this. And like I said,
Speaker 4: the idea was to not have to create an entire company.
Speaker 4: So with GitHub sponsors, you can set up your fuduciary
Speaker 4: connection with GitHub and your bank account through Stripe. That's
Speaker 4: a very easy thing to do as an individual. And
Speaker 4: then you say, I'm going to offer the I'm going
Speaker 4: to build the binaries for my project put a yula
Speaker 4: on them, and we actually have a ula that you
Speaker 4: can copy and paste out of the open source maintenance
Speaker 4: fee if you want to just use that one and
Speaker 4: put it up there. And then you say, you said
Speaker 4: for your gid HOB sponsors to say here's the fee
Speaker 4: that you pay and GETTHUB. Then we'll connect the payment
Speaker 4: from the companies straight into your bank account, so you
Speaker 4: don't have to do as a maintainer, you don't have
Speaker 4: to do anything, but you know, a day's worth of work.
Speaker 4: Generally you have to wait a little bit on the
Speaker 4: bank stuff, but a day's worth of work to connect
Speaker 4: all that things together. So it literally allows maintainers to
Speaker 4: stand all of this up without standing up a whole
Speaker 4: lot of infrastructure by building on top of GitHub sponsors.
Speaker 1: It's great. And this is this is something that I
Speaker 1: kind of suggested back in twenty twenty two when we
Speaker 1: were at NBC talking about making open source work for
Speaker 1: everyone with David Whitney episode eighteen eighteen, and you know,
Speaker 1: we were just talking about that whole problem of open
Speaker 1: source maintainers need to get paid somehow, and I think
Speaker 1: I suggested that we did it through maybe I suggested
Speaker 1: new Get. I think it was new Get that I suggested, you.
Speaker 4: Know, I think you said you said get up. Someone
Speaker 4: else said nugot. I think I think it was Dave
Speaker 4: Whitney maybe someone that has recommended nugat.
Speaker 1: But we were talking about this, this whole idea.
Speaker 4: Yes, this idea yeah. And the trick though, was in
Speaker 4: the past sponsors and all these conversations have been around
Speaker 4: it would be nice if you pay. It should be
Speaker 4: nice if you could put a donation, a tip jar,
Speaker 4: something like that. The important facet that has worked out
Speaker 4: really well in the open source maintenance fee is the EULA,
Speaker 4: the fact that it's not optional, it's not a donation,
Speaker 4: it's not charity, and that actually activates everything that you
Speaker 4: need to inside the companies, because if it's a charity
Speaker 4: or a donation, the story usually goes, I'm an employee,
Speaker 4: I think we should you know, we use this project.
Speaker 4: Let's go sponsor it. You will hit eventually a procurement
Speaker 4: team that goes, do we have to spend money on this?
Speaker 4: The answer is no, and the procurement team says great,
Speaker 4: no answer. So now, but with a EULA, then the
Speaker 4: ULA says, here are the terms legal goes yep, those
Speaker 4: are the terms. Procurement goes great, how do we pay it?
Speaker 4: And you say great, go to GitHub sponsors and pay
Speaker 4: it there. Now, when we launched this we talked to
Speaker 4: last year. It was still brand new. I think I'd
Speaker 4: only talked to you guys. They had only been out
Speaker 4: a week and it was like May yeah, yeah, and
Speaker 4: I was. It was early enough that I was afraid
Speaker 4: to say what was going to happen. I had a
Speaker 4: whole lot of hopes, I had a lot of ideas
Speaker 4: was good, but I also know but I was also
Speaker 4: confident that there was going to be bugs right, There
Speaker 4: are things that I needed to work out. And so
Speaker 4: the tool set being my project means I could put
Speaker 4: it in a real project with real users and absorb
Speaker 4: all of the growing pains just the initial launch, right
Speaker 4: because I treated it just like a product, Pull the
Speaker 4: bugs in, resolve them. So like the fact got built
Speaker 4: up from every single question that people asked. One of
Speaker 4: the trickier ones was get hub sponsors when it launched,
Speaker 4: And this is my mistake. I didn't catch this detail
Speaker 4: when we put it out there to pay by invoice,
Speaker 4: which is what all major companies want to do. They
Speaker 4: all want to pay by invoice, require you to pay
Speaker 4: five thousand dollars up front, so you had to in
Speaker 4: your invoice, you had to invoice five thousand dollars, and
Speaker 4: I think there was also a three year commitment to
Speaker 4: doing that if you went through invoicing. And when you
Speaker 4: think about if you're a small company and you're paying
Speaker 4: ten bucks per month, one hundred and twenty bucks per
Speaker 4: year five thousand dollars up front for five years, was like, I,
Speaker 4: how many years do we have to go before we
Speaker 4: finally pay off this chunk of change that we put
Speaker 4: in to get hubbed? So I never really like I
Speaker 4: talked him a little bit. I never quite understood their system.
Speaker 4: It was something about trying to get charitable donations to
Speaker 4: be recurring from bigger companies and have them have bigger
Speaker 4: pools of money in there to spread abrout a bunch
Speaker 4: of their projects. So it was very charity donation kind
Speaker 4: of oriented, which of course doesn't work for what we want.
Speaker 4: I wanted to use it here, and so they were
Speaker 4: awesome and they created a whole extra invoicing system for
Speaker 4: the open source maintenance fee. Wow, so you can now
Speaker 4: just pay only your invoice.
Speaker 1: Isn't the whole idea that you want to make using
Speaker 1: an open source tool free for anyone who just wants
Speaker 1: to kick the tires and run it. And then if
Speaker 1: you start making money with your software project that we're
Speaker 1: an integral part of, that's when the feed kicks in.
Speaker 1: Is that in the yula?
Speaker 4: Yeah? Yeah, so actually that was one of the bugs
Speaker 4: that we had to fix as well. The first bug
Speaker 4: was getting it so that people companies could pay by
Speaker 4: invoice and get hub was great. It took a little bit,
Speaker 4: but we got that they had to make coding changes
Speaker 4: on their side for that to happen, so it was
Speaker 4: great there. I bring this up because I really appreciate
Speaker 4: what GitHub did to make that happen. Kidding, your issue
Speaker 4: that you're bringing up is also interesting because your original
Speaker 4: yula said that if you make money, you must pay
Speaker 4: this maintenance fee, and it got us into an interesting
Speaker 4: situation where there might be a someone that was just
Speaker 4: getting started in their business and maybe they were making
Speaker 4: like their first sale for five dollars or something like that,
Speaker 4: and now they're like, great, and I use a whole
Speaker 4: bunch of open source to build it. How Like I
Speaker 4: now have to pay a fee. I'm going to go
Speaker 4: negative for trying to do this, and that was never
Speaker 4: the intention.
Speaker 1: We got to set the bar to real money first, yeah,
Speaker 1: right right right, So, and then the challenge is that
Speaker 1: so we did I in so we released open source
Speaker 1: maintenance fee one point one v one point one.
Speaker 4: Like I said, it's a product. So it got versioned
Speaker 4: and move the minimum bar up to you have to
Speaker 4: make more than ten thousand dollars per year. It's still
Speaker 4: really low. But the idea, hopefully was that one of
Speaker 4: the important parts is if an open source project takes
Speaker 4: a maintenance fee, they pay the maintenance fee for their
Speaker 4: projects down the line. Because the one of the important
Speaker 4: factors is you only pay the maintenance fee for the
Speaker 4: projects that you use directly. You don't pay this like, oh,
Speaker 4: every single project that I depend on in the project,
Speaker 4: they depend on and so and.
Speaker 1: So and so, right, the whole tree.
Speaker 4: Only the ones that you chose, right, you picked them,
Speaker 4: therefore you pay the maintenance fee to them.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: But then when those maintenance those projects make a maintenance fee,
Speaker 4: they then will pay their projects down the line. So
Speaker 4: it hopefully works its way down the system. I haven't
Speaker 4: seen a whole lot of projects adopted yet to know
Speaker 4: how well it works down the same.
Speaker 1: Trickle down economics. I think they call that in the eighties.
Speaker 4: It is it is in the dot net ecosystem, which
Speaker 4: is the one that I know really well. The dependency
Speaker 4: trees don't tend to be very deep.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: The one case that I can make is like x
Speaker 4: unit is probably one of the most popular ones. That is,
Speaker 4: like the Wix tool set uses x unit for some
Speaker 4: of our testing systems. So we, you know, as part
Speaker 4: of fire Giant, we pay x unit a fee, and
Speaker 4: that's we just choose to They don't have a maintenance fee,
Speaker 4: but we choose to say, hey, we're going to pretend
Speaker 4: every dependency that we have we're making money on this project.
Speaker 4: Therefore we are going to pay all of our dependencies.
Speaker 4: And next unit is our I think it's the only
Speaker 4: dependency that isn't a Microsoft dependency in wex, So we
Speaker 4: pay that there.
Speaker 2: All right, Well, don't we take a quick break for
Speaker 2: these very important messages. Yeah, and we're back. It's dot
Speaker 2: net rocks. I'merchard Campbelllet's call Franklin. Hey here at toppling
Speaker 2: with Rob mentioned about the open source maintenance fee, and uh, Okay,
Speaker 2: so you rev to one point one, you obviously learn
Speaker 2: some things, but otherwise, how is it going if you
Speaker 2: got some folks signed up?
Speaker 4: Yeah, so it has completely changed my outlook on contributing
Speaker 4: to my project completely.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 4: We went from no sponsors because we didn't take sponsors
Speaker 4: before this, so we have a nice clean start to
Speaker 4: now about a year later, and today I think we're
Speaker 4: at like three hundred and eight wow wow sponsors, which
Speaker 4: is I went digging could be the most, if not
Speaker 4: one of the most sponsored projects on GitHub.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 4: Like it's there, aren't I compare. I've compared us to VTE,
Speaker 4: which is the kind of turned into the default build
Speaker 4: system of JavaScript. I don't know how better else to
Speaker 4: describe it, but it's a massive project JavaScript typescript all
Speaker 4: that being a huge space, lots of people depending on it,
Speaker 4: created by even you who also created view guys brilliant.
Speaker 4: I'm impressed by everything he does. And he had, like
Speaker 4: their project had like sixty two sixty five people sponsoring it.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 4: So it is working exactly like we wanted.
Speaker 2: You've plugged into this business mechanism that I think you
Speaker 2: grappled it with a lot of other people didn't that
Speaker 2: when you create this construct of it is an obligation
Speaker 2: for a business using the binary to pay, They pay.
Speaker 4: And they don't complaint the business is the only thing
Speaker 4: they complain about is how we use getub sponsors to
Speaker 4: do this because finding the invoice thing that we talked about,
Speaker 4: how yes, it's it's purely a how do we pay?
Speaker 4: Not why or do we have to? It's purely a
Speaker 4: what is the mechanism by which we put the money
Speaker 4: into the right place? Because we just want to solve
Speaker 4: this problem and streamlining that is probably the biggest problem
Speaker 4: to tackle. When I first announced this idea, everybody said,
Speaker 4: how are you going to enforce this? Even Carl brought
Speaker 4: it up, like how are you going to force people
Speaker 4: to do this? And I was like, well, our primary
Speaker 4: focus is education first. Because's brand new, all those sorts
Speaker 4: of challenges.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like a Grateful Dead show. You know,
Speaker 1: you can tape it, go ahead, We're not going to cool.
Speaker 4: I didn't know that about Grateful Dead, but yeah it.
Speaker 1: So they're all dead now, so grate Yeah.
Speaker 4: So on that front, it worked perfectly in that it
Speaker 4: got it for it. We did get the feedback that
Speaker 4: there was no notification that the EULA had changed. And
Speaker 4: when we talked about before, I said, we have this
Speaker 4: perfect mechanism in nugat packages, which Wix happens to be
Speaker 4: all shipp through nugat packages that you can say requires
Speaker 4: license acceptance. It's a bit in the nugit manifest and
Speaker 4: if you install through visual Studio, it will prompt up
Speaker 4: a little box to say, hey, accept the ULA. But
Speaker 4: most of which stuff is a dot net tool and
Speaker 4: a MS bill desicate. Neither of those routes that you
Speaker 4: use showed you, including dot net tool installed does not
Speaker 4: tell you that there is a license that you must accept.
Speaker 4: So you're like silently accepting the license as the dot
Speaker 4: net tool installs it or.
Speaker 2: Something that's not sexy.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Well I couldn't get the dot net team to care.
Speaker 4: They're like, oh, this is this is not our problem,
Speaker 4: and actually there's an issue. It's it's in the newgit repo.
Speaker 4: I got bounced out of the dot net one in
Speaker 4: the NuGet when it's been like I don't know thirteen
Speaker 4: years or something, me complaining about open source project for
Speaker 4: Noshue for a long time, but like they're not interested
Speaker 4: in tackling this in fact, the discussion is mostly about
Speaker 4: maybe we should remove this. So the feedback was coming in, Hey,
Speaker 4: we didn't realize this was happening. I only saw this
Speaker 4: because I read this one page in the documentation which
Speaker 4: notified to me that, yeah, people don't read the new releases.
Speaker 4: They just pick up the new one and go. So
Speaker 4: a lot of people didn't even realize it's happening. So
Speaker 4: we implemented in Wix seven, which just released back in
Speaker 4: this April, so a year after wik six, when we
Speaker 4: introduced open source maintenance fee. This concept of what I
Speaker 4: call ed uforcement. It is a property you add an
Speaker 4: MS build to say accept the EULA, or you can
Speaker 4: add it to the command line tool, to the Wix's
Speaker 4: command line tool say accept the EULA, and then you
Speaker 4: specify the version. So in the latest version you say
Speaker 4: accept EULA Wix seven, and so that means that you
Speaker 4: now have acknowledged that there's ULA, and if you don't
Speaker 4: pass that switch, then the tool fails errors and says, hey,
Speaker 4: you need to accept the open source license fee. Go
Speaker 4: to this link and you can read all about it,
Speaker 4: and we have the information and it basically tells you, hey,
Speaker 4: you need to if you're doing all this, you need
Speaker 4: to pay the fee. And after you've done that, then
Speaker 4: here's the command line switch you add. So Carl will say, well,
Speaker 4: then they can just go ahead and add the command
Speaker 4: line so which once they learn how which is true.
Speaker 2: But generally speaking, businesses are not criminal, no, and they
Speaker 2: don't want to be criminal. They don't want to be
Speaker 2: they don't want to be criminals. They want to follow
Speaker 2: the rules. Make the rules clear and easy to follow,
Speaker 2: and they will follow them exactly.
Speaker 4: And so we have finally put together these pieces that
Speaker 4: have fit into a yula, which is a natural concept
Speaker 4: for them, unnatural and open source, but it makes sense
Speaker 4: as soon as they evaluate it, come back with a
Speaker 4: payment process that they have to go through gethub sponsors,
Speaker 4: which is a little bit unusual, but it's get hubbed
Speaker 4: and trusted and therefore they just have to kind of
Speaker 4: work their way through. And so smoothing that procurement process
Speaker 4: is the last thing that I'm kind of continuing to
Speaker 4: iterate on trying to find easy an easier ways through
Speaker 4: because I kid you not, the emails that we get,
Speaker 4: we're almost up to like one or two a day
Speaker 4: of people asking how do we do GitHub sponsors, How
Speaker 4: do we pay you through get hobs sponsors. Can we
Speaker 4: have another mechanism. We're not really used to doing it
Speaker 4: this way, and so if we can figure out how
Speaker 4: to smooth that out one more time, then it just
Speaker 4: fits very naturally. And all the companies are like, uh, okay,
Speaker 4: we just just do it done.
Speaker 1: And and they pay annually, so.
Speaker 4: You could pay annually, you could pay monthly. Getthub supports
Speaker 4: both of them through the invoice whatever.
Speaker 2: But getthub Sponsors does all that.
Speaker 4: Get houb Sponsors does all that. Like I it is.
Speaker 4: It has worked so well by just fitting into these parts,
Speaker 4: and the pushback has been minimal, like I was prepared
Speaker 4: for so much more sure, but people, but people have
Speaker 4: been like, there's been a couple like you should not pay,
Speaker 4: you should not charge for open source that goes against
Speaker 4: them luntro of it yah, which of course is demonstrably false.
Speaker 4: That's not at all true anywhere in the history of anything.
Speaker 4: This is exactly where you do pay it. I've had
Speaker 4: I've only had developers say that they're not sure that
Speaker 4: the wording in the yula is quite right right, and
Speaker 4: I'm like, that's possible. I had a lawyer write it.
Speaker 4: If you have a lawyer that says that there's a
Speaker 4: problem here, I would love to work with them. But
Speaker 4: my understanding from legals that I had, these are all
Speaker 4: the correct words. They quibble over what does user mean?
Speaker 4: And it's defined in particular way legally. And it's very
Speaker 4: funny because I had the same comments to my lawyer
Speaker 4: when I read it, like does it really mean this?
Speaker 4: He's like, well, if you change it the way you're suggesting,
Speaker 4: then that messes all these days up. I'm like, I'm
Speaker 4: not doing law Okay, I trust you've got this right.
Speaker 4: The professionals do the professional thing exactly exactly. So last
Speaker 4: year I was very uncertain how it would go, and
Speaker 4: now it's a completely viable model that a maintainers that
Speaker 4: are like my project has gotten to the point where
Speaker 4: I'm spending more time on this than I feel like
Speaker 4: I'm being conversated for because it's just making social value
Speaker 4: for the system. I think this is this is an
Speaker 4: absolutely a viable option for them to consider it.
Speaker 1: Last year I looked at it and I kicked the
Speaker 1: tires and I was like, well, you know, maybe I'll
Speaker 1: wait a year. So this just while you were talking
Speaker 1: I went and looked at my new get published packages,
Speaker 1: and my most popular project is Blazer Sliders. So this
Speaker 1: is you know, you get panels that have sliders between
Speaker 1: them and that kind of stuff, vertical, horizontal, you can
Speaker 1: nest them and everything. It's really cool. And I've got
Speaker 1: twenty four thousand downloads, so and it's it's a main
Speaker 1: It's not hard to maintain. But every time there's a
Speaker 1: new version of dot net and I have to you know,
Speaker 1: upgrade it and test it, make sure that it all works.
Speaker 1: I've got clients that use it. Yep. So I'm thinking
Speaker 1: I might this might be a good time to pull
Speaker 1: the trigger on that. Yep. Sure.
Speaker 4: And it's exactly that spot that you're like, oh, well, yeah,
Speaker 4: you know what, I have enough, there's of value me
Speaker 4: continue to stay on top of the dot net releases
Speaker 4: that come out, the security releases that come out. You
Speaker 4: just have to be aware of them, all those things.
Speaker 4: And now you're like, yeah, you know what, I'm going
Speaker 4: to do that and then I'm going to go get
Speaker 4: another couple, you know, extra picks for my guitar or
Speaker 4: whatever you're doing. You're like, you know, like pickups, pickups,
Speaker 4: all right, all of those things become viable or you know,
Speaker 4: you you donate it, or you you know, I don't know,
Speaker 4: take your wife, your daughter, your son, your whatever out
Speaker 4: to dinner that you haven't seen him, like all those things.
Speaker 1: Well, I'm a I'm a big fan of pricing things
Speaker 1: according to the value of the customer to the customer, right,
Speaker 1: and so if a customer is using Blazer sliders in
Speaker 1: a in a project that they're making millions of dollars
Speaker 1: a year on, you know, it's kind of it makes
Speaker 1: sense to.
Speaker 4: It makes sense some of that down and that's why
Speaker 4: it's worked. It's it's been everybody's been like, okay, it
Speaker 4: makes sense. The numbers small. If anything, the number is
Speaker 4: too small. I have to deal with procurement. My hope
Speaker 4: is that while I try to work on pre procurement
Speaker 4: at the same time, if more projects start picking it up,
Speaker 4: then it just becomes part of procurement, which is what
Speaker 4: happened with open source. The lawyers were like, you can't
Speaker 4: touch OPO source, and then they got comfortable with the
Speaker 4: licenses and then it became a process. This is how
Speaker 4: you accept OPO source.
Speaker 2: I means it's obviously working for Wicks, but if you
Speaker 2: got some other folks that are being successful with it.
Speaker 4: So it's still early. It's early, and I have honestly
Speaker 4: shied most people away from trying to pick it up
Speaker 4: because I didn't think I had all the bugs worked
Speaker 4: out right, and I didn't want them to go through
Speaker 4: pain that I didn't know how to help them resolve,
Speaker 4: because there was a potential that you know, you get
Speaker 4: a lot of lashback, and as a maintainer, especially in money,
Speaker 4: I was very worried that it could get really, really nasty. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and so just finding the right way to say things
Speaker 4: and word things was a big part of it, and
Speaker 4: I feel like we're very much there to that end.
Speaker 4: Simon Kropp, who is notorious.
Speaker 2: Notorious, awesome on this show certainly.
Speaker 4: And huge in the dot net ecosystem, was the first
Speaker 4: second person I talked to the open Source Maintenance Fee about.
Speaker 4: I didn't know Simon before that. I just cold called
Speaker 4: him and said, hey, can I talk I want to
Speaker 4: show this thing to you. And he was the one
Speaker 4: very early had fantastic questions, helped me frame and make
Speaker 4: sure I had answered a lot of questions early, but
Speaker 4: he at that time was noncommittal. I'd say he's like, well,
Speaker 4: we'll see how it goes. But he's starting to bring
Speaker 4: his projects on now that's cool, and his projects are
Speaker 4: bigger than mine, like as pure numbers go libraries and
Speaker 4: these like that. There, it's much bigger. He's already opened
Speaker 4: the issue in Verify, which is one of his big
Speaker 4: testing systems, and he's doing it the right way because
Speaker 4: the docutation said, if you're going to introduce the open
Speaker 4: source maintenance fee, put an announcement out, explain what you're
Speaker 4: doing and why, and leave a lead time of three
Speaker 4: to six months, because if you don't, people will complain
Speaker 4: that you didn't tell them right, yeah, that you run
Speaker 4: exactly well, it just too fast. If you do, then
Speaker 4: they don't complain or they don't have anything to complain
Speaker 4: about in the end. So it's just things we learned.
Speaker 1: Simon is a brilliant, brilliant guy. He's helped me on
Speaker 1: a couple of my open source projects too, and it
Speaker 1: seems like every other better Know framework is because of him.
Speaker 4: Yes, I'm betting, and we'll see if it works, but
Speaker 4: I'm betting that the open source maintenance Fee, depending on
Speaker 4: how it goes, could make you know, Simon like retired. Yeah,
Speaker 4: that's actually my thinking is that given his projects, he's
Speaker 4: so prolific, he could through this have so many people
Speaker 4: that he could finish and then just work on his projects.
Speaker 4: And I keep thinking, how is that not the best
Speaker 4: thing for people using these projects? Simon available to work
Speaker 4: on all things full time, on.
Speaker 2: Verify, on you know exactly so many, so many things, all.
Speaker 4: Of them and all of them. Then he wouldn't have
Speaker 4: to pick which ones he's doing. He'd just be able
Speaker 4: to do them all because the dude's a madman. So
Speaker 4: that's I'm excited to see how it goes for him.
Speaker 2: Well, people will vote for their feet, right, he can
Speaker 2: go focus on the ones that are getting the most sponsorship.
Speaker 4: That that too, or spin up new projects and help
Speaker 4: and things like that. It's it's all in my opinion,
Speaker 4: it's all good. And I contrast it with like going
Speaker 4: back to VT Evan and they started a company, and
Speaker 4: they recently got acquired by cloud Flare, which of all companies,
Speaker 4: is probably one of the better ones because they are
Speaker 4: generally very much about continuing to keep things in the open.
Speaker 4: But I keep wondering if Evan had put the open
Speaker 4: source maintenance fee on vat and view. Yeah, that thing
Speaker 4: gets I forget. It was like twenty million down in
Speaker 4: a month. Yeah, double digit millions, you.
Speaker 1: Know, Richard, when I'm thinking about Polly, Yeah, totally Polly
Speaker 1: Appenaxtonnes Polly, Yeah, you know, and it gets millions and
Speaker 1: millions downloads.
Speaker 4: Exactly that that whole space. You're like, do that, and
Speaker 4: then what are we doing. We're funding a person to
Speaker 4: work on a project that they've been successful at, they
Speaker 4: figured it out, they like what they're doing, presumably they've
Speaker 4: been working on it so hard and for so long.
Speaker 4: Now we're just funding them to continue to do more
Speaker 4: of that. I in a way that.
Speaker 2: You know, no EXI I'd love to see Simon Cropp
Speaker 2: do even more, like goodness knows what he's holding back on.
Speaker 4: Yes, So so I am. I have gone from very
Speaker 4: frustrated and very afraid and concerned about what was happening
Speaker 4: to now I'm on the other side where I'm like,
Speaker 4: you don't have to adopt the open source maintenance fee.
Speaker 4: If you don't want money or do you want to deal,
Speaker 4: then that's fine. I'm not saying do that, but if
Speaker 4: you have any questions, it has been working really well.
Speaker 4: Oh Jason Everything was I think one of the first ones.
Speaker 4: And I know Kazoo adopted on a bunch of his
Speaker 4: smaller projects, but Jason Everything might have been the first
Speaker 4: project that was bigger. Greg Daniels, I don't I don't
Speaker 4: really know him. He just kind of picked it up
Speaker 4: out of nowhere that I didn't really understand. It just
Speaker 4: surprised me, and I learned a few things in his
Speaker 4: release of more things to put into the fack and
Speaker 4: and people's reactions, like the timeframe.
Speaker 1: Guess how many downloads of Polly have gone through new
Speaker 1: get two point eight billion?
Speaker 4: Now that that's tricky. Downloads are tricky because if they are,
Speaker 4: aren't they referenced by the dot net framework somewhere like internally?
Speaker 1: Well, so the transit of ones wouldn't count. No dot
Speaker 1: net framework forked the stop Polly that they're using for themselves. Okay,
Speaker 1: it's not that Polly is included.
Speaker 4: Okay, Okay, then then i'mification all right, cool. Then no,
Speaker 4: then then that's pretty much probably all straight up direct
Speaker 4: references to Polly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's still people at aptnx that are maintaining it, so,
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, the money would obviously trickle to them.
Speaker 4: Look like if fire Giant. I was getting a point
Speaker 4: where like, I can't do this. I can't fund Wix
Speaker 4: with the security vulnerabilies that we're hitting and things like that.
Speaker 4: We the whole lot of dev time into it in
Speaker 4: twenty twenty four, and it was brutal. With the open
Speaker 4: source maintenance fee, it's much more like, yeah, let's pick
Speaker 4: up one of the features and do those, and we've
Speaker 4: been able to do that. We did a long standing
Speaker 4: feature that we'd wanted to do forever, per user, per
Speaker 4: machine switching inside bundles. I mean it was complicated, a
Speaker 4: whole lot of problems. Yeah, we knocked it out in
Speaker 4: Wick seven and it was like, it feels better. The
Speaker 4: whole thing feels better. Answering questions, Yeah, no problem with
Speaker 4: suit as I get to it, I mean, boom boom,
Speaker 4: boom boom, knock them all out, keep going. Yeah, the
Speaker 4: attitude and everything just feels so much better that. All right,
Speaker 4: these large companies, these companies of all sizes are paying
Speaker 4: a maintenance fee for me to keep this project going
Speaker 4: that I want to see successful, and now I don't
Speaker 4: feel taken advantage of at all.
Speaker 1: So we didn't really talk about what's you set Obviously
Speaker 1: set the maintenance fee for your project, but what's the
Speaker 1: range that you would advise people to do.
Speaker 4: So there are two models pre presented on the open
Speaker 4: source maintenance fee dot org has two models that it proposes.
Speaker 4: One is if is a ten dollars fee if you're
Speaker 4: if you're just a library or something like that, you
Speaker 4: want it simple, just do ten dollars straight up. If
Speaker 4: you're at all bigger complicated anything, I would recommend in
Speaker 4: all cases you have ten dollars for a twenty person
Speaker 4: up to a twenty person company, forty dollars for up
Speaker 4: to one hundred person company, and then the sixty dollars
Speaker 4: for after the one hundred person company. And that kind
Speaker 4: of ranges that we found.
Speaker 1: Is this per year or per month, per month, okay.
Speaker 4: Per month?
Speaker 1: Wow?
Speaker 4: And then and like I said, nobody's really complaining about
Speaker 4: the present.
Speaker 1: Now, nobody would complain about that.
Speaker 4: No, We've had a couple devs complain about it, but
Speaker 4: they're not business people. Like that's the tricky thing. Also
Speaker 4: not tricky. There's a small cases of most of the
Speaker 4: people that give me feedback and the maintenance fee have
Speaker 4: been developers. And then I just have to make sure
Speaker 4: I coordinate with who they are where they come in
Speaker 4: at because as a developer I am guilty of this
Speaker 4: as well.
Speaker 1: Well.
Speaker 4: I don't always think businesslike yeah right, and and they're like, no,
Speaker 4: nobody would ever do that. You're like, well, you know,
Speaker 4: if it's just two hours, I'll just stand to see
Speaker 4: I system and run it myself. And you're like, absolutely,
Speaker 4: you could do that, but does your boss want you
Speaker 4: doing that? Is that really the best time for you
Speaker 4: to be using you know, is it worth all that
Speaker 4: a headache? No, you know, let's just pay the fee
Speaker 4: because it's not that much and the whole balance ends
Speaker 4: up working out. So yeah, I I am, like I said,
Speaker 4: I'm quite tickled that it all worked out. I was
Speaker 4: telling my wife I was going on the show today
Speaker 4: this morning, and she was kind of talking about and
Speaker 4: she said, oh, yeah, and now someone could go and
Speaker 4: work in the open source field, and I'm like, the
Speaker 4: open source field, that's not a thing. But I was like,
Speaker 4: you know, there's actually a space here that if you
Speaker 4: create a project's big enough, then yeah, you can work
Speaker 4: in the open source field.
Speaker 1: It's true.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's true.
Speaker 1: Well this is great, and I hope we have inspired
Speaker 1: some people who have big repositories that a lot of
Speaker 1: people are using to take a look at it.
Speaker 4: And you never know, and I hope people that work
Speaker 4: at companies start going, you know what, we should make
Speaker 4: sure that all of our projects are covered. Why don't
Speaker 4: we just pay a maintenance fee as if they didn't,
Speaker 4: But they do, right, That's what we do at fire Giant.
Speaker 4: We basically say every dependency that we can sponsor, we
Speaker 4: go and sponsor the mat our fee right like they
Speaker 4: took a fee.
Speaker 1: Just do it, absolutely, just do it, do it well.
Speaker 1: This is this is a great solution, Rob. Thank you
Speaker 1: for the update, and it's been great talking to you.
Speaker 1: Thank you for having me and congrats on the progress. Man.
Speaker 2: It's going well.
Speaker 4: Yep, and hopefully you have other people coming. Oh yeah yeah,
Speaker 4: I use the opens sours means fee. It's no big deal.
Speaker 4: That's what I want. Big deal, just the way we
Speaker 4: do it, good way it works, just the thing you do.
Speaker 4: Give me the time.
Speaker 1: Right, Well, thanks again, Rob, and we will talk to you,
Speaker 1: dear listener next.
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