text stringlengths 0 1.08k |
|---|
**Jerod Santo:** Okay. |
**Zed Shaw:** I came out and I was gonna do a new Python 3 book. I tried to use it, and it was slower; a lot of the features were not very good, and I would test it about every year... So finally it got to where I could kind of do it, so I said, "Alright, I'm gonna do a Python 3 book, but I really don't agree how the p... |
And immediately after I wrote it, a few high profile members of the PSF proceeded to go to all these people who wrote books and try to get my book removed as a mention in their book. People came to me, and they were like "Yeah, so-and-so-and-so are going around - here's their chat - trying to get people to stop using y... |
I asked my friends, or the people who would tell me this, I'm like "Okay, well why don't you say something about it?" and they're like "Oh, I'm afraid. I'm scared that I won't be able to work, or that they'll come after me next." So even people who claimed to be my best friend can't stand up to these people, this kind ... |
\[01:15:52.11\] My favorite was someone tried to write a blog post saying I'm unqualified to teach Python 3. This person previously had recommended my book, so I'm kind of like "Okay, so does that mean Python 3 is unteachable? Because if I can't teach Python 3, then I don't know if anyone can teach Python 3." \[laughs\... |
**Jerod Santo:** Because you were teaching Python 2 successfully. |
**Zed Shaw:** Yeah. Like, what's the huge difference in my -- and this person was recommending my books before this, so either they were lying about my books being good and they were giving them out, or they're lying about Python 3 being awesome and I'm just a terrible teacher. |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] |
**Zed Shaw:** But not a single person, I didn't read a single blog post from anyone, not a single email, nothing, even my best friends didn't stand up for me. Nobody came out. People told me that they would talk to members of the PSF and they'd say like "Yeah, what do you think about Zed's post?" and members in the PSF... |
**Jerod Santo:** So your best friends, did you -- so with my best friends, if a stranger offends me, it's kind of like, whatever... Especially someone on the internet. Not that it doesn't hurt, but it's not going to affect my day-to-day. But if my best friends don't stand up for me, I would turn to them and say "What's... |
**Zed Shaw:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** So did you talk to them? What did they say? Why aren't they going to come to your side? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** They're afraid. |
**Zed Shaw:** In a lot of ways, I can't blame them, because this would be their livelihood gone. If they stood up to the PSF and did what I did, they wouldn't be-- |
**Jerod Santo:** So if they say "We're with Zed", they're gonna lose their jobs, or what? |
**Zed Shaw:** That's what they worry, yeah; they're worried they won't get their consulting gigs, they won't get their jobs, they'll be banned from the PSF... Because that's exactly what they're doing to me. So they're like "Oh, I don't want that happen to me. I'm gonna tell Zed it's going on, but I'm not gonna stand u... |
This is very common, like, all the time. I'm in a unique position, because -- I mean, after I wrote that and they tried to ban me, my sales went up. It didn't do anything to me. I work very hard to make sure that I put out something good, that helps a lot of people, and it works; I try to make it work as best I can... ... |
That happens way more often than people wanna admit, but I think it doesn't happen too often, because the culture of programming now is that everyone just kind of goes with the projects, they're all very servile, and then when the next one comes along, they just leave, rather than trying to fix or change or contribute ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What do you think it is? I mean, not saying that you deserve this, but what do you think it is that you've done, or been involved in or around, that may make people feel this way about you? |
**Zed Shaw:** I think it started with Rails. That's where I marked the shift. Because before that, I feel like people in open source had a difference attitude about it, that was much more collaborative or discourse-based. You could totally disagree with the way someone did something. I would say Java, then Rails change... |
\[01:20:06.20\] And it's understandable. I don't actually hate any of the people who necessarily don't like what I have to say. I don't really hate them. The only people I really have a problem with are people who send me death threats because I don't like Haskell. \[laughter\] |
**Jerod Santo:** Have you actually gotten death threats because of that? |
**Zed Shaw:** Yes! You don't understand, like -- |
**Jerod Santo:** I don't understand, I'm trying to understand over here... |
**Zed Shaw:** It's so weird, right? |
**Jerod Santo:** That is weird. |
**Zed Shaw:** Look, you can think I'm a jerk, right? I'm totally fine with that. You can disagree with what I say, I'm totally fine with that. But the response has to match the offense. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yes, commensurate. Exactly. |
**Zed Shaw:** If I don't like Haskell, you go "yeah well I don't like your project", and I go "I don't like your project". Maybe you can say "I don't like your face." Alright, that's weird, but okay. But if I go "I don't like Haskell" and then you send me this insane email about how I should kill myself, then that's ki... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, since you brought it back to Twitter, this tweet storm we talked through here - which we didn't go through all of them, and I'm not sure we can actually link to it, because your account is protected, at least now... |
**Zed Shaw:** Yeah, yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** We do have a version we could PDF and host it if that's okay with you, but aside from that... |
**Zed Shaw:** Yeah, go for it. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** ...what was the response with-- I mean, you said lots of controversial stuff in this tweet storm... So any death threats? Any threats at all? What was the response? |
**Zed Shaw:** No, that's the thing that I find very interesting. I think all of the responses were positive. The only responses I got were mostly along the lines of the libertarian flair of "Well, that's corporations." And that's about it... Which si what got me thinking like "Wait, you don't have a problem with this? ... |
But the weirdest response that I got was all these people came out and they said "Hey, we're gonna try and solve that with blockchain." You wouldn't believe it. |
**Jerod Santo:** Oh, that's because blockchain solves all problems... |
**Zed Shaw:** Yeah, yeah. No, this was bizarre - I had these people who were like, yeah, what's gonna happen is you put your project in my blockchain, my licensing open source blockchain, and then people say "Yeah, I bought that thing. I'm gonna use that thing", and then you get coins. So when people use your software,... |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, when all you have is a hammer, and that hammer spits out coins, everything looks like a nail. You're just like, "Um, blockchain that. Get some coins." |
**Zed Shaw:** So one thing I did think... And I don't wanna ruin someone's -- like, if you've got an idea, go with it. I'm probably not a very good predictor of what's gonna take off. Try blockchain; if people use it and programmers are getting paid, then I'm happy with that. Go for it. I don't think it's gonna happen,... |
The one thing I did think is one problem is if you're an organization that's really huge and you would like to pay developers, you don't know what software you're using. It's really difficult to account for -- let's say you're running thousands of machines to power your website, and you know that there's some hidden GP... |
\[01:24:13.20\] You would probably just have to sell that tool to larger organizations, and then offer programmers -- say "Yeah, what we'll do is we'll send you a report with all these companies that are willing to say 'Yeah, we're using your GPL. We made these changes. Here you go.' and act as a proxy and solve that p... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, I mean, I can agree on one part where the blockchain makes sense as a ledger, but the coin part obviously is the stretch. It's like "Well, not really a lot of value there." And there's a lot of volatility. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. Well, and the ledger isn't the hard part of the equation, right? The ledger is workable. |
**Zed Shaw:** That's easy, yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** It's like the social constructs, and it's the industry... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** The buy-in... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, there's a lot bigger problems to solve than how you're gonna prove that this is happening in a decentralized fashion. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And Tether somehow makes it -- you know, tying it to the real world... |
**Zed Shaw:** So one of the things that you would get with a blockchain solution is companies are kind of really scared to announce what tech they use, because that's how competitors can compete with them. So if they're able to do this locally, with this distributed database, and then reach out to the people that they ... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.