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**Andrew Nesbitt:** And most of that activity is public. So it's not like there are -- you can be anonymous as a GitHub Sponsor, but you can't really hide the fact that there is a sponsorship happening there. There's also on Open Collective some massive donations that go to certain projects through company sponsorships... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. It reminds me of way back in the day, Chad Whitaker's Gittip, which was later called Gratipay. |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** Oh, yes. |
**Jerod Santo:** Remember that? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** And it felt all warm and fuzzy, because people were getting money for their open source, but when you go looking at it very closely, most of that was like the same 50 bucks getting passed around between friends... Not a slush fund, but like a -- they just felt good. So I would make 20 bucks a month and... |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** I definitely do that. I sponsor 35 different people on GitHub Sponsors with just a few dollars a month, to just be like "I appreciate your work." I don't have a huge amount to support you with, but just as a way of saying "I noticed you and appreciate that you continue to maintain these things that ... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[31:59\] Well, I hoped GitHub Sponsors was big enough and mainstream enough to kind of change the shape of that. And maybe it's done it some, but it sounds like there's still more indies passing person-to-person kind of sponsorship than there is corporate-to-person. |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** Yeah, I think the change of interest rate across the world had a massive impact. The nice thing about Open Collective is they are -- especially Open Source Collective is very public. You can see the amounts of donations going in and going out... And there was a big drop around the time that -- like,... |
**Jerod Santo:** So you've got 12 million packages being tracked, 287 million repositories, 24.5 billion dependencies, 1.9 million maintainers... I'm reading these stats off of your website. There's a timeline of like public events on GitHub, there's issues, there's commits... I mean, there's just tons of different dat... |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** So that 24 billion dependencies is a bit of a headache. |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] I bet. I mean, that's crazy. |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** Almost all of this is stored in Postgres. |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay... |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** Individual Postgres instances on dedicated machines in France and Amsterdam, mostly because they're very affordable. Online.net is a very reliable host, similar to Hetzner or some of these other kind of bare metal machines. |
So I do the maintenance of the machine myself, and obviously, scaling up is a little more tricky, because there's not just a nice Heroku slider anymore... I use Dokku as essentially like the open source Heroku, which is really nice. |
Just git push, it builds your Docker image, and then it handles putting NGINX, kind of proxying all of those things. Very nice for like an individual machine. It doesn't really give you any kind of multi-machine things, but I try to avoid too much complexity when there's only a very small number of people working on do... |
And then the whole website is basically read only. Like, you can't ask -- you can't put data into it as a user. You read from it. And all the data comes in in the background through loading data from package managers, and repositories, and... There's about 2000 different Git hosts in there that I'm constantly crawling ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[36:31\] Is this a solar project again, or is this you and Ben back together...? Who's the band? |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** So Ben is working on it part-time. He is also one of the directors at Open Source Collective, which is -- you know, that's a lot of work in itself. And then we have a few people who are doing some part-time work. Martin has done all the design work... Which looks so much better than my efforts of th... |
**Jerod Santo:** How many apps is it now? |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** Oh, good question. It must be coming up to 20... But some of them are quite small. There's a load of services that are kind of like stateless. Like, I will just give you a SHA-256 of a tarball that you get from RubyGems or similar, and a lot of those I basically have on the chopping block to try and... |
So I wanna pull it down, and make it a little bit kind of like fewer services, but one of those services will be basically the "Which open source analysis do you wanna run against this package?" And then "Here's a massive fire hose of every activity that is happening", and you can hook those analyses in, to say "Okay, ... |
\[40:28\] And then we could actually start doing the interesting research. So what I hope is we get to a place where it's like "Oh, you don't need to do that. You can just use this open dataset", and that gives you a good starting point to then start to really dig into like "What's going on in these ecosystems?" That's... |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, you're certainly working your way towards that. So does Schmidt Sciences - do they foot the bill for all of this work? |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** So they gave a grant initially, to get started. Luckily, they gave it in dollars, and the exchange rate was very positive for a while, so we actually managed to stretch from a one-year grant into a two-year grant... And then Open Collective has been supporting the project as well as a fiscal host, b... |
And we also have a number of customers who pay for a different license for the data. So the data is CC BY-SA, which is like a copyleft license. You can use it for whatever you like, as long as you also persist the license and you credit where it came from. But if you don't wanna do that, then you can pay to essentially... |
So it's self-sufficient, it runs itself, as long as -- but you don't get any extra feature development on top of that. So that's where I'm trying to work on right now, is to get that level of sustainability higher. And we've just received a grant from Alpha Omega, to basically make that happen. |
Alpha Omega is part of OpenSSF, and their goal is turn money into security. And they have become a big user of Ecosyste.ms for doing analysis of like who are the critical projects in a particular space, who are the ones that are gonna be most likely impacted if there's a big security vulnerability? Who are the ones who... |
\[44:07\] And then also this kind of pipeline of analysis will be another way that -- it'll basically be like "Oh, you wanna run your LLM queries across all these package source code? Well, then you can funnel it through here. We'll just like tee that up and trigger it every time that we see a new release of a package,... |
I mean, what I'd really like to be able to do then is to actually do revenue share with the people who are maintaining those individual command line tools that do the analysis. Imagine being able to go like "Oh, we can help with supporting Zizmor, and Bullet", or all of these different things that are command line tool... |
**Jerod Santo:** That would be super-cool. So it sounds like there's a collection of potential income sources, some that are currently working, other ones that you're working on... The relicensing of the data for a fee seems like a good one. Is that potentially -- could you see a world where there's enough people that ... |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** Yeah, I think so. Especially this kind of dependent data, the 25 billion row table is really juicy in terms of the insights that you can get from that. The general package data though is often -- like, you can get Claude to generate you an npm scraper very easily. If you ask it to do it in Ruby, you... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's awesome. |
**Jerod Santo:** Do you get a nickel when that happens, or what happens? \[laughs\] |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** No, unfortunately not. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[unintelligible 00:46:39.08\] |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. Well, you know, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery... So just remember that. |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** Yes. It's tricky to get that kind of balance of like -- we want to give away as much as possible, especially as all of this data comes from open source. Like, it should be open, because it is data about open source. But then how do you continue to pay for that? ...whilst companies also can kind of g... |
So we try and take care of all of the horrible bits... And then also being able to fetch the Linux distro package managers, which is something that I'm trying to add more distro support in... Because each one of those has its own kind of like horrible rabbit holes of weird and wonderful metadata. And trying to work out... |
\[48:41\] Of course, you have two different SBOM standards. There can't just be one standard for things... But being able to look things up by \[unintelligible 00:48:50.15\] is something the ecosystem does really well, because you can basically then take an SBOM and just work through it, every single package that's in ... |
It's funny how much more traffic we get on a weekday than on the weekend... And I think it's just because of the GitHub Action kind of like "Oh, this is happening every time someone commits", so you see a smash of traffic of them enriching their SBOMs and checking out every package that is in there... And then the week... |
**Jerod Santo:** So you've mentioned a few of the weird, gnarly things like multiple SBOM specs etc. You have 35 ecosystems on here. npm, Golang, Docker, to name a few. Crates... NuGet, so you're in that world... Across 75 registries - so I'm assuming some ecosystems have multiple registries... |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** Yeah, Maven especially. There's lots of registries in the Maven world. |
**Jerod Santo:** And then -- oh, even Bower.io. I remember Bower. I don't know if people are still using that... Anyways. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Forever ago, man. |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** No one adopts anything, they don't accept any new packages, but you'll still find people that use them and download stuff through them, yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** So what I'm wondering is, where are the black sheep? Where's the gnarliest, weirdest -- like, let's not... I don't wanna create any enemies for you, Andrew, but which of these ecosystems are, in your own heart of hearts, notoriously hard to work with? |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** Well, the hardest bits are often the change over time, especially when you go back to the really old stuff. The classic one is that you'd think "Oh, npm - their names are case-insensitive." But if you go and try and index every name in npm, you will find about a thousand that are case-sensitive and ... |
So there's things like that, that when you go back into the time -- going back further and further is like "Oh, there's weird things here", especially when the package manager registry has a document database, rather than something that is always enforcing its schema in every record. And npm used to be CouchDB, which i... |
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