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**Zed Shaw:** But bug fixing is universal. It doesn't matter what programming language it is, it doesn't matter where you come from, where you went to school... If you can't fix bugs, I don't think you can really code. So it's an easy test... You can also do it without making people work for free. So you just point the... |
\[16:13\] I think 80% of a programmer's work is fixing bugs. I think if I sit around, most of the time I'm coding it's "Oh, this doesn't work. This doesn't work. This doesn't work. Oh, now it works." |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, the rest of the time you're just writing the bugs. |
**Zed Shaw:** Exactly, yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] So you're not fixing them, you're writing them. |
**Zed Shaw:** I'm a professional at that. |
**Jerod Santo:** That could be a different job interview - how many bugs can you write in two hours? |
**Zed Shaw:** That would be another one I would do. If I was gonna hire someone for a security job, I would do the opposite. "How many bugs can you hide in this code?" Because then I would know that person - they know their security. |
**Jerod Santo:** Exactly. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's interesting. I always enjoy -- I'm not sure if you're a fan of Mr. Robot, but that's kind of what I enjoyed about season 1 at least... All this kind of "How do things work?" and just the mind of a hacker and how they would get into or out of systems, and exploits, and how they would use them ... |
**Zed Shaw:** Yeah. I live in this building with crazy security. They've got fingerprint readers, and all this crazy stuff... And I was getting really tired; they're just like Nazis, man... They're just crazy. They yell and scream at you, which is insane. And I started walking around the building, and I found out that ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, exactly. Well, I mean, the most famous hacker/cracker back in the '90s, Kevin Mitnick, he went to jail, and all these things he did... And at the end of the day, what he did most of the time was he just asked people for things; it was all social engineering. Because a lot of the times the humans ... |
So yeah, security is tough, because you've gotta secure every little aspect. All the surface area has to be secure, but on the other side of the coin, you only have to find one problem. |
**Zed Shaw:** Exactly, exactly. |
**Jerod Santo:** It's almost not fair. |
**Zed Shaw:** I found that there's also a sort of correlation, because if an organization is very insane about security and sort of touting that, usually they seem to be too focused on obvious security, and there's always some really simple side-chain that just gets around it. So it's really interesting... What was tha... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow. You said you have a love/hate relationship with open source, and you mentioned -- and I'm not sure if this is a tough spot for you to talk about, but you mentioned being homeless. I'm curious of the relationship of yourself in that timeframe and open source, and maybe what happened. Was it your... |
**Zed Shaw:** Well, yeah... Ultimately, a lot of that is partially your fault, right? I mean, there's decisions that I made that I shouldn't have made. But I think at the same time I had created these projects that all these companies were using, and at the end of the day rather than hire me or get me consulting, they ... |
\[20:18\] Twitter was, I think, the worst for that. They were using Mongrel at the time as an excuse for why their website wouldn't work... And it really had nothing to do with Mongrel. They just were terrible coders, and that's why their website didn't work. |
But that basically caught me up and being homeless, combined with a couple other things and bad decisions on my own... But it was nearly impossible for me to find work within the Ruby on Rails open source industry at the time. That sort of taught me really quickly "Don't get involved with these communities that promise... |
After that, I turned all of my projects into "I'm helping the community, not the project." By helping the community, I'm getting some sort of benefit from it - they're buying my books, they're hiring me, doing something like that. That's the big change that came out of it. |
But the majority of the thing, like the homelessness for me at the time was basically for about six months I had to sleep on friends' couches and trying to scrounge for work. I didn't have anywhere to live, I didn't have enough money to get an apartment. So when I say "homeless", it's not like I was living on the stree... |
There was sort of like this unwritten contract in open source that we had; the unwritten contract with corporations was if you wrote open source that they were using, you got some sort of job, or consulting fees, or at least some respect so that way you could find jobs. |
And I think there was also an unwritten contract with communities too, where like if you contribute to the community, you'll get respect and a piece of the pie. I think that was demolished that year. So after that, I just kind of moved on. I started to realize that "No, that contract has completely been rewritten. It's... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Did the whole Rails is a Ghetto thing happen before or after that? |
**Zed Shaw:** Actually, "Rails is a Ghetto" happened after that, as a response to me finding out that a lot of the Ruby on Rails companies were actively going out and preventing me from getting work. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow. |
**Zed Shaw:** So this wasn't like I wrote -- actually, writing "Rails is a Ghetto" helped me get work, because it freed me from (I guess I'm just gonna say it) the oppression of the Ruby on Rails community. And that's a significant difference. And then after I wrote that, people were trying to come out and say that "Oh... |
As we talk, you'll find out... That's a common pattern where like you'll do something to defend yourself, and they'll tell you "Well, you deserve everything that happened because of this thing you did to defend yourself." It's sort of backwards; it's victim blaming, basically. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's why I was trying to figure out the timeline there, because I remember that - and I don't know the story well enough, and here we are, somewhat face-to-face, at least audio-wise, to discuss this... |
**Jerod Santo:** Voice to voice... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, and I see that in your history and I'm just wondering maybe what others assumed, which was like "Did that cause your scenario, or did your scenario perpetuate it?" |
**Zed Shaw:** \[24:04\] Yeah, my scenario perpetuated it, because keep in mind, I was working at Bear Sterns when I wrote that. So I was able to finally get a job, and the only job I could get was working at basically this crappy bank in New York, a bank that eventually collapsed. That's how terrible that place was. An... |
And then I find out all these background deals that Ruby on Rails people made, and a lot of the things that people were saying about me, and the stuff that Twitter was saying to defend themselves from investors wondering why their system collapsed all the time... That was why I couldn't get work, and I'm like "Alright,... |
**Break:** \[25:10\] |
**Jerod Santo:** That brings us to the tweet storm in question that caught both Adam and my eye. We interview a lot of people on the show, we talk to a lot of people in the open source community, so we see different perspectives... And one thing I appreciate about you, Zed, is of course some things you do say are infla... |
So let's start with I guess kind of the money quote, because it plays right into what you've just said... And I'll just read this tweet back to you from the storm; links are in the show notes for those that wanna read the whole thing. We won't read the whole thing here, for brevity's sake. You said: |
"In the end, open source is now the domain of corporations, using code to illegally collude under the guise of peace and love hippie software projects. If you plan on releasing software, AGPL it and simply do it for self-expression. Save your real efforts for a real job." |
**Zed Shaw:** Yeah, basically. |
**Jerod Santo:** That's a pretty dystopian view. That's pretty bad. |
**Zed Shaw:** Yeah, and I guess we're done... I mean, that's pretty much the whole thing, but... \[laughter\] But I can explore on that. |
**Jerod Santo:** Please do. |
**Zed Shaw:** \[28:03\] So it's sort of interesting that -- I mean, do you feel that's controversial? Like you said, it's dystopian, but do you think it's controversial at all? Do you disagree that corporations have kind of totally taken over open source and it's difficult to make money as an open source developer? |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, I would say that it's always been difficult to make money as an open source developer, so I don't think that's necessarily new. I would say that corporations have definitely moved in in big ways, and have made open source an emphasis, and because of just the pure weight of their size - we're talk... |
**Zed Shaw:** Giants. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, they're giants. They'll dominate any space they go into in software because of their pure weight. |
**Zed Shaw:** Exactly. |
**Jerod Santo:** So I agree with that. "Illegally collude under the guise of peace and love hippie software projects" - I don't agree with that. "Illegally collude" - that's where you lose me... But I definitely see where the game has changed. And I've seen that be good in some ways, and I've seen it also be detrimenta... |
**Zed Shaw:** Yeah, yeah. So it's pretty straightforward to just say, like -- let's take just Google. Google's entire company, up until maybe eight years ago, when they started making Go and their own stuff, their whole company was based on open source. They used Linux, they used tools, they used everything... I don't ... |
So if you take a company like Google - and they are worth 600 billion dollars, something like that; something really insane right now, 500-600 billion dollars. So they're benefitting from open source, and then the average open source developer that works on the tools they need makes almost nothing. In fact, what we see... |
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