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**Nadia Eghbal:** Yes. |
**Danese Cooper:** She runs Mozilla. She has run Mozilla since the beginning of time... So she started as a lawyer and she wrote the license, and then she got intrigued by the project. She had actually worked at Sun before she went to work for Netscape, so they knew her as a lawyer. And she got intrigued... She got a j... |
She had a pretty good severance package, she had a golden parachute of some kind, so she wasn't worried about money. She went home, she dusted herself off and she logged on and she kept running the project, and all of the engineers kept deferring to her, more importantly, right...? \[laughter\] And to be fair, they did... |
So she called me up one day and she was just panicked. She was like, "They're gonna pull the plug", and that's when we got it together to strong-arm them to create a foundation, basically. But think of that chutzpah, man, right? That's open source. |
\[28:15\] When I give the talk now to people about standing in their power as open source developers -- because honestly, the influx of new people that have come into open source, the most troubling this for me hearing them talk is a lack of understanding about where they can push back, and that they're gonna lose the ... |
**Break:** \[29:00\] |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Having that history is so important because what I've seen is a lot of people feeling isolated and not having that sort of long historical lens of seeing examples of where the other people have been able to push back and really understanding that, and I think almost some of that comes from open source... |
**Danese Cooper:** Yeah, if you were an engineer before we did all of this work to change things -- I mean, it would be a lot like being an engineer now in a lot of places like Accenture and those places. Think of yourself as a cog in a wheel for a minute; the problem is that engineers are artists. A good engineer is a... |
I mean, one of the reasons that Microsoft was so opposed to open source I think was their developer base -- when Steve Balmer ran around, screaming about developers with the sweaty armpits and all that, he wasn't talking about people that were gonna get to invent Microsoft products, he was talking about consumers of Mi... |
\[32:26\] So there's two kinds of programmers - there's people who invent stuff, and there's people who work with Microsoft's tools, and that's why it was so dangerous to them. And that was a gross generalization; of course, there are people who invent stuff with Microsoft's tools, but there's a really large percentage... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I think that's a big distinction that's growing now, especially as programming is becoming easier for a lot of people... And that's sort of the point, right? You have these tools that you don't have to go deep into the weeds and figure out how to build things. |
**Danese Cooper:** Well, that's what abstraction does, right? We're working on five and six GL languages now, and those abstractions save you from having to pay attention to pointer math, or any of the things that you used to have to really have got, like, powers to learn how to use the language well. But along with th... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** That's how I felt coming into it as an outsider... Like, "Wait a minute, all these people are forming the foundation of software for everyone else, but they seem to not have the leverage that they should", and I think that that's the part where even for an open source developer today who's pushing thi... |
**Danese Cooper:** Yeah, which is why I do that talk... \[laughs\] |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, which is really important. |
**Danese Cooper:** ...which we're gonna call the superpower talk. It has a superhero in it, and everything; he happens to be a little boy, but... Yeah, I think it's really important for people to realize that you've gotta be uppity, because you know, it's kind of like democracy, right? If you wanna talk about the real ... |
When we started out, people were just so excited to have an opportunity to work together and get stuff done so much faster and so much more efficiently than it was happening in their day job. People used to say things like, "Look, if my employer ever tells me I can't do this, I will quit, because this is the only thing... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Wow... That's such a difference from now, where people just flow in and out of contributing to open source in their jobs, a lot of the time... Whereas back then it was like, "Oh no, this is what I do to stay sane on my \[laughs\] nights \[unintelligible 00:35:29.24\]" |
**Danese Cooper:** Yeah, very much so. It very much was that way. And part of why I've been pushing inner source so hard is because I think we'll see a time - as with democracy - where it's so much an accepted fact that we start to lose ground on what we want for ourselves... Because we want a lot of autonomy and a lot... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[36:21\] Well, also a lot of projects are global; it's always night somewhere, so... |
**Danese Cooper:** Exactly. Before the internet, we didn't have good enough communications to do global projects. That was baked into open source, that assumption that somebody was always awake. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. So moving on through this a little bit... |
**Danese Cooper:** Yeah, you're trying to get to foundations... I apologize. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, it's okay. This is all great, so it doesn't matter. You've been involved in more foundations than I can count... I mean, just for the audience to be aware - you mentioned Mozilla and Apache, the Node.js Foundation you've been a part of since we started... |
**Danese Cooper:** Yeah, the Open Hardware Association - I helped them get off the ground, the Drupal Association... I've had conversations with Ushahidi, I've spent a fair amount of time -- I've done a lot of "Let me just help you with this one little problem" with lots and lots of different foundations. |
Before there was the Linux Foundation, there was something called The Open Source Developer Labs (I think that's what it was called), and I helped them out, although they were really set up so that Linus would always have an employer, because Linus took a job with a chip manufacturer at one point, and announced that he... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, that's a word of warning for future BDFL projects. When you have a BDFL and a bunch of companies depend on your project, you need to be terrified that one of your competitors will eventually hire that person. It's one of the old things that LF (Linux Foundation) still does - they make sure that... |
**Danese Cooper:** Well, and to circle back on companies, I always say that there are no open source companies, there are only companies that are good to their open source employees, and if you look at Guido van Rossum, for instance, who invented Python, or Rasmus Lerdorf, who invented PHP - both of them had really, re... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah... So getting back to what I actually wanted to do... So a lot of these foundations have very different contexts that they came out of. When does a project need to start a foundation or they need to go into a foundation? What are the constraints that it's under where it needs that kind of instit... |
**Danese Cooper:** They're just on GitHub somewhere, yeah. So in the early days, the foundations were another way to convince people that you were serious about open sourcing, and you weren't gonna try to control it over much. There were a lot of attempts in the early days to leverage open source by big companies that ... |
\[40:25\] They kept throwing tarballs over the wall everytime they did something clever, but unfortunately that completely ticked off the people that were working on the public project and trying to solve some of the same problems... Because it'd be like, you know, I'm building a snowman - I've done the body, I've done... |
If Apple had created a foundation and made a commitment to working within that foundation to build their product in addition to everything else, that would have been unimaginable for them, but there were a lot of projects that went "Okay, let's make it a foundation, that way anybody that wants to can come in and work h... |
After the web server was a done thing and Apache was wondering about how to be relevant, Brian was really big on "Well, let's do Java. Java is the newest thing since sliced bread; they're gonna need to do some open source, let's make it the home for Java." Sun ended up not wanting to use that home, but at the same time... |
But that argument, that battle happened transparently at Apache. Anybody that cared about that cared about that could watch it happen, which is different than standards bodies, where everything happens behind closed doors by design, because none of the companies want anybody to see the political machinations they're go... |
Well, let's see... We might as well talk about Node, since both Mikeal and I work on Node. Node ended up at a foundation because we were trying to heal a fork. The community was rebelling against the trademark holder, because it was set up as a BDFL organization, and the thing that people don't understand about BDFLs i... |
\[44:13\] There were a lot of disagreements, there was a lot of desire on the part of the community to move forward, and the trademark holder couldn't keep up with the pace of interest in change, because they hadn't resourced it to deal with the growth that was happening... Because it wasn't part of their direct line o... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** It's interesting, I feel like I'm hearing a lot about... Foundations are - and especially historically - meant to be a governance mechanism, right? And I think there's sort of a misinterpretation of foundations sometimes as the way to raise money in itself or pay a maintainer to work on a project, but... |
**Danese Cooper:** Yeah, the deal about the money... I have to say, I've spoken out against pay-to-play boards, which upsets Jim Zemlin. I think everytime I say it, Jim Zemlin thinks that another kitten has died in heaven, right? Because he is genuinely trying to do the right thing; he's not a bad guy, and his concepti... |
One of the things he really saw was the inability to attract top talent because they just couldn't get paid at the same scale to work on foundation work, because the foundations didn't have that kind of budget. Now, Apache really kind of only spends money on sysadmins, and I think they do pay them pretty close to scale... |
Mozilla had the same problem, actually, that Jim identified. They were losing their top talent to, say, fellow travelers - not so much competitors, just fellow travelers - like Google, because Google was the new hotness and they were sucking up all the talent in town... But Mozilla really felt like they needed to make ... |
This was kind of new thinking on their part, because it was challenging the way that the tax authorities like to see things done. But they were trying to do the right thing; they were saying "No, we'll pay taxes on our profits, and we'll generate profits and that will allow us to hire people and pay them what will keep... |
But Jim's idea was "Let me streamline fundraising" -- and he inherited OSDL, which the buy-in cost to be part of OSDL was pretty high, and it wasn't clear what you were getting for that money, so a lot of his funders were really balking at the high price. So he reimagined all of that, and part of it was "I'm gonna hire... |
\[48:34\] He was aided in this quest by the fact that the whole idea of an open source foundation became controversial to the government... Because when they started out, we looked like raggle-taggle bands of hippies, right? And 10-15 years on, all of a sudden there's huge value being created in these foundations, and ... |
Apache went the other way - there's only one Apache Foundation, but you can be a project under that foundation. And there are a couple of others we should probably mention. There's one that came out of the free software movement called The Software Conservancy, and there are a lot of projects that are there, and... God... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** There's a bunch of other ones... There's the FSF, there's the Software Freedom Law Center, there's the Eclipse maybe... |
**Danese Cooper:** Yeah, exactly... I clearly forgot about them. Well, yes, but no... Eclipse was built for a different reason. It was originally organized around a project that IBM created, a development environment for Java, and it was an anti-competitive move, or a competitive move against Sun, because Sun had an op... |
Now, you're right that Mike Milinkovich has moved it into a space where there are a lot more than just that there, and not all of it is Java anymore either, so yeah, I guess maybe they are... But it's almost like neighborhoods - a certain kind of person is a tenant at the Eclipse Foundation, versus the Software Conserv... |
Software Freedom Law Center is not actually a home for software, it's a home for legal advice... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Right, right. |
**Danese Cooper:** ...but the FSF has been, and maybe was the first foundation that accepted other people's projects. Their way or running things is very particular. You're basically trusting the Free Software Foundation to run your project forever forward. In fact, they made an assumption early on that if you put your... |
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