Sustain

Pia Mancini | Richard Littauer

André Staltz

Hello and welcome to Sustain! Our special guest today is André Staltz, a self-employed JavaScript wizard from Helsinki, Finland. He’s done a lot of interesting open source work and has been really instrumental in how open source funds individual developers. He tells us about his consulting job and about the great blog post he wrote. We will talk about the cost of software going to zero and what this means. Also, André tells us what he hopes to see in the future for open source. Download this episode now to find out all this and much more!

[00:01:01] André fills us in about what he does, how he got started as a developer, and what kind of work he’s currently doing.

[00:02:22] André tells us how he came to write his fantastic blog post, “Software Below the Poverty Line” and he goes in depth to explain what it means by open source beneath the poverty line.

[00:06:50] Richard wonders if André has done any work looking at how many people in open source actually make money consulting and don’t make money from selling their open source at all.

[00:09:52] Pia asks André how you make the argument of more money going into this ecosystem if the cost is going to zero and he explains.

[00:16:30] André touches on something very important that’s connected with time, which is attention, which he states is something you can monetize.

[00:23:48] Richard wonders if the cost of software is going down so much just because the cost of production is going down so much.

[00:30:35] André tells us what he wants out of his open source work and what he’s interested in.

[00:35:06] Find out where you can locate André on the internet and look at cool stuff he does.

Special Guest: André Staltz.

Support Sustain

Pia Mancini | Richard Littauer

Danese Cooper

Hello and welcome to Sustain! On today’s episode, we have special guest, Danese Cooper, from her home in West Counties of Ireland. She currently works for NearForm, as VP of Special Initiatives. We will learn all about how the InnerSource Commons and Open Source are related. We find out about Danese’s last tech job at PayPal, where she started talking about InnerSource and why she moved to a remote part of Ireland with her new job. We find out about the concept of “trusted committer” and two companies that are practicing InnerSource. Also, find out why Danese said, “Open Source has won.” Download this episode now!

[00:01:45] Danese gives us a bio about herself and fills us in on her job at NearForm and InnerSource Commons.

[00:05:40] Richard is curious to know when Danese talked about InnerSource and Open Source being related, how do they both work together to actually sustain open source.

[00:10:50] Danese talks about the “sustainability quotient” and how there are not enough practitioners of open source.

[00:13:02] We hear the twenty-year old “fake stories” about why people are afraid when we talk about InnerSource and Danese tells us about the concept of “trusted committer” and what they do.

[00:18:38] Danese tells us two stories about two companies that are practicing InnerSource that have been talked about publicly.

[00:24:34] Pia asks Danese if she’s seen a lot of InnerSource or projects that were born in InnerSource and then they were released to the wild as successfully and she shares some stories.

[00:31:49] Danese explains what she means when she said says, “Open source has won.”

[00:34:54] Danese fills us in on what she’s doing now, what’s next, what’s exciting, and where to find her on the internet.

[00:11:17] “I feel like this area of endeavor has been so generous to me, giving me a means to make a living and an interesting means to make a living for this last 35 years. I kind of owe a give back of something to make the campground better than I found it and I think that is InnerSource.”

[00:11:35] “Getting those poor 85% out of the salt mines and helping companies modernize now, because in another ten years they won’t be able to hire people that don’t expect transparency. So, they are going to have to figure it out, but if they figure it out now for the right reasons, they have a better chance of being in a good position to accept those new workers when that’s all you can hire.”

[00:32:23] “There would be no Google if there was not Linux, period, full stop. It would not exist because their cost of acquisition for that kernel and their ability to modify it to their needs meant that they could optimize better than AltaVista, which was the search engine of choice before there was Google.”

Special Guest: Danese Cooper.

Support Sustain

Justin Dorfman | Richard Littauer

Shurui Zhou

Hello and welcome to Sustain! On today’s episode, we have special guest, Shurui Zhou, who is going to be teaching soon at University of Toronto in the Fall, and she’s been working on Forks on GitHub. Our topic today is Social vs. Hard Forks. We will learn all about the difference between the Social and Hard forks, Shurui’s GitHub Bot she wrote, and her paper she wrote on “Identifying Features in Forks.” Also, Jenkins, previously known as Hudson, an open source continuous integration tool, is explained and why it is such a success story in terms of hard forks. Download this episode now!

[00:01:31] Shurui tells us about her PhD Thesis which is on Forks.

[00:02:51] Richard wonders what Shurui means when she said she tried to merge together different forks. She also tells us where she got her initial forks from that she was trying to merge and where the initial database was seeded from.

[00:05:57] Richard wants to know without the domain knowledge of a maintainer does Shurui find it difficult to figure out what is going on. Also, has she seen any frustrations from maintainers? She wrote a GitHub Bot that she talks about.

[00:10:42] Shurui tells us about a future work that was super interesting which is how we can identify the intention behind this work. She mentions the paper they published on 2018 on “Identifying Features in Forks” and talks about the difference in hard fork and social fork.

[00:13:11] One thing that caught Justin’s attention is that 290 projects on GitHub are rejected to “redundant development” and Shurui explains what this means.

[00:17:00] Richard wonders if Shurui has run across this phenomenon of someone being the only maintainer and being a selfish person wanting all the stars and is this a common thing.

[00:19:04] Richard wants to know how Shurui is dealing with the political side of things.

[00:20:04] Shurui talks about the project she was referring to which is a repository. Richard wonders how many hard forks she’s found where it’s just some company that wants to do something, versus a group of community members who are interested in building out a feature and having it go in a different direction. Also, how many times do you see a company decide we need to have this under our own wheelhouse and fork it and them develop independently without going back? She brings up the Hudson and Jenkins story.

[00:26:22] Richard asks Shurui if she’s tried making forks.

[00:29:00] Shurui tells us where we can find her on the internet and how can we learn more about her research.

[00:08:16] “The maintainer will go through the code and with the description all together in the mail and to decide whether we want to merge it or not.”

[00:10:55] “One of the future works I think that was super interesting is how we can identify the intention behind this work.”

[00:11:19] “And we actually define these kinds of forks as social forks because people create forks and maybe their goal is to merge back.”

[00:11:30] “We found out there are two types of forks and we define forks that create a fork and going to a different direction and never come back we defined this as a hard fork, and we define the GitHub style fork as a social fork.”

[00:12:26] “We have seen some requests happening in one community and have been submitted three years later, exactly the same feature.”

[00:12:46] “I know the title to this podcast. It is going to be social vs hard fork with Shurui.”

[00:17:00] “But, if I were to hard fork it, I would lose all the watchers, all the stars, and I was signaled to every single one of those people that I’m kind of a selfish guy who wants stars.”

[00:17:55] “They don’t want people to hard fork and to fragment the community and go to a different direction.”

[00:19:22] “I’m not dealing with the political side, but what I’m trying to do is to just raise awareness of what’s happening with different forks.”

[00:21:19] “Jenkins was a hard fork off of Hudson because that’s the people after Oracle… and they want to maintain or keep the Hudson project within their pocket.”

[00:24:09] “One thing we’ve studied to compare the difference between the hard fork and social fork before and after GitHub, is maybe before GitHub people create a fork, they have already the intention of going to a different direction to fragment the community.”

Special Guest: Shurui Zhou.

Support Sustain

Eric Berry | Richard Littauer

Tom Callaway

Hello and welcome to Sustain! On today’s episode, we have special guest, Tom Callaway, currently working at AWS, but previously at Red Hat for almost twenty years, doing pretty much every job they had. We will find out all about Red Hat and all the positions Tom held there. We will also learn why Red Hat was the right people, the right place, at the right time, with the right seed funding to get it done. How did Red Hat figure out how to compete meaningfully and how did they deliver value above and beyond the bits? Tom has stories to tell and advice to share. Download this episode now to find out this and much more!

[00:01:40] Tom tells us what he did before working for AWS and how he started at Red Hat.

[00:03:58] Richard asks Tom what some of the main changes are that he has seen and how it’s affected things.

[00:09:23] Eric wants to know from Tom at what point when he was working at Red Hat, did everybody start believing that maybe this is something, maybe this can survive, and this will become something huge. He tells us one of the big things that impacted Red Hat early on.

[00:14:30] Richard wants to know how Red Hat pitched to developers that they want to get this and how did they pitch up to their managers.

[00:16:53] Tom fills us in on the strategy that has been worked successfully for Red Hat.

[00:19:12] Red Hat seemed to lead the charge in making open source a core part of the company and the culture. Tom tells us what it was like working with a company that had that type of focus giving back to the community.

[00:24:35] Richard is curious to know if there was any time when things didn’t work well at Red Hat and competition got out of hand and being in the open, ended up screwing over something.

[00:29:25] Richard asks Tom what he would say to developers who have something and then want to go out and make something out of it and does he think there’s models outside of sticking with large open source companies to sustainability live a middle-class life. Tom gives some awesome stories and advice here.

[00:40:54] Tom tells us where we can find him on the internet.

[00:05:24] “When I joined Red Hat there was no semblance of a reasonable business model at all. We made more money selling hats on our website than we did selling software.”

[00:20:01] “One of the things that’s unique about Red Hat is the employment contracts are structured in a way such that they explicitly say Red Hat doesn’t own the open source work that you do. You own it. You can go out and do whatever you want.”

[00:22:50] “And I was able to just by being curious and by being passionate, move into roles all the way up into the CTO’s office.”

[00:31:39] “I think you have to be willing to have the freedom to be open.”

[00:32:10] “If you write amazing software and you can never apply it in a real-world scenario, your company will die. If you cannot figure out how to compete meaningfully with the software, it does not matter how good it is, your company will die.”

Special Guest: Tom "Spot" Calloway.

Support Sustain

Allen "Gunner" Gunn | Eric Berry | Justin Dorfman | Richard Littauer

Nadia Eghbal

Hello and welcome to Sustain! Today, we have special guest. Nadia Eghbal, a writer and researcher, works for Substack, and has a new book out which we will be talking about today! We discuss Nadia’s book, what it’s all about, why she wrote it, and why Eric refers to it as the “Open Source Bible.” She also talks about the report she did called, “Roads and Bridges,” published by the Ford Foundation. Find out why she has been called the “Open Source Archaeologist.” Download this episode now!

[00:01:43] Nadia tells us all about her book, what it’s about, and why she wrote it.

[00:02:56] Justin asks Nadia what her expectations were of writing her report, Roads and Bridges.

[00:05:01] Eric mentions a talk Nadia gave a few years back, and she used a “lobster” reference throughout it, so he wonders what her motivation was behind going so deep into creating a legacy of documentation and knowledge that very few people in the world have.

[00:09:16] Richard brings up Mike McQuaid’s sticker funds and Nadia brings up an example of this.

[00:11:40] Eric talks about Nadia’s book which he refers to as the “Open Source Bible,” and Gunner adds his viewpoint as well.

[00:13:24] Gunner asks Nadia if this book leads to actions and does she have any thoughts about what actions she would like it to lead to on the part of readers.

[00:15:36] Gunner has an archaeology question for Nadia and is curious to know if she has reflected on the idea that when you’re not downloading, when you’re not installing the idea of a license or the idea of a piece of technology, being more community created, as a more abstract or removed concept.

[00:17:52] Justin brings up a previous podcast guest, Matt Asay from AWS, talking about Amazon working hand in hand with Redis and all these other open source companies, and he asks Nadia what she thinks about this.

[00:22:03] Richard is curious to know what to do with projects that don’t have a charismatic leader where it hasn’t focused on who they are, which may have really good documentation. Is there any hope for any of those projects or they doomed to just continually wither and run out of steam? Nadia gives us the run down.

[00:27:28] Richard wants to know what Nadia is doing at Sub Stack that is so interesting to her and following the research that you’ve learned from this book, why there? She tells us why she wrote the book.

[00:32:37] Justin mentions a book he read called, Hate Inc. by Matt Taibbi, who has a Sub Stack thing. This is a great read! ☺

[00:35:08] Richard wants to know how Nadia can help people who write low-level software projects, who don’t have the power or the means or they are shy. What can we do to help those people?

[00:38:22] Nadia tells us where you can find her on the internet, where you can find her book, and work.

[00:11:39] “I think what we’re seeing happen in all of this is we’re working toward building a shared vocabulary of the universe of this ecosystem, where each project is going to have its own arcane vocabulary over time.”

[00:17:49] “Depending on who you talk to, the term open source just means so many things to different people.”

Special Guest: Nadia Eghbal.

Support Sustain

Eric Berry | Justin Dorfman | Richard Littauer

Kevin Owocki

Hello and welcome to Sustain! Today, we have special guest, Kevin Owocki, founder of Gitcoin. We find out what Gitcoin does and what’s changed with it in the past couple of years. Some other topics we discuss are Quadratic Funding (QF), a hot new thing called DeFi, Ethereum, Blockchain, and Downtown Stimulus in Boulder, CO. Download this episode now to find out this and much more!

[00:01:27] Kevin tells us what Gitcoin does, what he’s doing there, and what’s changed in the past couple of years.

[00:03:43] The hot new thing is “DeFi.” Kevin explains what this is. Richard wonders if there’s any way to make some sort of mutual funds out of all the different dollars, out of all the different major currencies that you can actually stabilize and cross them.

[00:05:54] Richard wonders if the currencies have shifted in this stable currency market and has that affected DAI and Gitcoin in any way, and has Kevin seen less percentages going out because the current downturn in the global economy at all.

[00:07:44] Eric brings us economic struggle and he wants to know Kevin’s perspective on blockchain and if they’ve stepped up. Does this whole process make people think that we need to have more control over the structure of our economy?

[00:12:44] Kevin answers a question about maintainer’s views on providing quality or quantity on contributions. We also find out how much money has flown through Gitcoin’s platform.

[00:15:39] Eric asks Kevin, since there is a lot of money pumping through Gitcoin’s platform and the intention is to sustain open source, is that focusing on blockchain projects now and does he see this type of technology or this idea moving into more of a global landscape with all sorts of projects? Downtown Stimulus in Boulder, CO is also mentioned.

[00:19:52] Kevin explains what QF is. We also find out how QF can be gamed.

[00:32:41] If you are a maintainer, and you want to get involved in Quadratic Funding, find out here how to get involved.

[00:34:50] Kevin tells us how people can go about from nothing to doing stuff with Quadratic Funding, using Ethereum, using Gitcoin, or learning about DAI, if they don’t know anything right now.

[00:36:12] Kevin tells us where we can find more about him online.

[00:13:23] “One of the things she said was, even when contributors are coming to these repos is that they’re not providing quality contributions. And if they do, then they’re like drive by contributions and they don’t come back and they don’t promote to maintainers.”

[00:23:37] “If you push the power out to the edges and you let your community decide what to find, not only does that push the decision out to the edges, the Ethereum Foundation gets to measure which projects their community cares about. The community co-funds the projects along with them and they can fund a thousand projects per quarter or ten thousand projects per quarter instead of just 10-20.

[00:41:25] “And so, I’m really excited about what Ethereum is doing and I want an Ether-binge. You should check it out!”

Special Guest: Kevin Owocki.

Support Sustain

Eric Berry | Justin Dorfman | Richard Littauer

Amanda Brock

Andrew Katz

Hello and welcome to Sustain! Today, we have two special guests from the UK, Amanda Brock and Andrew Katz. Amanda is CEO of the UK body for “open” and OpenUK. Andrew is a lawyer working for a small boutique consulting firm that does open source things. We are discussing contact tracing apps and how they are going. We will find out how Amanda built her team when she was at Canonical. Then we will find out all about OpenUK and OpenUK KidsCamp, and the MINI-MU Glove, which is the coolest things ever! Andrew tells us about open hardware, Open-Silicon, open source licensing, and research he is doing. Download this episode now to learn more!

[00:01:06] Alex and Amanda tell us how they know each other and what they are working on.

[00:02:30] Since Alex and Amanda are both involved in contact tracing apps, which are coming out right now, they talk a bit about the British effort there and how it’s going.

[00:06:38] Justin is curious and wants Amanda to tell us when working at Canonical, the day to day for a lawyer just coming into the organization that was shaking things up in the Linux world and just the open source world, what did she do and how did she build the team. She also talks about the Dell deal when Dell started putting Ubuntu on their laptops for context, which was the first thing she worked on.

[00:10:54] Andrew turns the table and asks Amanda how it felt and how did you adapt to dealing with changes in negotiation dynamic changes. Richard asks how has that fueled your work with OpenUK and how do you feel that experience has allowed you to go forth and work there and what are your goals?

[00:15:24] Amanda talks about what OpenUK does and she tells us more about OpenUK KidsCamp, which their goal is have it running by 2022. She talks about the “MINI-MU Glove.” What a cool thing! (kit linked below.)

[00:22:41] Justin goes back to Canonical and wants to know what went wrong with Ubuntu phone. Andrew tells us how his experience has been working with open hardware. Andrew also lets us know of some other open hardware projects other than what he’s working on. He explains what Open-Silicon is.

[00:30:17] Eric wants to know what challenges Andrew is seeing with open source licensing and does he feel there is a certain amount of pressure or necessity for you to push and determine these different licenses that should exist. Also, what’s the goal of the research he’s been doing.

[00:35:41] Richard is amazed by the level of hardware hack that seems to go on in Britain, like RepRap, and he asks Andrew if he has any thoughts on why they are further along.

[00:39:27] Amanda tells us where we could find them and where can we read about the work that’s going on and she tells us about her book.

[00:45:40] Eric has one last question for Amanda and Alex and asks them why do they think that these countries are not wanting to open source their research and their findings in order to help us reach our goal of everybody can go back to school and work? They tell us their thoughts on this.

[00:31:56] The most interesting part of the research has been talking to people, you know, who are well understood, who are very prominent in this area, and understanding their different viewpoints.”

[00:37:20] “With Brexit, it made me sort of focus a bit more on what was happening.”

Amanda Brock Twitter 

OpenUK Twitter

OpenUK Linkedin

OpenUK

OpenUK GitHub

Andrew Katz Twitter

Andrew Katz Linkedin

Canonical

OpenUK Kids Camp

MINI.MU Glove Kit

RepRap

Sia.tech

Peachtree Sound

Strange Parts

CERN Open Hardware Licence

OpenRAN

LibreOffice article

Open Tech Reponse

Moorcrofts Corporate Law-“CERN Open Hardware Licence 2.0 Andrew Katz presents, ahead of the official release.”

Free and Open Source Software: Policy, Law, and Practice (second edition to be released August 2020)

Special Guests: Amanda Brock and Andrew Katz.

Support Sustain

Hello and welcome to Sustain! On today's episode, we have special guest, Nadim Kobeissi, who runs a small company in Paris called Symbolic Software. We are going to find out how Nadim got into doing security and cryptography and all about his new project called Verifpal. We will also learn more about PEPP-PT effort, RustTLS's code, Cure53, and we discuss the effectiveness of the Code of Conduct. Download this episode to find out all this and much more!

[00:00:45] Nadim tells us what Symbolic Software does and how he got into doing security and cryptography. He also tells us he's working on another project called Verifpal.

[00:06:28] On the topic of Verifpal, Nadim tells if he plans on building services around that with his consultancy or if it's strictly use it at your own discretion.

[00:08:45] Richard asks Nadim to talk about what's been going on in the world of cryptographically analyzing contract tracing apps and how they deal with privacy and what his thoughts are. He explains the PEPP-PT effort.

[00:19:47] Richard talks about contact apps being very useful for authoritarian regimes and privacy issues with Zoom. Nadim has a story about what they are doing in China with drones.

[00:25:20] Justin wants to know what Nadim did for RustTLS, how did he get paid, and what is Cure53?

[00:31:02] Nadim tells us his thoughts of the effectiveness of COC (Code of Conduct).

[00:40:17] Nadim has a great story about being approached while walking on the street by a Green Peace guy and Red Cross.

[00:42:32] Nadim talks about technology and it doesn't have to be tribal and maybe it could be political.

[00:43:40] Nadim lets us know where we could find him on the internet.

Spotlight:

Panelists:

Richard Littauer

Justin Dorfman

Eric Berry

Guest:

Nadim Kobeissi

Quotes:

[00:02:41] "What government told you…no, no, no, I was just poking fun at the fact that we had really severe security vulnerabilities and the Australian government at one point issued an advisory."

[00:18:29] "It confirms a lot of my worst fears in a way that's very visceral and dramatized with a multimillion-dollar budget behind it."

[00:18:48] "There's a saying at Google that in order to get promoted at Google you have to create a chat app."

[00:19:58] "A friend of mine was saying it looks like China has been particularly good at dealing with their population and COVID, and I'm like yeah, it's been really good at dealing with it if you only qualify certain amounts of people as citizens."

[00:29:00] "Personally, I don't think I could have written code this good myself."

[00:31:32] "The code of conduct, I don't think there's anything bad about them."

[00:33:55] "As a maintainer of my own open source project, I would love to have a code of conduct for contributors."

[00:35:38] "Putting a code into your repo doesn't do anything by itself most of the time."

[00:39:53] "One final thing I feel that is a bit problematic is that you find yourself in a position where by simply having any criticism at all, you already have to defend yourself as not being morally in a gray area or criticizing some sort of greater good."

[00:42:48] "There's a lot of tribalism that's entering open source software."

*Links: *

Nadim Kobeissi-Website

Cure53

Symbolic Software

Verifpal

DP3T-Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing

Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing

Exposure Notification

RustTLS

Youper

Resume.io

Moxie Marlinspike Stories-Website

Database Internals: A Deep Dive into How Distributed Data Systems Work by Alex Petrov

Black Mirror-Netflix

Special Guest: Nadim Kobeissi.

Support Sustain

Hello and welcome to Sustain! On today's episode, we have special guest, Matt Asay, Cloud and open source executive with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Matt tells us how his office is different from the Open Source program office. We will learn all about his career and his HTML5 start-up Strobe that was acquired by Facebook. Also, Matt talks about some interesting things he's learned from interviewing project maintainers and it has to do with the importance of being nice, kind, and welcoming.

Download this episode now for some great inspiration and advice.

[00:00:58] Matt tells us the difference between the two offices and teams and also how he ended up in his role.

[00:05:09] With the focus on what your customers are doing, Justin asks Matt how does how does he address the controversies like the MongoDB API and all that other stuff and what is he doing to combat that?

[00:12:22] Here we will hear all about Matt's impressive career and his HTML5 start-up Strobe acquired by Facebook.

[00:16:59] Matt tells us about interviewing project maintainers and things that have stood out during the interview process after talking to them.

[00:25:00] Matt explains what the key to sustainability is and he goes into risk sustainability.

[00:28:10] Richard gives some really good feedback on Matt's answer on how he solves problems and Matt says he is going to steal one of his answers.

[00:32:39] Richard asks Matt what is he doing with his team, what do your partnerships look like with CouchDB and Confluent, and what are you doing to make sure that the work you have lasts beyond you?

[00:37:48] Matt tells us where we can find out more about him on the internet.

Spotlight:

Panelists:

Guest:

Quotes:

[00:06:00] "So I've always worked for those companies. It's always been an easy marketing sell for me to talk about that. But, with AWS it's different."

[00:06:46] "The whole open source definition is around distributing software, but we're not distributing software anymore. It's being consumed as a service over the internet."

[00:07:35] "I used to work at MongoDB. I love MongoDB. It's one of the best working experiences I've ever had."

[00:10:42] "I have a lot of respect for people, these virtuoso engineers who develop great software. But I have just as much respect for those who can operationalize and make that software easy so that customers don't have to worry about how they're going do maintenance on my SQL, as an example."

[00:16:16] "If you want to successful you've got to figure out how to work with people."

[00:17:54] "You reflect the kind of community that you will encourage. And so, if you're a jerk, then you're going to struggle."

[00:18:03] "This is their free time. They're volunteers. They don't have to show up and be abused by you."

[00:20:17] "In general, life's too short to be dealing with mean people all the time."

[00:20:32] "If you're rude to those volunteers they're going to go elsewhere, and in open source, those contributors are your most valuable asset."

[00:25:00] "So I think one of the keys to sustainability has to be community."

[00:27:44] "I think that's something we need to figure out because open source is only getting more and more significant with more and more dependencies on it."

*Links: *

Special Guest: Matt Asay.

Support Sustain

Eric Berry | Justin Dorfman | Richard Littauer

Joseph Jacks

Hello and welcome to Sustain! On today’s episode, we have special guest, Joseph Jacks, Founder of OSS Capital and also works on Open Core Summit, which is a conference he founded as well. Today we discuss with Joseph what he does at OSS Capital, the companies they invest in and how he helps commercial Open Source Companies. We will also find out about what he did at Open Core Summit last year and find out about when and where the next one will take place. Download this episode now to find out more!

[00:03:22] Richard and Joseph discuss GitHub and GitLab.

[00:11:29] Justin brings up the business source license which is very controversial, and he wants to know Joseph’s involvement with it.

[00:17:08] Joseph tells us about OSS.cash, the conference he did in 2013 with the spreadsheet data, and how the Open Core Summit went in September 2019, right before COVID hit.

[00:22:49] Eric is fascinated by Joseph’s process and he says it seems like he’s trying to find that brief moment when a project starts to take off, but hasn’t really considered creating a corporation, creating a company to generate money around it. It seems like you’re looking for a unicorn before it grows its horn. Joseph elaborates on this.

[00:26:48] Joseph talks about RISC-V since they are invested in that company. He also tells us other companies they are invested in.

[00:30:36] Joseph explains how commercial offensive software companies are different. Also, he tells us how they help commercial Open Source Companies early on.

[00:37:03] Where can you find Joseph on the Internet, URL’s, or Twitter? Find out here.

[00:04:14] “I tend to think of the companies as slightly different in terms of what they focus on and GitHub has sort of like a Facebook social network feel, you know, huge amounts of people collaborating on public Open Source repos.”

[00:05:18] “And so even though the core, the Open Source core for GitHub is very small, it’s sort of super tiny core, and the crust around that Open Source core is really thick, like basically all of GitHub.com, all this proprietary technology they’ve added around it, I’ve still viewed it as commercial Open Source because that sort of existential definition is still true.”

[00:16:03] “Another one is WSO2 in Sri Lanka. The WSO2 is a company in the middleware kind of category and the enterprise IT world. They sell products for connecting applications and doing messaging integration, integration middleware, SOA software, and business process management, lots of things of this nature.”

[00:19:58] “The spreadsheet motivated starting OSS capital for sure, and also Open Core Summit. I guess the reason is because this thing’s kind of been maintained for going on seven years now I guess, and the growth of this spreadsheet’s been pretty substantial.”

[00:23:15] “Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but it seems like you’re looking for a unicorn before it grows its horn.”

Joseph Jacks Twitter

OSSC

Open Core Summit Twitter

Open Core Summit

COSS Index

Scuttlebutt

Kubernetes

Special Guest: Joseph Jacks.

Support Sustain