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**Daniel Bachhuber:** Well, I think how to decide upon new features as it relates to liberal contribution policy would be a good angle to it. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Very good. Yeah, I agree. We'll have to get into it. Maybe we'll do a conference panel, or something like that. Thanks for coming on though, we really appreciate you taking the time. |
**Daniel Bachhuber:** Thank you so much for having me. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So we're here for the finale episode -- and it's just a bummer to say that, but it is the real thing... |
**Jerod Santo:** Bittersweet... Bittersweet. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, bittersweet... Of this great show. This show began -- I don't even know the date, Jerod, but the very first time we talked to Nadia, which you found one of her first articles around open source and sustainability, and just this problem, so to speak... |
**Jerod Santo:** How Nadia stumbled upon the internet's biggest blind spot - is that what it was called, Nadia? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's what it was. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, something like that. |
**Jerod Santo:** That one caused a splash, and caught my eye, and we had you come on the show... For the long-time listeners of RFC, y'all probably remember some of this history. After we had Nadia on the Changelog, we had a great time, it was a very good show, we kind of kept the door open for you to do your own thing... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I think we even said at the end of that show too, "You know, Nadia, we'd love to hear you on the podcast, having conversations, that you're probably having to do these long-form essays on Medium... We'd love to hear the behind-the-scenes of this." That's essentially the rough recipe we began with. |
Then you went away for several months. We released the show, it was great, all that good stuff; you continued on your path, and then I think around four or so months later you came back and like "Hey, I've evolved this idea, I've talked to my buddy, Mikeal (which was also a friend of ours as well)" and then it became t... |
**Jerod Santo:** So here we are, this will be episode 20 of Request for Commits... A couple of years later, Nadia and Mikeal, we are winding down here and calling this not just the season's finale, as we've done before, but the series finale of RFC. Tell us about that decision, and maybe even the path that the show wen... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I'll let Nadia start, because I'm gonna end up showering Nadia with compliments about her stuff, so why don't we... \[laughter\] |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Lols... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I think it'll work better if you go first. |
**Jerod Santo:** Alright, Nadia, you go first. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Alright. Yeah, I think the decision came kind of in a good way in just talking to Mikeal, and both of us realizing that when we started this show a few years ago - yeah, I originally talked to you folks at Changelog - no one was really thinking or talking about this very much on a broader scale... The... |
A couple of years down the line, as we were thinking about what would a season three look like, or who else do we wanna bring onto the show, I'm kind of feeling like a lot of these stories are out there now - not just on RFC, but just all over the place... We're kind of at a point where sustainability is a little bit m... |
\[03:37\] I often have this -- I just think back to early 2016 and how we still had to make a case back then that this stuff was important. I remember having so many conversations with people that were just like "Yeah, open source is great, and everything is going really well. People like working on this stuff without ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay, Mikeal, shower with praise. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Don't...! \[laughter\] |
**Mikeal Rogers:** So I've been in open source for a really, really long time, and I've been trying to talk about the GitHub generation open source for quite a while; I've written about it, I've given talks about it, and still, the moment I got in front of anybody from an older generation of open source, or anybody who... |
After Nadia's work came out -- and really, this started to become really obvious as we were sort of recording season two... So we kind of planned season two before this was really kind of taken for granted... But all of that changed. Everyone that I talked to about sustainability now, not only are we like on the same p... |
Now I feel like there's been a very, very big shift in what we look at for open source sustainability and how we talk about it. The making the case stuff, which really felt like part of what we were doing with the show, was like talking to people and getting a lot of their stuff out there, and we're exploring what sust... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I did not fix it, but yeah, I think it's stuff like this -- I think the focus early on was just exposing as many stories as possible... Especially for me, coming into this space and being new to it, and not having a long background... My start was basically just like point to all these stories I was c... |
Yeah, I think that was a big part of making the case, being like "Here are all the stories", and at some point you can't really deny that it's a problem, when you're hearing it from lots of ecosystems and lots of different types of people in all these different ways. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[07:52\] It's interesting too, because your perspective was from a venture-backed scenario; I don't know the full story, but you came from a different angle, you weren't really in software day-to-day, but you saw this larger problem and you're like "How is no one talking about this? How is this not... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** It might have been right before we talked... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** It was after your initial article, though. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Because your initial article was 13th January, 2016, and I'm gonna fastly -- |
**Jerod Santo:** April 2014 was Heartbleed, but... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, so a couple years before then. So the Core Infrastructure Initiative may have been in place from the Linux Foundation around then. I think that was just before your timeframe of that post... But you know, these things were happening, you were just pointing to case studies, essentially; these s... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** It's a lot of things. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right? |
**Nadia Eghbal:** It's more complicated than that, I guess. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. People think "If I just had money...", but we've found from some people that they were like "Well, I'm glad I've got money. Now I don't know what to do with it. Now I've got another problem, now I've got money to deal with." |
**Jerod Santo:** Money problems. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. Well, I think in the very initial article that you first wrote, it was framed a little bit more financially... And I remember the first time that we spoke - you had already spoken to a lot of open source maintainers, but I was also very adamant that like "It's not a money thing." If the governm... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah. Our conversations, more than anything else, I think your perspective, Mikeal, really helped shape my view on that. At first I think it was really just about funding specifically, and then how it got kind of brought in more into sustainability, which is partly about money, partly about community,... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Can you take us back to maybe some of the topics you covered, or maybe some of the a-ha moments for you, Nadia, with the first few conversations you had with Mike? I know it was sort of over coffee or lunch, or something like that, like "Hey, I've been thinking about this", and obviously, the conver... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah. Man, that was so long ago. The structure around -- I remember you had this one post, Mikeal, "Healthy open source", is that right? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, I send that to everyone all the time, because there's like a really great diagram in there that's comparing the imbalance of maintainers and specifically the technical council, which was I think more specific to Node, but the idea of just having some core governance structure; then you have your... |
That, and then we talked about the role of contribution policies and theories, and I think that was also another really big moment for me... Because I think from talking to the maintainers, I got this one perspective of single maintainers saying "I'm really overburdened and I don't know how to manage all my issues", an... |
I think in my conversations with Mikeal helped me understand this aspirational of "Well, maybe it doesn't all need to fall on one person." That's a really great thing about open source - 1) you can always walk away, you don't have to carry all that burden, and 2) just thinking about how much can you push off to other p... |
\[12:24\] I think we do have slightly different philosophies on some of this stuff, and that's also why I think we're very complementary when we talk about this stuff. I think I'm still really interested in single-maintainer projects as something markedly different from -- most of the open source projects that make it ... |
I went really back and forth on this. At first I was like really like "Champion the maintainer!" and then I was like "Well, maybe there's a way to broaden it and bring in more contributors, so it's not so much work just for the maintainer, and you're off-loading some of that." I think I've come back to the maintainer s... |
I don't think every open source contribution deserves compensation, but it's more about like for the people that are really carrying the burden on the projects and how we support them. |
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