The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Gitter’s big adventure (Interview)

Episode Date: September 30, 2020

Gitter is exiting GitLab and entering the Matrix...ok, we couldn't help ourselves with that one. Today we're joined by Sid Sibrandij (CEO of GitLab) and Matthew Hodgson (technical co-founder of Matrix) to discuss the acquisition of Gitter. A little backstory to tee things up...back in 2017 GitLab announced the acquisition of Gitter to help push their idea of chatops within GitLab. As it turns out, the GitLab team saw a different path for Gitter as a core part of Matrix rather than a non-core project at GitLab. We talk through all the details in this episode with Matthew and Sid.

It's tough to get a chat client to rule them all, essentially. Like, yeah, that's the desire, I suppose, from a chat ops platform or a DevOps platform like GitLab is you'd essentially be saying this is the one that rules them all. And that's just not the case. Like many people, some use Slack, some use Gitter, some use IRC still yet, you know, even, you know, some use Matrix. So there's a lot of different blends out there and the UX and the UI and all of that. And even, I suppose, to the sake of Matrix, what it's trying to do is provide bridges and integrations, et cetera, natively to enable all these chat communities to connect. And that's maybe the bigger part of the story. Yeah, I mean, from the Matrix side, that is the goal that we're aiming for to basically get best

of both worlds. Some say that GitLab did have a chat client embedded in it. It wouldn't be the only way in which you can interact with chat ops functionality. You would also be able to come in via Slack or via Gitter or via Element as a native matrix client. So I wouldn't totally rule out the idea of a kind of interoperable world of chat ops in the context of an app like GitLab. But I also completely understand why it isn't core relative to the key of the product. But it's going to be really, really exciting, obviously, to go and take and get it and natively properly merge it into the wider matrix network. Being With Her changelog is provided by Fastly. Learn more at fastly.com.

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So head to digitalocean.com slash pricing slash calculator to play with the pricing calculator. And then head to do.co slash changelog to try DigitalOcean for free with a $100 credit. Again, digitalocean.com slash pricing slash calculator to play with the pricing calculator. And do.co slash changelog to get your $100 credit to play with the pricing calculator, and do.co.changelog to get your $100 credit to play with. Welcome back, everyone. This is the ChangeLog, a podcast featuring the hackers, the leaders, and the innovators in the world of software. I'm Adam Stachowiak, Editor-in-Chief here at Changelog. On today's show, we're talking with Sitsa Brandage, CEO of GitLab,

and Matthew Hodgson, co-founder of Matrix, to discuss their acquisition of Gitter from GitLab. A little backstory to tee things up. In 2017, GitLab announced their acquisition of Gitter to help push their idea of chat ops in GitLab. And as it turns out, the GitLab team saw a different path for Gitter as a core part of Matrix rather than a non-core project at GitLab. And today, we talk through all the details with Matthew and Sid.

So we're joined here by a couple of friends. This is like a three-way Git merge when you're bringing everybody together. We have Sif and GitLab. We've got Matthew from Matrix slash Element. And we're here to talk about another thing called Gitter. Guys, thanks for coming on the changelog. Thanks for having us. Well, thank you for having us.

Yeah, thanks. So the big news, which we're here to discuss, is that Gitter is exiting GitLab and entering the Matrix. And Gitter was this great service where if you have an open source project, it gives you a room for everyone to hang out in. When we came across its path it was growing it was doing well but there was no business model behind it so it would the more successful it was the more money it lost our mission is everyone can contribute and we thought

it was great that this thing enabled open source communities to become more active over time. And we thought that deserved a home. And we acquired it. We invested. We made it better. It grew. But long term, chat is not something that GitLab is going to specialize in. We're trying to have a complete DevOps platform delivered as a

single application. There's all kinds of things in there from monitoring all the way to managing, from security all the way to planning, but chat is not one of it. So we looked for a better home, a home of a company that was specialized in chat, but also, well, I think it's a big benefit. We find a home that is open source, open protocol, all the things that we hold near and dear. It's definitely a different kind of trait from a CEO, though, Sid. Not just so much your decisions alone, but I'm sure that inside of GitLab,

the thought that Gitter doesn't fit long-term with your vision, not so much just keeping it or holding it. Hoarding might even be a better word to use. One of your promises back to the community was to open source it, which you did. But then the desire, I suppose, to see it continue is very admirable. Yeah, I think I want to thank two people. First of all, Eric, who for years kept growing Gitter many times

almost by himself, even though the rest of the company wasn't focused on it. And then I want to thank Eliran. Eliran does mergers and acquisitions at GitLab and he's focused on acquiring companies. We just acquired two fuzzing companies not too long ago. But now he also has shown that when something doesn't make sense, he can find a great new home for it.

I'm very grateful to both. There was a time, Sid, where chat ops was going to be the next big thing. Everybody was talking about how you were just going to tell a robot to deploy via your chat channel, and those integrations exist on various platforms. Was that a concept that you were buying into, and you think that it doesn't actually work out in the long term? Or what are your thoughts around that?

Why is chat not part of a DevOps platform, in your opinion? That is a great question. I don't get it on a visceral level. On an intuitive level, I don't get it. I thought we would have the great chat ops application by now. I really studied this market. I think the reason is that currently, if you want to do chat ops,

a lot of things don't work out of the box. Everyone has to set it up, and then it works different for every project. So your chat ops skills are not transferable between different projects. And if you look at most significant companies, they have a ton of different projects. So chat ops is a feature of GitLab, and it works the same way whatever project you're in. However, it's not reached the popularity I expected, and there's much more to it. But in short, ChatOps doesn't require us to run a chat client. ChatOps and GitLab works both with Slack, it works with Mattermost, and I hope it soon works

better with Matrix as well. But it's not a reason for us to run our own chat client. I think chat clients are a very different business. There's a lot more people that use chat than DevOps tools, and UX and user experience is much more important. It's important anyway, but with chat, it is extremely important. So it's a different ballgame and a game we're not playing. It's tough to get a chat client to rule them all, essentially.

The desire, I suppose, from a chat ops platform or a DevOps platform like GitLab is you'd essentially be saying this is the one that rules them all. And that's just not the case. Some use Slack, some use Gitter, some use IRC still yet, you know, even, you know, some use Matrix. So there's a lot of different blends out there and the UX and the UI and all of that. And even, I suppose, to the sake of Matrix, what it's trying to do is provide bridges

and integrations, et cetera, natively to enable all these chat communities to connect. And that's maybe the bigger part of the story. Yeah, I mean, from the matrix side, that is the goal that we're aiming for to basically get best of both worlds. Some say that GitLab did have a chat client embedded in it. It wouldn't be the only way in which you can interact

with chat ops functionality. You would also be able to come in via Slack or via Gitter or via Element as a native matrix client. So I wouldn't totally rule out the idea of a kind of interoperable world of ChatOps in the context of an app like GitLab, but I also completely understand why it isn't core relative to the key of the product. So it's going to be really, really exciting, obviously, to go and take and get it and natively, properly merge it into the wider matrix network. So we have this transition, a passing of the torch. Who called whom? How did this deal come together? It's always fun to know what was the pitch, what was the idea, and

who got it all started. I assume that Elrond reached out to Element, but Matthew, what do you think? Yep, he did. He did indeed. I mean, we know Eloran well and have been chatting to him. In fact, I met him in person at GWADAC, the GNOME Developer Conference, a few years ago. I think I might have bumped into him at Fosdum too.

And we've been chatting on and off. And yeah, he reached out, I guess, on behalf of GitLab a couple of months ago to explain the possibility here and see whether we thought that there might be a match, given that whilst Git hasn't become core to GitLab it absolutely can become core um to the matrix ecosystem i mean our plan is to go and make it the poster child of how you integrate an existing chat platform into the wider matrix network but it was a really good conversation i think we're on the same page and um i know said and has helped us with advice on Matrix and growing Element as a company over the years. So honestly, we were very flattered to be asked if we could help out.

But it really is a nice win-win, I think, on both sides. So I appreciate the way you stated that, Matthew. And whoever's writing your blog post copy did a good job as well, talking about Gitter becoming a core part of Matrix rather than a non-core project at GitLab. And it seems like that's really the case where GitLab thought it was going to be core. Turns out that doesn't make sense long-term.

It can be core to Matrix and Element, and so this is just a much better long-term fit. So there's the why. The how in terms of the transition, because transitions are tricky, acquisitions are tricky, even with existing communities. Every time I see an acquisition of my favorite tool or project, I'm always like, oh no!

Or sometimes I'm like, oh yeah! It kind of depends on who's acquiring and what I think about the autonomy of that project. This is a case where we have a non-Indie project going to a new owner versus the initial when GitLab acquired it. It went from Indie to non-Indie in that regard. But we have the passing, and the how is interesting

from Matrix's perspective. You mentioned it's going to become this native bridge. Maybe tell us how it's going to work in the short term because Gitter is a standalone service and it's going to integrate with Matrix. But I thought there already were bridges to IRC and Slack and maybe even Gitter already. There already is a pretty basic bridge between Gitter and Matrix. I think it was the second one we ever built. The first one was, of course, IRC.

The second one was using the same code base, but customizing it for Getter. And the reason was that one of our developers on bridges at the time was very active in the NeoVim community. And NeoVim had ended up being split between IRC, Getter, and Slack all at the same time. And so we experimented on the poor NeoVim community by going and bridging them from IRC to Getter and also eventually to Slack. And I think it's still running today. But the problem is that Getter

doesn't have any native concept of bridging. So we did it using the simplest, worst possible type of bridge, which we call bridge bot-based bridging. So you literally have a bot called MatrixBot, not very imaginatively, that connects in on the Gitter channel, and it relays the messages of people on the Matrix side

who could in turn be coming in via IRC or Slack or wherever. So the messages get across, but it looks really ugly. It's horrible in that you don't get the correct user profile for who's speaking. Everything looks as if it comes from mr matrix bot and perversely as the years have gone by because that was like four or five years ago now um more and more traffic has come over into gitter from matrix and to the extent that i'm guessing probably about a sixth or a seventh of it today is probably natively coming

in from matrix and all it needs is for one person to do something stupid and get the kind of anti-spam or the anti-abuse stuff and get it to kick in and the entire bot gets taken out so ironically we know eric also known as mad little mods who's been valiantly keeping getter um growing for the last couple of years very well over the years because we have to keep pinging him and saying, hey, Eric, we just broke Gitter again. We broke the Gitter bridge. Can you guys unblock us so we can keep bridging in the traffic?

And he has been an absolute star. We expected him to say, what are you guys doing, injecting all of this traffic into our network with this horrible, ugly bridge? But instead, he has been really, really supportive and nice about it. And it's honestly going to be very, very nice to take that bridge and take it out behind the bike shed and dispatch it and replace it with something much more sophisticated. So what we'll be doing is setting up a proper home server on gitter.im

and have it bridged directly into the core of Gitter. And we want that to be exposing the existing conversation history. And it will be the first ever bridge, I think, that we've run, at least on matrix.org, which goes and exposes existing conversations into matrix and it will allow the well it will allow getter users to appear as native matrix users inside matrix and vice versa so it really will be the holy grail platonic ideal for how you would take an existing platform that previously didn't have bridges of any kind and then just make it interoperating with the wider network and because we've got loads of developers already hanging out on Matrix, like the entire Mozilla community now is on Matrix, and we've got the GNOME folks use it, they have their own server, KDE has it and has its own server. Bits of the Linux Foundation,

I think, are coming on board as well. It will be super nice to get all of the projects here hanging out on GitHub and just be able to directly link them together and DM each other and generally be part of one happy family rather than the sort of balkanisation of the solids that we see otherwise Our friends at Pixie are solving some big problems for applications running on Kubernetes. Instantly troubleshoot your applications on Kubernetes with no instrumentation, debug with scripts, and everything lives inside Kubernetes. But don't take it from

me. Kelsey Hightower is pretty bullish on what Pixie brings to the table. Kelsey, do me a favor and let our listeners know what problems Pixie solves for you. Yeah, I did this keynote at KubeCon where we talked about this path to serverless. And the whole serverless movement is really about making our applications simpler, removing the boilerplate, and pushing it down into the platform. Now, one of the most kind of prevalent platforms today is Kubernetes. It works on-prem, works on your laptop, works in the cloud,

but it has this missing piece around data and observability. And this is where Pixie comes in to make that platform even better. So the more features we can get from our platform, things like instrumentation, ad hoc debugging, auto telemetry, I can keep all of that logic out of my code base and keep my app super simple. The simpler the app is, the easier it is to maintain. Well said. Thanks, Kelsey.

Well, Pixie is in private beta right now, but I'm here to tell you that you're invited to their launch event on October 8th, along with Kelsey Kelsey where they'll announce and demo what they're doing with Pixie. Check this show notes for a link to the event and the repo on GitHub or head to pixielabs.ai to learn more. Once again, pixielabs.ai. so with an open source project it's always worth asking what exactly is being acquired shortly the getter brand and ip and like whatitter is. I assume there's some employees that are being transferred between organizations. Is that correct as well? You're getting a team? We can't stress enough how essential Eric has been to the continued success of Gitter. He many times single-handedly kept everything going. So he'll transfer the IP, but also

the infrastructure, the server, the backend, the database. All the history will be preserved and Matthew might want to add, but I think those are the most important parts with Eric being the most

important thing that kept Gitter going through these years. Yeah, precisely. So obviously the service itself will keep running. The domain name and the branding and the exception comes over to us, but we're going to keep the service running as it is today. Eric joins the Element team, starting off to focus on basically running this integration project

to go and be this very, very transparent open source migration to go and get Gitter into Matrix. In the longer term, it's kind of an interesting one because Gitter has a bunch of amazing features that Matrix doesn't have, and Matrix has a bunch of features that gitter doesn't have and the we run the risk of spreading ourselves quite thinly if we end up having to support two big flagship clients no it's going to be we already support three separate code bases on element web ios and android and gitter today is three separate Go bases on Web, iOS, and Android, and suddenly having six different sort of flagship developer apps

or developer chat apps, which we need to look after, could be quite painful. So what we're committing to do is to keep Gitter running as it is today, at least as well as it has been running for the foreseeable world speed. First of all, bridge it into matrix.

And then we shamelessly get the features that it has and implement them in element two. And assuming that we do that in the near future, and I hope that we will, as soon as we get to that point and get parity, then we would look at switching Gitter itself for a Gitter brandedbranded version of Element. So all the URLs will still work, the app would still work,

except in practice it would be the same code base as Element, and it goes and combines the two together. And it means that Gitter would get all of the nice stuff like end-to-end encryption and VoIP and read receipts and access to the whole matrix ecosystem. But on our side, we would finally have ktech support for embedding latex into rooms which is a really nice feature on getter or the excellent offline sorry the excellent seo static archives which getter has and the fact no i literally sat down when doing her due diligence for this and benchmarked how

rapidly getter launches to a live view of a chat room and it was about 1.7 seconds to go from absolutely nothing like totally virgin browser through to being in one of the angular rooms that had like 25 000 people in it chatting, which is incredible. That's faster than Discord, it's faster by a factor of 10 than Slack, and it's faster by a factor of about 20 than Element. So we basically want to get best of both worlds and then converge the two. I remember when we talked last, Matthew, one of the things we ended that show with, what was that, episode 384 of The Change? We talked, and near the end end one of the biggest questions we sort

of ended on was this still question mark i suppose getter might be solving this for you is a ui problem for matrix maybe speak to that why the details here make sense but why this acquisition why did you need to acquire uh getter to to make this happen the two code bases you know the overhead, why was that the smarter move towards, I suppose, solving your UI problem? Honestly, we'd been talking to Eric for two years, I would say, about getting GitHub natively into Matrix.

And he was interested and was saying, hey, this could be an interesting thing for us to do. But then we've got our own priorities. We're looking after our own users. It's a bit of a big strategic decision and all the rest of it. And I honestly think that if we had done the work ourselves and contributed as an MR against Gitter, it probably would have been merged. And yeah, Gitter could have natively come on board too. But

the way in which the cards have fallen here is almost better in that we can do it pushing from both sides at the same time and we can, as I say, use it as this poster child kind of flagship example of integrating an app into Matrix and our hope is that the guys

at Slack will sit there and say perhaps it isn't that hard perhaps we'll go and bridge in two or matter most or rocket chat or however it might happen to be i mean the rocket chat guys for instance have been trying to do this for years since really early days and they hired somebody i think twice now to work on matrix integration and the problem has been in that instance that we didn't have the bandwidth to support them from the matrix side. Plus, it was pretty early. This was like three, four years ago, and it was too early,

and it kind of fell apart, and they ended up implementing their own limited federation and that sort of thing. So I see this as an amazing opportunity to leverage, at the risk of sounding like a nightmare CEO talk, it's a synergy between the two organizations. There we go. Sid likes a synergy.

Bingo. I think it's overused word, but I think you very clearly articulated it. And if you look at, I don't want to speak for Matthew, but I think Gitter is a very easy on-ramp to chat. It's the fastest way to get started. It's going to be the fastest way to get started with Matrix.

It's less than two seconds. It has 1.7 million users. And I think that people who are passionate about open source have a huge overlap with the people who are passionate about matrix and the federated protocol that allows you um to have a lot more control and i i can see this uh see this growing both both gitter and and the, which is exciting. We wouldn't want one company to own all of email, and it would be strange for one company to own all of chat. I think Matrix is solving that. I actually think synergy is an underused word.

Oh no, unpopular opinion. I mean, I really do. I think if you really understand the the definition of it you know taking many things and the thing that you create with those many things is greater than the things themselves i think it really makes a lot of sense and i think it's an underused word and i don't think we should use it every day but i think it's an under understood and an underused word so i'm going to back you up said and say i like that word and that makes sense to me and i i think mostly when it when it's used in the Wall Street Journal,

it's some company got pitched by an investment bank and they overpaid for something, and the synergy means they're going to fire a whole bunch of people. Right. And I think none of these things are true. There was no investment bank involved. Frankly, I don't think Matrix overpaid, and I think that the investment is going to increase after this. frankly I don't think Matrix overpaid and

I think that the investment is going to increase after this so I think there's a very good case for Synergy and thanks for saying that. You too Sid as well I can see that you have I suppose a care and I'm curious what the relationship

after this might be. Sure this is an acquisition but this doesn't seem like a relationship where you just sort of like shake hands and just walk away. What do you think GitLab will do around Gitter over the long term? Will you continue to promote what's happening here? What role do you see GitLab playing or the, I suppose, the marketing behemoth that you can be for Gitter and Matrix and this blossoming ecosystem of open source goodness and developer chat and all those fun things, because you care about the community. So I'm imagining that you're not going to just walk away. What's going to happen from here for you? I don't think the acquisition by Matrix has any requirements for us to keep doing anything

after. But GitLab, the project, is on Gitter, and we look forward to continuing that and we're open to helping out our mission is everyone can contribute so if there's stuff in GitLab that can be better we were open to that discussion and I've been a big fan of Matthew and what he and his team are doing and if we can support that, either on a company level or on a personal level, I'd be happy to help. Yeah, I mean, if nothing else,

we will be adding GitLab authentication integration into all of Element, as well as going and bringing every repository can be a chatroom mentality from Gitter into the wider matrix ecosystem. As part of getting elements of parity with Gitter, we need to have that sort of feature. So I think there could definitely be the DevOps, chatops layer, even if it's driven mainly from the matrix side, you're often the get-lap side, and perhaps we'll get to the point where it will be an obvious, I'm not going to use the S word,

an obvious integration between the two of us. Energistic, I'll say it for you. Stop it, Adam. One thing to note here, I think, is something you're saying, too, is if we have some listeners that are on the engineering team at Slack, or Discord, or Mattermost, or wherever,

what you're saying is that part of the reason why this acquisition makes sense is because this can be, in your own words, the poster child to show how this can be done well. So this is sort of like saying, pay attention to what we're doing here because this could be in your future. Yeah, and that is absolutely the business case, or the, not really business case, the rationale, the justification on our side for doing this. It's to bootstrap ourselves out of the mess that we had before, where, as I said, people like Rocket Chat would try to do this themselves. We couldn't support them properly and it was too early.

Now it is the right time to do this, but to have the best chances of success it's great to have both sides of the bridge wanting to build a bridge and having the sort of alignment and enthusiasm to make it successful and then having shown everybody how we can build bridges like this it's a blueprint that other people can do without needing so much input from us or anything we will literally blog the hell out of this so that people can go and see the steps needed to successfully pull this off and whatever nasty issues we come up with along the way. So things like importing old history en masse and whether you do that incrementally is a surprisingly tricky problem. You don't want to be in a world where every time somebody joins a room via matrix

it has to kind of scurry away and pull up all the Gitter history and load it in before you can talk or something like that. So the mechanics is surprisingly tricky to get right, and we just want this to be the flagship example of doing it. And the fact that both sides of the bridge end up under the same organization is just a really, really convenient way of making sure that's successful. What's up? I have good news for you. Google Open Source Live is happening and you are invited.

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it is BazelCon 2020. Learn more and check this out at opensourcelive.withgoogle.com. Yes, you heard right. That is opensourcelive.withgoogle.com. come to an interesting place in the world of open source where we have companies that are built around open source projects acquiring open source projects from other companies that are built around open source projects, acquiring open source projects from other companies who are built around open source projects. I don't think this acquisition is unprecedented, but it's definitely an instance in an emerging

trend of kind of a new class of things, at least I believe it is. And there are other people who are going to be coming in the wake of this and maybe having similar scenarios with their businesses or their open source projects. I'm curious how much you guys are willing to share in the due diligence and the financials of what does an acquisition like this look like so that other people can have some sort of realm of possibilities. I wouldn't even know what order of magnitude we'd be talking about.

We talked 1.7 million people on Gitter. Small team, Sounds like Eric is awesome. Probably a couple other people playing support there, but what all is involved in the due diligence? And then you mentioned you don't think that Matrix got overpaid. If you're willing to share financials, we'd definitely listen

to them. I'm okay with sharing, but I want to leave it up to Matthew what he wants to indicate and what not and sorry for putting you on the spot there Matthew no no that's quite alright I think that from a financial perspective is

slightly missing the point on our side in terms of people are just going to get hung up on numbers and in some ways I think yeah you're taking on a huge kind of on numbers and in some ways. You're taking on a huge kind of additional burden now going from three clients to six clients and then having to reduce that again.

It's almost bootstrapping. Get this in the hand, get Matrix in the hands of a whole new audience. And I think that's what this is about. I agree the focus should be on that. Maybe what might be interesting for the audience, if there's deal terms that we kind of negotiated back and forth on that you feel comfortable sharing, that might be interesting.

Because it's like people always talk about acquisitions and negotiations but they're always pretty vague and i think i think things like that are tricky yeah that's a really interesting angle i'm worried that this is all going to suddenly go off into legal corporate development discussion style things, which I guess is something that we have to do on a regular basis for funding rounds and M&A activity. I can imagine the geek audience might flee at this point if we start talking about... You'd be surprised.

Humorous and we'll move on. We're not going to hold your feet to the flame here, Matthew, but humorous with something. The reason why I ask is not because I want to peg a number and everyone's like, the acquisition was this. It's because I'm inside the open source world. I'm also in the business world. I don't even know the order of magnitude of what is this kind of a process like.

And I've never gone through a due diligence like you have. So any insight into that process, you don't have to share the numbers. But something that maybe we can provide some context or even just a challenge or a struggle that you went through in making this decision, because both companies had to make a big decision here. I mean, I can tell the story from our side. And honestly, this was a very painless process indeed. And huge kudos to GitLab for being a very, very transparent, no BS outfit.

I think it probably helped that we know Aloran and Sid already, and Eric for that matter. So it's not like we're doing business with strangers. And the due diligence process was basically a bunch of shared Google Docs, which looked very much to be the existing internal shared Google Docs, which GitLab had put together. And we were just invited straight into them and could scribble all over them. Had a couple of video calls to look over the sort of KPIs, the Grafana dashboard style

view of where things were at and how traffic was shaping over the years and what the figures were. But it was just very, very straightforward. In terms of the process to get authorization on the element side, we have a board on the element side, so the acquisition here, even though it's basically entirely for the matrix, that ecosystem's greater benefit, we've actually done the acquisition as element as the for-profit starter rather than the non- nonprofit matrix.org foundation.

Because, frankly, that's where the money is. And it's where we have the infrastructure to support the legal process of doing an acquisition. So we went to our board and said, hey, guys,-class native citizen into matrix, which nobody has basically done before. All the other bridges are pushed from one side or the other side and nobody natively speaks them. Nobody has done an IRC network which has native matrix support. We've spoken about it with Freenode but in the end it's a lot of engineering to have happen whereas for something like Getit it could be easy and this will cement matrix as the obvious open place for open source developers to openly collaborate with one another on an open standard in a very open way and so our board said yeah sounds good why not then in terms of the

actual legal process it's been a little bit of backwards and forwards i get the impression i mean we've had a bunch of distractions on my side i think the gitlab has also been busy doing operational stuff and so in the end i think basically theLab has also been busy doing operational stuff. And so in the end, I think basically the respective lawyers have been going back and forth on it, which is always in some ways good because if you've got good lawyers on both sides, they go and figure the things out and the deal happens. On the minus side, if left to themselves, the lawyers can also go back and forth quite a lot and i guess it's useful to get the balance right in terms of getting to a sensible conclusion rapidly and not letting it drag on i think we were impacted a bit by it being the summer and so lost a bunch of time with me being

out on holiday and laws being out and that sort of thing. And in terms of juicy sticking points, I think the only thing that actually came up as a point of contention was whether we were going to take on liabilities for the business which existed prior to the acquisition itself going through. So if something terrible had happened at some point historically on Getter that comes to light subsequently, is it entirely our problem to deal with it? Or if it was due to a disaster that happened on Getland's watch, is it Getland's problem? And I mean, that's a fair enough point for both sides

to push back and forth on. And I think we got to a good place in the end. But if that's the fair enough point for both sides to push back and forth on. And I think we got to a good place in the end. But if that's the biggest problem to quibble over, then that's definitely a good deal and a good process for myself. That seems to be a fairly normal point of contention, that particular piece. Yeah, it's kind of ironic

because that point of contention, the biggest thing is the representation about the code base. Like, are we sure that all the open source licenses that are used in the product are adhered to? If Matrix would acquire the project from us and then they find this AGPL library and that we wouldn't have adhered to the license,

now we would be liable to that. So that was an interesting one to discuss. So you're moving a project between open source to open source companies, and the biggest problem is open source licenses. Yeah, exactly. Well, that's a fitting detail. Thanks for sharing that, guys.

What about from the back-to-the-end-user perspective here? If I'm a happy Gitter user today, maybe I'm on the Angular project and we're just happily using the chat service, what can I expect in the next six months, 12 months, three years? What's going to change, what's not going to change? I guess on our side, we really, really hope and promise that we won't screw it up, that we will keep it running at least as well as it is today. And in the immediate term,

the main difference is going to be getting a mail shot saying, by the way, your chat history has moved over to Element. And if you're not comfortable with that, you have the right to delete it, which is a requirement under GDPR and a perfectly reasonable thing that when somebody gets acquired, you have the option to opt out of the process, basically.

And then as soon as we possibly can, it really depends on how fast Eric and the bridge team here can get this bridge up and running, we should start to see people flooding in natively from Matrix into the chat rooms rather than the super annoying Matrix bot channeling everybody and getting banned every two weeks instead it will be proper native people coming in and likewise um and we haven't decided this for sure yet but it's possible that we might just expose all of matrix into github so rather than just joining chat rooms which are backed by repositories on gitlab and github um you could just use it as a free-form matrix client

and talk to people anywhere else. So if you wanted to talk to Mozilla people, you could just go off and talk to the Firefox team directly. So that could be fun. In the email where you ask people permission to transfer their data, are you going to work in a red pill, blue pill joke, or is that pushing it?

I think that might be pushing it, unfortunately, although it is slightly tempting. Unfortunately, you know, when we began doing Matrix, it was already, I think, 15 years since the Matrix film came out. And we thought, 15 years, that's long enough. People are going to have started to forget about it. Now, here we are, 22 years later. It's a cult classic, come on.

It is a cult classic, but it seems to be getting more and more cult by the minute, and particularly the Red Pill, Blue Pill thing seems to have taken on political overtones and all sorts of weird misadventures that we tend to steer the hell away from it. But it is tempting. Helps for making the exception just this time. Oddly enough, I think

the John Wick series actually brought new life to the Matrix series, because everyone's just like, can I get some more Keanu Reeves kicking butt and then go back and watch the Matrix? I'm like, wow, this movie is actually pretty trippy and awesome. That's just my take on the matter. I think one interesting thing that I would see is that it becomes easier to kind of migrate from the Gitter chat room to the rest of the company. And I think right now, that's something where we at GitLab struggle.

We have people in the Gitter chat room, but it's kind of hard to add them to all our development channels. The channels that are a bit more internal, because sometimes someone shares a customer name or something like that. And that's a bit more internal because sometimes someone shares a customer name or something like that. And that's a tough problem. We're not solving it with this move. But I think making the outside of the company

more permeable for contributors, for open source contributors, for the wider community is something that Matrix and element has has an opportunity to do like like nobody else and i think it's super important that it's not like you have your external chat room you have your internal chat room but imagine that you could still like dm the people inside the company and i think that's the the promise of matrix and that's will be super important for the health of open source communities.

Yeah, and certainly something we've seen in terms of how Gitter has been used, that often it ends up being a slightly secondary community often to the primary one, because you get your Gitter room for free on your repository, and so there's always going to be people just turning up there asking questions, and whether you like it or not almost you can have that community there much to the frustration of the official project who uses discord or whatever it might happen to be so by having this permeable membrane around it and the ability to bridge through into and defragment the other conversations whether they're're happening on IRC or Slack or Matrix itself, heaven forbid,

is a real, real opportunity to basically bring the Gitter audience more into the mainstream and just make it part of the overall party. I mean, it's like basically drifting back towards IRC in a world where IRC was one great big global network rather than fragmented and everybody is roughly in the same ecosystem on the same page so it's all born out of nostalgia for the 90s in the end this is a problem though with uh I know I hear a lot of people say this is my first time using slack or this is my 11 slack room you kind of get the the full gamut but you got this um I guess multiple opportunities whether it's matter

most or rocket chat as you mentioned or getter or you name it there's a lot of different ecosystems and places to belong i suppose you know and we here at change i'll even have our own slack and it's open so we encourage our listeners to join that as well just to have a place to go home not so much to be the only place you hang out, but to be among the many. And I suppose the issue with that is this among the many is that you can kind of lock away conversations and you describe it as this fragmentation of Dev Chat. Can you kind of speak to that a little bit in terms of like quantify, I suppose, how ecosystems get locked away and then why the plan you have in place with Gitter solves that? Yeah, I mean, we see it everywhere, particularly in open source lands

where open source is always a little bit disorganized, everybody pulling in different directions. And we've seen so many projects fragment a million different ways. People going to Telegram, people going to Discord, people keeping on IRC, people going to Slack. And previously, where everybody would have been on the same page,

like the Linux kernel mailing list, a great example of the one place where you need to be for that community to track what's going on, and then the equivalent ones. Instead, you have things like that, NeoVim, an example I gave earlier, where they'd split three ways. In Mozilla, they were split into the private internal slack so it wasn't even happening in the public domain anymore and then on the irc mozilla network as well as people also on telegram and it's just destroying the culture and the efficiency and the sort of cohesion of these projects it's almost a forking mechanism like you would see and might be pretty problematic if your project's only forked from under you, except it's even worse.

It's your community forking its ability to talk to itself. It's almost balkanizing and breaking down. So that is the risk. That's what we're trying to fix with Matrix and Getter being the only chat system that has ever focused purely on developers, which really is quite something. I'm amazed that nobody else did that because IRC was never just for developers.

It was kind of free-form geek chat on the internet. Discord, obviously, for gamers, and they've kind of done this slightly half-assed, trying to get open- source people into it too but Gitter's only an element of Matrix it was like IRC, just a general comms platform going and getting those guys from Gitter into the existing developer morass and Matrix is just a no-brainer

When speaking to I suppose the Gitter community as it speaks now you mentioned let's not screw it up or something to that degree. And then even to your board of directors, you'd said, like, this is what we need to do. So obviously the pressure is on to do something. You'd mentioned not screwing it up or doing different things to integrate, and obviously we're talking about fragmentation here. One of the things that was mentioned was essentially becoming,

or sorry, that Gitter would become a full-fledged Matrix client. Can you speak to sort of the direction beyond the next six months or so? What's the long-term plan with Gitter and Matrix? Well, as I say, we're going to take Gitter's specific features and try to get parity and element. So the most important ones there is threading. So for instance I was up until God knows what hour last night getting threading working in element

so that we can go and bridge the threads from getter into element and matrix in general because it would be pretty sucky if we lose threading. We need to get the offline archives, the static archives I mentioned which work so well. We need to get the offline archives, the static archives I mentioned, which work so well.

We need to get peaking working. And as it happens, I was also looking at the improving and optimizing peaking in Matrix. At the moment, when you start peaking into a room, it basically transfers everything in terms of who is present in that room to your server. And that could be like 30, 40, 50,000 people, and it's going to take 10 megabytes of JSON, and it's going to take ages to transfer, blah, blah, blah. What if we could do that lazily to be more efficient? We've talked about the LaTeX support.

What other good things does Git have that we do not on the element side? Obviously, layering on top of GitLab and GitHub. And the single sign-on auth is lovely. I think they were the first people to do just OAuth to single sign-on. You just click the sign-in with GitLab or sign-in with GitHub and you would just be teleported into the app.

You don't need to pick a username or anything. And it's such an obvious thing to do, but we still don't have it on element. And so we be adding that as well and once we have those and once the app launches at least as fast as gitter then that would be the point to say hey on the site do we really need the gitter code base running and shall we just put a gitter branded version of element there instead and i'm guessing that's going to be at least a year away frankly possibly longer we're not going to rush it we will make sure in the meanwhile that the gitter apps lives as well as it ever did but also when it happens gitter will benefit from all of the nice stuff we have in

matrix like encryption and the voip stuff widgets we've got brand new widgets as of last week which are looking really sexy allowing you to pin whatever iframes you like into your chat rooms and resize them now all of these nice things too so i think it will end up feeling very much an upgrade from where things have been in terms of the features and in case you're thinking that this is us being megalomaniacal on the matrix side and assimilating poor Gitter into the collective. It is worth noting that Eric and the Gitter folks had already come up with this as a plan before the acquisition, specifically for the mobile apps.

So apparently the mobile apps, as native iOS and Android, have been a pain in the ass to maintain. It's just too much stuff for the Gitter team to look after. They were falling behind. They didn't have the same features. And so there is already a GitLab bug out proposing to just deprecate them entirely in favor of just using a progressive web app instead,

which would have been sad in terms of losing those native apps entirely. And one of the proposals that came up, again, prior to the acquisition on the bug, was, hang on a sec, why don't we just use Element or Riot, as it was then, in order to replace the native mobile apps? And everybody said, oh, that's great. Yeah, why don't we use Matrix for that? So it's not just us.

It's getting themselves thinking, well, actually, do we really need to have a dedicated app for this? And it's showing that where the app is better, like Element is better in some places, then hopefully we can get best of both worlds. Yeah, that's a really good point, because I think what Jared and I are trying to key on when we ask you about the plan is essentially confidence, right? What confidence can you instill in, I suppose,

existing matrix lovers and those that are on gator now and i suppose the community at large like what kind of confidence can you instill i suppose the plan coming from get lab and eric and team you know from that direction versus from you you know kind of you know propositioning this opportunity with them it's like there is a belief in matrix there There is a belief in this future. So I think that's something to hold dear to as we begin to watch you down the next six months to a year, etc. is that confidence and the fact that this was kind of planned already to some degree.

It was from the GitLab side to make this happen. There was some desire on there. So that's the thing I think really matters is this confidence that can be instilled. Yeah, I mean, there's definitely confidence from the Gitter side. The matrix can be the future of communication. And there's definitely confidence on our side that we'll keep Gitter running

and that we can be a good custodian for it and indeed accelerate it and take it to the next plane of existence, if that doesn't sound too sinister. We're definitely excited to see this transition take place. Guys, thanks so much for coming on the changelog and sharing the inside look at this big adventure that Gitter is going on from GitLab

into the matrix. Sid, any final words from you or something you'd like to pitch or promote as we close out the show? I think it's essential to give people the option to host their own infrastructure. Even if not, everyone does so. I think it's a great option. With GitLab, we provide the ability to self-manage your instance. Matrix is the prominent player to do that for chat. And I think this is a great development for the world

as data gets more important to everyone, more control over that data, more accountability is essential. And the world's moving that direction. This is a great example of that. Thanks so much for diving into this. Really appreciate the questions. What up, listeners?

Got a little bonus for you today. Just when you think it's over, we're going to give you a little bit more today. And here is an extended segment with just Matthew. Sid had a hard stop, so we asked Matthew to stick around for a few more minutes. And this is what happened. So since we last talked, Matthew,

lots happened around Matrix. Riot is no more. There was a big raise of money at one point. You want to catch us up and tell us about the rename and some of the exciting things going on? Oh, wow. Was it before Automatic joined that we last spoke? I think it might have

been. Yeah, so the Automatic thing was big since we spoke, and then the rename was since we spoke as well. Wow, okay. So that must have been back in march i guess at the beginning of the end times pandemic wise that we caught up and then it was in april that we announced that automatic the guys behind wordpress had come on board matrix with a strategic investment in element the for-profit that we use to keep the lights on for Matrix development and hiring the core Matrix team. And that was really exciting.

They put just under $5 million into funding Matrix with the hope of basically building opportunity both for the WordPress ecosystem and likewise in Matrix supporting WordPress. Now, since then, things haven't moved quite as fast as I would hope, which is entirely my fault and our fault on the element side for going and hooking up the WordPress world with Matrix. But the intention is still very much to get better integration for Matrix within WordPress and vice versa. And occasionally I have some really really nice people at automatic pinging me saying hey so you know that call where we're going to be

working on those integrations please please can we like have it and so we've been running late on sorting that out but the automatic folks have been lovely to work with and incredibly helpful strategically in terms of helping advise us on growing element in fact very similar relationship to the one we have we've said in terms of providing mentorship of how you build a massive multi-billion dollar open source company in a sustainable and ethical manner rather than the sort of traditional capitalist approach and um sir matt mellenweg had already been supporting matrix for many years um as a donor um on patreon um he was one of our sort of secret thousands of dollars a month and supporters um for like two years or so so he

obviously believed in what we were doing and i occasionally ping him and sync and then he said well hey guys knows there are where i can actually support more concretely and get involved and drive the overlap between the two companies and as i said it's been good and was very helpful and basically gives us a safety net in terms of financing through the pandemic and whatever uncertainty lies beyond whilst also going and finding useful parallels between the two projects. I can't really think of any other companies other than Automatic and GitLab who have sort of used the same model here of taking an open source project and sustainably providing services and support around it for a larger ecosystem. I mean, there's obviously lots of open source companies

out there, but once you have an ecosystem like the WordPress one, or for that matter, the GitLab environment, it's fun to be able to learn from these guys. And they're having massive success on both fronts. It's really fun to watch. Yeah. No, it's very reassuring that it is possible to do this without selling out and waking up one morning and discovering you've become Facebook or something. Hopefully Sid and Matt aren't going to fall to the dark side after I've said this, but

so far it's looking like it's possible to be a good human being as well as have a successful business in open source. Not that it's easy, but at least there's a precedent. It's not easy, but possible. But back to that confidence that I was suggesting on the show, that's what you get though. When you work with organizations that don't make you think or make the audience or the user or whomever, whatever now you want to put in there, think that you're going to sell out. I think that make the audience or the user or whomever, you know, whatever now you

want to put in there, think that you're going to sell out. I think that's the key there is like you matrix to me, given whom you work with and what I've seen from you so far, Matthew and the rest of your team doesn't make me ever think that you're going to be like sell out. Like you're in it to win it, as they say. Yeah, I hope so i mean we spent ages on the open governance for the matrix foundation to basically try to legally create a safety net or a kind of protection mechanism to make sure that even if we did go evil and sell out you know who knows what happens that we get acquired by some obnoxious company perhaps or

i know people just the world economy completely collapses and we frantically start trying to think of ways to avoid having to downsize the company or keep the projects about there are all sorts of worst case scenarios where things could go wrong and so to try to force ourselves to do the right thing, we basically built it into the articles of association of the foundation that bad stuff like that will at least not impact Matrix, and that Matrix as a protocol would be protected from it. But these things are hard. I mean, you look at dramas with DRM at the W3C or other places where kind of standards,

neutral standards bodies have got onto rocky waters or whatever the expression is. Troubled waters. Troubled waters. Or they've got onto the rocks. In terms of being in a sticky situation. I think there's risk of us ending up with similar problems in future, particularly around legality of end-to-end encryption, data ownership,

the fact that data gets replicated around matrix could be a fun one, abuse in matrix, the fact that bad guys use it as well as good guys for your definition of good and bad. Lots and lots of things which could go wrong. You know, what's interesting about that I didn't consider really is that only until recently was it just a hypothetical that the world economy would collapse. Like only recently did it come to sort of full fruition that it could possibly be something that happens whereas before we would just say it kind of tongue-in-cheek like ah like if that would ever happen like now it seems like it's it's a possibility far more than it ever had

been in my life before and to have those kinds of protections and protocols and i suppose thoughtfulness to organization and governance whereas before it was just like oh that's we should do that now it's like no we need to do that because if the world economy geez can i say that word or not world economy collapses as monday and my tongue's all tied up if it ever did happen like and all this history and all this worth inside of you know you know in terms of history, I suppose, that you could search through was available to everybody, or the bad guys, not the good guys. It could be a bad world up there for developers in the future, for all.

Yeah, I think that's why it's important to provide a mechanism for folks to communicate, which doesn't put all your eggs in one basket. Even if the Element team collapsed tomorrow, even if the Matrix Foundation collapsed tomorrow, at least the network and the tech is out there that other people can keep it running and keep it going, just like the web would limp along even if the W3C collapsed

or even if Mozilla and Google went bankrupt the next day. So, I mean, trying to engineer for Armageddon scenarios is a good thing. Well, last time we talked to you, and Adam brought this up on the main show, is we talked about some of the UX problems that you're trying to solve, and with Riot, the client, and the UI and the UX of that experience. One of the first things that you come across with any product or service is the name of the thing.

Riot itself, it's funny, if you go back to 2020 and say what were the words of the year, I think Riot would be one of those words along COVID and quarantine and justice. These words, protest. Riot would be one of them. And it seems like you jumped ship on that particular term at an opportune time. But you said we're not riot anymore. Historically, I've always thought riot was, I hadn't had real life experience

with too much rioting. There's now rioting going on in the United States and elsewhere around the world. And it's got a negative connotation. I always thought of a riot as a good time. Like, hey, it was a riot. Like, hey, it was a riot. It was a blast. But you just... I'm glad somebody thinks that.

That's how I used to think about it. Well, you're literally the first person who has ever admitted to thinking of riot as in a hey, man, that probably was a riot. Back in the day, Jared, I'm sure you can recall. And there was a song, Zuzu Riot.os remember that one and that was a fun song so i don't know i had a positive connotation for a time i mean i remember uh learning about the la riots i was alive during the la riots back in the early 90s but i wasn't like of age where i pay attention to you know

events so it was always a very abstract term and i just thought it was like a blast or things were crazy but it's much more concrete than that now, and now you're no longer associated with that word. So tell us about that switch. So honestly, the switch was independent of the misadventures and dramas of 2020. It's something that was many years coming. We actually picked the word element in 2018 to replace it. The reason for this was a certain large company, which includes Riot in its game, went and posed some fairly big legal problems for us when we were trying to trademark the word Riot.

In fact, not even Riot. It was trying to trademark Riot.im just so that we could have a mechanism to protect from abusive forks like if somebody went and fought riot and called it right but better or more secure and it had malware in it then it's really useful to be able to go to google and apple and say hey guys by the way these guys are ripping us off and it's malware please get rid get rid of it. You can do it anyway, but it's even stronger if you can say, look, they're infringing on our trademark. So we filed for trademarks for it and triggered the legal beast of a certain multi-billion dollar company who have a lot more lawyers than we do.

And also, frankly, more people were seeing the negative sense of right than the, hey, I'm a right at the party kind of mentality. We also had the comedy problem that a lot of our traction at the moment is in the public sector. For instance, Texas's Department of Public Safety uses Matrix for all of its public safety sort of work, which is a bit awkward if you ask everybody to go and install an app called Riot

whilst you're dealing with some kind of public safety event. And we were also working a lot with France at the time, and there was one memorable meeting where we were having a very serious pitch to the Ministry of Digital about getting Matrix on board talking about Riot and meanwhile you could literally hear the Riot in the street outside the Ministry. So basically the connotations were getting worse and worse and worse. There was also the problem, that we had three different brands flying around. We got Riot for the app, we had NuVector as the company, and we had Modular as our hosting service, which in the early days of Matrix made a lot of sense, because we really wanted to make

it clear that there were roles for different people to play. You can have multiple service providers, you can have multiple companies, you can have multiple companies you can have multiple clients and so we deliberately gave them different names to kind of trigger people's sort of get people's juices flowing and realize that they too could launch a matrix hosting service and that it would be available to people on riot but it would compete with modular or whatever and the good news is that that worked and people started to fill in the holes of the ecosystem with their own offerings. And nowadays, there are lots of different people providing matrix hosting, and there are hundreds of matrix clients, and there are lots of companies building on the protocol. But the bad side is that it was getting really confusing for our users,

particularly on things like fundraising, you go and talk to an investor and say, Well, we've got all these random different brands. Let me draw you a diagram to try to explain how modular relates to matrix, relates to element, relates to new vector, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we wanted to fix that. So we just called everything element. Matrix obviously is sacrosanct

and is still its own independent, neutral, open-source project. But on the corporate for-profit side, we just renamed the company Element, we renamed the app Element, and we named Modular as Element Matrix Services, which is basically Element 2. So I think it's good overall.

Element's a much more neutral name. Hopefully it's still quite memorable. You are literally an element in a matrix and all the maths geeks will eventually groan as they realize that we went from a matrix made up of vectors, which is now made up of elements.

Oh boy. Yeah. Well, one thing is for sure is it does take good naming. And that's something that I think we've somewhat done well around here, Jared. I'm going to change all plus plus. There's some good names we've had around here. And it does take a good cohesive, especially when you talk about multiple brands, you know, the company, the client, the layers do need to have cohesion and naming can provide that graph essentially to understand what everything is. I can only imagine how embarrassed you might have been to be telling people in France to install this Riot client while things were happening to kind of trigger you to want to change the name.

As I say um it wasn't just that aspect of it but it was definitely a synergy of different things we were gonna oh i used the s word no adam likes it say it more please we were gonna synergy we were gonna do it back in 2019 when we relaunched Riot Web, as it was at the time, with an entirely new professionally designed skin. And we hired the guy who designed Unity for Ubuntu, or led the team there. It was just after Unity got canned and the canonical London office has a lot of people released. And so we worked with him to come up with the new design and it was head and shoulders above what we had before and we thought wow we know this is suddenly going to start feeling like a proper app why don't we also fix the name at the same time and we chose

not to in the end because we honestly didn't want to undermine the redesign by also changing the name because if people didn't like the name it might unnecessarily kind of undermine the rebrand so we deliberately kept it where it was and then pushed it back another year and a bit until the time was opportune to get element sorted as a name but it's only been two months now i'd say it hasn't had massive positive impact on light uptake. It hasn't had massive negative impact either. It's been kind of neutral, and people on Hacker News seem to dislike it because it's too bland.

There are people who think that we've done it to be politically correct, which isn't particularly accurate. I mean, as I said, it's a confluence of many factors. And I think we'll see that people grow to love it. Although I do still find myself calling right, right, which is really

annoying. I need to stop doing that. Old habits die hard. Naming is hard. It's got a couple things going for it. It's easy to say. It's easy to spell. And like you said, it's relatively a neutral thing. There's not much connotation one way or the other. Slightly bland, I guess, if you had to give a criticism. But it is what it is.

And definitely a hard transition. And given your accent, it sounds cool. It does sound cool when you say it. It doesn't sound cool when I say it, but when you say it, it sounds cool. When you say it, it's cool. But not when me or Jared say it. If you say so., it sounds cool. When you say it, it's cool. Not what me or Jared said. Say it one more time for us. Element.

See how cool that was? The irony is, if I wanted to make it sound cool, I've got to kind of go into in a world, do a Mr. Voices in a really bad American cinema. There was a chat client connected to all chat clients around the world. Its name was Element.

I don't know. Shivers. I got shivers there. I'm digging it. I'm going to go see that movie. Okay, I like it more now. Yeah, that's actually great. You should actually have it.

When you click on the name on the web page, it should have you say it aloud in the browser. Because people love when their browser autoplays audio. Yeah, they do, don't they? Yeah. We'll probably have to. At night, too. Yeah, we need to work around some of the minor browser restrictions

to make that happen. But hey, I'm sure that's something we can do with service workers. You guys have the technical expertise. I know you've put VR and Matrix and stuff. So I think you can get an audio element to play when you click on a button on a web page. That's just my take. Matthew, we know you're super busy.

We appreciate you hanging out a little bit longer with us and chatting, but we'll let you go. Awesome. Thank you so much for having me on. It's been a pleasure to speak and catch up again. Hopefully we'll have some interesting news in the future to talk about too. Absolutely. That's it for this week.

Thank you so much for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed this extended episode here at the end with Matthew. That's cool to do that kind of stuff. And we appreciate doing that as well. Special thanks to the many listeners out there who share their feedback via that form about us sharing more extended content and more importantly, not paywalling it behind change law plus plus. We don't like paywalls. We don't plan to do paywalls. We love you all. Thank you so much for tuning in. We'll be doing more of this as it makes sense if you want to share your feedback check the show notes for a link and as you know you can drop a comment on this episode for matthew and sit to read head to changelog.com slash 414 this is episode 414

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