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So it's like, once again, with the train, it's like, "Well, I didn't create that wheel. Someone else created that wheel, so that's their problem." Or with the Spectre/Meltdown hardware problems, where it's like, "Oh, well it's not my fault that there was a breach. The processor shouldn't have been speculatively executi... |
**Luis Villa:** Yeah. And I think applying the old models is probably going to get us some very bad outcomes... And unfortunately, the way the legal system learns sometimes is by having bad outcomes. Everybody stubs their toe on it, and then you sort of fix that up as we go. But some people end up being caught in the m... |
\[34:10\] And so I do want to talk a little bit about the day job here, because I co-founded a company called Tidelift. And Tidelift's mission, as we said at the top of the show, is to make open source better for everyone, in part by paying the maintainers. Because what we're seeing happen all the time - we saw it happ... |
And we can go back and forth about like whether or not two-factor authentication in some of these cases is a good idea... But I want to step out -- I mean, I generally think two-factor authentication is a good idea, don't get me wrong. But that's the easy case. It just gets harder from there, right? Like, "Okay, what d... |
Anyway, we're putting all these new requirements on people, Kris, because of exactly this intuition you've had about -- but we're doing nothing to make open source more fun, easier... Like, all we're doing is loading more work on top, and I think at some point -- I think we're already starting to see it in some communi... |
So what do we do? So what Tidelift does to help address this problem is we go to our customers and we say, "You're going to get more predictable, more reliable open source if developers follow these standards. If they're not going to follow these standards on their own, you should pay them. So if you want the stuff you... |
Now, there's a lot of challenges around this, in part because - guess what? Nobody wants to pay for open source. It should be free. And well, guess what? If you're liable, all of a sudden maybe it's not free. And I think one of the interesting things that we're gonna see in discussion about these EU regulations, for ex... |
**Kris Brandow:** \[38:16\] Yeah, one of the thoughts I had during what you were saying is - I express this in private to some people, and I always get kind of the "You've just said heresy" look or comments... But I have been wondering, is open source sustainable as the method of how we do things in this industry? Is t... |
If I remember the kind of genesis of copyright, or the vague genesis, it's like "We want to protect people, making so they can profit off of their creative work for some time", but then it goes back into the general pool of things so we can kind of continue making progress forward. |
**Luis Villa:** Yeah... Boy, that sustainability question is a big one, Kris, and I really don't know. I'd like to say that we have a real clear answer to it. Certainly, I think that Tidelift is part of the answer to that... But I think it's a really good question to be asking, and that heresy - it is an elephant in th... |
It is the kind of thing -- you know, you've got a puppy... Puppies are often more fun than replying to pull requests from automated bots. And, Kris, I think one of the interesting things - we've been a little backward-focused, but I think there's a lot of cool stuff... I know we're flying through this time, but I think... |
So in the US, in the Constitution, it says that the purpose of copyright is to encourage authors. So it is a very utilitarian, like, "We're going to give you this copyright, and as a result, you're going to create more stuff, and that's a bargain that we're gonna have. We're gonna give you this monopoly", which otherwi... |
In the EU, and really actually most of the rest of the world except the US, it's more like, "Your creativity is like a part of you. It is part of your human -- your human nature is to create", and so there's often what are called moral rights; the idea that inherently you have some control over the thing that you've cr... |
And by the way, the third historic - like, the original copyright, was literally just basically a tool of censorship for the UK government in the early 1600s. It was a way for them to control printers. And I think, Kris, there's a really interesting discussion we're going to have over how does open source -- it probabl... |
**Kris Brandow:** \[42:29\] Yeah. It doesn't help that our legislators aren't very tech-savvy, and they tend to write a lot of laws that you're like "This makes no sense." Or ask questions in hearings that are questionable at best. |
**Luis Villa:** Yeah. There's two parts of that. That's the one -- and again, I'll try to be quick here. That's the one that everybody thinks about, because we've seen our legislators on TV, and it's terrifying. But there's also this thing where -- so legislators sort of provide you like a rough draft, and then the cou... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** I wanted to say that -- that's a couple of topics back, but I had a... I'm a contractor, so I have clients around the world, I see all sorts of different contracts... And one time I had a contract with a California-based company, and there was a clause that said that any damage that I caused, I... |
**Luis Villa:** I mean, contracts can say that... The good news/bad news is that you were probably what is known as not a deep pocket... Like, they're unlikely to sue you, because what are you going to give them? Your collection of goldies would not be worth much to them. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** I was really terrified. Exactly. |
**Luis Villa:** You probably should have negotiated that out, but that's one of these ways in which the legal system is very imbalanced, unfortunately... And that's a whole other rant, for a whole other show. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Especially the American one. But the thing is, some friends who work in California said that this is actually a normal clause, that they had this in the contract in the past. I think nobody working in California is on this panel, so maybe somebody listening can keep me honest here... But I've b... |
**Luis Villa:** Well, there's a whole other thing about cruft in -- again, another rant for another day... How lawyers deal with cruft could learn a lot from how programmers deal with cruft, because a lot of the stuff that is -- we don't have any sense of dependencies, or module reuse or anything like that in law... An... |
**Break:** \[45:04\] |
**Kris Brandow:** I was gonna say that, like, when you were talking about how we have the laws get written, and then they don't get tested or refined, I'm like, "That's kind of like writing code, but without tests." It's just kind of like, "I don't know, it's just running out there, and we have no idea if it's doing th... |
**Luis Villa:** There's no test frameworks, there's no linters, there's no -- by the way, when you compile it, there will be somebody else trying to persuade the compiler to do things totally different from what you intended... It's a very adversarial system that is not set up for robustness. Don't get me wrong, it wor... |
**Kris Brandow:** I find it interesting how it also causes some class problems as well... I have legal insurance, so every time I get a contract of any sort, I send it to lawyers to review. I'm like, "Is any of this weird?" But also knowing that I can just like take a pen and just strike through anything I don't like i... |
**Luis Villa:** Yeah. Well, and on the flipside, of course, especially in the US, Natalie, I think you're correct to say that this is less of a problem in the EU, though definitely not unknown as a problem... You get lawyers who end up working more defensively than they might otherwise... Because they're thinking of th... |
**Angelica Hill:** And that seems to be the case with every episode we do, Natalie. We're gonna have to get you back for a part two, to go deeper dive. I have one more question that I want to dive into before we go to the unpopular opinion section, which is - and you alluded to this earlier... Are there specific consid... |
**Luis Villa:** \[49:54\] I think there's one -- I'm getting a little over my skis here, but Go is very much a -- because of the way that you all have done packaging, it has some real implications I think for... It breaks the brain of a lot of people who come out of like other language package managers... And it has so... |
We never really got to it here, Natalie, but I think there's this penumbra of -- it's not ownership, but it's sort of entitlement, almost... And this is certainly not Go-specific, but this sense of like, "Well, I'm using it, and so I'm going to treat it a little bit like I have a support contract, like traditional soft... |
So, I guess the unpopular part is not Go-specific, but that's definitely the responsibility lies with all of us, because we specifically decided in open source that "Well, I'm not owning this thing in like some sense", but we very much decided in other senses that... Like, one way of putting it is we decided that use o... |
**Kris Brandow:** I remember a conversation that happened I think among a smaller group of people within the community, but when modules were being designed and developed, one of the comments that kept coming up was "This is biasing toward the consumer instead of the provider, the maintainer. Is that a thing we really ... |
\[54:14\] I think we're gonna see a lot more people that just are like, "Well, I can't --" Like, if there is a bug, and now I have almost no recourse to fix it, or I can't get people off old versions of things, that does kind of erode the ability of people to do open source really, which erodes our ability to maintain ... |
**Luis Villa:** Yeah, absolutely. And that's one thing I would say to the Go folks - you're not alone in that. Every ecosystem is struggling with that. There are different flavors caused by different technical choices and different cultural choices along the way... But the core problem - we did a Tidelift conference ri... |
Microsoft has done a lot of amazing things for the open source community, which 1997 me is like aghast that I'm saying that out loud... But at the end of the day, when it comes down to push or shove, the decisions are often going to be made in favor of the consumer, and we do need to have some of those honest discussio... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** We'll add that in the show notes. |
**Kris Brandow:** I want to end with -- because I know we've got to get to unpopular opinions... But I just want to say, one of the things I always think about when we get into these conversations is like people tend to think like humans are like transactional, and they're kind of mean to each other, and we want a war,... |
**Luis Villa:** It's been too long since I worked at Wikipedia, but... I mean, here's this thing, it's this amazing cultural treasure, and anyone can go and graffiti on it at any time. And something like 1 in 1,000 edits are spam. Think about what that says as -- to exactly your point, Kris... Actually, most of the tim... |
**Angelica Hill:** Lovely not to end the episode on, we're gonna have to get you back for a part two, for sure. But before we let you go, we're gonna be doing a little bit of unpopular opinions. |
**Jingle:** \[59:03\] |
**Angelica Hill:** So over to you, Luis.... What is your Go Time unpopular opinion? |
**Luis Villa:** Oh, boy... The one I have in the show notes is absolutely one I already nailed, which is "Hey, we should all be paying for this, right? We got it for free for a long time, and that train is running out", for very human, decent reasons. It's not like I think companies are bad for having used this stuff. ... |
Needless to say, that project has not really gone much of anywhere. But I was treated as like a pariah, and literally not invited to future meetings for a while, because I had dared to ask this question of "Why would people do this?" Unfortunately, I still get that all too often. I think, to be fair, lots of people are... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** It's like that meme about that guy that's being thrown outside of the window... \[laughter\] |
**Luis Villa:** Wait, which -- thrown outside of the window? Now I've gotta google this... |
**Kris Brandow:** Where it's like, they're all in the meeting... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** It's like this comic strip that -- |
**Luis Villa:** Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yup... I've been that guy. |
**Angelica Hill:** Intrigued to see how unpopular or in fact popular your opinion is. And then I want to ask you, Kris, for an unpopular opinion, given that we're just getting you back... I'm sure you have something on your mind; you always do. |
**Kris Brandow:** I have so many unpopular opinions... I don't think this is gonna be unpopular... So I think most people probably agree... But it's like a thing I want to put out into the universe more, and that is that every tech company larger than probably 20 or 30 people should hire a librarian. |
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