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**Evan You:** Yeah, so VoidZero obviously is supporting the documentary. We are the main sponsor, but we also managed to secure a few sponsorships from other companies that are either using Vue or actively involved in the Vite ecosystem. StackBlitz is one of them. Sentry, Shopify, Bolt, and Supabase. |
**Jerod Santo:** Nice. |
**Evan You:** Yeah. So we have quite a few interesting companies backing the documentary, too. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, that's really cool. I didn't know that side of it. I knew that they had renamed. I wasn't sure about the rename, Honeypot to CultRepo. And that's a really cool model, because they do a great job of telling you stories, and making them interesting. That's always the thing; you're like "It's the st... |
**Evan You:** Yeah. I think they are working on quite a few additional ones in parallel. I think they did one with Rails, I believe... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yup, I think that one's out there. And then we just helped promote the Python documentary as well. |
**Evan You:** Yeah, the Python one, the Angular one... They're doing a lot of great stuff, and I think it's definitely needed for the dev community. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. It's so cool to be featured as a person who writes software, to have your story told... Especially because it's never the story of one person. Like, maybe it starts with Evan You, but then the story actually weaves in and threads through all these people's lives, you know? |
**Evan You:** Totally. Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** It's really neat. |
**Evan You:** Yeah. I believe this is the great part. In a way, every time I see these documentaries starting with a big shot of me, I feel a bit uneasy... \[laughter\] I feel like I don't want these documentaries to be about just one person. In a way, open source is about people, so these documentaries should be about... |
**Break:** \[35:46\] |
**Jerod Santo:** So I've been curious about VoidZero, since you made the announcement this is a new direction for you, I suppose... Because prior to Vue, weren't you working at a big tech company? Was it Facebook, o...? Where were you working? |
**Evan You:** I was working at Google when I created Vue. |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. And then you went indie, and open source... |
**Evan You:** Yeah. I left Google in 2014. But I left Google to work at a startup called Meteor, which was also a startup working on open source JavaScript framework. |
**Jerod Santo:** Meteor.js?. |
**Evan You:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** I didn't know you worked there. Okay... |
**Evan You:** Yeah. I spent less than two years. So I left Meteor in 2016. So I officially became fully independent in 2016. That's when I started working on Vue full-time. Which means I've been working independently for like nine years now. |
**Jerod Santo:** Almost a decade. |
**Evan You:** Yeah. That's a long time. |
**Jerod Santo:** And you're kind of a poster child for "This can work." The open source independent thing with sponsorships can work. Now, it doesn't mean it's going to work for everybody... And in fact, for most people it doesn't work in that particular model. But for you, it was working. So you're kind of inspiring t... |
**Evan You:** Yeah, I've always considered myself lucky to make that work. Because to be honest, when I started doing it 2016, I had no idea if it was going to work. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. |
**Evan You:** I was like, YOLO... And was I like "I want to just work on this thing full-time, and let's see how long it lasts. Worst case scenario, I'm just going to go back and look for another job." But it was just so fulfilling to be able to work on something that -- you just work on that one thing, you know? |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. Yeah. It's really cool. That being said, I think we can probably count maybe on two hands - maybe not just one hand, but two hands - the people that have made that work, like you have. It is the exception, it's not the rule. |
**Evan You:** It is definitely an outlier kind of thing. In fact, a lot of people, a lot of open source maintainers have came to me over the years, asking for advice, "How can we make this work?" And in a way, my response was always "Look, it's hard to replicate exactly what I did. There's no real formula that you can ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. |
**Evan You:** It depends a lot on the kind of project you have... Even if your project is like wildly popular, what kind of layer it sits on also kind of determines a lot... Because for a framework like Vue, you get massive exposure and constant interaction with your users. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. |
**Evan You:** And people also kind of -- it's easier for people to feel more closely associated to a framework that they use every day, compared to something that sits lower level. The more lower level it is, the more difficult for you to get this sort of connection with your users. Like, an example I've always used is... |
So yeah, over the years we've seen a few other examples successfully sort of making this work, but... Yeah. I've also seen so many cases where they're trying to do what we do, but it's very challenging. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. Interestingly, I think WebPack was one that was making it work as well, maybe because again, they're right there, in your face. It's a build tool that you use every day. And for a long time -- well, they had a good evangelism as well, and large corporations using them, and so it became kind of co... |
**Evan You:** \[42:18\] Yeah, there is a project called thankyou.dev, I believe. Vite and Vue are actually on there too, but we receive such a small fraction compared to what we receive from, let's say, GitHub Sponsors. And given the amount of Vue's usage in the wild, I can kind of imagine how little maintainers of sma... |
I think the intention is obviously good. The idea of consumers open source should try to support the dependencies you're using... In theory, that's what everyone should do. I think the fundamental problem is the donation or sponsoring open source is just not a thing in many of these companies. So if we think about like... |
An individual developer, if you're just making a sort of side project, you're using open source, you're not even creating value yourself. So asking them to donate to the open source project - maybe they'll like donate one or two bucks a month. In the grand scheme of things, that's negligible. But if you think about a b... |
I guess for larger projects like Linux or Kubernetes, they can operate it in a very, very different way. They have foundations, they have bigger companies just backing those foundations... But many other open source projects kind of fall into this category where you're not big enough for these big companies to say "Hey... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Evan You:** So I think that's the unfortunate sort of state of things for a lot of open source projects, is that they are creating value for these commercial entities/businesses that's actually sort of using their open source projects. I wouldn't say it's -- it's close to freeriding in a way, but it's also because in... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[45:59\] Yeah. I think the corporate open source support movement was had some steam up until the market correction, when money became tight. And then it was like "Well, now we're doing layoffs, and now we're tightening the belt. We're not going to give money away that we don't have to." And so it's k... |
**Evan You:** Yeah, I think for Vite - it actually has a similar challenge, because it's a very high visibility project, but it's not as... It's still a little bit different from Vue, in the sense that it's not a framework in itself. |
**Jerod Santo:** True. But it has Evan You, and it's a command that you type into your terminal. Like, you're using it actively. It's not hidden from you. And so do you think -- I guess, where was your thinking with VoidZero and Vite? Was it like "We're not going to do the same model that we did last time?" Or did you ... |
**Evan You:** Yeah, it's a combination of multiple factors. So one thing is my experience with the sustainability side of Vue is that the success of Vue is an outlier, and has a lot luck involved. The timing - the fact that Vue was able to become now the second largest framework has a lot to do with doing the right thi... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Evan You:** If we were a business and we were only getting the amount of sponsorships we get today, which is like less than a million a year... That's like -- right? If it's a business, it's not a very successful business. |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Evan You:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** Successful open source project, not successful business. |
**Evan You:** Yeah, in terms of conversion rate. So it's all relative, but... Imagine if you're a business with like 2 million users and you're only making this much. That's not a lot. |
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