Sustain

Duane O’Brien | Mandy Grover

Richard Littauer | Justin Dorfman | Ben Nichols

Hello and welcome to Sustain! The podcast where we talk about sustaining open source for the long haul. On today’s episode we have two excellent guests, Duane O’Brien and Mandy Grover. Duane is the Head of Open Source at Indeed and Mandy is a Technical Content Architect III, as well as manages a team within the Technical Content organization at Indeed. They are here to talk about the FOSS Fund and the recently released FOSS Fund report. Duane and Mandy go in detail on the report and expand on who it is for, how to use it, tools they used, and things they’ll be writing about in the second report. We also learn the ups and downs of writing, but more importantly how Duane and Mandy built their friendship and trust in the process of writing this report successfully. Go ahead and download this episode now to learn more!

[00:03:11] Mandy and Duane fill us in on the FOSS Fund report titled, Investing in Open Source: The FOSS Contributor Fund.

[00:04:57] We learn more about how the FOSS Contributor Fund started, what it is, and how the response has been so far.

[00:09:06] Justin wonders if Duane and Mandy ever thought this would become the blueprint, and then we hear the story how the Sentry thing came about.

[00:16:08] Learn about some new things coming out in the second report.

[00:19:24] Duane explains how you can still use this report even if your organization is not huge.

[00:20:56] Richard wonders if you were a coder, how could you make yourself more eligible to be a recipient of funds.

[00:24:19] Find out about a few of the tools they talk about in the report, one which is called Starfish.

[00:26:28] Mandy fills us in on how everything went when they released the report and how they set expectations with each other. Duane also brings up about asking maintainers to write things.

[00:33:54] Find out where you can find this report and where you can find Duane and Mandy online.

[00:13:56] “We had this moment where we were like, it’s certainly projects, it’s certainly money, it’s certainly all these things, but at the heart of it is people.”

[00:21:17] “The biggest problem that we don’t talk about is this: You are a single project in a sea of thousands that organizations may depend on.”

[00:26:48] “We set expectations early, we knew the goal, and we were always there supporting each other and holding each other accountable.”

[00:33:12] “Let’s temper our expectation of what we want maintainers to do when it comes to documenting things because it’s not easy.”

Special Guests: Duane O’Brien and Mandy Grover.

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Samuel Wein

Richard Littauer | Justin Dorfman

Hello and welcome to Sustain! The podcast where we talk about sustaining open source for the long haul. On today’s episode, we are very excited to have as our guest, Samuel Wein, who is a core developer and Executive Chairman of the OpenMS Foundation, a Post Doc at University of Tuebingen in Germany, and the head of a software consultancy specializing in analysis of RNA using Mass Spectrometry. Samuel fills us in on OpenMS and Mass Spectrometry and how he’s trying to make it better and expand it. He explains more about the governance process, how the funding process is going, training programs he’s done, and an internship program in the works to get more diversity. Samuel shares some great groups to get involved in the open source projects sciences area, and what he would like to change with OpenMS. Go ahead and download this episode now to find out more!

[00:02:14] Samuel is a scientist, so we find out how he ended up being a coder.

[00:03:27] Samuel explains OpenMS and Mass Spectrometry, and Justin wonders if this was instrumental in the mRNA research from Moderna and the other place that Pfizer teamed up with.

[00:06:47] Justin wonders how many times Samuel has been trying to get recruited from companies, such as Moderna, since they are probably looking for people like Samuel, and what’s keeping him away from them.

[00:08:14] Richard wonders what the governance process was like.

[00:11:09] Samuel has three partnerships for funding right now and Justin wonders if they are his go-to or if he needs to get more funding from different partners.

[00:13:08] Richard asks Samuel if he can talk about how he’s keeping the project from ending up bending the corporate interest and what it looks like for him.

[00:14:29] Justin wonders what other revenue streams Samuel has besides his donors and grants and if he has any training programs that he’s put together.

[00:17:34] Besides documentation, Richard is curious to know if Samuel could think of looking at his organization and then the wider field as a whole of really improving JEDI work, and if there’s anything he’s working on besides that.

[00:20:00] Samuel explains how people can get involved and what was helpful for him.

[00:22:17] We find out what Samuel is interested in learning and changing, as well as other things he’s interested in doing with OpenMS.

[00:24:07] Samuel suggests some groups that have useful to him to join, such as Open Bio, EuBIC-MS, and HUPO PSI.

[00:25:45] Find out where you can follow Samuel on the internet.

[00:08:19] “My experience with scientific projects developed in labs is that they unfortunately tend to have a lifecycle that is contingent upon the career path of the core developer.”

[00:08:45] "There are issues with sustainability and maintainability once the original developer has left.”

[00:09:39] “[On community organizing in OSS] It’s all volunteer, it’s all passion projects, and you need to steer people towards their passions.”

[00:16:20] “We’re looking for a Community Manager.”

[00:22:41] “I would like to convince more scientists of the importance of choosing their software based on it’s openness.”

Special Guest: Samuel Wein.

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Ele Diakomichalis

Richard Littauer | Eric Berry | Pia Mancini

Hello and welcome to Sustain! The podcast where we talk about sustaining open source for the long haul. We are very excited to have as our guest today, Ele Diakomichalis, who is one of the Co-Founders and one of the core contributors to Radicle. What is Radicle? It’s a decentralized stack for code collaboration that enables developers to collaborate on code, govern code, and fund code in a decentralized way. Ele fills us in more about Radicle, how many people are on the team, how many people use it, the financial commitment to using Radicle, and he explains the three layers to the Radicle stack. Also, we find out Ele’s pipe dream for long-term usage of Radicle and his thoughts on how he thinks he can change the coding space for JavaScript and Ruby coders, and people who want to make open source better. Go ahead and download this episode now to find out more about how to get involved in Radicle!

[00:01:28] Ele fills us in on what Radicle is and why it’s so awesome. Also, we learn how Radicle is different than using GitHub and then paying people through Open Collective using Ethereum.

[00:08:39] We learn more about the financial commitment that somebody using Radicle might be obligated to or not obligated to.

[00:15:29] Richard wonders what the current scope of Radicle is, how many people use it, and how big the team is.

[00:18:09] What is Ele’s pipe dream for long-term usage of Radicle for the average contributor who doesn’t want anything to do with P2P or Crypto, and how does he think he can change the coding space for JavaScript coders, Ruby coders, or people who are interested in just making open source better and working on stuff?

[00:22:42] The topic of finding a path for open source creators to capture more value out of their creations through a coin or token is brought up by Pia and she wonders how that’s looking now for Ele with Radicle, as well as challenges of paying or getting paid for value creation in open source.

[00:32:12] If you want to get involved in Radicle find out where you can go.

[00:33:25] Find out where you can follow Ele online.

[00:06:25] “One of the things that we actually do with Radicle is actually leveraging Ethereum for code governance.”

[00:13:28] “The last thing is basically what we call Radicle Funding, and this is basically our contribution to the open sustainability problem where you, as a maintainer, you can actually raise funds from your supporters, either as donations or in exchange for something within your community.”

[00:19:17] “The second thing that it’s more of a dream or a hope, but I really feel that what we’re doing with Radicle works is introducing a non-hierarchical model for collaboration.”

[00:19:57] “We really hope that we’re going to see a lot of these developers actually realizing that if we can also coordinate in a non-hierarchical way and sometimes this actually looks more beautiful.”

[00:30:56] “Because we think that we need to create new cultural norms. We want to make this a norm that every time that you get paid, more developers get paid and try to create this more cyclical, regenerative, someone would say, open source economy.”

Special Guest: Ele Diakomichalis.

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Nicholas C. Zakas

Richard Littauer

Hello and welcome to Sustain! The podcast where we talk about sustaining open source for the long haul. You may know my guest today, Nicholas Zakas, because he is the creator of a very popular JavaScript project called ESLint, which has been downloaded 13 million times each week. Nicholas is an independent software engineer, consultant, and coach, and has written numerous books including, Understanding ECMAScript 6, The Principles of Object-Oriented JavaScript, and Maintainable JavaScript. With over sixteen years of web application development experience and speaking at conferences around the world, he’s putting his focus now on mentoring and coaching the next generation of JavaScript engineers. Nicholas brings us on his journey sharing his story of becoming a developer, starting ESLint, and what he’s doing to make sure everybody in the ESLint community is able to benefit from the money they are bringing in. We also learn more about an interesting blog post he wrote, how contributors get paid, and other open source projects ESLint donates to. Why should you use ESLint? Go ahead and download this episode now to find out!

[00:01:39] Nicholas shares his story with us starting out as a developer and how it led him to starting ESLint.

[00:03:01] What did Nicholas mean when he said he fell in love with JavaScript?

[00:03:47] We find out how long ESLint has been around, how many people are working full-time, and how he keeps himself in funds.

[00:05:04] Nicholas talks about the Open Collective and GitHub sponsors they set up for donations.

[00:07:42] Richard brings up a blog post Nicholas wrote on, “How to talk to your company about sponsoring an open source project” and he tells us what iterations he’s gone through with ESLint.

[00:10:59] Nicholas talks about the difficulties in multi-tasking, and he tells us the next thing they tried with paying a straight per hour rate for team members.

[00:17:15] Richard wonders where Nicholas came up with the less than standard rate for hourly work which is not really a Silicon Valley salary, and he also tells us how many hours per month he is paying out and for the people that have been paid, how they feel about it, and having no caps on what people can make.

[00:20:43] Nicholas mentions using Tidelift, how much money it brings in, and the money going to TSC members.

[00:22:04] Find out what else Nicholas is doing with the money besides paying contributors. He mentions several other open source projects they are donating to, and one person in particular he mentions is Sindre Sorhus.

[00:27:58] Richard wonders more about the governance process and how Nicholas feels about it.

[00:31:52] Nicholas dives deep as he explains three things that would convince him that ESLint would be a project that he would want to use.

[00:34:20] We learn some future plans for what Nicholas would do with funds to make the project more sustainable.

[00:38:09] Find out where you follow Nicholas online.

[00:03:26] “And I see ESLint as really, this will sound cheesy, as an act of love on your code that we aren’t trying to change what it does.”

[00:04:24] “We found that people who have kids are looking for something to do after the kids go to bed.”

[00:05:52] “And so, if that is your starting point where even folks who are just coming right out of college are getting 120k each year, that means that’s the minimum that you need to raise in order to hire someone full-time if they’re in a major metropolitan area in the United States.”

[00:22:17] “The first thing is we have what’s called a contributor pool, which is money that we set aside every month to pay non-team members for contributions to ESLint.”

[00:22:46] “Generally, anything that is of benefit to the project we will potentially pay you for.”

[00:24:43] “So, one of the things that we were looking at in terms of sustainability is we’re bringing in a certain amount of money each month.”

[00:24:53] “We are building on top of the work of others. And so, why shouldn’t we be spreading that money to those others, because without them ESLint either wouldn’t exist or be a lot harder to maintain.”

[00:28:17] “Well, what’s interesting is that when I started ESLint, in my mind this was like a one-year project.”

[00:29:16] “And I just kept coming back to, what’s in it for them?”

[00:30:44] “And so, how can I ensure the future survival of the project outside of me working on it?”

Special Guest: Nicholas Zakas.

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Paul Bahr | DeAnn Bahr

Richard Littauer | Allen “Gunner” Gunn | Eric Berry | Justin Dorfman | Pia Mancini | Eriol Fox | Ben Nichols

Hello and welcome to Sustain! The podcast where we talk about sustaining open source for the long haul. Cue the horns and balloons folks because today’s episode is extremely special. We are celebrating our 100th episode!! Can you believe it? We are so fortunate to have everyone with us, including our editors, as our conversations takes us back to the origins of this podcast and how it all began. We find out a little bit more about each panelist, and thoughts about the future of Sustain and plans going forward. The topic of having more controversy on this podcast is discussed, and thoughts on how each panelist sees the impact this podcast has made on open source sustainability and whether or not we can measure it. Go ahead and download this episode now to hear more and thank you for celebrating this momentous event with us!

[00:00:58] We start by getting to know the background of each panelist, where they work, and what they do.

[00:08:25] Since Richard always states in the beginning of every episode, “Where are we going,” Paul asks where Sustain is going as an organization and if they have any future plans.

[00:13:49] Eriol shares some thoughts with us about the future of Sustain Open Source Design.

[00:16:12] Richard brings up wishing there was more controversy on the Sustain podcast and the panelists share more.

[00:21:07] Pia talks about some things going back to the origins of this podcast.

[00:23:40] We hear from everyone on how they see the impact that this podcast has made on open source sustainability, and if they think we can measure open source sustainability.

[00:15:24] “I really do think that the time for design as a topic within open source has never been more rich, involved, and interesting because of the amount of designers understanding what open source is in all of its different flavors and varieties. And, wanting to participate in new ways or old ways or different ways and doing a lot of really interesting stuff lately. So, I really do think it’s really a special time for designers in open source from what I can tell.”

Special Guest: Paul and DeAnn Bahr.

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Matt Mankins

Richard Littauer | Ben Nichols

Hello and welcome to Sustain! The podcast where we talk about sustaining open source for the long haul. Today, we are very excited to have as our guest, Matt Mankins, joining us from Barcelona. He is a Fellow at Mozilla, currently working on advancing open monetization strategies for the web. He previously worked at the publisher Condé Nast, where he led global monetization engineering efforts for the company’s iconic brands and was the CTO of FastCo magazine. He’s also the Founder of numerous companies such as Lorem Ipsum Books, SMTP.com, Vert, and Fair Tread. On this episode, Matt fills us in on his journey as a Fellow at Mozilla and his ideas about alternative ways to fund the web, which led him to the idea of Kudos, that came out of thinking about payments. We learn what his main goal is right now with Kudos, the hardest problem he’s facing as he develops Kudos, and what he’s trying to accomplish before his Fellowship ends. Also, find out what Matt means when he said, “Kudos are about the creation, not the creator.”

Go ahead and download this episode now to find out much more!

[00:02:20] Matt fills us in on the history of the Lorem Ipsum Bookstore.

[00:03:57] We learn what Matt is doing at Mozilla and he explains Interledger.

[00:07:00] Matt describes what Kudos is and how it works, since that is the main thing he is working on now.

[00:12:50] Matt explains how Kudos is in the philosophy stage right now and the implementation is up to the various people that implement this.

[00:15:22] Flattr is brought up in conversation, and Matt explains something he did called “in-a-moon.”

[00:17:27] Richard wonders how Matt sells this to companies and how does he get them involved in wanting to invest in Kudos, and Matt shares a goal he has right now.

[00:20:02] Matt shares what he thinks is the hardest problem he’s facing right now as he develops Kudos.

[00:21:52] Ben wonders if Matt is looking for particular communities that might be interested in experimenting and Matt shares a dream of his with us.

[00:24:09] We find out how Matt is working with the Mozilla communities and how he’s about to be in the “build it phase” and the “promote it a little bit more phase.” He also tells us something he’s hoping to do in the implementation phase with Facebook and Kudos.

[00:30:44] Find out where you can follow Matt and his work online.

[00:11:31] “In my mind, this is not just supporting Babel or Henry, but you’re supporting all of the contributors that could number in the thousands or tens of thousands.”

[00:22:21] “One of my dreams is that, as a creator, I can just go do my creation and money will show up in my bank account as I do good work to society.”

Special Guest: Matt Mankins.

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Silona Bonewald

Richard Littauer

Hello and welcome to Sustain! The podcast where we talk about sustaining open source for the long haul. Today, our guest is Silona Bonewald, who is the Executive Director of IEEE SA OPEN, which is a comprehensive platform offering the open source community cost-effective options for developing and validating their projects. She is also the Founder of Leadingbit Solutions. We find out why Silona was a taker, not a maker, when she first got into open source, how she went from writing code to working on policy, how she ended up at IEEE, and what SA OPEN does. She reveals her long-term vision for IEEE and open source, how she feels about standards using her Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups metaphor, working on certifications, and she shares her thoughts on where she thinks we will be down the road in the distant future in terms of badges and certification for open source. Go ahead and download this episode to learn much more from Silona!

[00:01:30] Silona tells us how she was a taker, not a maker, when she first got into open source.

[00:05:20] At some point Silona segued from writing code to working on policy and she tells us how that happened.

[00:06:53] We find out how Silona ended up at IEEE and what SA OPEN does.

[00:09:08] Silona talks about her long-term vision for both IEEE and open source.

[00:11:30] Standards are explained by Silona, how they work, why they think in decades, and who the 30,000 people are involved with standards.

[00:14:17] In regard to talking to developers, Richard wonders if Silona feels like she’s often trying to talk in two languages again when people would come into the room while she was coding.

[00:18:48] Silona tells us about working on doing certifications and how they are going through badges and are in the design phase right now. She also mentions that IEEE recruits from engineering schools all over the world to get their members.

[00:20:00] Richard wonders if some people think certifications are scary and they won’t be able to get them, will this slow down open source development by forcing people to jump through hoops in order to do work.

[00:22:00] Find out about a conversation Silona had with Richard Rockefeller and Larry Brilliant. She talks about an experiment they are doing with three advisory groups which include the technical advisor, marketing advisor, and community advisor, which Georg from CHAOSS is running. Also, she tells us about a great article to check out written by Dries Buytaert on the “Makers and Takers.”

[00:28:20] Richard mentions a great episode to check out on CHAOSScast Podcast with guest Stephen Jacobs, and he gives a shout-out to Rachel Lawson at Drupal.

[00:28:55] Silona shares her thoughts on where she thinks we will be fifty years down the road in terms of badges and certification for open source.

[00:34:14] Find out where you follow Silona on the internet.

[00:09:59] “You can pull the data back out, but can you pull the community back out of GitHub?”

[00:13:36] “But, I really do love the not doing the corporate dominance aspect, and the trying to achieve the balance pieces I think is really important when you’re creating a standard, especially if you want true adoptability.”

[00:14:27] “My favorite little metaphor now is chocolate and peanut butter. You put your peanut butter in my chocolate. Oh, you put your chocolate in my peanut butter. And then you’ve got the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.”

[00:23:29] “It’s hard to teach non-profits to become a software company.”

Special Guest: Silona Bonewald.

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Anthony Ronda

Richard Littauer | Eric Berry | Ben Nickolls | Eriol Fox

Hello and welcome to Sustain! The podcast where we talk about sustaining open source for the long haul. Today, we have an amazing guest, Anthony Ronda, who is one of the leaders in the League of Extraordinary Foundry VTT Developers. Foundry Virtual Tabletop is a standalone application built for experiencing multiplayer tabletop RPGs, which helps you play games like Dungeons and Dragons and other games virtually. Anthony fills us in on the history of the League, the background of Foundry, and the open source module that was created. He also tells us about a really cool game he made, how he found it easier to make friends through the league, more about the Open Game License, and advice on how you can get started in this community. Go ahead and download this episode to find out more cool stuff!

[00:01:40] Anthony explains Virtual Tabletop (VTT) and gives us the history and background of the League.

[00:03:53] We find out the background of Foundry and how it’s geared more towards Dungeons & Dragons and tabletop role-playing games, and Anthony tells us how the adoption has been over the past couple of years.

[00:07:29] In talking about the API developer community, we learn how this relates to open source and what type of contributions exist. Anthony mentions a book by Nadia Eghbal that helped him make sense of what was going on, especially with making sure games run smoothly.

[00:11:15] Anthony tells us about a cool game he made in Foundry.

[00:14:30] The topic is gaming communities and Richard is curious to know more about Wizards of the Coast and what their involvement is with open source and Anthony explains how his league is doing newer novel things. He also explains the Open Game License.

[00:19:05] Anthony shares his thoughts on the barriers to entry.

[00:21:32] We learn from Anthony how he found it easier to make friends through the league than other open source communities.

[00:22:47] We find out how many people in the open source gaming community are there on behalf of their company.

[00:25:17] Anthony tells us how you can get started in this community.

[00:29:24] Find out where you can follow Anthony online.

[00:15:09] “First off, rules aren’t protectable by copyright. However, a specific implementation of rules into texts are protected by our copyright.”

Special Guests: Anthony Ronda and Benjamin Nickolls.

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Chad Whitacre

Eric Berry | Justin Dorfman | Richard Littauer

Hello and welcome to Sustain! The podcast where we talk about sustaining open source for the long haul. Today, we have the fabulous Chad Whitacre, who was one of the Sustain conference organizers in the first year and is currently a Senior Software Engineer on the Open Source team at Sentry, where he helps Sentry’s engineers and users collaborate to make Sentry even better than it already is. He is also the Founder of Gratipay, also known as Gittip. Chad takes us through his journey as we learn more about how he helped fund the first Sustain, and more about Gittip, Gratipay, Sentry, and what they’re doing to fund the open source projects that we depend on at Sentry. Go ahead and download this episode now to find out more cool stuff from Chad!

[00:03:08] Chad fills us in how he first got involved with the idea of funding open source, what Gittip did, and gives a shout-out to Liberapay.

[00:05:46] We learn a little bit about Gratipay, what it was like shutting it down, and a blog post that he wrote about it that you can check out.

[00:08:31] Chad talks about his job at Sentry and what he does on a day-to-day basis.

[00:12:57] We learn more about the Business Source License and risk mitigation.

[00:16:47] Richard mentions a previous episode with Toby Langel to check out where he talks about the graph of what’s open source and what isn’t open source.

[00:17:46] Chad explains what Sentry is doing to give the money back to people.

[00:21:09] We hear how Chad made a list of open source projects Sentry uses. He also shares the origin story for Back Your Stack, and he tells us about his use of raw.githack.com.

[00:26:33] Chad shares a story that starts at the beginning of 2020, and Duane O’Brien from Indeed contacting somebody at Sentry before he started and offering a grant, and what we learn what happened with the money.

[00:29:22] Find out how Sentry donated $150,000 to open source!

[00:33:11] Find out where you can follow Chad online.

[00:10:53] “We have a great customer support team, but a lot of times there’s an anti-pattern, which is that I contact customer support and unfortunately their hands are tied, and so they say "I’ll let our product team know, but no promises." Or "I’ll let you know, if this ever ends up on the roadmap." That’s shutting the door in someone’s face - unfortunately we put customer support in that position to have to do that.”

[00:11:45] “So one of the big projects this year has been tracking triage time, meaning somebody creates an issue in our GitHub issues, and asking - does anybody ever answer that?”

[00:12:22] “Sentry is as open source as we can make it.”

[00:18:43] “We just gave $150,000 roughly into the open source community.”

[00:27:39] “The wider picture, the thing that we’re talking about, one of the big things obviously for sustaining is: companies need to fund open source.”

[00:27:49] “We need to figure out how to have companies fund open source because companies are the ones that benefit from it, companies are the ones that have the money. We just need to figure out the mechanics.”

[00:31:45] “It takes time to change systems.”

Special Guest: Chad Whitacre.

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Marko Saric

Eric Berry | Justin Dorfman | Richard Littauer

Hello and welcome to Sustain! The podcast where we talk about sustaining open source for the long haul. We hope you are as excited as we are to have as our guest today Marko Saric, who is the Co-Founder of Plausible Analytics, which is an open source and privacy friendly alternative to Google Analytics. If you’ve never heard about Plausible Analytics, then this is your episode to learn all about it. With over 4,000 subscribers in the past year, Marko tells us what they’ve done to get people to convert. He also gives us his perspective on how he sees the business surviving in the next ten years, what his future game plan is, and why it’s so important that Plausible Analytics is open source. Download this episode now to learn so much more from Marko!

[00:01:33] Marko tells us what he does as one of the Co-Founders, how long Plausible Analytics has been around, and how many subscribers they have.

[00:03:57] Justin asks Marko how he handles the bots and how much of a threat are they in terms of making sure that they don’t mess up someone’s expectations in terms of traffic.

[00:06:15] We find out how Justin found Marko which was from a blog post he wrote and Justin wonders how this issue has converted people that are so Google dependent in terms of Google Analytics to turn over to a paid service like this, and how the shift has been since he was brought on board.

[00:10:25] Eric wonders what’s to prevent developers from adding blockers to this system and is there a reason why they would or would not.

[00:17:59] Marko tells us how he sees his business surviving in the next ten years, and if he sees any big plans that he is trying to push to make it so there is that harmony between advertisers and the consumers.

[00:24:12] Richard wonders what Marko’s game plan in twenty-five years, where he wants to go in the future, and how to build a more sustainable web for everyone.

[00:27:46] Does Marko see Plausible Analytics staying independent or possibly joining a company?

[00:30:40] Justin shares a conspiracy theory about what he thinks Brave is doing to Plausible Analytics and Marko shares his thoughts.

[00:32:59] Richard asks Marko why it’s important that Plausible is open source.

[00:35:29] Marko tells us if he’s worried about people taking the code and just running another “Pausable” Analytics as a fork.

[00:13:14] “My thinking is let’s try to make the devs better by getting website owners to use better tools for people that use ad blockers - the fact is still that most people don’t use ad blockers.”

[00:15:01] “There’s a huge disconnect between people, like all of us here in the chat and the more kind of normal dev user.”

[00:22:04] “If you actually give your vote and say no, or no to this and yes to that, you’re actually voting to make a change.”

[00:22:14] “That’s one of the main Key Performance Indicators these days in companies is how many people are saying yes or no to that little banner we have on our sites.”

[00:22:23] “I’m going to take my three seconds to click on options and then scroll down and click on reject because I know that it makes a difference.”

[00:24:35] “Yeah, I mean GDPR was a great first step and I think if there can be something similar, but actually just going off to the personal data.”

[00:24:48] “Many websites that I visit, the newspapers and so on, they will live from the ads.”

[00:25:00] “I understand that there is a need for ads while that is the main monetization method of the web.”

[00:26:15] “A few weeks ago, Ethical Ads installed Plausible and they wrote a blog post about it and I was like, “Perfect!”

[00:27:19] “You can find people doing studies on their own website, and like personal ads versus contextual ads, they’re seeing no difference in terms of effectiveness or in the kind of income they get or the conversion rate or whatever.”

[00:27:34] “You can actually do good business, both as a publisher but also as an advertiser, just by talking to people contextually or whatever other way they can find out that’s not really necessary as part of surveillance capitalism.”

[00:28:45] “We just do our own thing and try to kind of do our own little sustainable business.”

[00:33:19] “If you’re not open source and you’re talking about privacy first you will probably be excluded from the conversation. People will not take you serious.”

[00:33:58] “And if you’re proprietary, a lot of people with technical knowledge and people really deep into this would not trust us because we’re just saying things. We don’t know who you are. Why would we trust you?”

[00:35:08] “I gotta trust that by being open source and having so many eyeballs on it at least if there some kind of sketchy going on or whatever, somebody will kind of flag it.”

[00:35:40] “I was completely new to all this licensed system. I had no idea I was using WordPress and stuff.”

[00:36:29] “And I was like, again, I was new to the open since I had no idea that this is how it can work, that they will just upfront come to us and tell us, we don’t want to do anything to help you, but can you please do something so it helps us so we can kind of complete video and we have tens of thousands more of audience?”

[00:37:47] “And we ended up with AGPL and we felt this was a great kind of license for our own situation.”

[00:38:41] “Honestly from our perspective, like if we want to make this a thing that could become sustainable in the future, pay our own bills so we can focus on it full-time and then hopefully make a difference.”

[00:39:32] “I know that my Co-Founder says that if you’re doing like a database and things for developers, you probably want to be MIT because then other companies can use other projects. But I would say if you’re coming from my perspective, as somebody who has to communicate the message and kind of differentiate ourselves and try to compete with what else is on the market, I was like, if you’re going to sell to consumers and other businesses, like it’s going to be really difficult to survive it in IT.”

[00:39:57] “Again, as a beginner there are MIT licenses that have worked very well and they’re sustainable, but I just don’t know how I would compete with a bigger company.”

Special Guest: Marko Saric.

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