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**Break:** \[52:20\] |
**Mikeal Rogers:** So I'm trying to pull this back a little bit from the history and get it more into what these foundations actually offer to projects, so why you would wanna spin one up or join one. I think there are some huge disparities in just what these foundations do, for instance. You mentioned that Apache runs... |
So with the member organization, you definitely need to have a wall between the project and the board, because the board is the corporate interest, right? Like the pay-to-play board, and you can't have them just sticking their thumb in the project... |
**Danese Cooper:** That's how Jim has it set up. There are other possible setups, right? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, well there are infinite possible setups. |
**Danese Cooper:** He's using board membership to drive fundraising. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Right, but also there is not a connection between board membership and, for lack of a better term, project ownership. So you have this wall between the project governance and the board governance, and the board governance is mainly dealing with the institutional aspect... Whereas I think in Apache be... |
**Danese Cooper:** Well, only in extreme cases, actually. 99% of the time as appeals come to them to deal with issues, they turn it back to the project committee. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yes, but the projects also operate under a process that is pretty strict, and the interpretation and how that process is written is owned by the board, right? |
**Danese Cooper:** Yes, that's true, but getting them to take the kind of action that you're talking about... Like, troublesome member of my project - this person on my project is really creating a lot of problems for the whole project, and everybody's mad at them and we can't figure out how to get rid of them; the boa... |
They only get involved in really the most extreme cases, or if that person is actually on the board, they would deal with it because they are the project, right? But yeah, it can be vexing actually, the extent to which they wanna turn it back to the project, and a lot of the -- it's been very successful for projects th... |
They have a couple of times stepped in and restructured a project that they thought was otherwise healthy (had a lot of contributors), but there was some kind of poisonous aspect to the project brewing. They have put in almost like a special master, who is nominated by the board to get the project back on track... Less... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Right, right. I wanna get into the future of open source a little bit, and I think that I know how to bring us there. In the io.js days, in the fork, when we were considering where we could go, like "Could we put this into a different foundation? Could we go into Apache?" were we going to need a new,... |
It was less than six months old, and we had been iterating on it a lot, and we were wildly successful, but we were not confident enough that what we had written down at that time was not going to need to evolve and change, and it definitely has had to evolve and change over the last few years... And one of the constrai... |
\[01:00:06.25\] So if we're looking at like where new projects go -- I think just in the last few months Apache said that you can even have your project on GitHub, so... If you wanna use new tools, if you wanna use new governance structures, there are constraints with some of these other foundations. And then moving aw... |
**Danese Cooper:** Well, it's an interesting question. The Drupal Association was having some problems last year - not the problem that recently happened, but more funding problems the association was having, because they make their money from a conference, so they're subject to the vagaries of the conference business.... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** It's a liability, it's not an asset, right? |
**Danese Cooper:** But he was unwilling to take a project on that didn't host itself on GitHub, so he's made a tooling trace as well. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** There have been projects that were brought on in that time, that use non-GitHub tooling. I think that the distinction though is that they don't have tooling that they entirely have to own the maintenance and hosting of, right? |
**Danese Cooper:** Right. Well, everybody had to do that back in the day, because SourceForge, although it existed, you couldn't really run a project on it. I think going forward, there's a general consensus that spinning up a thousand foundations is probably not gonna keep scaling, partly because it's so hard to do no... |
It depends on how you define umbrella. Apache thinks it's an umbrella, the Linux Foundation also thinks it's an umbrella... Each of the Linux Foundation foundations are technically separate - they have separate by-laws and separate articles of incorporation - but they're under the Linux Foundation family, if you will. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Also, some of those individual foundations are their own umbrellas, as well. It's complicated... |
**Danese Cooper:** Right. Jim is point out that those foundations can leave the nest anytime; they lose some things, but they might also gain some things by doing that. I think if too many of them do that and he becomes known as a foundation mill, then he may have trouble, if it turns out that the tax authorities are n... |
And then there's the whole question of the locus of the foundation. The vast majority of open source foundations exist in the U.S., and that's because most of the really deep pocket funders also exist in the U.S. and they get tax breaks if it's a non-profit. And also, it's relatively easy to start a non-profit in Europ... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** So there's the question of whether to spin up your own foundation or not, and I think we've talked about that. Then there's also the question of "Why join an umbrella foundation now at all, especially (I think) if you're not, let's say, a Node-sized project?" What does Apache or Linux or any of the ex... |
**Danese Cooper:** \[01:04:09.12\] Right. Well, a smaller scope project probably wouldn't do well in Apache, because there's an assumption of ongoing contributorship that isn't just you. If you are looking for additional contributors and it was sufficiently interesting, then it might make sense. The tiny projects that ... |
Now there's a foundation trying to retroactively help them without them actually being part of the foundation, and it's a little bit "cat herd-ey". |
I think that a middling sized project can totally just live on GitHub. I think that companies need to not create foundations to hold their IP. Microsoft did that at one point about five years ago, maybe four years ago, and there were some other companies that did it because it looks attractive, because you can create a... |
When PayPal asked me if they should create a holding foundation for their open source assets, I said "Oh, hell no!" I think that's been proven as a bad answer. |
But for an individual project, I think you start on GitHub, you see how much traction you can gain... If you get to the size where big, deep pockets are starting to come calling, you're probably gonna find yourself pushed into a foundation, if only because they're more comfortable that the legal procedures are somewhat... |
A lot of the way that we do things in open source comes down to Sun legal and IBM legal coming up with things that made them comfortable. Most of these licenses rest on copyright law, and copyright law is a good choice because they're almost immediate remedies if you can find infringement; you can stop software from sh... |
So copyright law is what they rest on, but U.S. copyright law, if you have to go to court, you have to assemble all of the people who have any claim to copyright and get them to - at least the majority of them - agree to your line of defense, and that's not gonna be easy if you haven't already aggregated the copyrights... |
Modern projects are asking whether things like a contributor agreement, which creates the copyright aggregation, is too much of a barrier to entry, because they're optimizing for contribution instead of optimizing for long-term legal viability. But you've gotta remember that IBM famously stuck through a lawsuit that th... |
\[01:08:21.07\] If you know about the UNIX wars, establishing who owned UNIX is a pretty tricky thing to do, but IBM, instead of settling that suit, instead of doing anything else, actually saw it all the way to its bitter end - at least we think it's done - and it was proven that SCO didn't have a claim, and that Linu... |
So they actually spent an enormous amount of money on figuring out exactly who owned all the parts of UNIX and Linux and all the other IX's and making it clear that SCO's claim was spurious, right? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** To bring us back in push towards wrapping up a little bit - we talked a bit about why it's now just more important than ever to increase adoption and then get contributors, right? And I think one of the things that you're seeing in these news communities as pushback is that what they are feeling and ... |
**Danese Cooper:** Well, we don't know yet what the legal challenges to all of that are gonna be; it's gonna be interesting to see. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Right, but that's such a hundredth-order problem from the problems that they're dealing with, right? And in particular if you're talking about establishing who wrote the work with these utilities, who would need them from day one. And in reality, we have them with zero of day one software, right? Nob... |
**Danese Cooper:** Well, there are a couple of really famous projects that are not aggregated, and one of them was a challenge to J2EE (Java Enterprise Edition), and that software -- the guy (Marc Fleury was his name) was an ex-Sun employee, and he was very concerned that he was gonna get sued personally, and his lawye... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** This was the Linux model for a long time too, right? |
**Danese Cooper:** Well, they didn't do it intentionally; they did it because they thought it was gonna be a barrier to contribution, I think... Or they just didn't think of it. I think initially it wasn't a high-order issue. The whole contribution question didn't really come into being until about the time that Mozill... |
\[01:12:00.12\] I mean, I'm immensely encouraged because there's now gonna be (it seems) a formal legal challenge to the GPL. We just found out that GPL was a good enough contract that they were willing to let it be tried in court in the U.S., which is -- every other time in the U.S. that that's happened, it's been set... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** So we're thinking about this from the point of view of these open source projects on a somewhat individual basis, and I think that we have an assumption that over time it gets more adopted and it becomes more of a target and so on, but if you actually take a modern application and work through it and... |
**Danese Cooper:** Well, but then you see people who are getting sued for stealing trade secrets and stuff between industries, right? That stuff expresses itself in open source, too, so... It's a thornier problem than you think, but I understand the reordering of the issues based on what feels like the most important t... |
I think that contributors to projects like Node realize that, but again, when I said at the beginning "Money changes everything" - most of this stuff came up around the money, not around the contribution, right? So I think as with everything, if you follow the money, you can understand the motivations for things, so... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. I think that people tend to think of money as being directly flown into the project, but money is flying around all the time, and if you don't think about how it's influencing stuff, it'll just sneak up on you, right? |
**Danese Cooper:** Yeah, and it takes a lot of vigilance to keep that from happening. Keeping the same people involved -- so the BDFL model I think is pretty difficult to sustain for any length of time, because people get old, and you can't pass on that right... I mean, you really can't; we've seen it tried many times ... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** They get bored quicker than they get old, but yeah... |
**Danese Cooper:** Right. Well, there's been some hacks on it. The Debian people vote in a leader every year, which is kind of an interesting thought... Because there was a BDFL, but then there's also a Debian leader. The BDFL is gone, but he's also not been involved for a really long time. |
So the consensus model seems like it's winning just because there's no way to live long enough to keep the BDFL thing going... Although some of the most powerful software is still BDFL software. |
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