text stringlengths 0 2.02k |
|---|
**Break:** \[32:20\] |
**Jerod Santo:** One thing I haven't mentioned yet is that I have you on today, Paul, because a listener requested that we do this show. |
**Paul Biggar:** Oh, cool. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. So shout-out to John \[unintelligible 00:34:16.15\] He requested that we do a show on Dark Lang and your open source strategy. |
**Paul Biggar:** Well, thank you so much, John. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, absolutely. We love listener requests, because then we know we're doing a show that at least one person absolutely wants to hear. |
**Paul Biggar:** Yeah... \[laughs\] |
**Jerod Santo:** Someone's gonna be happy. It's gonna be a non-zero happy listener count. And one thing that John said - he says you have an interesting take on SPA/PWA with functions as a backend, and then you also have a special take on open source, of course in the air quotes... |
**Paul Biggar:** Yeah, air quotes much needed... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. Because it's source-available licensing, but not open source. So that kind of opens us up into Dark Lang's ecosystem; there's a business around it, it's not open source, but you can view the source code... Talk to us about that whole situation. |
**Paul Biggar:** Yeah, so where to start with it...? I hate fake open source. I'm really into business models; I love thinking about business models, and the worst business models are the open source business models. We're a couple of days after AWS just forked... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yes, Elasticsearch relicensed, and then AWS forked. |
**Paul Biggar:** Right. |
**Jerod Santo:** It's a big conversation piece. |
**Paul Biggar:** There's all these companies that are really struggling with the fact that they built open source businesses. And for a lot of things, especially for databases, you kind of have to be open source. It doesn't make sense to be -- and Elasticsearch is a database, really... But you kind of have to be, becau... |
And when you think about what is the purpose of Dark - the purpose of Dark is that you don't have to do anything. So the first thing that you do with an open source thing is that you install it. You find a system that you maybe put on your first computer... And that's not what Dark is. That's not what we're here for. |
\[36:07\] We're kind of in this world where you want a business model that matches to how you want people to use the system. So for us, open source was not it. It is not a thing that made direct sense, because we have that AWS problem. If Dark manages to succeed, do we just want to just be run by AWS? No. |
But also, we've been talking for 45 minutes now about this integrated ecosystem... And part of that integrated ecosystem is we're the package manager, we're the hosting. It doesn't make sense to have another instance of Dark over there. There's a bunch of things I'm planning to build where the -- I wouldn't call it soc... |
And when we look at people asking us for open source, there's a couple of things that they want. Some people are into open source for status. They want to build their reputation in order to do consulting, or something along those lines, so that's a thing that we wanted to enable... People want to install it themselves ... |
Then there's people who are worried about business continuity - what happens if Dark shuts down? That is a thing that we wanted to take care of. And then there's people who just want to be able to extend their programs, their uses of Dark, and they want to be able to make it better. |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Paul Biggar:** Of those four things, three of them we wanted to enable... So there's a couple of things that we did. One is - we've not done this yet, but intend to... |
**Jerod Santo:** It's on the roadmap. |
**Paul Biggar:** Yeah. It's sort of like an open source guarantee, where if Dark shuts down, we'll open source it. That's for the business continuity side of things. We have not actually done the legal side of that, so what you have today is "Well, it's source-available." If there's no business left, no one is gonna su... |
With the source-available you've got the people who are trying to build up a reputation for being experts in Dark; they can contribute to the community there. The people who want to extend the ecosystem, and who are unable to do a certain thing in Dark, and so they want to make it so that they're able to do a thing in ... |
So we've got a lawyer called Heather Meeker, who's like a famous open source lawyer, and she wrote the PolyForm licenses, and a bunch of other things... So we got her to write a license for us. And the license basically says "This is source-available, it is not open source. You can use this for the sole purpose of deve... |
**Jerod Santo:** I like how clear you are about that, and straightforward... And you say you hate fake open source, and you're not trying to be open source. You're source-available, and you say it right there, upfront. I think that's admirable. |
**Paul Biggar:** The "but" is coming... |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, it's not a big but. Do you think that's gonna hamper it? |
**Paul Biggar:** Oh yeah, absolutely. |
**Jerod Santo:** Because there's so many people that just see that and they're like "I'm out." |
**Paul Biggar:** \[39:50\] Yeah. I think that the problem with having nuanced opinions about anything, looking for some middle ground is that a lot of people just aren't interested in the middle ground. And I'm not saying that's bad. I think having an open source-first philosophy isn't a bad thing. But people who build... |
The people who are looking to build the sort of thing that we want you to build on Dark I think for the most part are gonna be very familiar with this idea that actually they don't have a license to everything, top to bottom. |
**Jerod Santo:** Fair enough. I think in light of that, languages have communities. If you think of a language that's owned by a single person, or a single entity... Even Microsoft has released the death grip on a lot of their proprietary software... |
**Paul Biggar:** Yeah, that's right. |
**Jerod Santo:** ...and languages. |
**Paul Biggar:** F\# is open source. |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. Apple famously open sourced Swift, and they said they were gonna do it the entire time, they just didn't do it right away. I think that's probably true, where they wanted to do it the entire time... At least the -- I can't remember the language designer's name off-hand, but I know the core team ... |
**Paul Biggar:** Yeah. So the thing that we recognized upfront is that we want the Dark fans, and we don't necessarily want the open source fans. So if Dark to you is like a cool thing that I can hack on - it's not really that interesting, because you're gonna hack on the wrong things. We get a lot of feature requests ... |
So the purpose of going the source-available thing was for people within the community to contribute back, and to be able to contribute back to solve their own problems. And it's sort of like a multi-faceted approach, because there's the Dark codebase, but there's also gonna be a package manager that people can contrib... |
For a bunch of reasons, we don't actually want anyone who can't get past the zealotry side of things. I don't mean to -- like, "zealot" sounds so negative, and I think that there's so many positive things about open source... But there's so many negative things about open source. People are talking about the licensing ... |
**Jerod Santo:** What's interesting is that your initial audience - I'm just thinking of the diagram between language nerds (and I say that in the kindest way; I consider myself somewhat one of them), and then open source nerds. And then like the cross-section of those two. And I feel like they 80% overlap. |
**Paul Biggar:** \[44:09\] Well, our target is not language nerds. |
**Jerod Santo:** I know, but you build your community out of your early adopters, right? And you said that the people that are coming on earlier, like "Hey, here's a cool, new language. I'm interested in this." |
**Paul Biggar:** There were. But most of our community now is people who build web stuff. |
**Jerod Santo:** Gotcha. |
**Paul Biggar:** The language nerds don't use Dark. They're interested in Dark in sort of an abstract sense... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. They're watching you build it maybe. |
**Paul Biggar:** Yeah. But the people who use Dark are people who build SaaS and web backends, and web frontends, and don't build backends, use Dark for that. I'm not gonna say that there hasn't been people who have dropped out of contributing because it isn't fully open source... I think that's fine. Everyone makes th... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. Well, like I said, I applaud you for staking your claim. I'm with you. The only thing is that I like open source, I'm also okay with proprietary, and I just want the lines to be drawn and clear... And what I do not like is when you have people who are trying to ride the coattails of open source, ... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.