894: Open Source Matters w/ Chad Whitacre

Wes and Scott talk with Chad Whitacre, the newest member of the Syntax team, about all things open source—licenses, controversies, economics, and ethics. Chad breaks down what most people misunderstand, and how companies can support sustainable software development the right way. Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! 00:39 Meet Chad Whitacre 03:39 Chad’s retro headphones Retrospekt 05:00 Chad’s role at Syntax https://syntax.fm/oss Open Path 09:41 What do people get wrong about open source? 11:11 Why is open source so divisive? 13:01 The evolution of open source and free software 17:55 Single vendor vs. community open source 20:22 How do people build businesses off of a GPL license? 24:40 What’s the most pure version of open source? 26:55 Fair source licensing explained 30:30 Brought to you by Sentry.io 33:09 Should you be concerned about dependencies in your app in relation to licensing? Fair Source 35:16 What’s the most interesting/unusual open source license? Beerware License 40:00 What is Open Source Pledge? Open Source Pledge 45:41 Choosing the right open source license 48:31 Wes’ most popular open source project wait 49:39 Interesting open source projects Mercedes-Benz embraces Open Source Porsche Open Source Platform 51:33 Licensing for educational content 53:46 The beauty of open source Plausible 56:12 Scott’s various open source projects 56:44 The importance of contributing to open source projects 59:16 Sick Picks + Shameless Plugs Sick Picks Chad: Save The Cat! Shameless Plugs Chad: Coming soon Hit us up on Socials! Syntax: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Wes: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Scott: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Randy: X Instagram YouTube Threads

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Scott Tolinski?

  Welcome to Syntax. Today, we have a great one. We have the latest member of the Syntax Team, Chad Whitaker, on this 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? And, you know, just in general about...

• 0:25Speaker 01

  That's what the internet's for.

• 0:26Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, just in general about the topic. So Chad, first of all, welcome to the Syntax Team and welcome to Syntax.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  Thanks, Scott. Thanks, Wes. Happy to be on the team and excited to join you guys for this episode.

• 0:39Scott Tolinski?

  Right on, right on. So, you want to give us a quick rundown? You're not new to Sentry or open source at all.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  No, sir.

• 0:47Scott Tolinski?

  You have a bit of a history with open source. You want to give us a

• 0:50Speaker 01

  A little bit.

• 0:50Scott Tolinski?

  Quick rundown of that whole story and what it is that you do?

• 0:54Speaker 01

  Accidental. Open source as a movement started in 1998. I graduated from college in late 99 and started, you know, a career as a programmer in around then 2000. 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 in 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 are like the big web frameworks, and there's some newer ones coming out. But back in the 2000s, everybody had a Python web framework. We had like these web framework shootouts and all this stuff. There was like 20 different Python web frameworks.

• 1:39Speaker 01

  So I, I kind of participated in that. I had, I think it was like the fifth most downloaded Python web framework in 2008 or something like this. Anyway, yeah, so that's kind of where I cut my teeth in open source and in web programming. And then really experienced... You know, we can see how much this we get into, but really kind of experienced the tension between the fun volunteer 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 kind of came to head for me in about 2012. I started a crowdfunding platform for open source maintainers called GitTip. And I ran that basically through the teens and then joined Sentry here in 2020.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  So a few years ago now, so I've been at Sentry for a little over four years. I joined as a software engineer on the open source team, working on our self-hosted Sentry. And then also got involved in funding open source maintainers kind of from the Sentry side of things. And that kind of grew into something bigger. And so now I've been promoted 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, a little bit of a history.

• 2:53Wes Bos?

  I want to say one thing about, about Chad is that like he's, he's, he's an OG, man. So one thing that we do when we put people on the Syntax website is that we find an old, embarrassing photo of them. And I'm like, I'm a bit of an internet sleuth, you know, like I can spy, I can find things. If we need to find it, we can find things.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 3:14Wes Bos?

  And I like, I went way back on, on Chad and he's got like internet archive website from, when would you first, when was your first domain?

• 3:25Speaker 01

  I bought my first domain in, I think it was April of 2000. So again, I finished school in like late 99 and yeah. So I, I, I wish that I had the domain from pre-millennial era, but no, yeah, 2000 was.

• 3:39Wes Bos?

  And, and for the listeners who are on audio only, Chad is wearing like, like Sony Walkman headphones from like 1993 and you, can you tell us about those a sec?

• 3:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I mean, these are actually there, there's a company, I gotta dig it up. There's a company that's making these headphones new again. 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. With a K.

• 4:17Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I gotta say, anybody who wasn't around for those headphones, they're, they're so funny because the little foam bits, they always eventually just completely deteriorated.

• 4:28Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 4:28Scott Tolinski?

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

• 4:36Speaker 01

  Well, it, it is retrospect. So retrospect.com with a K. And you can buy, you know, replacement foams. They have like 12 different colors and stuff. It's pretty fun.

• 4:45Scott Tolinski?

  Wow, that's so fun.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  Check it out.

• 4:47Wes Bos?

  That's great.

• 4:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. This episode sponsored by.

• 4:51Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  Retrospect.

• 4:52Wes Bos?

  Retrospect.

• 4:54Wes Bos?

  Just kidding. Man, I can like, I can, yeah, like I can almost smell the like metal band on those headphones. That's hilarious.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:02Wes Bos?

  So what are, are you going to be doing with Syntax then? Like, what's the deal here?

• 5:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. So we've, I guess maybe, we'll get into it this way. So maybe revisiting more of the recent history with Sentry. 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 kind of stay on top of GitHub issues to, to really kind of be practical about it, you know, because Sentry was a growing company. I think when I joined, there was 130 people at the company and now we're up over 300, you know, we're like 350. And it was hard for, you know, we were like dropping stuff through the cracks on GitHub. So that was a big part of what I focused on at first. But then again, kind of with this funding program, you know, well, yeah, here's the story. Okay. Indeed, do you remember Indeed?

• 5:49Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 5:49Speaker 01

  Like the jobs board. Okay.

• 5:51Wes Bos?

  Yes.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  Well, Indeed had this program, my friend Dwayne O'Brien, when he was at Indeed, he started this program called FOS Fund, the FOS Contributor Fund. And so he had this great program at Indeed where Indeed would pay 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 FOS funds. Sentry was a recipient of one of Indeed's FOS Fund grants, like, because a little history on Sentry. 2008 started as this little open source side project. Wasn't until 2015. That David and Chris 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 Sentry.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  Sentry is open source. Let's give money to Sentry. And you know, but by then, you know, we were like off and running on, you know, on the startup path. Didn't need $20,000 or whatever, $10,000 from Indeed. And so we ended up taking that, matching it and re-gifting it to open source projects. But when I showed up, David Kramer, our technical co-founder, he was like, Chad, he's like, I need you to give $100,000 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 going to do this this year. We're going to do even more next year. So I showed up and like the first week, you know, I'm here to be like an engineer. And he's like, Chad, give $100,000 to open source projects. I was like, well, that's pretty cool job to have.

• 7:21Wes Bos?

  No kidding, yeah.

• 7:21Speaker 01

  Walked into, right? It took about a year to, to really get organized and get that done. 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 Sentry's open source values. First inside the company and then kind of as time went on, you know, started to get a higher profile outside the company. Wes, I felt like this was answering a question that you were asking. And now I've lost my train of thought and I'm hoping that we're going to bring it back around.

• 7:52Wes Bos?

  The question was like, what are you, what are you doing here?

• 7:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:56Wes Bos?

  With, right? Cause like you, you joined Sentry.

• 7:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:59Wes Bos?

  Doing all this open source stuff, giving out money. Chad came to us, I don't know, six months ago and was like, hey, Syntax gets 50K.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was fun.

• 8:08Wes Bos?

  And we get to give that away, right? So we, we asked the community, like what projects should Syntax give that money to? And that was a really fun and interesting way to figure out how to divvy that up. So.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So I guess to, to complete the circuit.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  Started internally focused, grew for a few years there. And then, over the past couple of years, we've really started to see Sentry's open source funding and some other initiatives as something we want to offer to the broader community, to the broader industry. And so David's really asked me to step forward even more and play more of an external kind of role in promoting Sentry's open source initiatives, open source related initiatives in the community, in the industry. And, you know, and that means kind of, you know, doing more content creation and stepping out, you know, I started a blog, you know, started thinking about video and things like that. And then, you know, you guys were also working with David and kind of he made the connection.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  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."

• 9:16Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, and Chad, you do such an excellent job of teaching open source, which seems to be like a... I don't know if it's just a topic that people get confused by, or people tend to argue about it quite a bit, but you have a really great blog, theopenpath quest. And it's super informative for anybody who has really not dove into a lot of like deep things inside of open source. What do people get wrong most about open source in general?

• 9:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, wow. Well, that's a big question.

• 9:50Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 9:51Speaker 01

  Because, 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 Sentry that everybody who joins the company goes through. And it's about open source. And the way that I introduce that, you know, so I run that session. And what I say in there is, you know, open source fundamentally is really this brand. It's this, this, this name for a thing that, that anybody who's in anywhere close to software at least has some notion of, you know, you've heard of this idea. Okay. It's defined by a certain kind of licensing, you know, so the fine print really is the fine print, you know? It's about the legalese, it's about the licensing.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  So it's this brand in the software industry that's defined by a certain kind of licensing. And that licensing is designed to encode...

• 10:43Speaker 01

  A public, community-centric approach to building software. So that's kind of the heart of open source is like this public, community-centric approach to building software. You know, 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, uh, you know, that anybody who's in 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 at a high level.

• 11:11Scott Tolinski?

  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 details.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, one of the things I see, and maybe this is the biggest problem, you know, getting back, getting back to your original question, because it has this legal element to it, it is really easy to get kind of legalistic about it, you know? And to have this, what I think of as kind of a narrow or kind of rigid approach to it. And to forget, you know, it's kind of a letter of the law, spirit of the law kind of 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 Ts and dotting the Is on the licenses.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  It's like, let's keep the main thing, the main thing without, of course, you know, losing, uh, you know, those, those definitional aspects.

• 12:18Wes Bos?

  It's always an interesting question of like, how do you license something so that it's not, uh, like you, you keep that community, you keep the openness, but you also protect the project 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, uh, a project? Like, I'm thinking of, like, one project is huge is FFmpeg, right? Like tirelessly maintained by several developers and probably billions of dollars of companies sitting on top using that to run companies.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. Here's the thing about open source. Another thing, let's, we'll, we'll throw some things on the table and maybe.

• 13:06Wes Bos?

  Yeah. Get as spicy as you like, Chad.

• 13:10Speaker 01

  All right. Open source, we think of it in terms of technology. Okay?

• 13:16Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  And, you know, we're all geeks here. We all love, you know, the tech and everything and geeking out on the tech. But when we look at this idea of a public community centric approach to building software, that really gets us outside of technology per se, and it gets us into economics. It gets us into politics. 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 I think a lot of the confusion, you know, that people have about open source is like, is not really recognizing that and not really taking that on board, not really understanding kind of,

• 13:59Speaker 01

  you know, these bigger implications for the thing. Yeah. I mean, so this FFmpeg example, let's maybe go over a little more of the detail of what's called the open source definition and how that applies to maybe the specifics of the license and see where we go from there. So before there was open source, there was something called free software, which was a movement started by Richard Stallman in 1983. Okay. And then by the late 90s, folks were trying to take that free software movement and kind of broaden it. You know, take it to the masses. And the term free was confusing because it's like, well, is it free as in beer? Or free as in speech? This is the way that we thought about it. And so they landed on the term open source as kind of a replacement term.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  But all of the values of free software are kind of like implicit in the open source movement.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  Bruce Perrin is this fellow that wrote a 10 point definition for free software for the Debian project in like the mid 90s, 96, 97, somewhere there. Bruce is a lawyer. And he wrote this 10-point 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 or you go to opensource.org/OSD, you know, you can see these 10 points. So number one, free redistribution. Number two, source code is available. Number three, derived works are allowed, et cetera, et cetera. Right? Like, here's 10 points that any software project licensing needs to fit

• 15:36Speaker 01

  in order to meet this kind of strict definition according to this Open Source Initiative Authority for open source. Okay. Yeah, well, there's that first one, free redistribution. That's what I'm trying to focus on. Okay, free redistribution. 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 obligation, any requirement that you pay for it. Okay? And, you know, Richard Stallman, the people, you know, kind of invested in free software would be like, it's okay to charge for it. You're allowed to do that. But, you know, at the same time, 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. Yeah, right.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  So this is why I say like, when we talk about FFmpeg being an open source project 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 Sentry's wandered into this in years past. And it's like been a big part of our story with open sources. Like, you know, Sentry'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 kind of manages this whole thing, you know, like formally approved by them. We are no longer an open source project. Sentry, the product that we're selling, we relicensed in 2019 away from an OSI compliant BSD license to, at the time it was called the Business Source License.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  Now we use something called the Fair Source, no, excuse me, I'm gonna mess that up forever. Functional Source License, which is a Fair Source License. All right. That's, I'm firehosing here. That's, that's some confusion. But this is, this is where we get to. Like, there's a lot of nuance here, right? Yeah. But really what that comes from is... Sentry, meaning like the app that we sell at sentry.io, you know, on SaaS that you can download, install yourself using self-hosted. That product is owned and run and the roadmap and the governance, keyword governance are controlled by a single company. Functional Software Incorporated, you know, C corp, Delaware C corp, DBA Sentry.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  Our company is 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? This is a tension point because it gets back to this idea of open source as 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 wholly controls that project? Then we get into other things like, you know, Linux is the biggest example where 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.

• 18:33Speaker 01

  Multiple companies, no single company owns that roadmap, owns that project. And so you've got, you know, a multi-vendor or a true community-based open source project. So, 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 the distinction between a single vendor project and a community-led project. So FFmpeg would be on that, I haven't dug deeply into the details. My understanding of it, it's on that community side, right? On the one half, we've got multi-vendor, community, open source.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  And on the other half, we've got single vendor. But I also want to have another axis here, which is, is it using an OSI approved license or not? Because that's where some of the, 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 want to keep using the term open source for that. But then there's another nuance, which is, oh, yeah. All right, we're going to get even more confused before we dig our way out of this.

• 19:46Wes Bos?

  Let's get into it. Yeah.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  There's another nuance, which is there's a particular license called the AGPL, which is kind of like a nuclear, nuclear license. It's like, if your project is licensed under the AGPL, then anything else that touches your software 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. And, you know, which is distinguished from what we say is permissive open source. Okay.

• 20:23Wes Bos?

  If I have a, a project, and I, I think WordPress is this, is that right? Where

• 20:29Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 20:29Wes Bos?

  I build something on top of WordPress, whatever I build must also be publicly available and licensed under that.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 20:39Wes Bos?

  But people are, people are building WordPress businesses, right? And like this was, this was a huge thing 10 years ago. I remember this big fight where people had, had themes that they were selling. How do they get around that?

• 20:51Speaker 01

  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 a true 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.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  To have a business, you have to have something scarce where you don't get the thing unless you pay for it. Okay. And so in an open source business, what you do is if the source code is not, you know, 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. I'm selling my time. My time is scarce. There's only so much of my time to go around. So if you want to use this open source software, I'm a consulting company and you're going to pay me to maintain your IT systems. And I'm going to use open source software to do it, but I'm going to be, you know, you're paying me for my labor.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  So the scarce thing there is the labor. So, 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 the convenience of clicking a button and having that installed on their WordPress system. Because WordPress is so popular, many people using WordPress are not developers, right? Are not savvy enough that they're going to 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?

• 22:23Wes Bos?

  Yeah, yeah, totally. It makes sense. I've always been interested in all of these. We'll talk a little bit more about licenses in a little bit, but yeah, that's super interesting.

• 22:33Speaker 01

  All right. I want to throw this, I'm not going to say it's the last detail, but another detail at you. 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 is like, you know, anything even on the network that touches this has to be released. And what companies will do is they'll add an additional legal document called a CLA, which stands for contributor licensing agreement, 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?

• 23:17Speaker 01

  Because if you don't do this, then you know, it's a really muddy situation and probably 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 re-license 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 this CLA upfront before they Accept your contribution to their project and that way they've got, you know, they've got the wherewithal where they can re-license a project or do something different with it in the future. So that combination of the AGPL license, which is a true OSI approved license, plus a CLA is kind of a loophole that companies use to pretend that they're an open source

• 24:02Speaker 01

  company, but really it's a single vendor. They control it. It's not a true community project. I mean, this is the open core playbook. Open core 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 can 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 or a Linux. Yeah. And so people get, that's one of the things people get upset about. It's like, people see it as companies taking advantage of developers' free labor.

• 24:40Scott Tolinski?

  So 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? Is that kind of how it's viewed or is it just like the most intense version of it?

• 24:54Speaker 01

  This is where opinions differ.

• 24:55Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  Between that, what we say is permissive versus copy left. The copy left is the share alike that we're talking about. And the difference between the two, permissive is like an MIT license or an Apache license or a BSD license or, or my favorite, when we get into the beerware license where it's like, just do whatever you want. You know, like take the software and do whatever you want with it. 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.

• 25:28Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 25:28Speaker 01

  On the GPL side, on the copy left side, they're really long licenses 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, all right, companies that love lawyers, like, we're going to 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, like we're better at this game than you are, we're just going to come back with CLAs, you know, that like, uh, it's sort of like wall off the garden again. So. AGPL, when it's used by a community project, which tends to look like a nonprofit foundation. There'll be a nonprofit foundation that is the umbrella

• 26:13Speaker 01

  under which multiple companies come together to collaborate. And that nonprofit is the thing that holds the intellectual property for the project. And they're using the AGPL to preserve that nonprofit ownership of this code and community management of the code. So the AGPL is a little neutral. Like, it could be used in either scenario.

• 26:35Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  Is it the purest? I mean, Sentry is on the permissive side. You know, our kind of open source values are really on the permissive side, where it's just like, look, take it, do whatever. Like, we're not here to fight a legal battle with you. You know, the point is, yeah, we'd rather write code than licenses.

• 26:57Wes Bos?

  That was my next question. People are probably thinking right now, so when something is, I guess, fair source or source available, but there are limitations on what you can do with that. A, what are you allowed to do? And B, why even have your project open source if people are not able to then take it and use it?

• 27:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:21Wes Bos?

  If that's the case.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  So fair source is a term that's been around for a little while, but we took it over last year. And we launched this fair source movement, which is really about these companies that want to share. And so far, the best option has been a single vendor open source that gets you in these fights over what does open source really mean? And we sort of said, okay, let's let go of that battle and let's just have a different name for it. With fair source, you could read the code. You can download the code. You can run the code. You can run the code for your own purposes. You just can't compete with the single vendor company that's producing it in the first place.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  So for Sentry, our business is all in SaaS. And so we've got our SaaS Sentry.

• 28:14Speaker 01

  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 installations of self-hosted Sentry out in the wild. So like, this is actually working, you know, people are using it and getting real value out of Sentry. The limitation thing you can't do with it is you can't stand up a competing SaaS business, because that would undermine our ability, you know, undermine our business. Like, because yeah, what you have to understand is, when a company like Facebook puts out React, or a company like Google puts out Kubernetes, okay, they release these kind of big open source projects that we're familiar with, or like the Go language or whatever, right?

• 28:55Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  When these companies are releasing that software as open source, it's not their core business, you know, like a 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. It's not part of their core business. Sentry is a software company. We sell software. That's our core product. So we need to have a little protection around that. Yeah. So Fair Source 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, and really, hopefully, free us up as an industry

• 29:39Speaker 01

  and as a community to really let open source be about this multi-vendor, you know, community approach to building software together, and have a clearer path for founders that do want to share, especially developer tools companies, you know, it's like, you're not going to have a developer tools company without some kind of open source or sharing strategy. So let's, yeah, let's kind of clarify those two things. So we can, I mean, we'll never stop fighting on the internet, Scott, but yeah.

• 30:10Scott Tolinski?

  That makes, that makes so much sense to me, though, in terms of. Like giving people the opportunity to utilize the code or understand the code or even host it themselves while not allowing somebody to just copy it and make a business out of it. 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, you'll want to check out Sentry at sentry.io/syntax. 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 over to sentry.io/syntax. Again, we've been using this tool for a long time and it totally rules. All right.

• 30:55Wes Bos?

  I'm just looking into another piece of software right now that I've been touching a lot, and that is 3D printing slicing software, which is basically you take like a model, like I've got like a little M24 nut or a bolt right here, and 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 orient and whatnot, all kinds of features. The software that I use is called Bamboo Studio, which is by this company. And they basically forked Prusa Slicer, there's another one called Orca Slicer. They're all, they're all based on the same thing. And Bamboo 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 the Prusa Slicer

• 31:40Wes Bos?

  is AGPL. I just looked it up, right? So they have to make that open source, right? And it's a, it's a net win for the community because 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, take that, oh, they added tree supports. Let's, let's take that over. They added in auto arrangement. Let's take that feature and port it back to, to our own. And it's, it's nice because now the, the software for the entire industry is, all these companies have their own software if they want to, but they're all kind of helping each other out.

• 32:17Scott Tolinski?

  Wow. Yeah, I'm seeing this. I guess it's a couple of years ago, but yeah, this blog post, AGPL compliance of Bamboo Studio. It's interesting. I hadn't seen this case.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:28Wes Bos?

  It's a wild world. It's, it's not just software, right? Like, um, even, um, I don't have an example right 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 like some like Ikea coming and just injection molding 10 million of them. And yeah, and then making all money off of it. So it's, it's kind of tricky.

• 32:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, so you can see where what starts out as, you know, we're having fun building tech together, gets into these really thorny kind of economic questions and political questions.

• 33:02Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 33:03Speaker 01

  And like, what does it mean to have a society together? Kind of questions like, yeah, as you start pulling on the thread, it's like, whoo. Yeah.

• 33:10Wes Bos?

  Yeah. So my next question then is when you simply just npm install something and you might have dependencies 11 layers deep, should we be concerned about that? Let's say someone's building an app that they want to one day sell. Should we be concerned about that? Even like when, when syntax joined Sentry, we had to go through our package JSON and find every license all the way down and we gave it to the lawyers. Yeah.

• 33:35Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Give it to the lawyers. Yeah.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  To make sure there's none of that AGPL in there, right? None of that viral, so to speak. Uh, yeah. Copy left licensing. I mean, it's definitely something to be aware of and it's absolutely, I mean, like you experienced at, at any scale, you're to need to, you know, and there's tooling for this now, you know, Fossa is one that we use internally to keep track of our licenses, you know? We're kind of too far gone with it, you know? It's like anymore you can't, you know, the, the stats of these things are always questionable, but like 90 plus percent of any code base is open source components. You know, like if you look at any of the apps on your phone or whatever websites that 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? Were you the one that had to go through that, Wes?

• 34:20Wes Bos?

  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?

• 34:32Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Enjoy.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  You asked for it.

• 34:36Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, that happened when I was working 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.

• 34:46Wes Bos?

  Yeah, a lot of people do that, or I'll have, I'll often have a repo where I don't add a license because for whatever reason, and then someone, or someone simply wants, you sometimes hit upon a GitHub Gist, eight lines of code, 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.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, no more enlightened lawyer will let you get away with eight lines.

• 35:08Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 35:09Speaker 01

  From somewhere, but yeah, but you know, left pad, right? How many NPM packages are only a couple of lines?

• 35:14Wes Bos?

  Yeah, yeah, no kidding.

• 35:16Scott Tolinski?

  Chad, what's the most interesting open source license? Uh, the most unusual, I suppose.

• 35:21Speaker 01

  The most interesting? Is that a leading question, Scott?

• 35:24Scott Tolinski?

  No.

• 35:24Speaker 01

  Because I was about to bring up.

• 35:26Wes Bos?

  T-ball.

• 35:27Speaker 01

  The one I'm loving right now is this beerware license that you guys have seen me talk about in our channel. And I guess I mentioned a little earlier here, and I was thinking about it just now because you're talking about having to go through the audit of everything, uh, you know, in syntax. With open source licenses, you can do whatever you want with it, but almost always you have to include what's called attribution. So you have to actually include the text of the license when you, uh, when you incorporate a component into your own app, all right? And, you know, so any company of any size is doing this, you know, in some way. And so on your phone or in any of the apps that you're using that use all this open source software,

• 36:09Speaker 01

  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, uh, you know, permission slip from the author to use the thing. Okay. 20 years ago, probably, yeah. I mean, I went back and looked. I actually 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, who wrote like half of Free BSD. He wrote this, this HTTP cache called Varnish, which is a popular HTTP cache, uh, that basically got commercialized as Fastly. You know, so Fastly like came out of the Varnish community and is, you know, is built on top of Fastly. A lot of PHP goes by PHP.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  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 anti-lawyer license. Yeah, I'm gonna read it to you here. The Beerware License, the Beerware License Revision 42, PHK at freebsd.org wrote this file, as long as you retain this notice, you can do whatever you want with this stuff. If we meet someday and you think this stuff is worth it, you can buy me a beer in return, Paul Henning camp. That's it. That's the license. No legalese, 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 2005 or whatever, 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.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  And I guess going back to what I was saying earlier, Apple, you know, you'd think, okay, this is just like a joke, right? But Apple has components that they're using for iOS that, you know, PHK wrote and licensed under the Beerware License, which means that Apple has to include 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 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 Beerware License. I, I get a kick out of it.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  This, of all the licenses that I'm aware of, actually does the best job of pointing to what we've kind of been, you know, that thread that we've been pulling on, which is that open source has economic implications. Open source has political implications. Because in here, this idea that it's like, hey, if you like this, you know, feel free to buy me a beer sometime. That's an exchange, as funny as it is. That's an exchange. It's an indication of the back and forth of open source. 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,

• 39:01Speaker 01

  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 invitation, you know, invitation. I see open source. As an invitation, it's a gift. Open source is like, hey, here's the software I wrote. You know, feel free to use it. 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, uh, you know, extra computers lying around that you'd like to give me? Uh, you know, as an exchange, as a reciprocal gift for this thing that I've given you? 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?

• 39:41Speaker 01

  Like, that's really what it's all about is like people working together, collaborating, building stuff, uh, you know, and, and, and getting way further than we could on our own. Yeah. So as funny as the beer license is, I think there is a really deep insight kind of embedded in that.

• 40:00Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Yeah. I love that. Let's talk about the open source pledge really quick. Uh, you had mentioned that you'd worked on the open source pledge at Sentry. We've talked about it a bit on this show already, but can you give the audience a rundown about like what the open source pledge is and who's involved?

• 40:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. So the open source pledge is Sentry's attempt to get other companies to give as much money to open source as we do. Because, uh, again, going back to my own history here, like I started this, David was like, Chad, give money to open source. So I gave a bunch of money to open source. And then the next year he was like, Chad, give even more money to open source. And so I gave even more money to open source. Then the third year, you know, we doubled the amount again, we gave $500,000 to open source.

• 40:45Scott Tolinski?

  Crazy. Yeah.

• 40:47Speaker 01

  In year four, we were like, okay, this is cool, but 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. 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, uh, you know, that we're not burning them out. 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 is a group of companies working together to change the status quo in open source sustainability. So there's this classic XKCD comic. It's called dependency. I think it's number 2347.

• 41:31Speaker 01

  And it's got this like Jenga tower, you know, of blocks kind of built on top of each other. And it says, you know, here's all modern digital infrastructure and it's resting on this one little kind of precarious component that says, "A project from 2003, thanklessly maintained by some guy in Nebraska." Okay. That is the problem we're trying to solve with the pledge. We're trying to get that guy in Nebraska who's been thanklessly maintaining that project since 2003 paid so he doesn't burn out and the whole thing collapses. And yeah, so we've got, let's see, we launched about six months ago. For a company to join the pledge, they need to, number one, pay maintainers. And then number two, blog about

• 42:12Speaker 01

  it. So there's a threshold amount, which is a function of the number of developers employed at the company. So if a company employs 100 developers, the figure is $2,000 per developer. That's the minimum. So if a company employs 100 developers, they would pay maintainers $200,000. 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." And then, you know, we onboard them and put them on the website. 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. It's been, it's been fun. If you're listening to this and your company uses open source software, then you should encourage your company to

• 42:57Speaker 01

  join the open source pledge.

• 42:59Wes Bos?

  Totally. It's way over two and a half million bucks on there. Some, some pretty big companies have joined.

• 43:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Laravel's with us. It was really fun. A company called Posit joined. 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 in R, this old data science language. And they've got more developers than Sentry does. So they joined, you know, just at the end of December, you know, a few months after we launched. So really encouraging to see companies, yeah, start to get on board with this and work together.

• 43:35Wes Bos?

  That's amazing. Yeah.

• 43:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:36Wes Bos?

  3,679 bucks per dev and there's 134 devs.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, right?

• 43:42Wes Bos?

  Ah, it's awesome.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  Pushing over 2.5 million and Sentry is only 750 of that. You know, so much more that's not Sentry than is.

• 43:52Wes Bos?

  You guys rolled out some like hilarious billboards as well? What were those? There's three of them, right?

• 43:57Speaker 01

  Oh goodness. Yeah, we, so we launched the open source pledge last year on October 8th. And we did it, we rented three of the most expensive billboards in the world. And Sentry's creative team, uh, we call them Studio 4 and 4, Studio 404 internally here. They had a lot of fun, uh, coming up with a campaign for us that we called Mooch Monsters. So we've got the CEO who's the chief excuse officer. 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, cause we did those three billboards. But we also got a bunch of buses and bus shelters.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  And they're still running around because those buses, you know, they don't, they don't change them as quick as the billboards, right? So like there's still chief CTO, you know, chief tightwad officers running around San Francisco. It's pretty fun.

• 44:50Scott Tolinski?

  That's good. Yeah, we, we saw some of those in SF. They're pretty eye catching. They're, they're pretty dope. Yeah.

• 44:57Speaker 01

  We got an article in the Register about the billboard. It's like, since when are billboards news? You know, it's like new billboard goes up on, you know, freeway or whatever. It's like, yeah. Well, and then the other one, we, we were on, uh, we were in Times Square too. You know, the NASDAQ Jumbotron?

• 45:12Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, yeah.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  Right? Yeah. Yeah. We were on there as well for

• 45:15Scott Tolinski?

  Amazing.

• 45:16Speaker 01

  With a bunch of, bunch of the launch partners, the innovators, we call them. The innovators that joined with us for that launch. Uh, yeah. So that's, name of the game now is, you know, We just got to keep growing. We got to get more and more companies on board, chip away. I mean, it's a weird, you know, it's a weird kind of startup, right? Where it's like, we're tracking ARR and we're trying to grow and we're like, you know, trying to get out there and not die. I got a question for you, Chad. Yeah. What license should I use? I like it. Well, it depends on your goals. There's different lifecycle stages for an open source project.

• 45:55Speaker 01

  So I think you're probably asking from the point of view of a kind of a solo maintainer, right? Who maybe has a fun idea and some spare time and nights and weekends and, you know, puts together a project. The two fundamental paths you can go down are the permissive or the copy left. I like the permissive side. I'm not really looking to use the law against people. It's like, eh, you know, I'm going to get outlawed one way or another. You know, if you're, if you're of that bent, then sure, use the GPL or look into it. Here's what I want to use this question to say. I see the copy left style as

• 46:40Speaker 01

  more niche and more and more niche as time goes on. Because I think most people 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. You have to kind of be an activist to bring that word in, you know? So copy left, free software, so to speak. I see that more for activists, which just, you know, by definition are going to be a much smaller, you know, proportion. And I think open source, we need to blow this up even bigger than it is. I think permissive is the thing that is going to resonate more with more people and

• 47:19Speaker 01

  is truer to what I understand to be that kind of heart of open source, which is really about that community aspect, which is 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, you know, like that's not how like it feels just kind of 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 yeah, to me, copy left misses the point. So use a permissive license. The MIT is one of the most established licenses. That's, you know, you can't go wrong with MIT. Apache has a little more legalese in there

• 48:02Speaker 01

  that gives you some, you know, nuanced 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 then Apache, we use for other components, you know, that we release. Of course, we do also use our functional source license for Sentry itself. I'm talking about the true open source stuff that we put out. So MIT, Apache, you know, or if you really want to 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, what's your own history with publishing projects?

• 48:36Wes Bos?

  Tons of it out there.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  Any, anything anybody else is using, Wes? Like, what's your most popular open source project?

• 48:42Wes Bos?

  Oh, my most, my most popular module is the most embarrassing thing. It's called wait. If you go to npm dot I M forward slash W A A I T.

• 48:52Speaker 01

  A A I T, two A's?

• 48:54Wes Bos?

  Yeah, because one wait was taken and it's simply a one line.

• 48:58Speaker 01

  That's branding right there, my friend. Yeah.

• 49:01Wes Bos?

  It's simply, it's just a function that returns a promise after however many seconds you pass it or milliseconds.

• 49:07Speaker 01

  And you used MIT on it. There you go.

• 49:09Wes Bos?

  And it, yeah, it's got 100,000 people a week. It used to be even higher before AI would inject it because it's a, it's a one line package, but embarrassingly popular.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  I love it. And it's seven years ago. You put it out seven years ago and it's still.

• 49:26Wes Bos?

  Seven years ago, updated it, I guess.

• 49:29Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 49:30Wes Bos?

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

• 49:35Speaker 01

  It's, it's the perfect package.

• 49:37Wes Bos?

  Yes, exactly.

• 49:38Speaker 01

  It doesn't need anything.

• 49:39Wes Bos?

  I'm just going through the iOS, um, legal.

• 49:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:44Wes Bos?

  Page. I found a copy of it online and I've been searching.

• 49:47Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, you gotta get it. Yeah, it's tough to scroll.

• 49:49Wes Bos?

  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.

• 49:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:59Wes Bos?

  And.

• 50:00Speaker 01

  You find some good stuff?

• 50:01Wes Bos?

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

• 50:04Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 50:04Wes Bos?

  And, um, Ember JS. I'm pretty sure iTunes, Apple Music is built with Ember. Or at least parts of it.

• 50:12Speaker 01

  Apple Music is built with Svelte.

• 50:14Wes Bos?

  Is it?

• 50:14Speaker 01

  Okay. Yeah.

• 50:15Wes Bos?

  Oh, some, at, at some point, Apple used Ember for something. I'm curious what that is. And obviously they still have jQuery in there somewhere. And then there's one for Web, a WebRTC JavaScript library. Curious, maybe FaceTime's built with JavaScript?

• 50:33Speaker 01

  And you find that beerware in there? Did you find that?

• 50:35Wes Bos?

  I did. I did find the beerware in there. It makes me want to make a funny license now and if, uh,

• 50:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:40Wes Bos?

  if it's ever used.

• 50:42Speaker 01

  Play in the long game.

• 50:43Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 50:44Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 50:44Wes Bos?

  Yeah. But every now and then when, if I go into a car and into legal notices, I, I scroll and I remember,

• 50:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, see what's in there.

• 50:52Wes Bos?

  we used to have a BMW and I scrolled and I found a whole bunch of JavaScript libraries in there as well.

• 50:57Speaker 01

  Mercedes actually has, some of the car companies are starting open source programs.

• 51:02Wes Bos?

  Hmm, really?

• 51:02Speaker 01

  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, for some reason, I feel like Porsche had an open source program. Yeah, Porsche, open, open source dot Porsche dot com. Yeah, so Porsche is in the open source game.

• 51:20Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 51:20Speaker 01

  I found that. I'll post a link to the Mercedes has a blog post about their, uh, Mercedes embraces open source to drive its digital ecosystem. Cool.

• 51:29Wes Bos?

  It's pretty cool, right?

• 51:30Speaker 01

  To drive its, yeah, that's fun.

• 51:32Wes Bos?

  There you go. Speaking of like, like interesting licenses, though, I need to find one for my, like my teaching content because

• 51:40Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 51:40Wes Bos?

  I've, I've 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.

• 52:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:03Wes Bos?

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

• 52:09Speaker 01

  What about Creative Commons? Any of those Creative Commons licenses appropriate?

• 52:13Wes Bos?

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

• 52:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. Creative Commons is very similar, of course, to open source, but it's really designed for everything except software. And open source is really about software. 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 content, otherwise, you know, that's what Creative Commons is there for. I don't know if like, because there is a non-commercial variant in Creative Commons, you know, that might do it. Because they have, they have like a mix and match, right? They have like four-ish different kinds of restrictions you can put.

• 52:54Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 52:54Speaker 01

  And still fit in the Creative Commons bucket. Yeah. And you can kind of pick and choose which of those you want to bring in.

• 52:59Wes Bos?

  Maybe I, I'll take a look into that. It's, for me, it's mostly just the, the software that I write, like the, the actual code.

• 53:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:07Wes Bos?

  Not the, the videos themselves all have their own individual.

• 53:11Speaker 01

  You might need fair source, Wes.

• 53:12Wes Bos?

  Yeah, there we go.

• 53:14Speaker 01

  You can't commercialize it.

• 53:15Wes Bos?

  I need to join on, yeah. Well, that's, that's the other thing is 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 be able to do that.

• 53:26Speaker 01

  What you don't want is people to compete with you to.

• 53:29Wes Bos?

  Yeah, exactly. That's, that's the thing is I don't want somebody taking the exact same code.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:34Wes Bos?

  And the words that I've spoken and just re-recording them.

• 53:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:38Wes Bos?

  Or doing it in another language or something like that, you know, and without explicit permission.

• 53:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that is really that fair source idea. This idea that companies that are, you know, public on GitHub with their code, but have, whether it's that AGPL with the CLA or using a fair source license. You know, there's this kind of dark aspect to it. People were like, wow, you're just, you know, stealing our labor and, you know, taking advantage of us. And I'll tell you what, there is, I feel differently about it. I think those people are mostly just grumps and are gonna hate anything in my experience 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 people. Plausible,

• 54:26Speaker 01

  you familiar with plausible? They're like the Google Analytics.

• 54:29Wes Bos?

  Yeah, I think we use on the syntax site, don't we?

• 54:32Speaker 01

  We do, yeah. Yeah, I love plausible. They are one of these open core companies that's AGPL with a CLA. And I have a contribution in plausible. I gave them a pull request. You know, like, this is five years ago or whatever, six years ago. 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 request and they accepted it. And now it's in there. And I don't at all feel taken advantage of by plausible. You know what I mean? It's like, I don't want to maintain that code forever. You know what I mean? It's like, I want to 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.

• 55:17Speaker 01

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

• 56:01Speaker 01

  You know, you're welcome to give us contributions, you know, and it's Again, invitation. It's like, nobody's twisting your arm to force you to contribute to something.

• 56:09Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, right, yeah.

• 56:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think there's value there in both approaches. Scott, how about you? Do you have any open source projects?

• 56:15Scott Tolinski?

  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 Zero Sync, which is a local first syncing platform, so I wrote the Svelte bindings for that. I have a number of little, small utilities, like an automatic Babel plugin for auto-importing certain files and stuff like that, but nothing crazy. Most of my stuff has just been the educational content that I just throw up on GitHub, yeah.

• 56:45Speaker 01

  Do you guys ever contribute to other projects in open source?

• 56:49Wes Bos?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, quite a bit. I love that about open source projects is you can just do drive-by, drive-by, fix something, and get going.

• 57:00Speaker 01

  So you're actually giving PRs, Wes, not just issues?

• 57:02Wes Bos?

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, you take a look at my GitHub profile, you'll see it.

• 57:07Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 57:08Wes Bos?

  But, yeah, when I first got started in GitHub, maybe like 12 years ago, I was Mr. Docs, you know? Boom, boom, boom. But

• 57:16Scott Tolinski?

  Mr. Docs.

• 57:17Wes Bos?

  Much more of like, well, I still do quite a bit of docs because they're unfortunately kind of neglected in many use cases. But I would say like, my most is simply issues with replications.

• 57:30Speaker 01

  Super valuable, yeah. High-quality bug reports.

• 57:34Wes Bos?

  Oh, man. Sometimes I just get so exhausted when you like, open up a new issue and it's like, here, fill out this book.

• 57:40Speaker 01

  Here's the template.

• 57:40Wes Bos?

  Give me a whole code sandbox. I'm like, ahhhh. But, yeah, I realize on the other end as well, it's like, well, I don't know of this issue that you're having, please show me how it actually works.

• 57:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Well, that just goes to show you how much labor does go into open source, you know?

• 57:57Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 57:57Speaker 01

  And if you can spread it around a little bit, if we can, I don't know, I kind of think, you know, a company like Sentry, given 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 and make it stronger. If you're a company and you can give $750,000 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 bug report, you know, that is actually valuable. And if, you know, if we could have kind 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 sentry that can give all this money.

• 58:41Speaker 01

  Like, there is absolutely stuff that you can do to participate. One notch, you know, more than than some of us are doing.

• 58:48Wes Bos?

  Totally. And maintainers like that, though, because you give them a failing test. Even if it takes you half an hour, sometimes they can just, like, 10 minutes. Fix it, push a new version.

• 58:59Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, man, if you're a maintainer and you get a really good bug report, I mean, that lights up your day, you know? After all the trash that you get, especially with like the AI-generated slop now. It's like, maintainers are flooded with it. So if you come in with some valuable, yeah, info, that's, that's gold.

• 59:16Wes Bos?

  All right, should we wrap this up, Scott?

• 59:18Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah, I think it's a good time to do that. Let's get into the part of the show where we talk about sick picks and shameless plugs. Chad, a sick pick is something that you're just liking right now, enjoying anything. Do you have a sick pick?

• 59:31Speaker 01

  Oh, well, you guys know where my head's at. And this episode is supposed to air with my first salvo on the Syntax Channel. I'm really enjoying these Save the Cat books about screenwriting and writing narrative story content. So shout out to this fellow, Jamie Nash, who wrote a book about writing for TV using the Save the Cat beat sheet method. So look into it if you want to understand about screenwriting, I guess.

• 1:00:06Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, nice.

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  I'll give that one.

• 1:00:09Scott Tolinski?

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

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  Oh, man. What's the difference between a pick and a plug, Wes?

• 1:00:17Wes Bos?

  A sick pick is what you just gave, and a plug is like you wanna

• 1:00:21Speaker 01

  My own thing?

• 1:00:22Wes Bos?

  Yeah, your own thing.

• 1:00:22Speaker 01

  Show my own thing?

• 1:00:23Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  Well, then that, I mean, the obviously compliment is like, yeah, go watch my show on Syntax that's coming out together with this episode. That's an easy one.

• 1:00:33Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, Chad's gonna be talking about open source and giving us all some

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

  Oh, my goodness.

• 1:00:39Scott Tolinski?

  Really interesting open source information in various ways. So, we're really, really stoked to have Chad jump on the team. Yeah, pull on the thread.

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  And see where it goes, yeah.

• 1:00:50Scott Tolinski?

  I love it. Yeah, so, looking super forward to that. Chad, it's awesome. It's been great having you on the team so far, and I can't wait to see your show and what you put out.

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  What the future holds.

• 1:01:01Wes Bos?

  All right, thank you.

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  Appreciate it. Thanks, Scott. Thanks, Wes.

• 1:01:03Scott Tolinski?

  Thanks, Chad.