text stringlengths 0 2.46k |
|---|
• Valsorda's open source projects and history, including YouTubeDL and the Heartbleed test |
• The dynamics of open source community and project maintenance |
• Valsorda's experience as a maintainer and his views on the importance of making a living from open source work |
• Filippo Valsorda's background in security and his work on the Go project |
• His transition from being a corporate employee to working independently on open source projects |
• The challenges of maintaining open source projects, including burnout and team turnover |
• The concept of a team as a collection of edges (connections between people) rather than nodes (individuals) |
• Valsorda's proposal for a new model for maintaining open source projects, which involves a maintainer working independently while still being supported by the community |
• His work on the Age file encryption tool and the makecert tool |
• The importance of sustainability in open source projects and the need for new models to support maintainers |
• The speaker is proposing a new business model for maintaining open-source projects, specifically for companies that rely heavily on them. |
• The model involves a retainer contract where companies pay for access to the project's maintainers and to influence the project's direction and roadmap. |
• Reciprocal access is a key component, where companies provide feedback and input on the project's development, and the maintainers take their concerns into account when making decisions. |
• The model is designed to align incentives between the project maintainers and the companies that use the project, ensuring that the project is developed with the needs of its users in mind. |
• The speaker emphasizes that this is not about closed-door access or paying for features, but rather about providing a service to help companies navigate the project and ensure their needs are met. |
• The model is tailored for critical projects that would take months to replace, and the speaker uses a framework to determine whether a project is critical to a company's business. |
• Transparency trees and checksum database for ensuring Go module integrity |
• Legibility of open source maintainers as experts and the importance of framing and presenting information in a way that's familiar to others |
• The concept of being "legible" as a reliable borrower or vendor, and how this applies to open source projects |
• The idea of being accessible as an expert, similar to a lawyer on retainer, for on-demand advice and consultation on specific topics |
• The use of a minimum guaranteed amount of meetings, but an unlimited amount of time for questions and advice, with a six-hour SLA for urgent help on vulnerabilities. |
• Unlimited access to a maintainer for security and risk management |
• Reciprocal access model with incentives aligned for maintainer and client |
• Scalability of services without fixed time standards |
• Potential for a career path in open source maintenance |
• Early success with six clients, with a goal of 15-20 clients |
• Challenges and difficulties in enterprise sales and client acquisition |
• Open-source projects can generate revenue through relationships with companies, not just donations |
• Other professions, like dentistry, have a clear path to financial success, but open-source projects lack a clear model |
• Critical projects, like programming languages, can be sustainable and reproducible |
• Different projects are well-positioned for this model depending on market, segment, and company needs |
• Maintainability and legibility are key to success, and companies are more open to this model than maintainers |
• This model is not yet scalable for projects that need financial stability immediately |
• Proving the value of the concept through repeat business and client retention |
• Potential for scaling and iteration of the model |
• Need for a more formalized or named approach to describe the model |
• Discussion of potential revenue streams and categorization (grants, consulting, paid support, etc.) |
• Importance of client communication and proactive outreach to maintain relationships and provide value |
• Idea of creating a curated newsletter or report on industry developments and trends |
• Comparison to other industries and business models, such as lobbying and punditry |
• Difficulty of quantifying the value provided to clients and measuring success |
• Discussion of categorizing personal approach to software development |
• Proposal of "professional maintainership" as a potential category label |
• Consideration of making the label more specific or adding context |
• Invitation for listeners to suggest alternative labels or models |
• Encouragement for Filippo Valsorda to continue sharing his approach and experience |
**Jerod Santo:** Alright, well, I'm here with Filippo Valsorda, formerly of Google's Go team, now a full-time open source maintainer. Welcome to the show. |
**Filippo Valsorda:** Thank you. Nice to join you. |
**Jerod Santo:** Nice to have you, and a big congratulations. You made the announcement official February 2nd of 2023 on your blog. Pretty cool, man. You made it to full-time. |
**Filippo Valsorda:** Indeed. Thank you. It was a big relief. When I left Google, this was basically just a project, an idea, and when I started recruiting clients, it was entirely like "This might work, this might not work... I might just be looking for a job in six months." |
**Jerod Santo:** Right |
**Filippo Valsorda:** And it was actually a big relief sending out the blog post and saying "Alright, so this is it. I can share it now. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. Very cool. And you're not merely surviving on like a ramen kind of a thing; you said in the post you have six amazing clients at the time, and you're making an amount of money equivalent to your Google's total compensation package, which is - that's a nice package, right? It's not like "I'm just ... |
**Filippo Valsorda:** Yup. You know, I don't want to make this too materialistic, I totally get that people do open source not just for the money, and that's me, too. I've built a career in open source also by doing a lot of it on the side, and not specifically to make money. But I think it does matter a lot too whethe... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[06:31\] Exactly, exactly... Which is why I do think it's a big deal, that this is a model that you've succeeded at and have written down how you did it, what you're doing... We're gonna dive into the details of exactly the setup that you have. Let's first talk about your open source bonafides, as the... |
**Filippo Valsorda:** Yeah, so I started early on with YouTubeDL, the Python program - not too little these days - that downloads from the various websites. |
**Jerod Santo:** Did you start that? Or did you work on it? |
**Filippo Valsorda:** I absolutely did not. But I joined at a time... |
**Jerod Santo:** I was about to say "Thank you, thank you." I still use it to this day. I mean, I'll still say thank you, but even more so. |
**Filippo Valsorda:** No, they were actually super-nice. They let me join as maintainer when I was barely more than a kid, figuring out Python. And yeah, I was around when the maintainers had other things to do, so I just took a bit of the lead of working on it. |
One thing I remember doing is making it a little easier to add modules. At the time, it used to support just five different websites, and then I made it easier to just drop a Python file in a folder, and now you support another thing, just adding a couple of regex'es. And that was a hell of a lesson on open source, bec... |
By the way, as a tangent - when the RIAA went after YouTubeDL, and GitHub then obscured them, then reinstated them, and did that fantastic job setting up the fund, I was emotionally involved with the whole thing, and tried to help as much as I could, because it is a bit of my origin story. I'm glad that they're doing w... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. So maybe you can catch me up then, because I was definitely paying attention then, but I continued to use YouTubeDL until very recently; it seemed that something changed, and the way I used it wasn't working, and so then I switched to... Is there a takeover project? YT-DLP? I'm not sure if it's t... |
**Filippo Valsorda:** Yeah, so at the time, the thing resolved with YouTubeDL carrying on with the same maintainers, and I can't claim to be a maintainer anymore. I do Go these days. But I think what happened is that they also got busy in life, and that is the very churn of open source maintainership we're talking abou... |
**Jerod Santo:** That's the beautiful thing, is like, this one stopped working, and then I was like "Dang, it was working so well. It's not working", and I went out and I was like "Oh, there's a fork that the community is running with called YT-DLP, and because it's a fork, it was actually feature-flag compatible, at l... |
\[09:59\] Going back to your work, though - so some people don't know this, and it took me a while to realize this... I just thought it could download off of YouTube. But pretty much at this point darn near any web page that has a video in it somewhere, it's probably going to figure it out, and that's probably because ... |
**Filippo Valsorda:** Yep, indeed. It's built so that it has zero dependencies, but it's very easy to drop in a new module and just write the regex'es it needs, and has helpers for everything. It can just download from about any website. At some point I need to download some videos of a conference and it didn't support... |
**Jerod Santo:** Beautiful. |
**Filippo Valsorda:** So yeah, it's a project that's still very close to my heart. |
**Jerod Santo:** And very useful. |
**Filippo Valsorda:** And that's how I got started in open source. After that, I started working more and more on security, on cryptography, and on Go, which are pretty much what I work on these days. I built the Heartbleed test back in 2014, when the big Open SSL vulnerability came out. I was basically emulating somet... |
**Jerod Santo:** Oh... Did you have a big bill? |
**Filippo Valsorda:** Yeah... For where I was at the time, yeah. Just out of high school... It started getting into the five figures, and I was like -- sorry, four figures. But still... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.