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So that's the thing - it's really obvious, but for some weird reason programmers sort of all think that's okay. They can't really think about it. And in fact, they go so far as if you try to make money with your open source - like, you license it GPL; I remember I licensed something GPL, and all these people from Djang... |
So we go with this thing, this sort of like self-loathing, "If you wanna get paid, you're greedy", but the company who's making tons of money on your stuff is not greedy. They're allowed to make that money, they're a corporation. But you, the developer, you should be helping the universe with your free stuff, and you'r... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What do you suggest then? The thing of open source is that the code is open and it's free for everyone, regardless of if you can make money from it or not, right? So by having this stance, are you saying that because these corporations decide to use the game, use the rules of the game and use the so... |
**Zed Shaw:** So I actually think that the thing that the corporations are doing is totally what corporations are usually gonna do. You can't blame them; that's a corporation, that's what they do. I think the bad thing is when we're telling open source developers that they can't be just like corporations. |
So yeah, corporations are gonna go out and do that. I'm not surprised. Are you surprised? I'm totally not surprised. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I have no problem with anybody making open source and making money from it, personally. I encourage it, please do that. |
**Zed Shaw:** \[31:56\] Yeah, but what we do is when I GPL-ed something, all these dudes came out saying I was a jerk for GPL-ing my stuff, because I'm gonna make money on it. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Maybe they're just jealous. |
**Zed Shaw:** No, I think they really wanted to use my project without paying for it. That happens a lot. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I see. |
**Zed Shaw:** Node.js started with a piece of my code, and then right after that they needed a new license, so rather than pay me for the license, they created a separate project that just had my code in it, and then Ryan Dahl emailed me and he's like "Hey buddy, can you just give me a free license for this?" Like, why... |
So my problem with it is that if it's right for corporations to be making money, it should be right for us to make money, but that's not what's happening. There's something else going on, and it's taken me a while to sort of figure out that really this is sort of a strategy among corporations to kind of do three things... |
The first one is they're just trying to commoditize their complement. Have you ever heard of that strategy? Microsoft - they sold operating systems, so they did a lot to commoditize hardware. So if you're Google, you make all your money on ads; you don't make money on hosting software, you don't make money on Kubernete... |
That's what all these companies are doing - they're trying to use open source to commoditize their complement... Which, okay, great - someone releases, and then they're doing it, no problem. But then I've sort of noticed that there's been a change, and companies have started to figure out that if they keep -- and I don... |
And then the other thing is they use it as a way to collaborate with other giant monopolies. So code is language, code is communication. If you've got people from Amazon and people from Google and people from Microsoft while working on Kubernetes, then they're illegally colluding. If they got together in a meeting and ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What do you say when the foundation says "Well, we're a neutral base"? Because that's the response to that concern. It's like, "Oh, but we're neutral. It's a foundation, we're neutral, we have all the different acronyms (Technical Steering Committee, TCT)" and all that stuff to manage things, but gu... |
**Zed Shaw:** Exactly. My favorite example is every time some IETF standard comes out, it's always to-do's from Google and someone from Mozilla. The standard - you look and it's like a Facebook person, a Google person, and then a Mozilla person, because they need someone from a non-profit to say that "Yeah, yeah, yeah,... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[35:54\] So what's your response on neutral? Just that they employ people to be on these committees or the foundations? |
**Zed Shaw:** Yeah, so my response is basically "Show me the cash." Let's say you join the Python Software Foundation, or Software Freedom Conservancy - I don't know if they do any of this, but if you're a member of that, if you're in the Python community, if your project is there, and then they're constantly begging f... |
I think the other thing would be if what you see is suddenly there's these directions that benefit the Googles and the Facebooks and whatnot, and sort of screw over the individual developers, then these are not neutral organizations. And I think that's the biggest thing. I think even a lot of these organizations, they ... |
I think my favorite example is GitHub. GitHub hosts all this open source, and they have investors that invest in Google, and in other projects and companies and whatnot, and when you try to make money off GitHub - they've shut down projects that help developers make money on GitHub. And every time I've said, "Why does ... |
So what I've started to sort of realize is there seems to be a motivation or even a concerted effort to make it so that open source developers can't make money... And I believe the two things to that are open source developers kind of deserve it. There's a certain thing about, I don't know... The way they run their pro... |
**Jerod Santo:** Let's look at the other side of the coin, because you haven't mentioned at all -- I mean, you mentioned Kubernetes, but you haven't mentioned at all the actual value-add that these corporations have given, freely... Like you said, it's a good corporate strategy to use it to commoditize your complements... |
I mean, we always talk about letting your code do the talking, like bring software, bring value to the community, contribute back - all of these things, and I agree and I think that corporations should be offering money to people... And in some ways they are, in other ways they aren't. We're seeing more and more emphas... |
**Zed Shaw:** \[40:03\] Yeah, so in that respect it's that sort of enlightened self-interest that they're saying they do. I call it "fopen source", because it still serves the company. No matter what you do, what that company needs is what's gonna happen. And I'd be fine with it if they said "Yeah, this is an open sour... |
**Jerod Santo:** I think in many cases it's pretty clear... I mean, when we have these conversations on this show, we ask people "What kind of open source is this? Is this community-driven, is it a Google project that's open to be contributed to, but it's a Google direction?", and they're historically very clear on tho... |
I feel like in a lot of readmes, a lot of open source website, it'll say right there... And not all the time, granted... We're just picking on Google as the example, but I don't think it's always unclear who's driving the project. I think it's usually pretty easy to either derive, or it's explicitly stated in many case... |
**Zed Shaw:** No, I think actually they kind of dance on the edge of it. I think what they wanna do is they wanna have sort of the community control that a sort of like "kumba ya" project has, but still also have their own control. It's never explicitly said "Look, if you want this project to go in a different directio... |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, you would just fork it and give it a new name and do go your own way, right? |
**Zed Shaw:** I suppose, but I'd bet you anything if you tried to do that, they would use the community to come after you. That's what happens all the time when you try to do those forks. |
**Jerod Santo:** Do you have any for instances on that? |
**Zed Shaw:** Do you remember FFmpeg? |
**Jerod Santo:** I use it all the time. |
**Zed Shaw:** Okay, it forked tons of times... Numerous projects, they fork... Oh, and Node. Node is a really good example. Node forked - remember they went and called it something-io, had a huge fight... |
**Jerod Santo:** Io.js. |
**Zed Shaw:** Yeah, yeah. All over the place, a massive fight, big internal -- and then Joyent had to change its steering, and its licensing, and everything to fight it... But they totally fought it. They had all sorts of propaganda going back and forth, yelling all sorts of stuff, fights... It was terrible, it almost ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** We were pretty close to that one though. I think there were a lot of community members knee deep into the Io.js and Node fork and bringing the communities back together. From my perspective, I think there were plenty of community members that were what I would consider just peer-to-peer developers, ... |
**Zed Shaw:** Right, after they got Joyent to sort of agree to their things. Because Joyent wasn't really running the project ethically; they were doing exactly what I was saying. |
**Jerod Santo:** \[43:19\]They were letting it languish. |
**Zed Shaw:** Yeah, they weren't running it well; they were only doing what they wanted and what benefitted them, but then claiming "Oh, this is a community. We're all friends!" So then Io forks for that very reason. |
**Jerod Santo:** Isn't that a success story though? Isn't that just like the actual open source thing working? Like, okay, Joyent was letting it languish, they wanted to maintain and control - and I'm just going based on memory; this was years ago, so maybe the details are not particularly clear... But the maintainers,... |
**Zed Shaw:** \[44:26\] I didn't really say it was a-- |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, I said "You just fork", and then you're saying that "Well, then they force you back in", or I can't remember exactly what you said... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** They use the community against you. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, yeah. |
**Zed Shaw:** So Joyent was worth like - what, maybe 10 million dollars? So Google is worth like 500 billion, right? |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, it's definitely not apples to apples. That's why I'm asking for examples. |
**Zed Shaw:** See, I think you don't get examples. I think this doesn't happen too often for two specific reasons. One is the companies that are doing this are HUGE. Can you imagine if you had an open source project and you decided you wanted to re-copyright it, remove your license, and that would affect the bottom lin... |
Then I think the second reason that all of this is allowed - I've gotta say, I'm not upset or really blaming the corporations for doing this, because the programmers let them. I can't say that -- corporations just do corporation. That's what they do. If they can make money anyway, that's what they do. I mean, they try ... |
So actually, for a long time I didn't blame the open source projects, I didn't blame anyone or anything like that in running projects; I said "This is just corporations exploiting people." But then, when I started talking about how they sort of allowed this, I would get death threats if I criticized a project... And th... |
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