The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Corporate interests in open source and dev culture (Interview)

Episode Date: June 6, 2018

Zed Shaw – creator of Mongrel, Learn Python the Hard Way, and more – joined the show to talk through a recent Twitter thread from Zed where he shared his thoughts on open source, making money in open source, corporate interests and involvement, developer culture, and more.

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caused each error. Give Rollbar a try today at no cost to you. All right, welcome back, everybody. This is the ChangeLog, a podcast featuring the hackers, the leaders, and the innovators of open source. I'm Adam Stachowiak, editor-in-chief of ChangeLog. On today's show, we're talking to Zed Shaw, creator of Mongrel, Mongrel 2, Python the Haraway, Ruby the Haraway, and so much more. We talked to Zed about a Twitter thread he posted sharing his thoughts and opinions about open source, corporations' involvement, dev culture, and so much more. We talked to Zed about a Twitter thread he posted sharing his thoughts and opinions about open source, corporations involvement, dev culture, and so much more. So Zed, we invited you on to talk about somewhat of an epic Twitter rant you went back on in April. But now looking at your Twitter, it looks like you have it on private mode. Are you on hiatus? What's going on with your Twitter feed? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, I have two Twitter feeds. So I have the one that's

just kind of me ranting about stuff. And then I have another one that's for my books. So like Mr. Professional, author of books that teach people, right? You live in two lives. Yeah, I live in two lives, just like a serial killer. So what I did is I put that one on private just for a little while, just to see, you know, like if it changes the way I say things. Also, I just sort of like, because I feel there's a lot of people who follow that Twitter feed and then they're sort of like, it's a different tone than the book feed. So I'd rather have them follow the book feed because the book feed is low volume, much more positive, upbeat.

And then my personal feed is me. It's my personal life and things I do. And so I kind of, kind of want to separate the two for a while. That's so funny that you're like that, though. Yeah. I mean, I think everyone's like that. I'm just honest about it. Okay. I'll give you that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, if you look at all these people, yeah, you look at all these people who are like, you know, oh, yeah, I'm Mr. Sensitive and I do all these things and I really love humanity.

And then you find out that, no, they're actually giant pieces of crap. So, yeah, I just I'm just honest about it. I'm like, yeah, I mean, I'm, I'm not a bad person, but I have no problem, uh, speaking my mind, um, speaking out about things that, uh, I seem to think affect other people or myself, um, talking about my personal life, um, things like that. And it's not like I have some weird personal life. It's pretty boring, you know. And then there's also a lot of that personal account is a lot of art. So I do a lot of painting and I think that doesn't mix for a lot of people. So I think there's a lot of people who follow me for the painting, you know, and I'd like to have those separate and I can put some

paintings out. I can do a lot more talking about art, things like that, keep it private and then direct people towards the more professional book programmer oriented things. So yeah, I appreciate that because a longtime Twitter user and you know, we could probably just talk about the platform and the medium for an hour and call it a show, but we don't necessarily want to do that. But while we're here thinking about channels and like, like segments of people, i follow a lot of people that will say like you know and i completely respect this take they have it's like but you get all of me like you're going to get my software side you're going to get my personal side you're

going to get all these things and that's fine but as a as a reader as a person who's like there there's there's people that you know maybe maybe i don't care about Zed's art, for example, just throwing that out there. And so you actually spleen those out for people as kind of a public service in certain ways for those that just want, you know, this type of a thing. Exactly, exactly. And also like, you know, my books are targeted at beginners and they're trying to learn to code. So I think it's kind of not right if I'm also in there ranting about how terrible the industry is and causing disillusion in people. You know, I am very honest in my books. I do say the job is not that great. It pays well, but it's not like the greatest job in the world. So it's not like I'm lying, but I'm also sort of being like, you know, well, you know, there's some

issues in the industry, but for now, if you want to learn to code, just focus on learning to code. You know, don't look at all that other stuff. And so, yeah, so my private account, I'm just going to keep it private for a little while. And, you know, just basically talk and be myself like I always do. But then sort of shield people who are just, you know, just poor, normal folks who don't really care about the programming industry and just want to learn to code. And they can go over to the other one and I'll be all nice. And this is the programming side. You think people are getting into programming for the wrong reasons?

Not necessarily. So, I mean, everyone wants a job, right? I mean, I don't, unless you're independently wealthy and you don't care. I mean, most people want a job. So it's reasonable. Like if you see people making lots of money programming, of course, you're going to want to go into it for programming and to make money. But, um, I think it's more that they're putting the cart before the horse. I think they're like, they're worried very much about how they're going to get a job before they even know how to

code. And so my, my thing is always like, don't worry about that. Just focus on coding. Okay. Just get your coding done, get that out of the way, and then worry about how you can get a job when you know you can actually code. So you're the author of multiple books, like you said, for beginners, learn Python the hard way, learn Ruby the hard way. Um, and has been, you know, an author of many open source libraries down through the ages. I guess we can say ages now because internet time, right? So we had you on the ChangeLog episode 34, which I guess makes Adam probably makes us feel old because that's 2010.

Really old. Might make you feel old. Maybe not. But that was back talking about Mongrel, Mongrel 2, long time ago. Feels like ancient history to me. Catch us up on your books, what you've been up to. And really, you you know don't give

us like a deep history necessarily of of everything between now and then but just to introduce the the audience to the context you have um with open source with open source and with teaching people software and the industry at large yeah yeah so um I think the best description of kind of my position in the industry is someone once said, uh, um, I'm the most famous a programmer can get without being a billionaire. And so, right. Cause I'm like, I'm poor. I, I, I'm, I'm, I try to be very honest and I've told people like, you know, at one point, I know, I mean, compared to like, uh, a lot of the other people, yeah, yeah. Not, not now. Right. But no, there was a period of time when I was actually homeless and, you know,

and like trying to work as a programmer and open source. And yeah, I mean, I'm, I'm honest about this thing. And, and so it's funny. Cause like, I think that I kind of liked that description. Cause it's sort of like, you know, it's saying, yeah, there's, if you want to be, if you want to be famous and actually, um, you kind of don't want to be a programmer. You don't want to be a founder and start a company. And, you know, it's like, um, but also it's sort of, that summarizes it. I mean, I'll own that, you know, I'm about as, about as famous as you can get without actually running a giant billion dollar company.

But, uh, I don't know if that's actually accurate, but whatever, you know, I'll go for it. And then I think the other thing about it is, you know, late when we did that in 2010, I was kind of on the cusp of kind of coming to this realization that open source really wasn't like the best way to move forward with my career. And I think it was right about the time when I started really pushing my books forward and, you know, sort of changing my career from being the guy who made all this software to the guy who teaches people how to make software. And that's been the big shift for me, was that I shifted out of, I took that, that fame that was, you know, really not doing much for me as far as an open source developer and my skills at teaching that I kind of just stumbled on, you know, I wouldn't say I was like an expert already, but turned that into a new kind of career as an educator. I teach people how to learn to code, how to pick up new skills, things like that. I do a lot of live teaching now.

And that's sort of been my direction. And then on the side with that, I've been doing a lot of painting, you know, love art i'm doing painting now so aside from the obvious answer of read my books like if you were to take somebody a smart person who's not a programmer um and turn them into one like what's the happiest path in your opinion and in your experience from you know zero to employable? I know you don't, you say maybe not focus on employment right away, but like to, let's call it proficient programmer. What's the best way? Yeah.

Yeah. I like to say, I mean, so I think it's totally fine for people to get work. I mean, that's totally one of the motivations, but I try to say, look, if you're focused on work, you're going to miss out on the process of learning and building your skills. So I tell people going from zero to being proficient, you know, so proficient means you can sit down on your own and have an idea and turn that idea into a working piece of software. Maybe not a pretty piece of software. Right. Because I think pretty and beautiful and all that sort of very subjective.

Right. And I tell folks, I mean, you don't have to read my books. Right. Like you can because I don't have to read my books, right? Like you can, cause I don't have a book for every language or every skill. Um, you know, I tell people just take any book and sort of do it the way my books do it. So take the books, get all the code working, then read about the code in the book. Cause I think most books are actually written backwards where like they talk a whole bunch and then show you a little bit of code. And it's way easier to like get the code to work and

talk and like just sort of get it up and running and then go read what they say about the code. Cause you get to see the whole thing in action. It's a lot easier to understand it. So, so a lot of times I tell people like, let's say you want to learn Go. I don't, I don't do anything with Go. I don't really have any plans for it. So they'll email me and say, like, do you have a Go book? I'm like, no, no, but take this book. It seems to be really popular on Amazon. And it kind of doesn't matter. Just get all the code working.

And then just keep doing that and getting code working and understanding it and trying to make it work. And it's like learning a language. And eventually you'll get pretty good at it. And then go out and either try to make your own little projects and put them out as sort of like a demonstration of what you're able to do or go find someone else. And this is the thing I advocate a lot is find some open source project and go in there and fix bugs. Just find the simplest bugs and slowly just keep squashing bugs. Just that's all you do. Don't make any new features.

Don't add anything to it. Just squash bugs. And so far, that seems to work for folks you know like i'm saying you don't have to read my books but if you go through a bunch of books and get the code working and then go and squash bugs that's a pretty good path that's interesting too because there's so many open source projects out there that are now we've talked about this on this show and other shows to talk about like how do you flag and give somebody an on-ramp? So there's so many on-ramps out there in open source to easily, you know, take that advice and run with it.

Yeah, yeah. I really think that, well, we can get into it. Actually, you know, I got a love-hate relationship with open source, but I do think fixing bugs is kind of like the bread and butter for a lot of programming especially entry-level programming right and the easiest place to find bugs to fix is projects that are totally open and you just you fix the bug and you send them the code and they go oh that's cool thank you for fixing the bug so that's one way to kind of like build up your skills and also get recognition for what you're doing and you know kind of build up a resume of what you're working on you don't have to have permission and no one's going to turn down a bug fix

well not many of these right very very few less likely to turn down a bug fix yeah I mean merge yeah well they might have a problem with your code quality right and usually they'll give you feedback to be like oh yeah you got to use these variables

like this and that's not really what that, can you redo this one? And now you're in a code review and you're learning. Exactly, right. And actually, I take this a little bit further because like, you know how you hear about those developers who do those,

they do an interview where they're like, you know, can you refer to the red black tree without using any memory? Right. You know, and I'm like, that's just the worst interview or, you know, why are manholes round? You know, like stupid questions. And I'm sort of starting to advocate, like, I don You know, and I'm like, that's just the worst interview or, you know, why are manholes round? You know, like stupid questions.

And I'm sort of starting to advocate, like, I don't know, like the programmers who seem to have the most value in an organization are the ones who can fix stuff. Like, you know how to debug software. You're just like super good at fixing things. And for me, I would love to have it where like you do your interviews, you hand them broken code and you say fix as many bugs as you can in like two hours, you know, and then you come back and say, all right, let's see what you did. And yeah, they just if they if they can prove they can squash bugs. That's the kind of employment test I'd be looking for. That's true. Yeah.

Give them a piece of software and say fix some bugs. Is anybody doing that out there? I mean, that seems like that seems like almost obvious now that you say it. I know we don't have the whole industry in our heads, but I wonder if we know of anybody, businesses. I know nobody. Nobody, yeah. I mean,

probably there is. We don't know every industry. Listeners, if somebody out there is doing that and you know about it, give us a holler. It's every day. I can't reference any particular tweets, but there's definitely, as we watch what we do to do change a lot of news in this show jerry like i see those tweets and i see people say i can't possibly deal with one more job interview to do what zed just basically said i can't do that one more time you mean the bad way or the way he's like you mean like in a bad way like i

can't go through one more of those scenarios of like why is this that way versus like saying hey can you code it's it's like these challenges that have no meaning right right i mean is anybody doing it the bug squash way okay that's what i meant no no no jeez if we're missing that one then jeez we're not watching because that's every day so So, I mean, I have, everyone has tons of stories where they go and they do a whiteboard and the guy is like, you know, yeah, can you do, find a substring in a string, you know? And if you don't, you could use a better algorithm. But if you don't do the algorithm that he learned in college, you don't know how to do it. So it's not even if you can do the thing they ask you to do. It's if you know what they know, if you're just like them. And I think that's the biggest problem with it is

sure, it's great. Everyone should know algorithms. That's a useful thing to learn. But if the point of algorithms is to make sure that you went to his CS 105 class in MIT, then you're just filtering people based on kind of socioeconomic things, not really their skills. Right. Experience, things they really their skills. Right. Experience, things they're done with, yeah. Yeah. But bug fixing is universal. Doesn't matter what programming languages it is.

Doesn't matter where you come from, where you went to school. If you can't fix bugs, I don't think you can really code. And so it's an easy test. You can also do it without making people work for free. So you just point them at an open source project. You say, fix bugs. And that's your job interview. And they just, they fix bugs.

And it's done for free. Yeah, it's an easy way to check that they can understand code. I think 80% of a programmer's work is fixing bugs, right? Like, I think if I sit around and like, most of the time I'm coding, it's like, this doesn't work, this doesn't work, this doesn't work.

Oh, now it works. And that's- Well, the rest of the time, you're just it's like, this doesn't work, this doesn't work, this doesn't work. Oh, now it works. Well, the rest of the time you're just writing the bugs, you know? Exactly, exactly. Yeah, yeah. You're not fixing them, you're writing them. I'm a professional at that. That could be a different job interview.

How many bugs can you write in two hours? Oh, that would be another one I would do. Like if I was going to hire someone for a security job, I would do the opposite. Like how many bugs can you hide in this code right because then i would know that person they know their security right yeah they know exactly that's interesting i always uh enjoy i'm not sure if you're a fan of mr robot but that's kind of what i enjoyed about season one at least which was like all this you know kind of how do things work and just the mind of a hacker and how they

would get into or out of systems and exploits and how they would use them against somebody. I don't think that way, but I love hearing stories about someone who does. Yeah. Yeah. Um, my favorite, uh, uh, I live in this building with crazy security, like they, they've got, um, fingerprint readers and all this crazy stuff. And, um, I was getting really tired because the front gate, they're just like Nazis, man. They're just crazy.

They yell and scream at you. It's just insane. And so I started walking around the building, right? And I found out that there's a back gate that has zero security and is never closed. So I was kind of like, all right, I'll just start going to the back gate. And it's like a whole other world. And I'm thinking, you know, this is this is the kind of this is the kind of thing that sort of like describes software hacking is like a lot of times nobody really does anything like Mr. Robot style hacking. It's mostly times people just forgot to close the back gate and you're just walking through the back gate and you're just like, well, OK, I'm going to take all your Equifax data.

Yeah, exactly. just like well okay i'm gonna take um all your equifax data yeah exactly well i mean the most famous hacker slash cracker back in that was at the 90s kevin mitnick you know he was he went to jail and you know all these things he did and at the end of the day what he did most of the time was he just asked people for things and they just gave it it was all social engineering because a lot of times the humans are the weakest link and you just call an app yeah oh i thought i forgot my password you reset it to this for me and then they just would so yeah it's security's tough man because you know you got to secure every little aspect right all the surface area has to be secure but on the other side of the coin you only have to find one problem you know exactly exactly it's just almost not fair I found that there's also a sort of correlation because if someone is very, like if an organization is very insane about security and sort of touting that, usually they seem to be more like too focused on obvious security.

And there's always some really simple side chain that just gets around it. And so it's around it um and so uh it's really interesting like i like um uh what was that there was a bug in signal recently where if you just sent someone an html document you could completely own their machine and like everyone tells the signal is the most secure thing ever and the dude is not even checking html documents and for me i'm thinking html no you don't get that that is not secure i'm like you cannot send html that is not secure. I'm like, you cannot send HTML. That is the most terrible thing ever. Why would you want HTML?

You know, but to them, they're like, yeah, sure. And then they totally got owned like twice, I think. Even their fix got owned after that or something. Wow. You said you have a love-hate relationship with open source. And you mentioned, and I'm not sure if this is a tough spot for you to talk about, but you mentioned being homeless. I'm curious of the relationship of yourself and that timeframe and open source and maybe what happened. Was it your fault? How did this go down for you? Well, you know, I mean, yeah, ultimately a lot of that is partially your fault, right?

I mean, there's decisions that I made that I shouldn't have made. But I think at the same time, I had created these projects that all these companies were using. And at the end of the day, rather than hire me or get me consulting or whatever, they went the complete opposite direction and sort of seemed to go out of their way to tell everyone that my software was terrible.

Twitter was, I think, the worst for that. And they were using Mongrel at the time as an excuse for why their website wouldn't work and it had nothing to do with mongrel you know they just were terrible coders and that's why their website didn't work but um that uh basically caught me up and being homeless combined with a couple other things and bad decisions on my own but it was nearly impossible for me to find work within the Ruby on Rails open source industry at the time. And so that sort of taught me really

quickly, you know, don't get involved, like don't get involved with these communities that promise you that you're going to become, you know, you're going to get a piece of the pie if you contribute. And after that, I turned all my projects into, I'm helping the community, not the project, right? And by helping the community, I'm getting some sort of benefit from it. They're buying my books, they're hiring me, doing something like that. And that's the big change that came out of it. But the majority of the thing, like homelessness for me at the time was, you know, basically for about six months,

I had to sleep with on friends couches and stuff and trying to scrounge for work and didn't have anywhere to live didn't have enough money to get an apartment so when I say homeless it's not like I was living on the streets doing something like yeah no nothing like that but it's still it's still sort of like a big distance between what should have happened, which is if my project is being used by these companies, then I should have been receiving some sort of benefit, even if all that was, was a job. Right. And that's sort of like this unwritten contract in open source that we had were like, you know, the unwritten contract with corporations was if you wrote open source that

they were using, you got some sort of job or consulting fees, or at least some respect. So that way you could find jobs. And I think there was also an unwritten contract with communities too, where like, if you contribute to the community, you'll gain respect and a piece of the pie. Right. And I think that was kind of like demolished that year. And so after that, I just kind of I just kind of moved on. I was like, I started to realize that, no, that that contract has completely been rewritten. It's totally different now. And if you write open source, you're not going to get a job. And it's actually even now, I think what's been happening and part of my tweet storm and whatnot about open source is that it's gone the opposite direction where what I see is sort of

like almost direct action to prevent open source from developers from making money which I find very strange and I've been trying to think about that a lot lately did the whole rails is a ghetto thing happen before or after that actually rails is a ghetto happened after that as a response to me finding out that a lot of the rails is a ghetto, a lot of the Ruby on Rails companies were actively going out and preventing me from getting work. Wow. So this wasn't like I wrote, actually writing Rails is a ghetto helped me get work because it freed me from, I guess I'm going to say it, the oppression of the Ruby on Rails community. Right. And that's a significant difference.

And then after I wrote that, people were trying to come out and say that, oh, well, the reason you can't get work is because you wrote that. And like, no, no, no, I wrote that because I can't get work. And as we talk, you'll find out that's a common pattern where like, you'll do something to defend yourself. And then they'll tell you, well, you deserve everything that happened because of this thing you did to defend yourself. And it's sort of backwards, right? It's kind of, it's victim blaming, basically. That's what I was trying to figure out the timeline there, because I remember that and I don't know the story well enough. And here we are, you know, somewhat face to face,

at least audio wise to discuss this. And voice to voice. Yeah. And I see that in your history. I'm just wondering maybe what others assumed, which was like, did that cause your scenario or did your scenario perpetuate it? Yeah, my scenario perpetuated it because keep in mind, I was working at Bear Stearns when I wrote that. So I was able to finally get a job.

And the only job I could get was working at basically this crappy bank in New York, a bank that eventually collapsed. That's how terrible that place was. Right. And I was not making all that much money um uh pretty much joining ruby on rails destroyed my ability to work as a java programmer because of all the animosity that david hannemeyer hansen created between rails and java so the second i started becoming high profile within ruby on rails i couldn't get work as a java guy because they were they were like anti-rails to that point. You know, they were just, yeah.

And then I find out all these, all these sort of like backroom deals that Ruby on Rails people made and a lot of the things that people were saying about me and stuff that Twitter was saying to defend themselves from investors wondering why their system collapsed all the time. And that was why I couldn't get work. And I'm like, all right, screw this. I'm going to write about it. And I came out and told the truth.

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We are never down. 24-7 customer support, 10 data centers, 3 regions, anywhere in the world they got you covered. Head to leno.com slash changelog to get $20 in hosting credit. That's 4 months free. Once again, leno.com slash cheeselog. That brings us to the tweet storm and question that caught both Adam and my eye. And, you know, we interview a lot of people on the show. We talk to a lot of people in the open source community.

And so we see different perspectives. And one thing I appreciate about you, Zed, is, you know, of course, some things you do say are inflammatory. And so that gets people worked up. But you definitely see things differently than a lot of people. And I always appreciate, like, a separate voice out there crying, you know, here's a different thing than what you're hearing normally. And so that's what caught my eye about this, what you were saying, specifically around what you just said with regard to making money in open source and really the move of corporations into the community, which is something we've been tracking, of course, over the last 10 years. It's been very obvious that that's been something that's happened and it's very intentional.

So let's start with, I guess, the most, kind of the money quote, and we'll just, because it plays right into what you just said. And I'll just read this tweet back to you from the storm. Links are in the show notes for those that want to read the whole thing. We won't read the whole thing here for brevity's sake. But you said, in the end, open source is now the domain of corporations using code to illegally collude under the guise of peace and love hippie software projects if you plan on releasing software a gpl it and simply do it for self-expression save your real efforts or a real job yeah basically I

mean that's a pretty dystopian view I mean that's bad yeah yeah and and I guess we're done I mean that's pretty much the whole thing but but I can I can explore on that right okay so so it's sort of yeah so okay so it's sort of interesting that i mean do you feel that's controversial like you said it's dystopian but do you think it's controversial at all like do you disagree that corporations have kind of totally taken over open source and it's difficult to make money as an open source developer well i would say that it's always been difficult to make money as an open source developer. So I don't think that's necessarily new. I would say that corporations have definitely moved in in big ways and have made open source a emphasis.

And because they're just the pure weight of their size, right? We're talking about large technical corporations like Microsoft, like Google, like Facebook right facebook you know these are the big tech companies that are going to dom yeah they're giants they'll dominate any space they go into in software because of their pure weight exactly so i agree with that um illegally collude under the guise of peace and love hippie software projects i don't agree with that like illegally collude that's where you lose me um but i definitely i definitely see where the game has changed. And I've seen that be good in some ways, and I've seen it also be detrimental.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, so it's pretty straightforward to just say, like, let's say just Google. So Google's entire company, right, up until, I don't know, maybe eight years ago when they started making Go and their own stuff, right? Their whole company was based on open source, right? They use Linux, they use tools, they use everything. I don't really think they built too much of their own stuff, right?

In fact, they got sued for that, right? They were using Java and they weren't paying for it. And so they got sued for it, right? So if you take a company like google and they are like we're worth what 600 billion dollars something like that something something really insane right now 500 600 billion dollars so they're benefiting from open source and then the average open source developer that works on the tools they need makes almost nothing like in fact what we see is an open source developer is going to die from

cancer and he goes on GoFundMe and begs people for money for his funeral, you know? And then there's this company that's making $500 billion, right? And so that's the thing is it's really obvious, but for some weird reason, programmers sort of all think that's okay, right? They can't really think about it. And in fact, they go so far as if you try to make money with your open source like you license it gpl i remember i licensed something gpl and uh all these people from django started yelling at me that i licensed the gpl like how dare i try to make money on it right so we go this thing we're like this sort of like self-loathing if you want to get paid you're greedy but the company who's making tons of money on your stuff is not greedy. That company, they're allowed to make that money.

They're a corporation. But you, the developer, you should be helping the universe with your free stuff. And you're just a greedy jerk for doing that, for trying to make money. What do you suggest then? I mean, the thing of open source that the code is open and is free for everyone, regardless of if you can make money from it or not, right? And so are you, by having this stance, are you saying that because these corporations

decide to use the game, use the rules of the game and use the software and make money from it, that they should somehow be required to give back. What's your point there? So I actually think that the thing that the corporations are doing is totally what corporations are going to do, right?

Like you can't blame them. That's a corporation. That's what they do. Right. I think the bad thing is when we're telling open source developers that they can't be just like corporations. Right. Right. So, yeah, I mean, corporations are going to go out and do that. is when we're telling open source developers that they can't be just like corporations, right? Right.

So, yeah, I mean, corporations are going to go out and do that. I'm not surprised. Are you surprised? I mean, totally not surprised. I have no problem with anybody making open source and making money from it personally. Yeah. No. Yeah.

I encourage it. Please do that. But what we do is when I GPL'd something something all these dudes came out saying i was a jerk for gpling my stuff because i'm gonna make money on it right maybe they're just jealous no i think they i think they they really wanted to use my project without paying for it that happens a lot i see uh node started with a piece of my code node.js or with a piece of my code and then uh right after that they needed a new license so rather than pay me for the license, they created a separate project

that just had my code in it. And then Rydal emailed me and he's like, hey, buddy, can you just give me a free license for this? Right? Like, why are they trying to steal it from me? Right?

They could just paid me and I would have been like, cool, like just pay me and I'll give, I'll do a new license and we're done. Right? This is, this is capitalism.

Contracts, paying money, exchanges. That's how it works, right? So what, so my, my problem with it is that if it's right for corporations to be making money, it should be right for us to make money, but that's not what's happening. There's something else going on. And it's been a while. It's taken me a while to sort of figure out that really this is sort of a strategy among corporations to kind of do three things at once okay and these are three things that actually happened to me so or that are happening it's really easy to find it and the first one is they're just trying to commoditize their complement right have you ever heard of that strategy so yeah microsoft right like so they they sold operating systems so they

did a lot to commoditize hardware right um so if you're google you make all your money on ads you don't need you don't make money on hosting software you don't make money on you know kubernetes or any of that stuff so what you do is you commoditize all that you depress the market for those things so that way it's always cheaper for you to run your infrastructure for the thing you actually make money on so that's all the that's all these companies are doing they're just they're trying to use open source to commoditize their complement which okay great i mean someone releases it and then they're doing it no problem but then i've sort of noticed that there's been a change and companies have started to figure out that if they keep and and i don't know if this is explicit

or if it's just sort of like emerged from this whole thing, but if they keep open source developers poor, it's easier to grind them out and then take over the projects. And this, this happened to me with Mongrel. It happened to me with Node.js. It happens to a lot of programmers where, you know, if you just grind some dude out, then you can take his code and he can't complain about it. He's not, doesn't have any power to say that you're taking advantage of him, nothing. And then the other thing is, uh, they use it as a way to collaborate with other giant monopolies. So code is, is language code is communication. And so if you got people from Amazon and people from Google and people from Microsoft all working on Kubernetes, then they're illegally colluding.

If they got together in a meeting and said, hey, what we're going to do is we're going to collaborate on a project to commoditize hosting so that way nobody can ever make money on it. That would be illegal. Like if they said, yeah, we're going to collude to depress the price of ads, right? That would be illegal. But somehow they're able to go and collude on an open source project that depresses the price of a compliment they need. What do you say when the foundation says, well, we're a neutral base? Ah, so that's the thing. That's the response to that.

That concerns. Oh, but we're neutral. It's a foundation. We're neutral. It's a foundation. We're neutral. We have, you know, TCT, you know, the, all the different acronyms to technical steering committees and all that stuff to, to manage things and be, but guess who they work for? Exactly. Uh, uh, my favorite example is every time some IETF standard comes out, it's always like two dues from Google and someone from Mozilla, right? You know, like the standard and you look, it's like, Oh, it's a Facebook person,

a Google person, and then a Mozilla person. because they need someone from a nonprofit to say that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This isn't this isn't anything right. That was baked in a back room based on code we already had. This is totally about the community. So what's your what's your response on neutral? Just that they're they employ people to be on these committees or the foundations. Yeah. So my response is basically, you know, show me the cash. So let's say you join the Python Software Foundation or Software Freedom Conservatory.

I don't know if they do any of this, right? But if you're a member of that, if you're in the Python community, if your project is there, and then they're constantly begging for money, they have these giant corporations that are a part of it, then you know that it's not actually, they're not actually a part of the community that they claim to be. I think the other thing would be if what you see is suddenly there's these directions that benefit the Googles and the Facebooks and whatnot, and sort of screw over the individual developers, then these are not neutral organizations, right? And I think that's the biggest thing is, um, I think even a lot of these organizations, they pretty much exist just to make sure that these companies have free resources. I think my favorite example is GitHub.

So GitHub hosts all this open source, right? And they have investors from all the like from like companies that investors that invest in google and other non other uh projects and companies and whatnot and when you try to make money off github like they've shut down projects that help developers make money on github and every time i've said why does github not have a buy button like why can't you go to GitHub as a company and say yeah I want to just buy your license and you give me premium support or something like that and yeah because if they gave these developers easy access to revenue to money then all their investors would lose money because the compliments would suddenly go up in value. Right.

So now the price of the compliment that they're using, the web server, they use the small orchestration framework, whatever they're using goes up because, oh, well, if we want support, we got to go and pay this guy. But you should be paying that guy. You shouldn't be getting your support for free. And so what I've started to sort of realize is there seems to be like a motivation or even a concerted effort to make it so open source developers can't make money. And I believe the, the two things to that are open source developers kind of deserve it. Like there's a certain thing about them that I don't know. They, the way they run their projects and the way they run their show seems to be that they just are open to it, you know? And then also the companies that are doing it, I don't know if it's super conscious, but I know in my case, it was very conscious that they were trying to make

it so I couldn't make cash and to take the project after I gave up. So I'm kind of curious if it's with other ones. Let's look at the other side of the coin because you haven't mentioned at all. I mean, you mentioned Kubernetes, but you haven't mentioned at all the actual value add that these corporations have given freely. Like you said, it's a good corporate strategy to, like you said, to commoditize your compliments. But what that does is that actually lowers the playing field for everybody and people are building very successful businesses and careers based on software that they never could have written themselves they never could have afforded to build a kubernetes to build a tensorflow or these other these other things that you know wouldn't exist out in the open in the 90s but

now do because of these reasons i mean we always talk about bringing you know wouldn't exist out in the open um in the 90s but now do because of these reasons i mean we always talk about bringing you know letting your code do the talking like bring software bring value to the community contribute back all these things and i i agree that i think corporations should be offering money to people and in some ways they are in other ways they aren't we're seeing more and more emphasis on that from the developer side of like, you know, not just being open source friendly, but actually being like a supporter or sustainer of open source from these corporations who are doing very well financially. But what about all the value add? Because I mean, these are very huge software projects and many people are making livings off of TensorFlow that they just never had

a chance on their own. Yeah. So in that respect, it's that sort of enlightened self-interest that they're saying they do, right? So a company puts out, I call it FOPEN source because it still serves the company. Okay. No matter what you do, what that company needs is what's going to happen. Okay. And I'd be fine with it if they said, yeah, this is an open source project you can use, but it's going to be in our direction. Okay.

So they come out and they say like, you know, hey, this is TensorFlow and you know what? Google is going to run it and we do our thing. And if you want to contribute, that's cool.

But what we do, what we want first is what comes out as what's going to go in the project. But that's not what they do. Right. What they do in many cases is pretty clear. I mean, when we have these project. But that's not what they do, right? What they do is- I think in many cases, it is pretty clear.

I mean, when we have these conversations on the show, like what kind of, we ask people, what kind of open source is this? Like, is this community driven? Is it a Google project that's open to be contributed to, but it's a Google direction? And they're historically very clear on those things. Even, hey, changelog.com is open source. And we just say right on the front, like, this is our CMS. Like this is not going, we have a product roadmap. You can contribute, but this is not like a, and so I feel like a lot of read me's a lot of open

source websites. It'll say right there. Um, not all the time grant you. And I know we're just picking on Google, but this, you know, as the example, um, but I don't think it's always unclear who's driving a project. I think it's usually pretty easy to either derive or it's explicitly stated in many cases. No, I think actually they kind of dance on the edge of it. I think what they want to do is they want to have sort of the community control that a sort of like Kumbaya project has, but still also have their own control. Right. It's never explicitly said, you know, like, look, if you want this project to go in a different direction, Google is going to tell you no.

Right. They say, oh, come on, come buddy. Come on, you can do it. You can contribute. But really, if you contributed something that was totally anti what Google wanted, they would shut it down. Well, you would just fork it and give it a new name and go your own way, right?

I suppose, but I bet you anything, if you tried to do that, they would use the community to come after you. That's what happens all the time when you try to do those forks, right? Do you have any for instances on that? Do you remember FFmpeg? I use it all the time.

Okay, it forked tons of times. Numerous projects, they fork, and then, oh, Node. Node is a really good example. It forked tons of times. Numerous projects, they fork. And then, oh, Node. Node is a really good example. Node forked. Remember, they went and called it something IO. Had a huge fight.

Yeah, yeah. All over the place. The massive fight. Big internal, like, and then Joyent had to change its steering and its licensing and everything to fight it. But they totally fought it. They had all sorts of, like, propaganda going back and forth, They had all sorts of like propaganda going back and forth, yelling, all sorts of stuff, fights. It was like terrible, almost destroyed Node, right?

We were pretty close to that one, though. I think there were a lot of community members knee deep into the IO and Node fork and bringing the communities back together. From my perspective, there were plenty of community members that were what i would consider just peer-to-peer developers you know not corporations that were that were i guess they were leading io but then they were also bringing it back to this recombination of io node right after they got giant to sort of agree to their things because joint wasn't really running the project ethically. They were doing exactly what I was saying.

Yeah, they weren't running it well. They were only doing what they wanted and what benefited them, right? But then claiming, oh, this is a community and we're all like friends, right? So then IOF worked for that very reason. Isn't that a success story, though? Isn't that just like the actual open source thing working? Like, okay the joint was letting it languish they wanted to maintain and control and i'm just going based on memory this

was years ago so maybe the details are not particularly clear but the maintainers which was you know michael rogers and friends i can't remember the other names but we interviewed michael rogers about it they forked, they forced, forced joints hand. A lot of changes happen. Like you said, there was definitely, you know, propaganda back and forth or there's communication back and forth. There are blog posts written, right? There are conversations had at the end of the day, I think the IOT, the forked team were very happy to recombine and keep it a singular community. I think they got a lot of the things that they wanted out of it. And so I just don't see how that's a failure of open source in terms of really if things aren't going your way well i said if you just fork right and then you're saying that well then they

right force you back in or they i can't remember exactly right so use the community against you or rally yeah yeah yeah so so uh joint was worth like what maybe 10 million dollars so google's like worth like 500 billion right it's definitely yeah it's not apples yeah that's why i'm asking for examples you know i think i think you don't get examples right i think this doesn't happen too often for two specific reasons one is the companies that are doing this are huge like like can you imagine if you had an open source project you decided you you wanted to recopyright it, remove your license, and that would affect the bottom line of like, say Amazon and Google, let's say there's something they're using that you,

you know, they're using, you're, you're not making money. You're like desperate for work. They don't hire you. So you say like, screw this. I'm going to get rid of, no, you can't use my stuff anymore. You got to pay me now. I guarantee they're going to pump probably two, $3 million into lawyers and just bury you. Right. So nobody tries it. They know they're not going to be able to do anything about it. If you tried to fork Kubernetes, they're going to use, uh, uh, the, just the way programmers are to keep people there, the way communities run, the way open source is sort of like considered a community thing. How dare you?

They do this all the time, right? So I think it's just you don't have examples because that's the system doesn't provide examples. And then I think the second reason that all of this is allowed, like I got to say, like I'm really not upset or really blaming the corporations for doing this because the programmers let them, right? Like, I can't say that. Corporations just do corporation. That's what they do, right?

I mean, if they can make money anyway, that's what they do. So, I mean, they try to pretend they aren't that way, but that's the way it is. That's reality. So, I actually, for a long time, I didn't blame the open source projects. I didn't blame anyone or anything like that in running projects. I said, this is just corporations exploiting people. But then when I started talking about how they sort of allow this, I would start, I would get like death threats if I criticized a project. And there was this whole other side to open source. and i just sort of

started to see that like really the reason these guys are getting exploited is because they're just a bunch of servile fascists like they just like open source just the internet i mean because the mob mentality has infected the internet oh yeah totally but the thing that i think with an open source right is oh so this is one thing that's really interesting about fascism is you find it happens whenever there's a new community communication medium. Right. You find rises in totalitarianism when there's a new way to talk to people. So this happened when radio came out. It came out when printing came out.

It came out with like every time there's a new way to talk to people, someone out how to exploit it to control the masses so the internet comes out right and suddenly you can use that whole propaganda tactic again to get a new batch of followers and then ta-da there you have it but i think what i've started to find is like um these a lot of the people who are programmers kind of like that there's corporations taking advantage or harming the people that they consider their enemies in some ways, or that they have a project that thinks it's going to become the winner. The programming language is going to become a winner and wipe out every other programming language. And I'm like, no, that's terrible.

Why would you want to wipe out every programming language? That's just awful. And I started to realize like, look, I think the reason why these corporations can do all this stuff, right? They can collude illegally and nobody cares and they can just destroy people's lives and take, take, take and never give back and all these sorts of things, right? Because you two have been saying, oh, well, they gave out Kubernetes, right? But Kubernetes is not cash money to the people that wrote the open source that started their company, right?

So really giving back is helping the programmers that made your stuff, not, oh, hey, thanks for making that stuff. Here's this thing you totally don't need. I actually asked Brendan Burns face-to-face at KubeCon last year this very question. He was one of the founders of Kubernetes. I said, why didn't you just keep it for yourself? Why didn't you turn it into a corporation yourself or a for-profit thing? He's like, it would have never gone how it has. It would have been the ride it has been.

He had his own reasons, but he was like, you know, that's not the not the way it needed to go like it was by choice to do it that way and he was one of the founders of the projects yeah actually i think one of the other reasons why you can't really make open source is i think the the imagination is you can just be a dude in your bedroom you know crank out some code and you're gonna get a job or cash or something like that and i think no i think now to run like a very successful large open source project is so expensive right that no no small group of people being underpaid as a hobby can do it i think you're now competing with a google who has 500 billion dollars and can hire a thousand people to work on their open source project right and you are not going to make a competitor to that you're not going to be able to fork it either like if this is a project takes a thousand people what you and your three friends who hate

it are going to fork it no you're not going to be able to do that and then what are you going to get a job like um i remember google interviewed the dude who made homebrew and they didn't hire him like they use his software and he can clearly make a piece of software and manage a team, which is way more important than any algorithms knowledge. And they turned him down because he couldn't reverse a red black tree. Right. And I'm thinking that's insane.

Like that's not the important part of making software. You can look that up. Like, like what's next. I don't get a job because I don't know the name of every King and Queen in England. You know, I guess this is so weird.

I can, I can look that up. Like, I guess this is so weird. I can, I could look that up. Like, why would I bother learning that? I can look it up, you know? And so for me, I think if, if yeah, Kubernetes totally made the right decision, like trying to run a project that large without support, without money, and then venture capitalists won't invest in a lot of these projects because if you invest money in a kubernetes right that kubernetes needs to have a return on investment adam said founders of kubernetes it was founded inside of google so it wasn't like a startup that google acquired right when he's when they founded it but they founded it as it was already owned by google so right just

make but technically they could have they could could have not presented it. They really, they really pushed it to get funding inside of Google. They could have, I'm sure maybe I'm wrong, but I'm my, if I heard correctly, it sounded like there was a choice of, it could have been a Google thing or a, us three guys do this. I think it was three, three, three guys doing this originally. There was a choice. Well, they were Google employees. So, I mean, it would have been a google thing yeah right anyways so so i think gitlab is a very good example of someone where

like it's two people right that mainly started it and then yes and then they just ran it and then it got successful enough right that they were able to actually receive a pretty large vc investment you know you know but it's. You can go with your crappy app that you hacked up in a weekend on your phone, do a pitch deck. If you know the right VCs at this company or whatever, they'll be like, yeah, cool. Here's 20 million. Right. So open source is a much, much higher amount of effort to prove that there's a market. And I actually think if the guys who did Kubernetes went off to investors and said, yeah, what we want to do is create this thing that basically makes it so you can craft your own

like AWS infrastructure, whatever, they'd be like, hmm, now we don't want to do that because a bunch of our portfolio companies need free stuff. Now I'm just thinking of all the different people who built, I mean, another trend that we're tracking, and I don't disagree that it's easy in 2018. I think it's probably easier in 2016 to get VC funded in the Valley with an app or with a, you know, just in general with a good pitch deck. I think it's, I hear it's getting harder. We're not in the Valley, so I've never written a pitch deck. I don't know those things very well. But what the other thing that we're saying, you know, we've been this trend of of large organizations moving in also is vc funded open source projects and uh we're

coming out of our ears with them and so that's a path that a lot of people are taking and i wouldn't say i mean when i say we're coming out of our ears maybe a dozen or so that i could think of of projects that are that are making that work, at least for now. We'll see if they can go for the long run. More than before. Yeah, more than before. More than before. But it's still, I bet if you look at them,

the order of operations was not, hey, VC, here's my pitch deck and zero code. Fund me so I can make this happen. I bet the order was, I already have 20 million users, 5,000 users, whatever. I've already got a working project. It's already used by all these companies. Give me some money to make it a product. And that's the difference. It is much, much harder to pitch open source to a VC. Now you do, um, uh, any other kind of like, if, I mean, basically I remember if you were living in New York City and you wanted to make money in software, the easiest way was to make something banks wanted and write it in Java.

Because they would just suck that up, no problem. It's just like, oh, oh, yeah, you have a Java-based, WebSphere-based thing for managing doors? Cool, we'll buy that. You know? And if you wanted Ruby? No, no, that doesn't run on our infrastructure that we spent 20 billion dollars on you know so i think yeah i think in a lot of cases um you know it used to be i i really think that it used to be there was this sort of like contract where if you did open source you at least could get a job because that demonstrated that you could work.

Right. And they sort of changed that up. Right. Where now I think the contract is if you do open source, you better treat it like a job. Like you got to work for free, but act like you're a professional. Okay. And it's sort of like kind of slightly inverted it. And then when you don't really want to work for free, like when you go, no, screw you.

I don't want to work for free. That's just ridiculous. I don't work for free. They're like, Oh, you're not a team player. You're a jerk. And that happens a lot.

And all of that is part of this strategy. I don't know if anyone's articulated it as a strategy, but the strategy is if you keep the cost and the amount of money that these developers make down, then it's easier to take their project and use it, and they can't fight you back. They can't sue you in court if you violate the GPL, all these things. And then you commoditize your complement, and off to the races.

Yeah, I doubt anybody, I doubt if you dig far enough into the vaults of these organizations, you're going to find that game plan written down in a briefing that know, in a product, in a briefing that somebody proposed to their upper management as a game plan. Yeah. You know, I will say based on the documents that we sort of saw from Microsoft about their embrace and extend strategy, right? I remember there were things that they had said and when they got sued, right? Remember back in the day, a whole bunch of emails came out and we know what their strategy is now.

I predict you actually are going to see sort of a similar embrace and extend strategy come out of Google and Amazon and whatnot. And we're going to find out that actually, no, they've just been sort of exploiting open source to pad their pockets. But again, oh, well, I mean, that's companies. Why are we surprised by that? I'm not surprised by that i'm not surprised by that and then i feel open source developers uh programmers in general i feel are very i don't know i don't know why but i think they're very fascist i mean it's really hard like servile fascist you know this idea that you know totalitarianism right so like okay

so totalitarianism is basically the belief that somebody else should control things and that's fine. Somebody else controls things seems to be like, you know, governments, societies, religions, whatever. But then they add on and anyone who disagrees with me is the enemy and should be destroyed. Right? So that's kind of like the simplest way to say that's totalitarianism. And then I like to say, well, fascism is just totalitarianism for

profit. I just like, I just, I just put that out there. I'm like, no, if you're doing totalitarianism, you create an us versus them and you create an enemy and then you allow your followers to attack that enemy and then you do it so that way you can make more money. You're a fascist. And what I see is a whole bunch of science. I've been talking about this since like around, I want to say 2010. I think most open source projects are run kind of like little fascist regimes. I mean, Python and Linux call themselves like the benevolent dictator for life. I mean, like it's, they say it's a joke, but I don't know, right? I mean, those guys are kind of jerks. So, I mean, it it can't be it can't be that it's

all a joke you know and so what I see is I see these programmers who like somebody else being in charge they like watching their rivals be demolished or exploited or slandered right and they assume it'll never happen to them because they're part of the community they're a part of it and so they sort of like they they serve this sort of fascism and it's a it's a very gentle fascism it's not like you know they're going out in the streets and killing people but uh just from my own experience you know you speak up about something and i get death threats so i don't know i kind of call it like I see it. If I see a bunch of people freaking out, cause I don't like Python and, uh, I see projects who call someone the enemy, you know, or, um, Oh, my favorite is when they say they're going to win, like, Oh, JavaScript's going to take over the entire

world. We're going to win. I'm like, why do you want to destroy all the other programming languages? That's so weird. That's that's only what something fascists say. So what I see is, yeah, sure. I think corporations are taking advantage of programmers, but I think there's so many servile fascists in programming that they kind of agree with it and they kind of like it. And so there's no way to fix it. There's no way

you're going to stop them. Like there's no fix. It's just, this is how they are. And the only way to fix it for yourself is just don't go into that. Don't try to make money in open source, try to maybe build up a career, but stay very far away from the communities. Don't identify yourself with any one language or project or anything like that. And just basically, you know, play the game and try to get out and get ahead without getting hurt. Open source is what fuels new industries and pushes longstanding ones forward. In its 20th year, OSCON continues the tradition of bringing you the latest technological advances and a path to successfully implement open source in your workflow. OzCon 2018 features frameworks like TensorFlow, MXNet, and PyTorch, to blockchain projects like Hyperledger, Bitcoin, and Ethereum, as well as infrastructure disruptors like Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Istio.

You'll get an insider's look at the open source implementations that will have the most profound impact on your business. Thank you. on gold, silver, and bronze passes. Head to OzCon.com to learn more and register. Hey, that is the cat-v link to Rails of the Ghetto. Is that the canonical? Google says it is. I'm just curious if that's true. cat-v link to Rails as a Ghetto. Is that the canonical? Google says it is. I'm just curious if that's true. Cat-v? Harmful.cache-v.org is where the main Rails as a Ghetto links to. It's by Zed's So F-ing Awesome.

Actually, I think that shouldn't be up there. Is that re-hosted or something? No, I took it down, so I'm going to have to sue that person and make them take it down. Did you take it down? Was it on your personal site back then? Yeah, it was on my personal site. Is it down? I like to take it down.

No, I think people should be allowed to move on with their lives, right? It's not supposed to be on the internet anymore and we can't link to it anywhere? Go ahead and link wherever you want. I mean, that's fine. Well, I mean, obviously. I mean, it is ancient history in a lot of ways. Like, yeah, I wrote that. It is. But that's like 10, what is it?

10 years ago, right? It's gotta be more than 10. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, like, time to move on. I was a way different person in 2007. Just so you know. Yeah, me too. I agree with you. Me too. I'm thinking just more for, like, if the listeners are like, what the heck were they talking about? Is there a link to it?

Because we would get yelled at for not having links to things, especially something like they want to dig into. It's like, well. I would say go ahead. I mean, you know, I am sort of honest about myself and I did write that. So, I mean, if you link to it, it's no problem. I think one of the I mean, and I'm going to contact this person, tell him to take it down because I own the copyright. You can also probably find it on archive.org, a few other things. Right.

But yeah, I mean, if you do, just, you know, I would say preface it with Zed took this down because he wanted to move on with his life. So, you know, this is Zed circa 2008 and he's different, you know. Yeah, sure. Yeah, because like I would say, yeah, I was making fun of people who are overweight in there and I don't agree with that, you know? Yeah, sure. Yeah. Cause like I would say, yeah, I was making fun of people who are overweight in there and I don't agree with that, you know? And I was, I was saying like a lot of, you know, pretty terrible things, but at the time it was sort of like this cathartic, like I just wrote how I felt at the time. And, uh, and you know, part of that was, I actually was being threatened by certain people, um, and stuff like that. So, I mean, a lot of the things that I say in there are at specific people, but I don't

believe in like making fun of someone's disabilities or anything like that. You know, I think there's some things in there that I actually am ashamed of, you know, so I took it down, you know? We got a link to it. I mean, they can Google it. I mean, if they can Google it, we don't have to link to it. So one thing that's good for us is we're definitely about lifting people up rather than putting people down. So our goal is not to shame you, nor we want to perpetuate you being shamed.

So, you know, it could be Googled. And that's something that's like not exactly pertinent to our conversation. So I have no concerns about linking to it. I just want to make sure if we do, we are linked to the right place. That's what my concern was, not that we can find you and get you. Yeah, that's no problem. But, you know, I mean, I will say I have no problem with people disagreeing with me and telling me why they disagree with me. I don't know.

I come from a different era, I think, where like you can disagree with someone and not hate them or think they're a terrible person. You know, you can have wonderful disagreeing conversations but I think what happens I don't know if it's just a thing about Americans I don't know the internet I think they take disagreement to be an argument and sort of like an attack from an enemy right and to me I'm very different I'm like well no I can disagree with you and I can still I don't know like like you and I think the line between disagreement and hate and dislike is can be has gotten to some degree closer

yes because I don't agree with what you say doesn't mean I don't like you or I can't show you love or be kind or you know help you or serve you or do something for you or be there for you when you need somebody like because i don't like the way you do things doesn't mean i i don't like you right exactly you know people think that way i know i don't get it too because i've been and i

mean i think zed probably just looking at your career i probably trail you by five or ten years maybe because when you were writing mongrel i was like just learning how to write code back then um me too but so my point but you said maybe it's your age or maybe you know um just with the generation that you're from but like i just don't i don't get offended when people disagree with me and vice versa like i just feel like that's life like discourse that's that's that's how we learn and grow and and live it's like we don't have to all and so i I mean, some of that leads back into the show because I see what you're saying, you know, with regards to specifically like with this, maybe we should just start the show, but, uh, the developer fascism thing, like I identify and I identify as a developer,

but I don't feel, I don't see those things in myself. And I don't see those things in, i see that like nuanced what you're saying and um i feel like you're saying it in a blanketed almost like matter-of-fact way that i i feel is maybe overstepping but maybe you're just matter-of-factly stating your conclusions of something that you admit is is is nuanced and and into a minor degree. We should start there because we almost ended that last segment with me saying that I disagree with Zed. I mean, if we didn't have to end the segment for time-wise,

I would have said that I disagree. I don't agree with you, Zed. I just don't agree. Because that's your experience. Yeah, so this is the thing is i'm not saying it's a blanket statement on every programmer however um i do think that it is very endemic in how the tools work how the writing has been how the industry has been run um i think it's so like i think it's just there so much it's like so everywhere that they don't even notice it a lot of times

um and also i think a lot of these people where they're like, you know, oh, I'm totally not like that. Right. And then you see, they see other people being like that and they say nothing. And I think that's the thing. I've never ever had anyone stand up to an abuser of me and say, hey, leave him alone. He's just saying, he's just saying he doesn't like this or he doesn't like python you don't have to be like abusive right i've never seen anyone say that ever right so there's two types when i say a servile fascist i don't mean someone who's out

there you know like doing it i mean it can be someone who actually really enjoys it and supports in the regime and goes along with it and never disagrees with them, or someone who allows the regime to do what it's doing or the corporation doing what it's doing and then just assumes, well, you know, it doesn't relate to me, so I'm not going to do anything about it. You know, I'm not going to stand up and help that person. Yeah. Let me, let me present this angle because, and I have never been in, I've never been around the circles wherein you are, you know, disagreeing with Python people or somebody's attacking you. So I, I can't,

I can't give the contextual thing, but I will say, you know, back from, but I think I was reading rails as a ghetto back in oh eight or whenever. And I was in the rails community back then. And my take as somebody who's completely on the outside,

but in the community to a certain degree was like and this may be completely myopic but like zed is a guy who does not need anybody's help in terms of staying up for himself like you do very well and you represent your side very well and strongly and so i wonder if a lot of the inaction that you've experienced which i'm not necessarily excusing and saying and therefore nobody needs to help you out or anything. But on the internet, you come across as somebody who's very, what can very well take care of himself. And so maybe that means people just remain silent because I think, well, people think people are attacking Zed and Zed is defending himself or attacking back. And it's just kind of a sideshow. Yeah, no, no, I agree. I actually tell people

don't help me, right? Because the collateral damage to people who help me is pretty great. So I tell people like, hey, don't worry, I can take care of myself, right? But if we're talking about the general kind of population, open source projects, things like that, right? Then you don't really see this anywhere.

I'll give you a really, really good example from Python. So there was this project by Aaron Schwartz called web.py and web.py was great. They made Reddit with it. Originally they did Reddit in scheme and I guess they did it in this and Aaron Schwartz was working there. And it was awesome. It was so cool. Like you just like, it was worked really well, very tiny, very small. And at one point, I guess Guido, the benevolent dictator for life for Python tried tried it. And he decided that it was terrible because it had too much magic.

So rather than someone saying, hey, aren't you supposed to support people in the community and not trash people's projects? Because, I mean, you are supposed to be the benevolent dictator for life. Everyone decided that his project was terrible. They said, don't use it. Every time you tried to use it, they went, oh, it's terrible. And then they banished magic through all of Python.

And by magic, they just meant usability, really. Like, you know, shorter names for function calls. I remember the, I'm serious. In Django, I remember that. I thought it was like

just metaprogramming. No, like they still did metaprogramming. Like go look at Django. Like it's ORM is tons of metaprogramming. But what look at Django. Like it's ORM is tons of metaprogramming. But what they did is to make it not seem like magic, you had to type render to template, right? And then there was another one,

render to template with session or context. It was like crazy. And I'm like, why can't I just have render? Oh, well, that's magic. Like, no, it's not. It's just easier to use. And so, and you can also say, you know, magic is just like, you know, like what's that quote?

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. So you can say the opposite is the only reason you think something's magic is because you're uneducated. So these are people who are saying like, that's magic. I'm like, well, you just got to learn how it's done. That's all. If they're making it easier to use and, you know, you can go read the code. The code's there. So I think that's a really good example. Nobody really stood up for him. I remember I was one of the few people who was like, that's stupid. This thing works great.

I put it in my book. People ranted at me. Why are you putting in your book? You should just other project that doesn't have any magic. And I'm like, okay, this is a developer who worked on stuff. He's a part of your community. And you're allowing someone to just blanket decide that this guy is terrible for writing his project and nobody should use it. And the way he wrote it should be banished. And you're agreeing with that and nobody's telling the benevolent dictator for life,

yeah, just why are you doing that? That's wrong. He can make his projects and yeah what was the specific things done there because on the other side of that coin like guido's completely uh he has the right to his opinion on software and because of his position it makes sense that people respect his opinion and and so there's like a natural leadership there that doesn't seem counterproductive um and so and i don't know again i'm missing the detailed context of like, and then he did this and it was mean, or it was like, was he criticizing software based on, you

know, his own ideas of the way software should be written? That seems like a constructive thing to do, you know? Not really. Because it's just style based or? No, it was because he didn't like the way that it used these features of Python that were metaprogramming. That's it. That was all it was. Didn't he write those features? Yeah, that's the thing.

He should have left the metaprogramming out, maybe. Just don't have that ability, right? What it was, though, is some projects could do do magic but not this project could do magic he had no problem with magic and all these other things he has no problem with magic being done throughout the python libraries he's no problem with this magic just this one guys right and then the actual point of the discussion yeah you're right guido's in charge whatever we're talking about people being servile fascists so everyone who who just went, sure, yep, all righty, and agreed with them and just, and then also went on the offensive and banished all magic from their projects and totally

believed him without thinking about it are what I'm talking about. Those are the people who are making it so that it's easy to exploit open source projects and take advantage of them because a corporation comes out and does whatever it wants. And everyone's like, yep, sure. Okay. Yep yep i agree with that regime should be in charge and anyone who disagrees should be destroyed it's kind of like brainwashing or mindless uh mindless followership it is and and the thing is is the the slickest form of that is the kind where people don't realize they are and they just sort of believe it and it's endemic everywhere and they just sort of like they think that's normal well you had me worried because i was worried that i

was some of these people you know not even knowing it but i'm not obviously but you had me concerned that somehow i was brainwashed and i'm just unknowingly out there as a fascist yeah and you know i actually i think fascist is the wrong, but there's not much of another word. Like I could say totalitarianism, but that's typically not with a profit motive. The reason all these people are doing this is they all hope to make a piece of the pie. They all hope to make some amount of money off of it. And that's historically, that's a thing about fascism is there's always this corporate element to it and things like that.

But I think it's got to have a new word. I mean, I could just say they're just totalitarians but um they're there's a difference between being a totalitarian totalitarian is trying to do it without trying to make any money and they are true believers but all these people are trying to make money they want a piece of the pie right so that's the only reason why i say they are but in the same way like i mean yeah sure not everyone in a fascist regime is totally fascist, right? Sure. Yeah, they're not totally fascist, but if they're allowing it to happen, maybe they're

servile, right? They're just sort of like going along with it because, hey, they're not coming after me. So I'm trying to think of some of the things here. So self-identification seems to be, I'm trying to think of the drivers of this. And you have a lot more experience with maybe pointing this out in your own mind or pinpointing that's what this activity is than I do.

So I'm very much processing and trying to think of examples because we've been very active in open source for a long time and having these conversations. And so I can see some of what you're saying, but I haven't like been part of like on watching an attack, you know, happen and then like nobody's saying anything type of thing.

So obviously. I can give you a super good example, right? Okay. Yeah, I came out and I was going to do a new Python 3 book and I tried to use it. It was slower. A lot of the features were not very good and I would test it about every year. And so finally it got to where I could kind to use it. It was slower. A lot of the features were not very good and I would test it about every year.

And so finally it got to where I could kind of do it. So I said, all right, I'm going to do a Python 3 book, but I really don't agree how the project's going. And I would tell people this all the time and they would shut me down. So I wrote a thing. I said, Leah, don't use Python 3. I'm going to do a book on it,

but it's not well run. It's not well written. It's basically just like not a good project right and this is my opinion as an educator the person who wrote one of the main python books a member of the community for a while everything okay and immediately after i wrote it two high profile members of the psf proceeded to go to all these people who wrote books and try to get my book removed as a mention in their book. And people came to me, they're like, yeah, so-and-so and so-and-so are going around. Here's their chats trying to get people to stop using your book because you don't like Python 3. That's

it. Just, I don't like Python 3. That's all. And I asked my friends or the people who tell me this, I'm like, well, okay, well, why don't you say something about it? And they're like, oh, I'm afraid. I'm scared that I won't be able to work or that they'll come after me next so even people who claim to be my best friend can't stand up to these people this kind of like you know oh if you criticize our project you're the enemy and we're going to go after you because you might make it so we can't make money on it and then interestingly enough like um oh my favorite was someone tried to to write a blog post saying I'm unqualified to teach Python 3. And this person previously had recommended my book.

So I'm kind of like, OK, so does that mean Python 3 is unteachable? Because if I can't teach Python 3, then I don't know if anyone can teach Python 3. Because you're teaching Python 2. Yeah. Like, what's the huge. Yeah. Like, what's the huge difference in my like, and then this person was recommending my books before this.

So either they're lying about my books being good and they were giving them out or they're lying about Python 3 being awesome and I just the terrible teacher, you know? Yeah. But not a single person. I didn't read a single blog post from anyone. Not a single email. Nothing. Even my best friends didn't stand up for me. Nobody came out.

People told me that they would talk to members of the PSF and they'd say like, yeah, you know, what do you think about Zed's post? And members in the PSF said like, oh, you know, Zed was the best thing to happen to Python, but I'm never going to say that because it'll be really bad for me. So your best friends that you, so with my best friends, uh, like if a stranger offends me, it's kind of like whatever, you know, especially someone in the internet. I mean, it doesn't, not that it doesn't hurt, but it's not going to affect my day to day, but my best friends don't stand up for me. I would turn to them and say, what's up with this? Like, why didn't you,

why aren't you, did you talk to them? Like, what do they say? Why aren't they going to come to your side? In a lot of ways, I can't blame them because this would be their livelihood gone. If they stood up to the PSF and, and, and did what I did, they were,

they were, they say, where was that? They're going to lose their jobs or, or what? That's what they're worried. Yeah. They're worried.

They won't get their consulting gigs. They won't get their jobs. They'll be banned from the PSF because that's exactly what they're doing to me. So they're like, oh, I don't want that to happen to me. I'm going to, I'm going to tell Zed it's going on, but I'm not going to stand up for him. I can't do that. And this is very common, like all the time. And I'm in a unique position because I mean, after I wrote that and they tried to ban me, my sales went up. I mean, I, I, I kind of, yeah, it didn't do anything to me. Um, I do work very hard to make sure that I get put out something good that helps a lot of people and you know, it works. So, you know, I try to make it work as best I can. And so

it didn't impact my sales, didn't impact my traffic, didn't impact anything. Um, and all their plans failed. Like, I mean, so what you take me out of other people's books, big deal. But it still kind of hurt that like nobody stood up to take care of me or at least just, I mean, my friend didn't even tell them you're an a**hole. Like me, if someone did that to my friend, I'd be like, oh no, we're going to have a problem here. Like I would just unload on them. So that's, that's like my biggest, like that happens way more often than people want to admit. But I think it doesn't happen too often because the culture of programming now is that everyone just kind of goes with the projects. They're all very servile. And then when the next one comes along, they just leave

rather than trying to fix or change or contribute in that way in the previous project. What do you think it is? I mean, not saying that you deserve this, but what do you think it is that you've done or been involved in or around that may make people feel this way about you? I think we'd start with Rails. That's where I mark the shift. Because before that, yeah, people, I feel like people in open source had a different attitude about it that was much more collaborative or discourse based. You could totally disagree with the way someone did something. And then, no, I would say Java then Rails changed it to be, you could use this sort of marketing tactic that was really similar to kind of like a fascist propaganda to convince people to join you and become rabid fans. And I think for me, I just have a very strong streak against that.

And so when I speak out against it, it obviously threatens what they're doing and also kind of questions people's core identities. Because the whole point of all this, this kind of running a project like this with this kind of like fascist style propaganda is you become their core identity. And so if there's this one guy who comes out and is like oh yeah no no look that's wrong somebody shouldn't do that to you you have you know they're like no no you're wrong and then they get really angry yeah and it's understandable i don't actually hate any of the people who really necessarily don't like what i have to say i don't really hate them um the only people i really have a problem with are people who send me death threats because I don't like Haskell, you know.

Come on, people. Have you actually gotten death threats because of that? Yes. No, you don't understand. I don't understand. I'm trying to understand over here. It's so weird, right? That is weird. Look, you can think I'm a jerk, right? I'm totally fine with that. You can disagree

with what I say. I'm totally fine with that. But the response has to match the offense. Yeah, commensurate. Exactly. If I don't like Haskell, you go, yeah, I don't like your project. Okay, there you go. Cool. Like you don't like your project, right?

Maybe you can say, I don't like your face. Like, all right, that's weird, but okay. But if I go, I don't like Haskell, and then you send me this insane email about how I should kill myself, you know, that's a kind of a disconnect. All I said was one tweet where I'd made fun of Haskell and you want me to kill myself. That's a huge distance between what I did wrong to you and what you think should happen to me. Well, since you brought it back to Twitter, this tweet stream we talked through here,

which we did go through all of them, and I'm not sure we can actually link to it because your account is protected at least now we do have a version we could PDF and host it if that was okay with you but aside from that yeah yeah go for it go for it yeah yeah you know what was the

what was the response with I mean you said lots of controversial stuff in this tweet stream so I mean what was the response with i mean you said lots of controversial stuff in this tweet storm so i mean what was the response any death threats any any threats at all what was the response no that's the thing that i find very interesting i think all the responses were positive um the only responses i got were mostly along the lines of like you know the libertarian flair of well that's corporations right you know and that's about it, right? Which is what got me thinking like, wait, you don't have a problem with this? That's kind of weird, but okay.

But the weirdest response that I got was all these people came out and they said, hey, we're going to try and solve that with blockchain. You wouldn't believe it. No, no. Blockchain solves all problems. See? Yeah, yeah. No, this was bizarre. So I had these people who were like, yeah, what's going to you, you put your project in my blockchain, my licensing open source blockchain. And then people say, yeah, yeah, yeah. I bought that thing. I'm going to use that thing. And so then, and then you get coins. And so when people use your software, you get coins. And so, so I'm kind of like, I'm like, okay, okay. Can I just get cash? Cause like, I got to pay rent. I got to like buy food. I can't, I can't use like

open source coin down at the Walmart. Right. So can I just get some cash money? And they go, oh, well, I don't think anyone would use that. They think that they're only going to use a blockchain based licensing system. And I'm kind of like, no, I think exchanging money for licenses has been around probably as long as there's been humans. So I think I think there are people pretty OK with that. Just throw up a PayPal and then pay me money. And nope. Yeah, that was the weirdest one.

Like everyone did that. Well, when all you have is a hammer and that hammer spits out coins, you know, everything looks like a nail. You're just like, I'm blockchain that. Get some coins. So one thing I did think that and so i i don't want to ruin someone's like you got an idea go with it i'm probably not a very good predictor of what's going to take off so rock tried blockchain if people use it and programmers are getting paid then i'm happy with that go for it i don't i don't think it's going to happen but

whatever so the one thing i did think is one problem is if you're an organization that's really huge and you would like to pay developers, you don't know what software you're using. Like it's really difficult to account for, like, let's say you're running thousands of machines to power your website, right? You know that there's some hidden GPL in there, right? You know, there's GPL code in there. So what you could do is a blockchain's only really useful thing would be you could register code into it and then organizations could use that registration to confirm whether they are complying with licenses, whether they need to release software or whether they need

to contact you and get a license. So I think that would be something viable and you would probably just have to sell that tool to large organizations and then offer programmers and say like yeah what we'll do is we'll send you a report with all these companies that are willing to say hey yeah we're using your gpl we made these changes here you go right and act as a proxy and solve that problem for them but otherwise i don't know if i'm getting coins i don't think i can eat so i want dollar bills you know the best coin ever well i mean i can i can agree on on one part where the blockchain makes sense as a ledger yes yes the coin part obviously is the stretch it's like well not really a lot of value there and there's a lot of volatility it's the easiest

well and the ledger isn't the volatility it's the easiest well and the ledger isn't the hard part of the equation right like the ledger is is workable it's that's easy yeah it's like the social constructs and it's the industry and there's a lot more there's a lot big yeah i mean there's a lot bigger problems to solve than like how are you going to prove that this is happening right distributed just decentralized fashion and And Tether, you know, somehow makes it, you know, tying it to real world. Well, so one of the things that you, that you would get with a blockchain solution is companies are kind of really scared to announce what tech they use because that's how competitors can compete with them.

So if they're able to do this locally, right, with like this distributed database and then reach out to the people that they owe code or money to, then they might be into that. Right. So that way they don't have to make out, they don't have to make calls out to some central repository that's tracking everything they use. They can keep that a secret. Which you can run data analysis on and machine learning and algorithms and ranking.

Yeah. Can you imagine if like you, you were a company and you were doing this, right? Everyone's like checking their software and you've got the central database, you know, every company and all the things are running, right? And then your competitor buys that company, right? And you're like, oh man, now they know everything we run. So if it's like blockchain distributed, you just do that locally. You're like, okay, cool.

People are registering their source code into it. And then you look and go oh right and then the next step is you go and hand that person money or code like this gpl you give them their code back or you say hey we don't want to give you our code back can we just pay you cash and exchange quick exchange licenses and you're done so in your opinion if every corporation were to agree that the best thing they could do with regard to open source software is to give cash money in whatever denomination the developer desires right according to their locality to the people who are writing the open source software that the company runs on um what would be the the threshold or the, are you talking like a percentage of net revenue?

Like, how would that break out that would make Zed happy of like, okay, now everything's right in the world because these companies are doing X. What would X look like? Yeah, you know, I mean, if you take, say, a company like Google, they're worth like $500 billion, $600 billion. So you're looking like 1% would be like $50 billion. I think that's more money than like all of the open source industry ever made in its entire existence. Right. So it wouldn't take much. Like you could do fractions like Google could go down to $1 billion and it would still be

so much money, you know? So it doesn't have to be very much. Um, I don't think this will ever happen by the way. I think this is, I think actually. I think this is in your fantasy. Never going to happen. I think actually what's going to happen is people are just going to stop making open source. And then these companies are going to be fairly desperate. But I think if they donated like fractions of percentage and they just gave it as direct money to developers or worked it in a system where like, you know, hey, we just want to pay you you to work on this doing exactly what you're doing. And we'll just pay you salary as an employee.

I think we used to do that. It doesn't happen as much anymore. Well, you definitely seen that happen. It's something I would love to see happen a lot more. A lot more, right? A typical, typical strategy is, oh, hey, buddy, you want to come work on your open source? Oh, sorry. Can you go move that CSS button over two pixels left? Don't work on your open source. It's like a bait and switch, you know, once you get there, you're not working on it anymore. Totally not. Yeah. You're working on whatever is going to make the company money. Right. So I think if they just started, so I think if they don't start making it so that open source is a viable career choice where I can say, I'm an open source programmer. I work on this project

and this project gets this much from these companies that use this software to keep it going. And then that open source project slash company hires people to keep working on it. Right. Then I think they'll avoid the problem in the future that I suspect, which is all of this just collapses. Right. Where events, it's not like it's going to be like a violent revolution or anything. It's just people aren't going to make open source. I mean, like, I don't want to be like that guy who was, when he died, he went on GoFundMe to beg money for his funeral. I want to be someone who's got a job and starts my own company and put stuff on the internet

myself and make my own apps. I don't want to work for free. Well, it's a, it's been a fun trip down this lane with you zed going back to the beginning of of uh your open source career to on through to this to this i guess happy place you are you seem happy right yeah mostly happy you got your rants but you're happy you're making money you got your books you're doing education you're helping developers making music making art yeah you know i think um i think one of the things that people sort of misunderstand is

they they sort of see a one-sided person in everyone right like you you we're very good at stereotyping people into one thing yeah and so they think if i disagree with the way open sources run that i'm an angry person i I totally hate it. I'm miserable, but it's not true. It's just, you know, thoughts, disagreements. I maybe word them a little strongly, but it doesn't mean like I'm like in my bathroom trying to cut myself to the latest, you know, cigarettes after sex album or something, you know, it's not, I'm not doing that. I'm just typing thoughts. I'm fairly calm and expressing myself. Right. And so in generally, I'm very happy. I think there's been times when I, when the working in software industry has been hard, but I would consider myself pretty lucky that I've managed to dodge a lot of the problems

that I talk about because I start becoming aware of them pretty early and turn that into a viable way to keep myself employed and able to work and produce something useful. And also then learn hobbies like painting and whatnot. Well, Zed, thank you so much for coming on with us. It's been a blast. I mean, you came on the show before. I didn't get a chance to talk to you then. It was so long ago. But to now finally get a chance to circle back eight years later almost-ish.

And it's been a blast. Thank you so much for sharing what you've shared here. And keep the tweetstorms coming. I like that stuff. He's off Twitter, man. You got to find him somewhere. What's the best way people can get a hold of you? Like if they're not going to attack you or anything like that,

or give you death threats, like you're open to conversation, right? Like we've had a great conversation here. So is it email? Like what's the best way that folks can't get you on Twitter anymore? How should people get in touch? Yeah, so what you can do is I have my blog, zedshaw.com. That's kind of my personal little thing. You can go there, pop a comment in.

I'll probably write a little blog post about this and announce it. So that way people can go and comment. Right. And if you want to talk to me about books and stuff like that, you can go to at L Z S T H W. So learn Zedshaw the hard way. And that's my Twitter. And yeah. And then that's pretty much it. And if you want to buy my books, I would really appreciate it. And you can go to learn

code the hard way.org and you get them there. And I'm also in the future going to be producing a painting book, a painting course. So totally free. I'm taking the money that I make from my programming books and I'm going to see if I can do some free painting education. So just putting stuff up on YouTube and totally free for people to learn to paint because I love it. It's helped me so much. Nice. It's like one of the best things I've ever done in my life.

And it's really not that hard. Like I think if people are making money off piles of garbage and that's really not that hard. Like, I think if people are making money off piles of garbage and that's considered art, then you can paint some really crappy oil paintings and it's totally art and it's fun. All right, that's it for this episode of The Change Log. Thank you for tuning in. Thank you to our sponsors, Rollbar, Linode, and OzCon.

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