Open Source Matters w/ Chad Whitacre

is truer to what I understand to be that kind of Thanks, Scott. Thanks, Wes.

Here's what I wanna use this question to say.

JavaScript library.

And I think open source,

The MIT you know,

as We've got the CFO, that's the chief freeload officer, and the CTO that's the chief tightwad officer. And, actually, just last week, because we dug did those three billboards, any requirement that you pay for it. Okay? And so I just kind of grew up as a, you know, as a programmer with open source. Didn't really appreciate until years later that it, like, hadn't always existed. But, yeah, long history with open source really got involved

I'm gonna get outlawed one way or another. You know? If you're we sort of said, okay. Let's And, you know, you could say in the AGPL and the GPL and that share like stuff, you have it. You know? But that's such like an arm twisting, you know, like using the law against them to force them to share. And this is much more like, I love the posture of this, which is and are gonna hate anything, in my experience, you know, we could see how much this we get ESLint. But really kind of experienced the tension between you know, you know, on SaaS that you can download and install yourself using self hosted.

the software that I write, like, the the actual Node. Yeah. Not the the videos themselves all have their own individual You might need fair source, Wes. Yeah. There we go. No. You can't commercialize it. I need to join on. Yeah.

and Python and, like, the Python community in the aughts. You know? So these days, it's Django. Right? It's Django and it's Flask or, like, the big web frameworks, and there's some newer ones coming out. But back in the February, public on GitHub with their code but have which is really Wes, start to get on board with this and work together.

variant And to forget you know, it's kind of a letter of the law, spirit of the law kinda thing. Right? It's like, well, here's the letter of the law. Sure. But, like, what's the point? Like, why do we have these definitions? Why do we have these, like, you know, these these fine print legal things? What's the point? And that's where I get to this idea of this public community centric approach to building software. It's like, if we lose that, then, you know, it doesn't matter that we're, you know, crossing the t's and dotting the i's on the licenses. It's like, let's keep the main thing the main thing without, of course, you know, losing, If we meet someday and you think this stuff is worth it, you can buy me a beer and return, pull Henning Camp. That's it. That's the license. No legal fees. Just like yeah. Hey. If you like it, buy me a beer. I love it. And yeah. And I I used this you know, I found this license in, like, 02/2005 or whatever. I was like, oh, man. That's cool. You know? And so I, like, put it on a bunch of stuff. What I really like about this license, though, you know, obviously, it's fun. It's tongue in cheek. And, I guess, going back to what I was saying earlier, you know, in in in syntax.

popular. I love it. And it's seven years ago. You put it out seven years ago, and it still Seven years ago, updated it, I guess. Oh, okay.

that returns a promise after however many seconds you pass it or milliseconds. And you used MIT on it. There you go. And it, yeah, it's got

There's not a lot. It's jQuery Okay.

I see the Copyleft has a little more legalese in there that gives you some, you know, Nuance protections around patents, very popular license. Those are the two that we use at Sentry, by the way. MIT, we use for all of our SDKs, And they're using the AGPL

had an open source program. Yeah. Porsche open open source dot porsche dot com. Yeah. So Porsche ESLint the open source game. Maybe that's the one that goes I found the I'll I'll post a link to the Mercedes that's a a blog post about their, definition more niche political implications.

a hundred thousand people a week. It used to be even higher before AI

Really? You know, so Mercedes Benz has one of these FOSFONs, if I remember right, or they at least have an open source program that you can find. And let me just think. I for some reason, I feel like Porsche on the Syntax channel.

Mercedes embraces open source to drive its digital ecosystem.

yeah, to me, copy left misses the Facebook puts out React So that's kind of the heart of open source JS, like, this public community centric approach to building software. You Node? The legalese is kind of how it gets encoded, and there's a lot of detail in there. You know? But the result is we've got this thing called open source, you know, that anybody using software touches in some degree or another. And, you know, yeah, you can go as deep as you want down the rabbit hole on it. But that's kind of how I think of it as a at a high level.

if it's never used

and then Apache, we use for other components,

The two So FFMPEG You know, they were a little little newer. And, yeah, there was like a little thing I didn't like about what they're doing. And because they were on GitHub, I could go in and I could, you know, make a pull Wes, and they accepted it. And now it's in there. And you know, permission slip from the author to use the thing. Okay.

Cool. It's pretty cool. Right? To drive its d yeah. That's fine. There you go. Yeah. Speaking of, like like, interesting licenses, though, I need to find one for my, like, my teaching content because Oh, yeah. I've I published lots of examples and stuff online, and all of my course content is is open source. And I just explicitly put there, like, you can do whatever you want. You can have make a startup. This app that we're talking on right now was was based on some of my course code. But I was like, the only thing you can't do is you can't make another course teaching the exact same thing, which, unfortunately, has happened a few times. Yeah.

I like it.

Oh, my most my most popular module is the most embarrassing thing. It's called wait.

It's simply it's just a like, ten minutes, fix it, push a new version.

It's it's the perfect package. Yes. Exactly. It doesn't need anything. I'm just going through the iOS, where you don't get the thing unless you pay for it. Mhmm. Okay? And so in an open source business, the difference between the two, Permissive is like an MIT license or an Apache license or a BSD license or or my favorite when Wes get into the beerware license Wes it's like, just do whatever you want. You know? Like, take the software and do whatever you want with They're short licenses, generally speaking, and they're very simple. They're like, you know, take it, do whatever you want, just, you know, don't sue me if something goes wrong. Yeah. On the GPL side, on the Copyleft side, they're really long licenses,

Yeah. Page. I found a copy of it online, and I'm just searching. Get it. Yeah. It's tough to scroll. Yeah. They don't let you copy the whole thing, but somebody figured out how to put it on a GitHub gist. And I searched for all of the JavaScript libraries that were used in iOS.

There's different are really kind of on the permissive side Wes it's just like, look, take it, do whatever like, we're Scott here to, like, fight a legal battle with you. Mhmm. You Node? The point is, like, yeah, we'd we'd rather write code than Yeah. Licenses.

It it might. The the thing is, like, I've never

you know, like,

I don't know, man. It's like if somebody's coming at me and trying to twist my arm to do this or that, like, to force me to share,

is gonna resonate more with more people and how that applies to make the the specifics of the license, that everybody who joins the company goes through, Open source as a movement started in 1998.

So I had to add that in there. But, like, I I just put it in the Read Me, and maybe I need a explicit license.

in Creative Commons, you know, that might do it. Because they have they have, like, a mix and match. Right? They have, like, I I never know what to use, and I think a lot of people are like that. I usually just throw MIT on there because I'm like, I don't know. Yeah. Creative Commons is very similar, of course, to open source, but but it's really designed for everything except software, and open source is really about software. Mhmm. You know, so if you're talking about, like, code examples and stuff like that, you know, that's the sweet spot for open source. If you're talking about So in order for something to count for open source or free software, clearly, it's in the name, you have to be able to take it and use it without any that are, tracking Yarn, and we're trying to grow, and we're, like, you know, trying to get out there and and not die. I got a question for you, Chad. Yeah. What what license should I use? Apple

iTunes, Apple Music is built with Ember, And,

life cycle stages for an open source project.

Curious. Maybe FaceTime's built with TypeScript.

aait? 2 a's? Yeah. Because the one wait was taken. And it's simply a one line

that's not how like, it feels just kinda dumb to me. Like, you can't force people to share. Right? The whole point is we're inviting people to share. We're inviting people into this community. And, I actually

curious what that is. And, obviously, they still have jQuery in there somewhere.

I'm not really looking to use the law against people. It's like,

Ember JS. I'm pretty sure the PrusaSlicer

legal

And then there's one for web WebRTC

point. So use a permissive license.

heart of open source, which is really about that community aspect, which is like you know, a career as a programmer in in around then February.

and, you know, puts together a project.

Playing the long game. Yeah. Totally. Yeah. But every now and then, when in a if I go into a car and into legal notices, I I Scott. And I remember I see what's in there. We used to have a BMW, and I scrolled. And I found a whole bunch of JavaScript libraries in there as well.

If you go to npm.im/waait

is Sentry, meaning, like, the app that we sell at Sentry.io, The limitation and more and more niche as time goes on. Because I think most people whether it's that AGPL with the CLA or using a FairSource license, Alright. I wanna throw this I'm not gonna say it's the last detail, but another detail at you.

Six years ago, last published. There's no there's no features that needed to be added.

would, inject it because it's a it's a one line package but

kind of a solo maintainer, right, who maybe has a fun idea and some spare time and nights and weekends

If you're a company and you can give $750,000 from 02/2003

narrative I graduated from college in late ninety nine and started, And I have a contribution in Flossibull. I gave them a pull request. You know, like, this is five years ago or whatever, six years ago.

code Yeah. Yeah. And the words that I've spoken and just rerecording them. Yeah. Or doing it in another language or something like that, you know, and GitHub explicit permission.

Like, I love that. I love that I, as an individual, if I'm sufficiently motivated, I can go fix that problem. You know, there's these kind of to pretend that they're an open source company, but, really, it's a single vendor.

A sick pick is is what you just gave, and a plug JS, like, you wanna change own thing? Yeah. Yeah. Show my own thing? Yeah. Well, then that I mean, the obviously compliment is, like

generated, And then, you know, we onboard them and put them on the website.

that, like,

sometimes they can just, like, injection molding Eating his lunch. 10,000,000 of them and yeah. And then making all money off of it. So it's it's kinda tricky.

and and, yeah, represent kind of the worst of the open source community because they're just, like, using the legalese of it to browbeat

Yeah. What about, shameless plugs? Would you like to plug anything?

And I'll tell you what. There is I feel differently about it. I think those people are mostly just grumps, you know and there's tooling for this now. You Node? FASA is one that we use internally to keep track of our licenses. You know? beat sheet method. So look into it if you want to AGPL,

to other projects in open source? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Quite quite a bit. And function

Really interesting open source information

And so I I don't think I don't see a problem with companies operating that way,

drive by, fix something, and and get going. So you're actually given PRs, Wes, not just issues? I mean Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah. You take a take a look at my my GitHub profile. You'll see it. Okay. See some solutions. Yeah. When I first got started in in GitHub maybe, like, twelve years ago, I was mister docs. You know? Boom. Boom. Boom. But Mister docs? Much more of, like Wes, I still I still do quite a bit of docs because

I I don't know if this issue that you're having please show me how how it actually works. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Exactly. Well, that just goes to show you how much labor does go into open source. You know? Yeah. And if if you can spread it around a little bit, if we can I don't know? I kinda think, you know, company like Sentry, giving a lot of money, we're doing that. Here's what I'm trying to say. There's different ways for each of us to participate in the open source ecosystem Yeah.

because they're honest, as long as you're honest about it. You know? Which is like, hey. We're a company. This is our thing. You know? You're welcome to give us contributions.

in various ways. So we're really, really stoked to have Chad pull on the team.

You know what I mean? It's like, I don't wanna maintain that code forever. You know what I mean? It's like, I wanna come in, fix my problem, and then go on with my day. And to me, that's that's part of the beauty of, you know, whether it's open source or even this kind of fair source model.

people.

they're unfortunately kind of neglected in in many use cases. Oh, a lot. Mhmm. But I I would say, like, my most is simply

Yeah. So that is really that fair source idea.

my first salvo this fella, Jamie Nash, who wrote a book about, as an invitation. It's a gift. Open source is like, hey. Here's a software I wrote. You know? Feel free to use it.

I have a number of little small utilities

contribute Yeah. Absolutely. So which tends to look like a nonprofit foundation. There'll be a nonprofit foundation to change the status quo in open source sustainability. So there's this classic x k c d comic. It's called Dependency. I think it's number twenty three forty seven, and it's got this, like, Jenga tower, you know, of of blocks kinda built on top of each other. And it says, you know, here's all modern digital infrastructure, collaborating, governance, keyword governance, But when we look at this idea of a public community centric approach to building software, which is a true OSI approved license, plus a CLA I'm really enjoying

Yeah. Yeah. I I realized on the other end as Wes, it's like, well, I

yeah, info, that's that's gold. Alright. Should we wrap this up, Scott? Yeah. Yeah. I think it's a good time to do that. Let's get it in the part of the show where we talk about sick picks and shameless plugs. Chad,

but

Deno sync, which is a local first syncing platform. So Okay. I wrote the Svelte bindings for that.

about, called GitTip, and I ran that basically through the teens So shout out to,

issues with replications.

certain files and stuff like that, but nothing crazy.

Yeah. Pull on the thread. And see where it goes. Yeah. I love it. Yeah. So looking super forward to that. Chad, it's awesome. It's it's been great having you on the team so far, and I I can't wait to see,

I love that about open source projects JS you can just do drive by

bug report, you know, that is actually valuable. And if, you know, if we could have kind if you're of that bent, then sure. Use the GPL or look into it.

dark aspect to it. People were like, well, you're just, you know, stealing our labor and, you know, taking advantage of us.

meme stories that go around of the, you know, the person that gets hired at the company and fixes the bug that's annoyed them forever then quits after two weeks because they only got hired in order to fix that bug. Right? Yeah. Yeah. So this. Right? It's like, that that's a joke because that's so hard to do. But what if it weren't hard to do? What if you know? And the fact is, you know, this plausible example is a real world example of that, where it's like, that's the value of kind of that fair source model or certainly an open source model.

Oh, man. What's the difference between a pick and a plug, Wes? that's right there, my friend. Yeah.

writing for TV using the Save the Cat And so on your phone or in any of the apps that you're using that use all the software, there has to be some place where they're listing, here's the components we're using, and here's the license, which is, you know, essentially, this permission, some of the roughness comes in is, you know, on the single vendor side, you could be using an OSI approved license or you could be using a non OSI approved license. And some people wanna keep using the term open source for that, but then there's another nuance, which is Scott, how about you? Do you have any open source projects? And so far, the best option has been kind of a single vendor open source which is Yeah. So that's name of the game now is, you know,

one notch, you know, more than than some of us are doing. Totally. And warp maintainers like that, though, because if you give them a failing test, even it takes you half an hour,

Yeah. You know what? I have one that I did recently, and it doesn't have a license on it. So I should probably put one. It's just the bindings for,

these Save the Cat books None of us had ever heard of them. They self serve, you know, found us and joined. They, do a bunch of they have a data science IDE,

Well, that that's the other thing JS I want people to be able to commercialize it. That's take people have started taking the code, and they've built startups off of it. I want people to do it. Want JS people to compete with you to Yeah. Exactly. That's that's the thing JS I don't want somebody taking the exact same

your show and what you put out. The future holds. This is great. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thanks, guys. Thanks, Wes. Thanks, Today, we have a great one. We have the latest member of the Syntax team, Chad

understand about screenwriting, I guess. Yeah. Node. I'll give that one.

a sick pick is something that you're just liking right now, enjoying anything. Oh, good. Do you have a sick pick?

babel plug in for auto importing

like an automatic

Most of my stuff has just been the educational content that I just throw up on GitHub. Yeah. Do you guys ever

company,

Because in here, this idea that it's like, hey. If you like this, you know, feel free to buy me a beer sometime.

and they basically forked

that, you know, PHK wrote and licensed under the bureau license, which means that Apple has to include getting way further than we could on our own. Yeah. So as funny as the bureau license is, I think there is a really deep insight kind of embedded in that.

We're kinda too far gone with it. You know? It's like, anymore you can't you Node, the the stats of these things are always Wes. But, like, 90 plus percent of any code Bos is open source components. You Node? Like, if you look at any of the apps on your phone or whatever websites you're using, it's like it's all it's like an iceberg of open source with, like, a little bit of proprietary on top. You know? Mhmm. Were you the one that had to go through that, Wes? Well, luckily, I found a a tool to do that. But, yeah, I I dug into it, and I wrote a or not wrote it to. I found some tool that would just crawl your package JSON, and we gave this massive spreadsheet to the lawyers. We're like, here you go. You know? Yep. Enjoy. Last for it.

And like, because a little history on Century. Two thousand eight started as this little open source side project. Wasn't until 2015 Functional source license, which is a fair source license. Alright.

A lot of PHK goes by PHK. A lot of his code is licensed under what he came up with. He calls it the Beerware license, and it's supposed to be this, like, Sanity lawyer license.

yeah. As you start pulling on the thread, it's like, whoo. Yeah. Yeah. So my next question then JS, when you simply just npm install something and you might have dependencies

orient and and whatnot, all kinds of features. The software that it uses JS called Bamboo Studio, which is by this,

Wow. Yeah. I'm seeing this. I guess it's a couple years ago. But, yeah, this blog post, AGPL compliance of Bamboo Studio. Yes.

who wrote, like, half of FreeBSD.

used this license for a bunch of code in the aughts. It's called the Beerware license. Okay? And it comes from a developer named Paul Henningkamp

Yeah. That happened when I was working at at Ford, though. We went to install something, and then the lawyers were like, we can't use this. And I'm, okay. I guess we're, rolling this by hand then. Okay. Yeah. A lot of people do that. Or I'll have I'll often have a repo where I I don't add a license because for whatever reason, and then someone or or someone simply want you sometimes hit upon a a GitHub Wes, eight lines of Node. And there's someone in the comments, can you please add a license to this? I need to copy paste this into our code base. Yeah. No. More,

you know, you'd think, okay. This is just like a joke. Right? But Apple has components but we also got a bunch of buses and bus shelters.

that basically got commercialized We are no longer an open source project.

that I'm aware of, actually The Beerware license the Beerware license, revision 42, It's been it's been fun. If you're listening to this and your company uses open source software, otherwise, you know, that's what Creative Commons is there for. I don't know if, like because there is a noncommercial

invitation.

is all these companies have their own software if they want to, but they're all kinda helping each other out.

to utilize the code or understand the code or even host it themselves while Yeah. Not allowing somebody to just copy it and make a business out of it. I I guess that just makes too much sense to me, yeah, to get angry about that. And if you want to see all of the errors in your application,

And, hey. Do you have any software you'd like to share? Do you have any any, you know, beer you'd like to buy me? Do you have any, four ish different kinds of restrictions you can put Yeah. And still fit in the Creative Commons bucket.

open source has economic implications. Open source has, That that's I'm firehosing here. That's that's some confusion. But this is Functional source source. To. Like, there's a lot of nuance here. Right? Yeah. Totally.

I'm just looking into

take that. Oh, they added tree supports. Let's let's take that, or they added in auto arrangement. Let's take that feature

You don't want a production application out there that, well, you have no visibility into in case something is blowing up, and you might not even know it. So head on to dosentry.i0/syntax.

it cuts it into layers and allows you to print it. And there's a whole bunch of, like, mathematics into, like, how do you

The one I'm loving right now is this beerware license that you guys have seen me talk about in in in our channel. I guess I mentioned a little earlier here, and I was thinking about it just now because

even, I don't have an example over here as well, but I'm getting into this, like like, multi board, which is for hanging stuff up. And the guy who designed it, like, wants it to be open source, but it doesn't also doesn't want, like, some like, Ikea coming and just,

Yeah. It's a wild world. It's it's not just software. Right? Like,

to what we've kind of been you know, open source funding and some other initiatives we just gotta keep growing. We gotta get more and more companies on board, chip away.

Chad, what's the most interesting open source license?

I mean, it's definitely something to be aware of, and it's absolutely I mean, like you experienced, They are one of these open core companies that's AGPL with a CLA.

You know? Invitation.

in the legal notices like, if you go into settings, you go into legal notices, whatever, and you scroll down far enough, you'll see probably billions of dollars of companies sitting on top using that to to run companies. Yeah. Here's the thing about open source. Another thing. Let's we'll we'll throw some things on the table and maybe Yeah. Get get us make the connections. You like Chad. Yeah.

Again, we've been using this tool for a long time, and it totally rules. Alright.

PrusaSlicer. There's another one called OrcaSlicer. They're all they're all based on the same thing. And Bamboo

yeah, let's kind of clarify,

p h k at freebies dot org wrote this file. As long as you retain this notice, you can do whatever you want with this stuff.

Yeah. I mean, I went back and looked.

Yeah. Yeah. I love that. Let's talk about the open source pledge

another piece of software right now that I've been touching a lot, and that JS, three d printing slicing software, which is basically you you take, like, a model. Like, I've got, like, a little m 24 nut or a bolt right here. Yep. And

building stuff,

really quick. You'd mentioned that you'd worked on the open source pledge at Century. We've talked about it a bit

is is AGPL. I just looked it up. Right? So they have to make that Interesting. Open source. Right? And and it's a it's a net win for the community because

at any scale, you don't have to. And when people don't have to pay for something, they don't pay for it, right, is kind of the way of the world. So Yeah. Right. Yeah. So this is why I say, like, when we talk about FFmpeg being an open source project And what companies will do is they'll add an additional I think you're probably asking from the point of view of, But, really, what that comes from is one of the most established licenses. That's you know, you can't go wrong with MIT. Mhmm. Apache What about Creative Commons? Any of those Creative Commons licenses appropriate? kinda stay on top of GitHub issues to to really kinda be practical about it, you know, because Century was a growing company. I think when I joined, there was a 30 people at the company, and now we're up over 300. You know? We're, like, three fifty. And it was hard for, you know, we warp, like, dropping stuff through the cracks on GitHub. So that was a big part of what I focused on at first, you know, extra computers lying around that you'd like to give me, you know, as an exchange, as a reciprocal gift for this thing that I've given you. Mhmm. Because that, to me, again, getting back to, like, the the letter and the spirit, like, to me, that's that's the fun of open source. Right? Like, that's really you Node, so any company of any size is doing this, you know, in in some way.

enlightened lawyer will let you get away with eight lines Yeah. You know, from somewhere. But yeah. But, you know, left pad. Right? How many Npm packages Yarn only a couple lines? Yeah. Yeah. No kidding.

forked it and started adding all these, like, nice features, like different types of supports and whatnot, but they didn't make it open source. And everyone freaked out because

This to, yeah, preserve that nonprofit, would be on that I haven't dug deeply into the details. My understanding of it's it's it's on that community side. Right? On the one half, we've got

Oh, yeah. And find every license all the way down, and we gave it to the lawyers. Yeah. Yeah. Just give it to the lawyers. Yeah. To make sure there's none of that AGPL in there. Right? None of that viral, so to speak,

that thread that we've been pulling on, which is that the open source pledge last year on October 8, and

like, giving people the opportunity

yeah, copyleft licensing.

Yeah. I mean, so you can see where what starts out as, you know, we're having fun building tech together ESLint these really thorny kind of economic questions and political Wes. Yeah. You know, and, like, what does it mean to have a society together kind of Wes. Like

you're gonna need to, and then really experienced the FOSS Contributor Fund. And so he had this great program at Indeed Wes Indeed would pay stand up a competing SaaS business because that would undermine our ability. You know? That would undermine our business. Like, because Yeah. What you have to understand in and then number two, blog about it. So there's a threshold amount,

of all the licenses So, again, I finished school in, like, late ninety Node. And yeah. So I I I I wish that I had the domain from premillennial grew for a few years there. And then over the past couple years, again, invitation. It's like nobody's twisting your arm to force you to contribute to something. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I think there's value there in in both approaches.

you'll want to check out Sentry at sentry.i0/syntax.

you're talking about having to go through the audit of everything, as Fastly. You know? So Fastly, like, came out of the Varnish community and is, you know, is is is built on top of Fastly.

and port it back to to our own. And it's it's nice because now the the software for the entire industry

That's an exchange. It's an indication of the back and forth of open source.

what it's all about JS, like, people working together, You know? And it's,

I see open source screenwriting grew into something bigger. And so now I've been promoted the head of open source, and we've launched this open source pledge and all this fun stuff that we can get into. But maybe that's a little bit of a little bit of a history.

Bamboo was able to get a really good base and start building on top of that, and now they have to make their stuff open source, which the other projects can now then take

on this show already. But can you give the audience a rundown about, like, what the open source pledge is and who's involved?

free us up as an industry and as a community to really does the best job of pointing

That that was my next Wes. People are probably thinking right Node. So when something is, I guess,

or a company like Google puts out Kubernetes,

It's not part of their core business. Sanity JS a software company.

this fair source movement, you know, and and and I mean, this is the OpenCore playbook. OpenCore is a word that's thrown around that's used for this. You know? So like a GitLab or a Calcom or a Plausible or some of these companies where it's like, yeah. You could download and you can self host it maybe, and, you know, the code's on GitHub, and you can contribute to it. But when you're contributing to it, you're signing that CLA. So you're not really participating in a community project like an FFmpeg again, going back to my own history here, like, you know, that we release.

We sell software. That's our core product. So we need to have a little protection around that. Yeah. Yeah. So FairSource is an attempt to kind of clean up this mess that we've ended up in after decades of trying to smash these two things together under the open source umbrella

about But all of the values of free software warp kind of, like, implicit in the open source movement.

is

why even have your project open source if if people are not able to,

fair source or or source available,

So FAIR source

You just can't compete with the single vendor company that's producing in the first place. So for Sentry, Okay?

it's not their core business. You know? Like, Google is an ad company. Facebook is an ad company. Facebook's not a software company. They're an advertising company. So for them to release React, it's like, well, they're not, you know React is like this infrastructure component for them.

approach to building software together and have a clearer path c corp Delaware c corp, DBA Sanity.

installations of self hosted Sentry out in the wild. So, like, this is actually working. You Node? People are using it and getting real value out of Century.

but there are limitations on what you can do that with that, a, what are you allowed to do?

our kind of open source Functional Software Incorporated.

let open source Oh, yeah. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Square. Yeah. We were on there as well for Amazing. With a bunch of bunch of the launch partners. The innovators, we call them. The innovators that joined with us for that launch.

And and, b,

values, So that's that you know, the GPL, the share alike, we're talking about that. This AGPL is kind of the nuclear version of that, which JS, like, you know, anything even on the network that touches this has to be released. Mhmm.

that, you know, kind of gets you in in these fights over what does open source really mean.

some kind of open source or sharing strategy.

you know, community So that combination

ownership of this code and and community management of the code. You know? So this the AGPL is a little neutral. Like, it could be used kind of in either scenario. Yeah. Is it the purest?

our business is all in SaaS. And so we've got our SaaS Sentry, I like the permissive side.

And I don't at all feel taken advantage of by plausible.

then then take it and use it if Yeah. That's the case.

And you I'll throw that. Can you tell us about those a sec? Yeah. So, I mean, these are actually they're

with a k.

had this program.

who are on audio only, Chad is wearing, like like, Sanity Walkman headphones And you find that beerware in there? Did you find that? I did. I did find the beerware in there. It makes me wanna make a funny license Node. And if,

Yeah. I gotta say, anybody who wasn't around for those headphones,

That's great. Yeah. This episode sponsored by Yeah. Retrospect. Retrospect.

Just kidding. Man, I can, like, I can yeah. Like, I can almost smell the, like, metal print on those headphones. It smells hilarious. Yeah.

You know, so these are, like, $15 headphones. You know? I was like, what, I don't know. Yeah. You know, I've I've got I've got the nice ones over here too for when I really, really need them. But, yeah, these are fun. Retrospect, I think, with a k. Let's see if I remembered it. Retrospect you know, slop now. It's like maintainers are flooded with it. So if you come in with some valuable, multi vendor Sanity open source, legal document called a CLA, you familiar with Plausible? They're like the Google Analytics yeah. They put it on the the Syntax side, don't we? We do. Yeah. Yeah. I love Plausible.

with a k. And that you can buy, you know, replacement foams Yeah. I'm gonna read it to you here.

colors and stuff JS pretty fun. Wow. That's so fun. Check it out.

Yeah. There's, like, a one single metal band over the top. It's like, oh, man. I I I have such fond memories of wearing those headphones with my first Walkman.

1993.

So what are are you gonna be doing with Syntax then? Like, what's the deal here? Yeah. So we've,

from, like, 11 layers Deno. Should we be concerned about that? Let's say someone's building an app that they wanna one day sell. Should we be concerned about that? Even, like, when when Syntax joined Sentry, we had to go through our package JSON

they're they're so funny because the little foam bits, they always eventually just completely deteriorated.

Indeed do you remember Indeed? yeah, I don't know. Yeah. Fire hose in here, and let me know what we need to go into deeper. But one important way to start wrapping your head around some of the nuance of open source is to recognize a distinction between a single vendor project the convenience of clicking a button and having that installed on their WordPress system because, you know, WordPress is so popular. Many people using WordPress are not developers. Right? Yeah. Are not savvy enough that they're gonna download that and install it themselves. So, yeah, that convenience there, you know, you could think of that as a hook, as a scarcity hook, that you can charge somebody for. Does that help? Yeah. Yeah. Totally.

but then, again, kind of, with this funding program, you know Wes, yeah. Here's the story. Okay?

authority for open source. Okay. Yeah. Well, that's that first one. Free redistribution. That's what I'm trying to focus on. K? Free redistribution.

so that it's not, several developers I sometimes I just get so exhausted when you, like, open up a new issue, and it's like, here, fill out this Here's the template. Give me a whole code sandbox. I'm like,

what's called the open source definition free software, so to speak. I see that more for activists, which just, you know, by definition, are gonna be a much smaller, you know, proportion.

and and see where we go from there. So to open source, that's awesome. If you're an individual developer and you come across a bug in upstream, you know, taking half an hour to write that book and give them that, reproducible, Yeah. Like, the John Ford? Okay. Yes. Well, Indeed

like, you you keep that Sanity. You keep the openness, but you also protect the project

Bruce Perrons JS this fellow that wrote,

by the late nineties,

a project? Like, I'm thinking of, like, one project that's huge is FFmpeg.

maintained by

license something

and

before there was open source, there was something called Free Software, which Wes a movement started by Richard Stallman in 1983. Okay? these companies that wanna share.

And, you know, Richard Stallman, the people, we've really started to see Century's The most unusual, I suppose. The most interesting? Is that a leading question, Scott? No. Because I was about to bring up. Tee ball.

Open source, we think of it in terms of technology.

Right? Like, tirelessly

you know, kind of invested in free software will be like, it's okay to charge for it. You're allowed to do that, But, you know, at the same time, and stepping out, headphones new again.

Yeah. I mean, so this FFmpeg example, let's maybe go over a little more of the detail of

it is really easy to get kind of legalistic about it, you know, and to have this, what I think of JS kind of a narrower kind of rigid approach to it. Mhmm.

you know, those those definitional aspects. It's always an interesting question of, like, how do you

folks were trying to take that free software movement and, kind of broaden it, you know, take it to the masses.

obligation, a community, With open source licenses, you can do whatever you want with it, You have to kinda be an activist to bring that word in. You know? economics. It gets us into politics.

that any software project, you know, licensing needs to fit in order to meet this kinda strict definition according to, you know, this open source initiative,

is is not really recognizing that and not really taking that on board, not really understanding kind of, you know, these bigger implications for the thing.

I think a lot of the confusion, you know, that people have about open source is, like, So let's, and then joined Century here in 2020. So a few Oh, well, you guys know where my head's at, and this, episode is supposed to air with

from from being taken advantage of. Right? Because, like like, maybe someone's listening and doesn't necessarily understand. But,

like, what are some bad things that could happen if you just wide open

and some of the confusion on the Internet around, like, well, what is an open source project? And, you know, I'll be honest. Like, Century's wandered into this in years past, and it's, like, been a a big part of our story with open sources. Like, you know, Century's a company. We started life as an open source project using an OSI compliant license. What that means is a license that fits this definition, that the Open Source Initiative, which is this nonprofit that kinda manages this whole thing, you know, like, formally approved by them.

Yep. And, you know, we're all geeks here. We all love, you know, the the tech and everything and geeking out on the tech.

for free software for the Debian project in, like, the mid nineties, '90 '6, '90 '7, somewhere there. Bruce is a lawyer, the fun volunteer

a 10

of one of Indeed's Yeah. And You find some good stuff?

And so we ended up taking that, matching it, and regifting it to open source projects. But when I showed up, David Kramer, our technical cofounder, But to really have an impact on this question, we say, of open source sustainability or this way to make sure that the people building FFmpeg and all the tools we depend on, you know, that we're not burning them out.

from Indeed.

My friend Dwayne O'Brien, when he was at Indeed, he started this program called Bos Fund, So

Century was a recipient And yeah. So we've got, let's see. We launched about six months ago. For a company to join the pledge, versus I'm selling my time. My time is scarce. There's only so much of my time to go around. So if you wanna use this open source software, I'm a consulting company, and you're gonna pay me to maintain your IT systems, and I gotta use open source software to do it, but I'm gonna be you know, you're paying me for my labor. So Yeah. The scarce thing there is the labor. So, Sentry, the product that we're selling, we relicensed in 2019 So Copyleft, style the single vendor, quote, unquote. Okay? So you have this concept of single vendor open source. It's like one company controls the whole project. Okay?

that David and Chris, you know, started the company and took venture capital and everything like this. You know? So even a few years after that, Indeed engineers were like, hey. We like Century. Century's open source. Let's give money to Century. And you know? But by then, you know, we were, like, off and running on, you know, on the startup path.

false fund grants, in funding open source maintainers kind of from the Sentry side of things, and that kind of, and then also got involved a community project, fundamental paths you can go down are the permissive or the copy left.

Wes, I felt like this was answering a question that you were ESLint, and now I've lost my train of thought. And I'm hoping that we're gonna bring that back to like, what are you what are you doing here? k, they release these kinda big open source projects that we're familiar with or, like, the Go language or whatever. Right? Yeah. When these companies are releasing that software as open source, the term free was confusing because it's like, well, is it free as in beer or free as in speech? This is the the way that we thought about it. And so they landed on the term open source JS kind of a replacement term.

he was like, Chad, he's like, I need you to, give a hundred thousand dollars to open source projects. This was, like, the year after the Indeed thing, you know, because at the time, he had, like, promised. He's like, yeah. We're gonna do this this year. We're gonna do even more next year. So I showed up in, like, the first week. You know, I'm here to be, like, an engineer, and he's like, Chad, give a hundred thousand dollars to open source projects. I was like, well, that's pretty cool job to have, you know, walk walked into. Right? It took about a year to to really get organized and get that Deno. But that first year of funding open source went really well and kind of started my path towards becoming more of a representative of kind of Century's open source values, first inside the company, and then kind of as time went on, you know, started to get a higher profile,

which is and writing We just rolled out a job board a few weeks ago, so we're, you know, trying to find ways to add value for those companies to say, like, hey. This is a little movement. This is worth being part of. Yeah.

Thanklessly

devs. Yeah. Right? Yeah. One of the things I see, and maybe this is the biggest problem, you know, getting back getting back to your original Wes, under the AGPL, or whatever, $10,000 is a group of companies and make it stronger.

about the billboard. It's like since when are billboards news? You Node? It's like new billboard goes up on, you know, Mercedes actually has some of the car companies are starting open source programs.

in R, this old data science language. And they've got more developers than Century does. So they joined, you know, just at the December,

thanklessly maintained by some guy in Nebraska.

we can't be the only ones doing this. Like, that you know, that that's fun, and, like, people are loving what we're doing, and it's great.

In year four, we were like, okay. This is cool, but is kind of a loophole that companies use

paid so he doesn't burn out and the whole thing collapses.

you know, a few months after we launched. So He wrote this this HTTP cache called Varnish, which is a popular HTTP cache, into your own app. Alright? has to also be released. It's a share alike, if you're familiar, like, from the Creative Commons, you know, the share alike idea. So the share alike part of open source is called Copyleft watch my show on Syntax that's coming out together with this episode. That's an easy Yeah. Yeah. Chad's gonna be, talking about open source and and giving us all some Oh my goodness.

really encouraging to see companies, let go of that battle, and let's just have a different name for it. With Faresource, you could read the code. You can download the code. You can run the code. You can run the code for your own purposes.

They're pretty,

Yeah. Laravel's with us.

working together

I mean, it's a weird, you know, it's a weird kinda Scott up, right, where it's like we're the open source pledge is Century's attempt to get other companies to give as much money to open source as we do. Because, And

to open source. Crazy. Yeah.

and it's resting on this one little, Happy to be on the team and excited to join you guys for this episode.

Mhmm. And they're still running around because those buses, you know, they don't they they don't change them as quick as the billboards. Right? So, like, there's still what's your own history with publishing projects? Tons of it out there. Any anything anybody else is using, Wes? Like, what's your most popular open source project? at least has some notion of. You Node, you've heard of this idea. Okay.

a function of the number of developers employed at the company. So if a company employs a hundred developers, And, Twenty years ago, probably.

maintaining that project since 02/2003 it depends on your goals.

It's awesome.

they would pay maintainers two hundred thousand dollars, and then they would write a blog post that says, our company loves open source, and we pay maintainers, and here's the receipts. We want those receipts. We want that accountability.

freeway or whatever. It's like yeah. Wes, and then the other one, we we were on, we were in Times Square too. You know, the Nasdaq jumbotron? a term that's been around for a little while, but we kind of took it over last year, And we launched is the figure is 2,000 per developer. That's the minimum. So if a company employs a hundred developers, and kind of precarious component that says a project that they're using for iOS Century, you know, you can see these 10 points. So number one, free redistribution.

Pushing over 2 and a half million, and Century is only $7.50 of that. You know? So much more that's not Century than is. You guys rolled out some, like, hilarious billboards as well? What what were those there's three of them. Right? Oh, goodness. Yeah. We've so we launched And then yeah. Go

That's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. $3,679

eye catching. JS that they're they're pretty dope. Yeah. We got an article in The Register

We need an industry wide change. We need kind of a culture change in how we think about this and act on it. And so that's what the pledge is about. So the pledge

we did it. We we rented

A a company called Posit joined.

It it was really fun.

three of the most expensive billboards in the world. And Century's creative team,

per dev, and that's a 34

we call them studio four and four studio four zero four internally here. They had a lot of fun, coming up with a campaign for us that we called Mooch Monsters. So we've got the Deno, who's the chief excuse officer.

then you should encourage your company to join the Open Source Pledge. Totally. It's, what, o over 2 and a half million bucks on there, some some pretty big companies that Yeah.

That product Well, it it is Retrospect. So retrospec.com those two things so that we can I mean, we'll never stop fighting on the Internet, Scott? But Yeah. We can do that. That makes so much sense to me, though, in terms of, no single company Didn't need $20,000 they need to, number one, pay maintainers, you know, that there's this kind of,

community led project.

is owned and run, and the Node map Well,

owns that road map, owns that project. And so you've got, you know, a multi vendor or a true community based open source project. So, thing you can't do with it is you can't yeah, outside the company.

Mhmm. Our company story content.

wholly controls that project? Then we get into other things like, you know, Linux is the biggest example Wes we've got a Linux foundation in which multiple vendors come together and collaborate. So you've got IBM and you've got Google and you've got Huawei and you've got Microsoft. Multiple companies,

Mhmm. You Node,

This is a tension point because it gets back to this idea of open source JS really being about a public community centric approach to building a project. Right? So,

really, there's this question of, like, is an open source project a genuine open source project if a single vendor, if one company Number two, source code is available. Number three, you know, derived works are allowed, etcetera, etcetera. Right? Like, here's 10 points I don't I mean, Sentry's on the permissive side. You know? Our which stands for contributor licensing agreement, It's, interesting. I hadn't seen this case.

away from an OSI compliant BSD license to at the time, it's called the business source license. Now we use something called the fair source no. Excuse me. I'm gonna mess that up forever.

are controlled by a single company, content

and you know, which is distinguished from what we say JS permissive open source. Okay. If I have a a project and I I think WordPress is this. Is that right? Where Correct. I build something on top of WordPress. Whatever I build or at least Apple Music is built with Svelte. Is it? Okay. Yeah. Oh, some at at some point, Apple used I'm

interested in all of these. We'll we'll talk a little bit more about licenses in in a little bit. But, yeah, that's super interesting.

Linux or Debian or there's, like, some big projects where it's like, you've got thousands of people contributing to it. And if you ever wanted to relicense or do anything with that IP, you would need to contact thousands of people for permission to do it. So what companies do is they make you sign the CLA upfront before they accept your contribution to their project. And that way, of everybody do a little bit, you know, then we all benefit from it. You don't have to think, well, I'm not a century that can give all this money. Like, there is absolutely stuff that you can do to participate, but almost always, you have to include what's called attribution. So you have to actually include the text of the license when you, when you incorporate a component

which means that and Sentry's got this. Like, if anybody shows up at Sentry and gives us a pull request, you know, there's some now we do it in kind of a goofy way, but there's some boilerplate in our pull request templates that say, you know, I acknowledge by giving you this pull request that, you know, I'm giving you a grant of rights that you can do whatever you want with this. Okay? Because if you don't do this, then, you know, it's a really muddy situation and probably

must also be

you you know, whatever the business model is, for these plug in businesses, there's something scarce that people are paying for. It could be as simple as

publicly available and licensed under that. Yep.

and on the other half, we've got single vendor.

oh, yeah. Alright. We're gonna get even more confused before we dare way out of this. Let's get into it. Yeah. There's another nuance, and really, hopefully, be about this multi vendor, I guess, maybe Wes can do it this way. So, maybe revisiting more of the recent history with Sanity. Again, I joined as an IC engineer working on open source, you know, on our self hosted release and really building out the infrastructure to help Sentry engineers chief the CTO, you know, chief tight wall officers running around San Francisco. It's pretty fun. That's great. Wes we saw some of those in SF.

they've got, you know, they've got the wherewithal where they can relicense a project or do something different with it in the future.

you know, if the source code's open source, well, that's not scarce because open source is, by definition, not scarce. So you have to have something around it, something adjacent to it, that is scarce. You have to find something. So the classic open source business model is support.

But people are people are building WordPress businesses. Right? And, like, this was this was a huge thing ten years ago. I remember this big fight where people had had themes that they were selling. Yeah. Mhmm. How do they get around that? I feel like I'm shooting a little from the hip here because I'm not super familiar with this particular case. Adam Jacob is the best one on this for how to run

open source business using open source licenses like this. And, basically, what you do is you you to have a business, you have to have something scarce. Let's do it this way.

But I also wanna have another Wes here, which JS, is it using an OSI approved license or not? Because that's where some of the,

there's a particular license called the AGPL, This idea that companies That's an exchange, as funny as it is.

which is kind of like a nuclear nuclear license. It's like,

It makes sense. I've I've always been

what you do is if the source code is not I started this. David was like, Chad, give money to open source. So I gave much money to open source. And then the next year, he was like, Chad, give even more money to open source. And so I gave you more money to open source. Then the third year, you know, we doubled the amount again. Wes get $500,000 Quite a

like, Internet archive website from Wes when did you first Wes was your first domain? I bought my first domain in, I think, it was February.

I wanna say one thing about about Chad is that, like, he's he's he's an OG, man. So one thing that we do

find an old, embarrassing photo of them. And I'm like I'm a bit of an Internet sleuth. You know? Like, I can find I can find things. If we need to find it, we can find things. Okay. And I, like, I went way back on on Chad, and he's got,

when we put people on the Syntax website is that we embarrassingly Yeah. And you can kinda pick and choose which of those you wanna bring in. Maybe I I'll I'll take a look into that. It's for me, it's mostly just the the

initiatives in the community, in the industry. And, you know, and that means kind of, you know, doing more content creation,

kinda role in promoting Century's

Wes get to give that away. Right? So Wes we asked the community, like, what project should Syntax give that money to, and that was a a really fun and interesting way to figure out how to divvy that up. So Yeah. Exactly. So, I I guess to to complete the circuit,

you Node. I started a blog, you know, started thinking about video and things like that. And then, you know, you guys Yarn also working with David and kinda he made the connection. He's like, look, Chad. If you're gonna do this, let's do it right. We got this crew here. This is what they do. This is their bread and butter. Let's connect you guys and, make it happen. Yeah. And and and, Chad, you you do such an excellent job of Because it has this legal element to it, Alright.

a public community centric approach to building software.

Yeah. With right? Because, like, you you you joined Century. Yeah. Doing all this open source stuff, giving out money.

open source related, you know, or if you really wanna have some fun, use that Beerware license. That'd be my record. Love it. Yeah. Yeah. I like beer. Have you guys ever put anything out open source? What's your beerware license. You're like I love it because it's like, Apple is such a buttoned up you know, like, the most buttoned up of companies. Right? Like, with the most controlled kind of image. And then it's like they have to put this beer license. I I I get a kick out of it.

has really not dove into a lot of, like, deep things inside of open source. What do people get wrong most about

open source initiatives, we need to blow this up even bigger than it is. I think permissive is the thing that Apache,

that licensing is designed to encode that really gets us outside of technology per se, and it gets us into

Yeah. Wow. Well, that's a big question. Yeah. Because oh, yeah. Open source means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. You know, maybe I'll approach it this way. We have an onboarding session at Sanity, So open source really has all of these, like, implications or these, like, tendrils or these meanings or these, yeah, like, things, yeah, that are really political about it and really kind of economic about it. And and he wrote this 10 definition. So that ended up being taken wholesale into the open source movement. They just changed the title. So the free software guidelines became the open source definition. So if you look up open source definition and you go to opensource.org/0sd, for founders that do wanna share, especially developer tools companies. You know? It's like, you're not gonna have a developer tools company without then anything else that touches your software era, but, no. Yeah. February was And and for the listeners a true

get confused by or people tend to argue about it, quite a bit. But you you have a really great blog, the

started internally focused, for open source maintainers, To have a business, you have to have something scarce, Plausible

teaching open source, which seems to be like a a I don't know if it's just a topic that people

open source in general?

It's defined by a certain kind of licensing. You know? So the fine print really is the fine print. You know? It it's about the legalese. It's about the licensing. So it's this brand in the software industry that's defined by a certain kind of licensing, and is Wes a company like of the AGPL license, and that's where we make our money. And then we have self hosted Sentry that people can download and run for themselves. And we've got, you know, 10,000 plus Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, man. If you're a maintainer and you get a really good bug report, I mean, that lights up your day, you Node, after all the trash that you get, especially with, like, the AI and it's about open source. And the way that I introduce that you know, so I run that session.

Wes, and and it's super informative for anybody who,

Chad came to us, I don't know, about six months ago and was like, hey. Syntax gets 50 k. Yeah. That was fun.

details.

as something we wanna offer to the broader community, to the broader industry. And so David's really asked me to, to to step forward even more and play more of an external, Source fundamentally is really this brand. It's this, this this name for a thing that, Of course, we do also use our functional source license for Sanity itself. I'm talking about the true open source stuff that we put out. So MIT, open source projects, would give money to open source projects. And he had this whole thing. He actually wrote a book on it and published it with O'Reilly about how to run one of these false funds.

that anybody who's in anywhere close to software,

Yeah. What do you think that's why like, the fact that people kind of have a different idea about it, do you think that's why people tend to get so mad about it on Hacker News? It's like anytime anybody posts anything about open source, there's just, like, bickering about

Whitaker,

you know, just in general about for. Yeah. Just in general about the topic. So, Chad, first of all, welcome to the Syntax team, and welcome to Syntax.

And,

Welcome to Syntax.

on the show here to talk all about open source.

He's an open source expert of sorts, and he is going to really fill us in about what licenses you should use,

why are people so mad on the Internet about open source sometimes.

when it's used by

They control it. It's not a true community project.

that kind of is the umbrella under which multiple companies kinda come together to collaborate, fundamentally don't care. You know? You have to really care. You have to really be an insider and really, like, geek out on the licenses and reading the licenses and everything like that.

or Linux. Yeah. And and so people get that's one of the things people get upset about. It's like people see it as companies lot. Yeah. A high quality bug reports evaluation.

sort of like wall off the garden again. So

of developers' free labor. So you you would say that, like, the the nuclear option you mentioned before would be, like, in some people's minds, the most pure version of open source.

copyleft. The copyleft is the share alike that we're talking about.

Between that what we say is permissive

Is that kind of how it's viewed, or is it just, like, the most intense version of it? This is where opinions differ

taking advantage

and that nonprofit is the thing that holds the intellectual property for the project.

and they're really trying to use the legal system against itself. You know? It was conceived as this kind of, like, clever hack on the legal system to be like, you know, alright, companies that love lawyers, like, we're gonna come at you with a legal document that forces you to share if you use our stuff. You know? And so then, of course, companies are like, well, you know, like, we're better at this game than you are. We're just gonna come back with CLAs, you know, that, like,

So I I kinda participated in that. I had I think it was, like, the fifth most downloaded Python web framework in 02/2008 or something like this. Anyway yeah. So, that's kinda where I cut my teeth in open source and in in web programming there's a company I gotta dig it up. There's a company that's making these, if your project is licensed

open source side of things and then, like, having to have a day job and work on closed source software for money, and kind of the tension between those. And that kinda came to a head for me in about 2012. I started a crowdfunding platform

Century here in 2020, so a few years ago now. So I've been at Century for a little over four years. I joined as a software engineer on the open source team working on our self hosted,

Right on. Right on. So you wanna give us a quick rundown? You're not new to to Century or to open source at all. No, sir. You have a bit of a a history with open source. You wanna give us a Little bit. Quick rundown of of that whole story and and what it is that you do?

everybody had a Python web framework. We had the, like, these web framework shootouts and all this stuff. There was, like, 20 different Python web frameworks.

Accidental.