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**Andrew Nesbitt:** And that didn't kind of start from metadata, but the idea of that project was to encourage people to contribute to open source as part of kind of the run up to Christmas... And after kind of like first getting that off the ground, we quickly ran into "Oh, how do we suggest -- where should people go ... |
And that kind of led me down this path of "Okay, well, how do you define what a good project is?" And then "Can we scale that up, rather than manually having to have people kind of like submit their things and keep those things up to date every year?", because that project would just kind of come and go every December,... |
So I started to build out some basic metrics there to try and go "Does this project look like it has activity that's happening on it? Does it look like it's ever received third party contributions?", and things like that. And that led me to kind of -- I got a job at GitHub from there, and then GitHub promptly fell apar... |
So package manager metadata was like "Oh, this is really juicy", because it kind of gives me a hook into saying "These libraries are being used by other people." But download stats - again, available for most package managers, but not all - is often kind of wildly all over the place for certain projects, especially if ... |
\[08:18\] And the insight that I kind of accidentally tripped over was if we go mining the dependency information out of open source repositories at a large scale, you actually start to get a really good picture of how people really use open source, and how they don't use open source. Like, if a project breaks, you pro... |
So that kind of led me onto a path of "I should just try and index the dependencies of every open source project ever." And libraries.io started out as a search engine, designed to be like "I can help you try and find the best package." |
And that was primarily like "This package is well used, so therefore that implies it has good documentation, that it actually works, and other people are using it as kind of a proxy." And it grew and grew, and became a massive and expensive and difficult project to maintain as a side project, whilst I was doing contrac... |
Didn't really work out at Tidelift... There's a big cultural difference in the founders at Tidelift compared to me and Ben. Me and Ben are very -- we really like building and solving problems in the open, and shipping stuff really quickly, and kind of iterating on those things... And Tidelift's culture was - because th... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, who bought Tidelift? |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** Sonar? I can't remember the name. It's a security company. |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay. |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** And as a shareholder of Tidelift, I can tell you, I didn't get anything from the sale. |
**Jerod Santo:** Bummer, dude... |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** \[12:02\] But Libraries.io was there, and was open source, and after -- I took a break for a little while during the pandemic, which - you know, everyone had a kind of a crazy time... I went to do some contracting with Protocol Labs, basically kicking the tires on IPFS and Filecoin, and trying to us... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[unintelligible 00:12:31.22\] was pretty cool. |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** Yeah. \[laughs\] And then at the same time was talking to Schmidt Futures, which is now Schmidt Science... But one of the kind of sub-foundations of the Schmidt Foundation, who were basically saying "We have researchers that were using the data from Libraries.io for research", but now Libraries.io -... |
So Ecosyste.ms is essentially a do-over of Libraries.io. It's many different Rails apps that are focused on collecting different kinds of open source metadata, and then combining them together in different ways. So there's a packages service, there's a repo service that collects the dependency information from reposito... |
And that has been going on for nearly - I wanna say three years now... Really kind of like going from -- it was a nice kind of year where I just worked on it myself, didn't really tell anyone about it, just kind of like plugged away... And there are core pieces -- because Libraries.io is open source, I was able to reus... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[16:23\] Wow. |
**Jerod Santo:** Wow, |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** And it has become quite a piece of critical infrastructure to a number of different kind of areas of open source in terms of SBOM enrichment, and also trying to find those critical pieces of open source that need security work or need sustainability efforts to be kind of coordinated around them. |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, I'm happy to hear that you got to reuse some of your code from Libraries.io, because what I thought was gonna happen when you said "I airdropped it", I thought you were gonna just catch your own airdrop a few years later and be like "And because I open sourced it, I just relaunched it under a new... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned this is used in research... I guess, research terminology, so to speak. What exactly does that look like? Who are those folks? What kind of research are they doing? Are they developers? Are they developer-adjacent? |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** I think mostly developer-adjacent, or in the research space I guess you'd call them research engineers... Where lots of computer science researchers are like "We want to study what these behaviors are like across different package managers", or comparing what are developers doing in this space versu... |
**Break**: \[19:00\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** This might be silly, but let me ask you this... I've been researching some CLIs and I've been researching how CLIs install themselves. Sometimes they'll leverage the actual package manager of the distro, like a Linux distro or something like that... But most, by and large, just give you a URL to cur... |
If I wanted to somehow research CLIs and how they install themselves, and the various ways they install themselves, is that something that this service could do? Is that the level of research it could do? |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** Yeah. I mean, for one thing, you would be able to quickly find everything that had kind of tagged itself up as a CLI program. I've also been indexing every public image on Docker Hub, and basically running an SBOM scanner against each one of those. There would be some juicy insights there, to be abl... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Juicy? I like juicy. |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** "...of these things were installed via a distro package manager, versus "we just have a URL for this"? Which would be recorded in the SBOM, basically to say "Oh, we've found this known bit of open source, and it appears to say that it sits in this file system here", which implies it was installed by... |
So you'd be able to go "Oh, okay. Well, I can see -- here are the CLI programs that are being manually downloaded inside of Docker images as part of this install process." It's not gonna give you everything, but it certainly gives you a good proxy for "Okay, well, I can see where --" Like, relative usage of these thing... |
\[24:28\] And you actually end up looking, like -- I like the 80/20 rule, but it doesn't actually turn out to be like 20% of packages make up 80% of usage. It's like 0.01% of packages make up 80% of usage. These tiny amounts. There might be 2000 Node modules total that make up 80% of all of the usage of npm in terms of... |
When you then start to really focus that lens, you see a long tail of stuff that never gets used, and it's also like all kinds of spam and malware and stuff that floats around. But there's 10,000-15,000 packages which are the packages that make up most open source usage across all these ecosystems. |
**Jerod Santo:** It's kind of amazing how massive that asymmetry is when you pin that down to the individuals... |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** Yeah, and that's on average one maintainer per package at that critical level as well... So that's like 15,000 people maintaining all of open source usage. |
**Jerod Santo:** That makes the XKCD comic even more poignant. Now you're the one person in Nebraska - replace Nebraska with wherever they are in the world; probably in different towns... |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** And how many of them have you had on the Changelog? |
**Jerod Santo:** That's a good question. Probably a good percentage of those. Oh, man... So there's 15,000 people basically running the world for free. \[laughs\] |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** Well, I have done a little bit of indexing of how many of those have GitHub Sponsors, or are their projects on Open Collective, or they have some other kind of funding link... And in terms of those top critical packages, it comes out to kind of like - depending on the ecosystem, it's somewhere betwe... |
There's a good chunk of those as well that are massive, corporate-funded projects. Like, all of the AWS RubyGems that make up the AWS CLI are in the top of RubyGems, because they're just massively used. They don't need any funding, because Amazon has full-time staff. But there's a good -- |
**Jerod Santo:** They might need some funding. I hear they're laying people off again... \[laughs\] |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** Hopefully, they didn't lay off all the Ruby people maintaining the CLI there. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, that would be awful. So do you track -- so you're tracking those who are able to receive funding in some sort of automated fashion. Do you track funding itself? Like, who's getting how much money, and how? |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** Yes. Well, where possible. So I'm tracking -- I call it a funding link, and some package managers have funding links support, where you can say "Oh, you can donate to me over here." Repositories have the funding YAML file, and I go looking for that wherever possible. And you actually see that even o... |
\[27:54\] And then also being able to go "This repository is owned by a user on GitHub who is part of GitHub Sponsors" is another way of kind of detecting that. Even if they haven't added their funding YAML file, we can kind of make a hop to say "Oh, here's one of the maintainers to be able to support that." I then col... |
It's a bit weird, though. A lot of people who have realized that GitHub Sponsors is actually quite a good way to sell digital goods. If you go looking at the top users of GitHub Sponsors who have the most people funding them, they sell things like avatars, and Discord memberships, and eBooks, and things like that. They... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. That's fascinating. So they're kind of doing sponsorware, insofar as it's not a donation, or "You're supporting my work on this project." It's like "Actually, there's a quid pro quo here. We're going to trade a good or a service for that sponsorship money." Really, it's a purchase of some sort of... |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** Yeah, yeah. If you go looking, it's easy to see GitHub doesn't make it particularly -- like, they don't have a leaderboard... Which is a good thing, to not -- like, putting a leaderboard on things can often produce some very strange behaviors... |
There's also an interesting breakdown of like number of users who sponsor other maintainers, versus companies. Obviously, companies are going to sponsor a lot more in total amount per company, but the distribution is quite surprising in -- you're looking at easily 10 times as many individuals are sponsoring other peopl... |
**Jerod Santo:** Really? |
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