The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - How companies are sponsoring OSS (Interview)

Episode Date: May 10, 2023

This week we're celebrating Maintainer Month along with our friends at GitHub. Open source runs the world, but who runs open source? Maintainers. Open source maintainers are behind the software we use everyday, but they don't always have the community or support they need. That's why we're celebrating open source maintainers during the month of May. Today's conversation features Alyssa Wright (Bloomberg), Chad Whitacre (Sentry), and Duane O’Brien (Creator of the FOSS Contributor Fund and framework). We get into all the details, the why, the hows, and the struggles involved for companies to support open source.

What's up friends, welcome back. We are excited to celebrate maintainer month along with our friends over at GitHub. Open source runs the world, but who runs open source maintainers? Open source maintainers are behind the software we use every single day, but they don't always have the community or the support they need. And that's why we're celebrating open source maintainers during the month of May. And the theme this year for maintainers is finding balance, stepping back and succession planning as leaders.

And the theme for companies is now is the time to double down on funding open source. Today's conversation features Alyssa Wright from Bloomberg, Chad Whitaker from Century, and Dwayne O'Brien, creator of the Fox Contributor Fund and The Framework. We get into all the details, the whys, the hows, and the struggles involved for companies to support open source. By the way, Jared and I are at Open Source Summit this week, so if you're there, come say hi. We're in the Expo Hall area at the Maintainer Month booth, P1.

We're recording podcasts, giving a high five, saying hello. So make sure you come see us. A massive thank you to our friends at Fastly and Fly. This pod got you fast because Fastly is fast all over the world globally. Check them out at Fastly.com and our friends over at Fly.io. They help us put our app and our database closer to users all over the world with no ops, and they'll do it for you too. Check them out at fly.io.

What's up, friends? Before this episode kicks off, I'm here with one of our sponsors. I'm here with one of our sponsors. I'm here with Ben Vinegar, VP of Emerging Technology at Sentry. So, Ben, let's start off with this. What is it you do here? So my role at Sentry is I'm VP Emerging Technology. What that means is I've sort of been tasked with finding new, innovative ways that we can extend the Sentry platform. I think this is more about trying to be a little risky, you know, trying to just sort of, what if we were, you know, 30% riskier, what would that

look like in terms of product stuff? So given that, with emerging technologies and this risk, this 30% risk, how do you build and ship features in that kind of environment? I think that the Sentry development model is that we mostly build for ourselves. Whenever we're introducing new capabilities, we are our biggest users, first and foremost. So, you know, when it came to building the session replay thing, it began with, how can we use this? Like, can we build something that we use every day that really provides value to us? And once we've crossed that threshold, like once we're using it and we're seeing how it's sort of like improving our debugging workflow, then that's when we start bringing it to other people, maybe in like an alpha or like a beta, like, hey, this is working for us. Does it work for you?

And so I think that like everything that we've worked on, including features outside of this group, it's all about dogfooding really aggressively. Engineers are really sort of like really baked into our product development process here, right? It's got a, what we're building has to work for them. So this isn't like a company where PMs go away, say, hey, it's got to look like X. Our enterprise customers want Y. So here's a big task list for you to implement. It's really more about building solutions that our team wants to use. And we have this theory that if it works for us, there are probably many teams that look something like us that could also benefit similarly. Very cool. Thank you, Ben.

So, hey, listeners, check out our friends at Sentry at Sentry.io. And use the code CHANGELOG when you sign up and you're going to get the team plan for free for three months. Make sure you tell them we sent you because they love hearing from our listeners. Sentry.io and use the code change log when you sign up. Enjoy. So we are here talking about companies sponsoring open source software. And Jared and I today, Jared, we're joined by some awesome people, not just you and I and one guest, but three guests. Not one, not two, three. Three for the price of one.

So they say. And we're all here celebrating Maintainer Month along with GitHub and a bunch of other companies supporting open source. May is Maintainer Month. I believe it's maintainermonth.github.com is the URL, if I got it correctly. Link will be in the show notes. Of course, but we got Alyssa right here from Bloomberg, Chad Whitaker here from century and Dwayne O'Brien from, I don't know, Dwayne,

is there a question mark behind your name now? There is a question mark behind my name now. Yeah. I'm a, I'm a freelance jumpsuit wizard at the moment. Okay. A free agent. Yes.

Yeah. I was actually watching the draft recently for, for football. And I was thinking software should have a draft. Software should have a version of that. That'd be kind of cool. Like free agents. We already move around a lot,

so why not put some drama and some showtime ability around that situation? That could go a couple different ways. That could go a couple different ways, couldn't it? Yeah. Well, we're not the NFL, but it would be fun fun and we do move around I thought well hey a draft okay Dwayne you're a free agent Alyssa you're hailing from Bloomberg you've done some awesome work there launching a recent fund inspired by some of Dwayne's past work and Chad you've been a friend of ours for a very long time we love the work you're doing at Century obviously we're using

Century we're fans of Century and we love that you found a way to support open source through Sentry's profits and what you all use. So really the topic here at hand today is, at large, how can we, and I guess Jared and I, we're a small company, but how can we as companies support open source software? So let's open it up. Who wants to go first? Who wants to kind of introduce where you're from and what you do? Well, you know, you put this thought in my mind, Adam. You guys are a small company. Are you guys on GitHub sponsors? Are you out there?

Are you sponsoring anybody? We are. Can we give you guys a chance to share your... Jared, tell them what we're doing there. We are sponsoring people. I don't remember who at this point. We can pause and look things up. A lot of our sponsorships come through Open Collective

more than GitHub sponsors, just because that's where the people are that we're sponsoring. A lot of our panelists on our shows, JS Party, GoTime, et cetera, they get paid per appearance, and a lot of them will opt to just take those payments that we would pay them directly to appear and just funnel those right into whatever projects

they're currently using, so that's really cool. Are there any big frameworks that you guys are using for your website or anything? Yes, we're using the Phoenix framework from Chris McCord and others in the Elixir community. We're built on Elixir and Phoenix. I don't think we send any money their way, though. We're just kind of using it.

We do talk about it prominently, which is somewhat helpful, but we don't have huge revenues to send in different directions, just being a two-person shop. But I think Chad raises a good point, right? We all come from large organizations who have gotten involved in funding open source projects, people, foundations, events, and so on in different ways. But it's not just a big company problem. And it's not just a big company responsibility. It's something that is accessible to anyone, no matter the size of their organization. You all have picked some specific ways that you show up and sponsor the projects that you depend on. And we should try to find paths that help to pave paths for

everyone, regardless of the size of their organization. You know, I always think about us too. Not that this gives us a reason to not sponsor by any means, but I kind of feel like we're a dev rel for the entire software community in a way. Like we really try to pay attention. We're in the trenches. We're obviously going to conferences. We're participating in maintainer month.

We've been around for 14 years. We put out, I don't even know how many hours of my life I've spent behind this microphone talking to folks like you, caring about and delivering great communities, great software, great methodologies, great frameworks to follow. Sustainability means different things. It does. I mean, I think we all play a role. But I mean, obviously, this conversation is about how you can actually fund it.

And I think the way we fund it is less than maybe ideal. But we do find ways through, I know we're sponsoring Homebrew and a couple others on GitHub. I'm not sure of the exact list, but there's definitely some we're using. We could be doing more. Everybody could be doing more, right? I mean, that might even be the angst here is like, we could all be doing a little more. What is that more? How does it shape out and play out for some organizations?

I know the FOSS Contributor Fund is one way, and how that's designed is one way. Chad, you've found a way. I don't know if you call it a FOSS Contributor Fund or not. I mean, how do you term that? Well, that term is trademarked by Indeed, so we're not allowed to use that exact term. It is not trademarked by Indeed. That term is not trademarked by anyone.

I'm pulling your chain. No, what I like to do with Sentry is my goal is to use the exact same blog post title every year. So we just gave X number of dollars to open source maintainers where that X hopefully goes up every year and then put that out.

Now, what happened though, I want to see that. We actually got modded by Hacker News this past year. When I put, you know, I published a blog post, we just gave, you know, $260,000, we were open source, put it up on Hacker News, started going up, started having a conversation.

And then we got modded. And I actually emailed, I don't remember his name, right? Like the mod for Hacker News. I was like, hey, did we get modded? He was like, yeah. He's like, this is, there's nothing to talk about here. It's just like patting you on the back and i was like did you look at the

comments you know we were having like good anyway so that that kind of threw a wrench in my plan of like branding it it's like we just gave we just gave we just gave but no we we were definitely inspired by duane which you did it at indeed i mean we can kind of maybe go over some of that history if you want to a lot of folks probably heard this story before, but some maybe haven't. Might be worth sharing. Well, on that note, we did have Dwayne on way back. Dwayne, you and I talked actually about this exact subject. Yeah.

Indeed's FOSS Contributor Fund back in episode 392. So listeners, you can go back and listen to that, but I would love to give that precursor to what that is so we can kind of open the conversation. Because Alyssa, this informs your work there. Maybe not not exactly but it certainly influenced the direction y'all took so do we give us a two-minute version of the fos contributor fund and what it is sure so back in 2019 indeed launched this thing that we built called the fos contributor fund and it was a framework for helping everyone at the organization decide which open source projects Indeed was going to sponsor. Every month, we held a round of voting. The projects that were eligible were projects that were used at Indeed and had open source licenses and had

some way to pay them. And if you wanted to vote, you needed to make open source contributions of your own. We took a very broad view of what that meant. And whoever carried the most votes in that month got a $10,000 one-time donation from Indeed. We released the framework as a Creative Commons licensed blueprint. It's been followed by organizations such as Bloomberg, and that's sort of what Alyssa is building over there. And early in the history of the FOSS Fund, back prior to Sentry's relicensing to business source license, they were nominated and carried the vote for a project that indeed should be supported. And it opened up this conversation between us and Sentry about what to do with that $10,000. Sentry decided to pass it on down to their dependencies. And it was the

genesis of this program now that Chad has built there with. We had a conversation about whether what Sentry is doing is a FOSS contributor fund or a FOSS fund or want that seemed maybe meaningful a year or two ago. It just doesn't seem to matter anymore, right? Like they're funding FOSS. What else matters? So yeah, yeah, yeah. Some differences in the details, but the big picture is different.

And then Alyssa, you launched your program when? We were, I mean, we were inspired by the work that had indeed had started. And I was actually working at Open Source Collective at the time. So, for transparency, you know, you brought up Open Collective earlier. Both Duane and I are on the board of Open Source Collective. And so, care about the sustainability of Open Source Collective and so care about the sustainability of open source projects from various perspectives. And inspired by the FOSS Contributor Fund work, we started the process of building our own Bloomberg FOSS Contributor Fund

about a year and a half ago, building a relationship with Open Source Collective and the grant framework internally with corporate philanthropy, which is a powerful ally and colleague in this work with the ASPO team. So we launched our first FOSS contributor fund, which runs on a quarterly schedule in January and just about to launch tomorrow, actually. So this will be May 3rd, our second round of elections and nominations. So, and it's, you know, from our, because I was thinking earlier, Chad, like, because we, when they open up questions, you know, one thing that I thought is like why companies of all sizes, like, have a place in the sustainability of open source? I'm thinking a lot about your blog post where you talked about the value of open source and how each, I forget what your actual equation was, but each technologist can contribute back X amount of money to the open source that you rely on. Maybe you can speak to that equation that you put down,

because I feel like maybe that's a way that we can set our, where our standards should be or could be. I do have a question for you about Bloomberg, but we can come back to it. I don't know, Adam, Jared, where you want to go next? The post you're referring to, Alyssa, is I think the one from years ago where I said something like, every company should be paying $2,000 per person for open source. Your company should be paying $2,000 per person for open source. Per engineer? Yeah, per engineer is what I ended up with. Yes. Yeah. And the exercise was kind of like,

I don't know, we could decide whether we're still the same, like the conversations moved on or not, because this was published in 2017. Okay. So before Open Source Collective, before Open Collective, there was another platform called GetTip. It was then called Gratapay. I didn't have anything to do with it, but I was just kidding. That was a startup that I was doing, you know, gosh, 10 years ago now around this. In 2017, I did this exercise where, you know, we're talking about like, there's this whole like feeling of fairness, right. Or like, that's, that's sort of like, if it's not explicit, it's like right below the surface of like,

Hey, you know, I'm doing all this work in open source and I'm giving away this work. And I'm like kind of motivated by generosity and giving away all this code. And, and, and at some point, maybe I start to feel a little resentful that like, you know, giant corporations are using my work and not contributing anything back. So there's this like this whole dynamic of, of fairness and what's fair. Yeah. So that was an exercise in trying to pause and say, okay, so like, what is fair? What would be fair? And I tried to kind of reason from first principles to be like, well, you know, I've got, I'm trying to get the post-it for you to remind myself. But it was basically like trying to come up with some estimates about what does the open source community contribute to the global economy?

You know, like what's the total value that the open source community contributes to the global economy? And then divide that by the number of software developers in the world. I think, you know, I came up with some numbers. There's like 20 million software developers in the world, and open source contributes like a trillion dollars or whatever. Does that math come out right? And that, you know, so it came out to like, long story short, $2,000 per engineer and company is kind of like the value

that the company gets out of having this open source smorgasbord they can pick from. For sure. So Alyssa, when you're having this conversation inside of Bloomberg and you're trying to figure out your guys' FOSS fund, it looks like you landed on $10,000 for three projects quarterly, something like this. I mean, it's the same amount of award as Indeed FOSS contributor fund. So we do a $10,000 grant for each project. $10,000 per project, three projects, four quarters.

Yeah, just that the actual vote is not held monthly, which I think is how you would set it up at Indeed, but rather it's done quarterly. Just as a reflection of our own capacity and attention span. Sure, absolutely. Well, I was just curious if this equation that Chad came up with,

is it a talking point inside the company as you're having these conversations on how, because surely lots of conversations and time go into a project like this. It doesn't come out of thin air. We've heard in detail what Dwayne had to go through to get things going at Indeed and other people there as well.

And you've been working on this for a long time. And I'm sure at some point it's like, well, how much are we going to do? And I guess you could just say, well, what did Indeed do? We're going to do that. But if that wasn't there for you, would there be conversations of like, well, what is fair or what is right for us at Bloomberg? Yeah, I mean, this is a big question. And I think that like one thing that we are, have historically and continue to think a lot about is like what is the value of open source like that it brings to Bloomberg and to the like the growth of our our people and and products and, you know, and services. And so and what is a way to responsibly and authentically, the word, like sustain that. And so the FOSS Contributor Fund, I mean, I think it's important for us to recognize that it's one thing that we do in sort of like a full portfolio of ways to support open

source. I think one of the, historically, one of the ways that we have continued to be supporting and sustaining open source projects is through like supporting and being part of foundations that do that like on our behalf and other other organizations supporting with like the python software foundation we supported like a community project manager i think in 2020 and then it just announced the support of a CPython developer in residence at PyCon this past week as like another example of how we hope to like support and sustain like open source projects, both through financial contribution as well as, you know, real time and effort and resources as well so and it is a constant it's not just about i think it's about equity and fairness but also about being like really engaged in these projects it's not just like you know asking them to be we're not consumers like only consumers of these

products we're real participants we want to be real participants and like and engage in a collaborative way and i think you know the fastributor Fund is one way to do that. But there are, I think, other ways for us to be fully engaged with these like open source projects and maintainers. Alyssa, I wanted to ask about at Bloomberg, what I've heard you say a couple of times is like this emphasis on corporate philanthropy.

Like I love how it's really like takes a different flavor at each company. Is corporate philanthropy, like is that, is that like a big thing inside of Bloomberg bigger than FOSS that you're kind of plugging into or like, I don't know, I've heard you mention it a couple of times. Like how does that work inside of Bloomberg? Thanks for that question.

I think one of the things that I really appreciate about Bloomberg and being an employee at Bloomberg is its philanthropic mission. I mean, all of our profits go towards the corporate philanthropy and Bloomberg philanthropy impact. And so I think our business objectives and our commitment to do good in the world are priorities, I think, for many of the people, both at a high level and at the day-to-day level of people's experience at Bloomberg. And so it's-

So you're saying it's a big part of company culture. It's like- Yeah, exactly. That was a really nice way of saying it in my long way. And it's really interesting because I have always, you know, I don't think open source is charity work. I don't think that we are doing it just to like, so that we're going to like feel good and when we go to bed at night like this is this is has a real economic impact

real business value like it is really like it is the right thing to do for innovation and for i think for getting work done is to collaborate in these spaces and work together. And so I've been very, like in my career, I've been a little hesitant to be like, well, and this is charity work too, because it's not just charity work, but it has been a learning to me, like the strong presence of Bloomberg philanthropic efforts, you know, and that they're not divergent necessarily from business efforts as well, that there can be a kind of convergence of the two when it comes to open source sustainability. And this is, I think, one space where doing good in the world and doing good by a company can actually find like places of overlap

and intersection. And I think that would mean that we're even more motivated to sustain this work, you know, and more motivated to converge those efforts. And so I, I am been embracing like the enthusiasm of corporate philanthropy to be our partner in this and for the kind of enthusiasm and motivation of the people at Bloomberg to like to do good, like by their work and by like, you know, the impact. What I think is unique about Alyssa's situation at Bloomberg is that there is such a relationship between Bloomberg's business and Bloomberg philanthropy. Like it's, it's the unique thing in your context that you're able to take advantage of in order to get more involved in this subject of funding open source. When I started at Indeed, the unique thing in that context was the executive sponsors who brought me in had giving back to the open source community as a core design principle of the open source program office. And so that was the thing I was able to take advantage of there.

For your own organization, I think it's really important to think about what is your unique special advantage in this organization that I can take and bring those forces to bear when it comes to funding open source. The other thing I want to talk about is this notion between charity and involvement in these projects. And if all we think about for open source funding is this idea of charity, it's like we're throwing money over the fence into another community. It's probably better than nothing, but that's not being a member of the community. And every person in every organization who wants to get involved in funding has to think beyond charity and beyond this idea that it is something you're doing for someone else. And instead, start thinking about it as a way that you are showing up for the community

that you are a part of in order to help ensure that that community is sustainable and healthy. Hey, friends. This episode is brought to you by CIQ, the founding sponsor and partner of Rocky Linux, Enterprise Linux, the open source community way. And I'm here with Gregor Kertzer, the founder and CEO of CIQ and the creator of Rocky Linux. So, Greg, I know that a lot of people are still sort of catching up to some degree with what went down with CentOS, the Red Hat acquisition and just the massive shift that required everyone using CentOS to do. Give me a can you give me a glimpse into what happened there? We've seen a number of cases in the open source community where projects were pivoted due to business agenda or commercial needs. We saw that happen with CentOS. CentOS was one of the primary, one of the biggest enterprise operating systems ever. People were using it all over the place. Enterprise organizations and professional IT teams were all leveraging CentOS.

For CentOS to be stripped away from the community and removed as a suitable option to meet their needs created a massive pain point and a gap within the industry. As one of the founders of CentOS, I really took this to heart and I wanted to ensure that this does not happen again. And that is what we created with Rocky Linux and the RESF. Okay. You mentioned the RESF. What is that? And what is its relationship to Rocky Linux? The RESF is the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation. And it is a organization that we created to hold ourselves responsible to what it is that we've promised that we're going to do with the community. It is community run. It is community led. We have a board of directors, which is comprised of a number of people that have a huge amount of

experience, both with Linux as well as open source and community. And from this organization, we solidify the governance of how we are to manage Rocky Linux and any other projects that come and join in this vision. Sounds good, Greg. I love it. So Enterprise Linux, the open source way, the community way has a home at Rocky Linux in the RESF. Check it out and learn more at RockyLinux.org slash changelog. Again, rockylinux.org slash changelog. this announcement post for your FOSS fund Alyssa I like this quote from you you said this isn't philanthropy it's common sense you say it's an investment in our shared infrastructure

it's infrastructure we all rely upon and it needs to be taken care of that's kind of what you're saying there Dwayne is like we're here. We're playing on this playground together. The things are in disrepair. Let's come together and find a way to not just fund it or just throw checks at it, but also show up with a shovel or a pick or whatever it might be to, or a wrench or a screwdriver to help play a role in that. I think the hard thing I think potentially for the community at large is how, right? You might say, let's do this. But then I think one thing you did, Dwayne, and Alyssa, you followed this up and Chad, you've done as well, is provided a framework.

And that's just one of the many ways you can. Of course, you have Open Collective and you have the Open Source Collective on Open Collective and you've got many, many ways you can give. And sometimes you get that choice of paradox. It's like, there's just so many choices out there. So many roads to this place. How and when do we do it? That's the challenge I think for some companies, Bloomberg's quite big. So maybe someone may say, well, of course you're so big Alyssa, of course Bloomberg is so big. You should be doing those things. And yeah, that might be the right answer, but it's like, what are the right frameworks that

we all can adopt? you said before chad to make it fair how can my company give back in a way that's fair based upon what we use based upon what our people vote against or for and then find a way to financially make that repeatable so we can sustain and it's no question they're necessarily but more just like the thought process of how we think about funding at large what What's the book, Dwayne? Where's the book? What is it and where is it? You guys know about this? Dwayne wrote a book with O'Reilly. There's a book? Yeah. I'm extremely disappointed that not everyone here has read the tiny thing that we did with O'Reilly. I had a great colleague at Indeed named Mandy Grover, where we sort of spread out the idea

of the FOSS Contributor Fund and the levers and the different pieces of it that make it work. That report is still available. If you go to Indeed's GitHub and look for the FOSS Contributor Fund, there's links out to a PDF of it. It's no longer O'Reilly branded, but the materials are Creative Commons licensed. And it was meant to be a playbook for how to think about building a FOSS Fund in your own organization. Now, to come back to something Jared was tiptoeing up to earlier, there's $120,000 or $160,000 of fair amount every year for a company the size of Bloomberg or the size of Indeed or the size of some of our big players. And fair can be a contentious term.

Let's use the word reasonable, right? And we can get into fair later, right? Is it a reasonable term? No, I don't think so, right? But it was anchored by some of the decisions I made in building out the first possible end in Indeed. And I didn't ask for what was reasonable. I asked for what I thought I could get away with. And I asked for twice as much as what I thought I could get away with, right? And was delighted to see that it came back. Now, in order for that to grow to the point that it becomes reasonable, I either have to grow in my career to the point that what I can get away with is a lot bigger, or I have to go to a different kind of framework that starts through a more reasonable position. And this is one of the things I like about Chad's approach. The formula that you came

up with that landed at $2,000 per engineer in your company. Love the formula. I think every piece of the math is wrong, but you have a framework, right? Like you have a process for doing it. Oh, it's napkin math for sure. It's like, yeah, a lot of squinting required. But that's not the point. The point is you started from think about it per developer, assign an amount per developer. And if $2,000 sounds high to you, great. Go back to your own organization. Look at how much you're spending on developer tooling and say, okay, what do I think is reasonable to invest in the open source

infrastructure that we depend on and think about it from that perspective. So I love the idea that you had a framework, even if I disagreed with the map on the napkin. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Dwayne, how would you do the math then? Redo the math for us. What would you think? Oh gosh, put me on the spot. I love it. Melissa's got an answer. Well, I just want us to be aware that we're not just, I mean, sustaining open source is not just about writing a check either.

And so this fairness, this reasonableness, this equity is not just a financial equation. Jared, I'm not ducking your question, but I was going to let Alyssa and Chad say anything you want to, and then I'll come back to you. It's not a math equation I'm going to add in here, but it's something that my friend and co-host on Brain Science said. And she says, I love to do the something over the no thing. And I think that's what we have to equip companies out there to do. And I would say it starts with, in many ways, bottoms up. And developers aren't on the bottom, but that's where this conversation begins. It doesn't begin at the executive level necessarily, but it has to begin at developers saying,

hey, we use this open source. We are profiting from this open source. Can we do something? And begin to ask that question of, how can we contribute? Let's do the something versus the no thing. And I think that's kind of what you did here, even Alyssa, like just because that's not reasonable or the most you can ever give as, you know, gigantic as Bloomberg is, it's something over no thing. And it begins. And what happens is when Dwayne, you do it at Indeed and Chad, you do it at Century and Alyssa,

you do it at Bloomberg is people say, that makes sense. I trust those people. I respect those people. I respect this community. How can I do something similar? And it may not be a FOSS contributor fund. It may be back of the napkin math like Chad did, which, you know, that's what we need to influence others to do. Those listening to the show saying, how can I adopt a version of this that is reasonable for my company to contribute to in open source? What makes sense for us? I want to stir the pot, but at the appropriate moment. I have a pot stir here. Well, let's let Dwayne just lean back in. I think he's ready. I think

he's done his math. Okay. All right, let's get that, and then we'll have the pot stirred. He just opened up chat GPT and was like, how much is it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Here, chat GPT, how much should I give to open source? Bingo. We got check chat GPT off the bingo card. No, I love your call out to something over nothing, right?

And if anybody came to me and said, where should I start? I'd tell them to start where I did. Start with what you can get away with. If you can get away with $5,000 in your massive organization, great. You're on the path and you're starting from somewhere. Somewhere early in that journey is you get a set amount that you have to do something with or you get to do something with. Somewhere later in that journey is you might have a set amount that you can do on a monthly

or on a quarterly basis or some kind of regular amount that you can do. I do think it's reasonable to shift from that position to thinking about the same way you think about developer seat licensing. Like how much are you paying for compliance tooling? How much are you paying for developer tooling? How much are you paying for these other things to support your development workflow? And set an amount relative to those that you feel comfortable with within your own organization. What I would love to see us drive to as an industry is for companies to think about investing

in their open source infrastructure as a fraction of revenue rather than per seat or per month or whatever they can get away with. I think we're a ways away from that, but I think we'll see it in the next five to 10 years, companies who are thinking about this from an equity and a revenue perspective. That'd be awesome. All right, Chad, stir up that pot. Let's hear it.

I'm ready to stir the pot. And actually, Dwayne, you kind of queued it up. All right. So here's my question. Open source is, depending on how you look at it, either a public good or a common pool resource. Okay. And historically, traditionally, normally, the way that public goods get funded is through tax dollars. Yes, we have toll roads, right? But even that is kind of like a pay-to-play thing. But all the infrastructure, all the real-world together and all agree to contribute in a certain way to avoid being regulated by the actual government. Okay. So this is kind of my pot stirring question is like, will open source ever be truly sustainably funded without either going

to that kind of quasi governmental, like, you know, some sort of like sweeps the industry. We all agree that, let's say, percentage of revenue, Dwayne, like we're all going to give some, you know, amount and that's going to be like the baseline. So either that like quasi-governmental thing or the whole way to public good tax dollars. And maybe there it does come out, you know, it's like some tax on corporations

that goes to an open source sustainability fund. And we have the one in Germany. tax dollars and maybe there it does come out you know it's like some tax on corporations that goes to an open source sustainability fund and we have the one in germany so i just learned about this last week we did a session last week together online and learned about the sovereign tech fund if i have the name right jared adam you guys aware of this? No. The Sovereign Tech Fund? News to me. All right, we got to bring this up. How does it work? Yeah. 11.5 million euro for open source projects. Is that for the year? Does anybody know? I didn't dig that deep.

I believe that's for the year. Yeah. That's a lot of money. It is. I gave $260,000 last year. It's 11.5 million euro. That's a lot. How does it get divvied out?

They're working on that is the answer right but it's specifically targeted toward projects that are important to the government of germany right because it's it's it's coming from the government of germany that's funding that right yeah so that's my pot stirring question is that like the end game here for open source sustainability is like it just needs to be a tax and the government takes care of it because it's a public good and that's what public goods get funded. I want to hear what Alyssa thinks. I mean, as we sit at the brink of a debt ceiling crisis, it's really hard. And like the IRS funding coming out from us, it's hard for me to imagine that we're going to get more taxes on anything for public good. But that's my perspective on the political context that we're in,

not necessarily the need for collective responsibility. So I continue to think that this will be a private entity, maybe collaboration, like organizations, academic institutions, like maybe governments as like, you know, a player. But I can't imagine that we're going to have like a federal tax to help us figure out open source sustainability. I think it's on us to figure it out as individual organization. I think my position is less political and more, I guess, common sense. And so, Jared, you and i talked to bruce nyer a while back about security and he's involved in in politics and oversight and stuff like that from a

i know how technology works so therefore i help guide it and i think that's the position that i sit at here which is like i think i don't know if it gets to the government level and that might be a political statement to some degree but i think that it needs to be guided by and supported by those who understand it and that might just be the commons people who are involved in open source software and involved in technology and those who use it and that might be where it begins i'm less inclined to put more into the government's hands not because they can't manage it but because i think it might be better suited for the hands that understand it best. And that's just generally not the government at large. It may be sectors of the government.

It may be particular areas of the government. They really use technology. Or different governments, right? The German government's different than the U.S. government, right? Well, I suppose I'm thinking more specific to my situation, which I live in the.s like you all do and that's my i guess lens so if i zoomed out further i think it's it might be better off and less abused if it's by the people for the people because we're the ones who are impacted first and foremost by it we see our friends fall down or be lifted up in the fight towards the same open store so we just see that

every day. And I think it's us who has empathy. Okay. So that sounds to me like a vote for the, I'm calling it quasi governmental, but it's like, it's a, it's gotta be a little more than where we're at. Maybe a lot more than where we're at right now. Cause like, here's the situation right now, right? Dwayne started the FOSS fund. There's like half a dozen other companies doing the FOSS fund. Century's got its own take on it, right? And there's like, you know, other companies doing stuff. So there's like, there's some stuff going on right now, but I mean, I kind of want to go back to where we started, which is like, changelog is a part of the community, right? I feel like until we've solved it for you guys, we haven't solved it, right? Until there's an answer that's

like, hey, changelog is part of the community. you do all this community stuff. It's great. Right. But like, what is the, if we're all chipping in, obviously like the absolute amounts, like change logs, not going to be given, you know, $10,000 grants every month to open source projects. Right. Like that's not what we're talking about, but like, let's figure out the formula. Let's figure out the thing. It's like for an organization of your size, like here's what, you know, I don't know if we're going with an organization of your size, like here's what, you know, I don't know if we're going with fair or reasonable or what, but here's like what sort of the community feels like is okay. Right. And it's, it's gotta be a negotiation and a compromise where it's like you two, when you contribute this amount, you feel like, yeah,

I can feel good about it. I can come on a podcast and be like hey here's what we do we give to these projects we give this amount and you know that we feel good about it you know there's no and there's no like there's no sense it's like well you should be given more there's no sense that it's like uh we're given too much or whatever right like we want to find that balance between the needs of the community and what uh you know what us and each of our organizations could do and that that to me is like you know if we're not going to go the whole way to like taxes and the government, like we got to find that middle ground of like, as a community come together and express, here's what is fair or reasonable or whatever, and make it easy for

folks to participate. That, that, okay. Let me get off my soapbox here. So let's, let's zoom out from the change log and let's talk about AWS. We're just going to name it, right? We've seen- Zooming the whole way out. We've seen changes in the licensing landscape that are about AWS, even if they don't say they're about AWS, the SSPL license, the BSL license, some others, right? You know, AWS got and continues to get a lot of heat from the community because of unfairness.

Right. Are they giving back to the community commiserate with what they're taking? Right. Right now, that's an academic question. We don't have a way to measure or talk about what we think is fair. We don't have a measure, a way to measure what they're giving in terms of code, what they're giving in terms of money. And even if we did, there's no commonly shared understand frameworks

amongst all of the community that say this is what feels fair to everyone. So it's all coming from just a sense of how we feel about things. And that's as true for AWS as it is for a D or Century or Bloomberg or the changelog or anybody else, right?

So we are having these conversations without the use of these frameworks that can guide us in them. But you also, like, you can't have these conversations without being a part of the community. And AWS is not a part of the community. The people who work there are the change log as a multinational faceless corporation, the giant behemoth that the change log is.

They're not a member of the community. Jared and Adam and the rest of your team are members of the community, right? Adam, when you said earlier, like for the people, by the people, like we're the people like projects don't burn out maintainers burn out and we put so much focus on funding and projects that we sometimes lose sight of the people aspect of that like money is a terribly inefficient way to exchange support for an open source project somebody has to turn money into time, into labor, into code.

Like being involved in the community is just so much more impactful. And that's why I would like to, I mean, some of the sustainability efforts that we're trying to really bring and surface at Bloomberg is about supporting people's engagement in open source communities.

So it is about like the FOSS contributor fund and writing checks and doing and foundational support and all these are really important, but also creating space for people to be engaged long term, like in these projects and communities that they're not just things from afar, but really part of like us, like people and community. Can you enumerate those things that those non-funding things creating space like what does that look like or how does that manifest well we've been trying to support more like events and like volunteer efforts in open source communities and hope to be announced like we'll be announcing something on more structured soon. But I mean, I'm not,

I can't fully describe it right now. But yeah, but I mean, we're hoping to really have like, really think about sustainability, both in terms of like people, effort, time, you know, and money. It may or may not be worth calling out, but predating Alyssa's work at Bloomberg,

they did a lot of convening of projects and maintainers and people at Bloomberg who wanted to get involved in those projects. And Pandemic kind of threw a lot of those plans out of whack as well, but they've been doing work in that area for a while too. How much are we seeing of the move where you just employ a full-time open source maintainer on your staff who works on projects that you use? Or maybe it was just one. A lot of times it's a big framework, like, well, somebody who works on Rails, we just employ them. That was going on somewhat. Well, we got React going from Facebook to Vercel, right? Like, for example, company-backed projects. Yeah, but I'm not even thinking of like one where the company begins the project

and supports it with the team. I'm thinking like I deploy one of my engineers onto the team. Maybe they've earned it themselves already or whatever, but I'm just paying them to work on it. I know Shopify did some of that with the Rails team for a while. Is that still a thing?

Is that going on? Is it not worked out very well? I just, I honestly don't know. It's absolutely still a thing. I think it's a huge part of it. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah well? I just, I honestly don't know. It's absolutely still a thing. I think it's a huge part of it. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's like, yeah, definitely.

Okay. Is it a growing thing? It seems like it's a good, because like that, that is a very high impact way of doing it. Yes, you're paying a salary and benefits and whatever you normally would pay. And you're letting that person just do what they do. It's long-term, right?

They're in the community. It's supporting. It's almost better than giving money to a group of people and then having them have to figure out how we're going to deal with this, which is socially awkward as well. Yeah, no, I think you're right. I think that if we tried to tally up, you know, each company's kind of contribution to open source, it's going to be line items, you know? So there's going to be like, here's the amount that you give through an open collective or GitHub sponsors. Here's the amount that you give in kind when you're hosting events or whatever it is, right?

And then sure, I think for a lot of companies, especially the bigger ones, I think that the, you know, FTE salary equivalent for people working on the Linux kernel or whatever, right? Like that's going to be a huge proportion. What we need is the ultimate pricing page for supporting open source. Like, you go to any given SaaS,

and you got a pricing page, and you got tiers. You got the freemium model, you got the free forever tier, you got the, you know, the individual plan, you got the pro plan, you got the enterprise plan. We need something like that, because I feel like what we need really is guides to on-ramps.

Because we want everyone and every business to find a way to appreciate and support open source. And that sometimes means giving back people that sometimes by giving back time, that might mean funding events or supporting events. It real individual people on core teams. It might be large donations. It might be grants and maybe the Fox contributor fund. Like, is there a one place? Should we have one place?

Maybe that's where it begins to add this this uh quasi government thing maybe it's not even i don't even want to use the word government can you just remove that from that because how about a web page it's a web page we just need something a broad scale cross-organization collaboration even better even better synergy i was just thinking a web page can we just have a web page just a web page i'm with you just a web page you don't remember so i'm joking but also remember choose a license.com like yes didn't github do that that was a boon for choosing a license for a lot of people like you could have you could have a choose a supporting open source.com kind of yes i actually have a a part domain for this purpose that chad has been needling me to do something with. Oh my God. What's the domain? Tell us.

See, if I say this, now people are going to go there. They're going to expect stuff to be there. So I registered FostFunders.com either last year or the year before. I don't remember quite what it was. And I just checked and we don't have anything up there right now. We don't have anything up there, no. But we have a working group that meets every other Tuesday for people who make funding a weird time right now to try to provide those kinds of on-ramps because everyone's very cost spending, right? Or spending conscious. Everyone is very spending conscious right now. But Adam, to your point, people will have different abilities to participate in these on-ramps at different points in the year or different

points in their programs. You might only be able to show up with a check and say, I don't have time to figure out where this goes. Please make it go to the right place. I just, I had a windfall of funds that I was able to leverage for this example. And you can do something like that. And there should be an on-ramp for you. You might have gotten buy-in from your executives to build out a program focused on understanding your dependencies and giving back to them. And you should have an on-ramp for that. You might have

sold the idea internally that now you can think about this as a per seat licensing and you need some kind of framework or some kind of blueprint for that. We don't have these on-ramps for folks right now. You just sort of have to rely on talking to folks like Chad and Alyssa and myself and the others who are in the working group to get there. What's up, friends? This episode is brought to you by DevCycle. You probably heard about testing in production, dark launches, kill switches, or even progressive delivery. All these practices are designed to help your team ship code faster, reduce risk, and to continuously improve your customer's experience. And that's exactly what DevCycle's feature management platform enables. They offer feature flags, feature opt-in, and they seamlessly integrate with popular dev tools, with client-side and server-side SDKs

for every major language. And I'm here with Jonathan Norris, co-founder and CTO of DevCycle. So Jonathan, I've heard great things about using feature flags, but I've also heard they can become tech debt. How true is this? That's a great point. Feature flags can quickly become tech debt is one of my common sayings. And how we deal with that is that we fundamentally believe that feature flags should be as easy to remove from your code as they are to add to your code. And that's kind of one of the core design principles that we're going towards is to try to make it as easy as possible for you to know which flags you should remove from your code and which flags you should keep and making it automatic to actually remove those flags from your code base. And so we've actually already built tools into our CLI and

our GitHub integrations to automatically remove flags from your code base for you and make a PR that says, hey, here's a PR, remove this flag, it's no longer being used from your code base, and you can choose to merge it or not. So that's another thing that I fundamentally believe that, like, yes, flags can become tech debt. And we've got to work on that full developer workflow from end to end. It's great that it's super easy to add flags to your code base, but your flag should be visible to you all throughout your development pipeline, everywhere from your IDE to your CLI to your Git repository to your Git repository to your alerting and monitoring system.

And then we should tell you when you should remove those flags from your code base and help you clean them up automatically. So it's just as important to clean them up as it is to create flags easily. Very cool. Thank you, Jonathan. So DevCycle is very developer-centric

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Again, devcycle.com slash changelog. It begins with people who care, though, right? At the heart of all this, you can have a framework and you can have the ultimate pricing page for funding open source but it begins with people who care because i agree i think it should be buying for the people and that begins with people who care and you got to care enough to show up and do some things i don't know how we move that ball forward but i would love to support it however it works out whether it's a podcast coming back on here or us contributing some ideas to it i would play a role in that i think that's the hardest part about supporting or doing something or doing change is to some degree the somewhat easy button to do that change where can i go to learn what i need given my circumstance to put out that change and that might be this simple on-ramp type site that you got what

is it uh oss funders is that right foss funders foss funders when does this episode go out may 10th may 10th i have eight days are we gonna get the page up in the next week yeah you got a week duane yeah like okay sure that's that's what we're gonna do between now and may 10th by the time this episode releases there will at the very least be a form that you can fill out to say, I want to be part of this conversation. Right. And we'll go from there. Love it. Love it.

And we'll gladly come back. And when that conversation gets more and more clear, we'll gladly come back and announce whatever it may be for the next phase of that. Because we truly care. And Chad, you asked earlier on the top of the show, like, it's kind of embarrassing we don't have our list of our github sponsors it's kind of embarrassing but at the same time like we've been in these trenches for so long i feel like we're just embedded and that needs to be part of it that needs to like like yeah i feel like it because there's got to be part of what happens in what we're not calling the quasi government, like the, the way that comments pool resources are adequately governed, self-governed is through a certain measure of social pressure,

right? It's like, Hey, you know, person in, you know, in the socially acceptable is a better term. Well,

but there's like, there's, there has to be some thing like it's weird if your company doesn't participate. And we can talk about what participate means. And for changelog, absolutely. Like all the stuff you guys are doing, you know, like you said, you're DevRel for the whole industry, right?

Like that needs to be accounted for in like your contribution to the community. You know what I mean? But like, I hate to say it, but like that that i hate to say it but like that's that's really where the rubber meets the road is like when it's like oh their company like you know drop changelog here but like you know xyz company isn't giving like fun but it but it's very delicate right it's like very delicate because we don't want to like we're not trying to shame people but it's like you know we're trying to be like hey come on like we're all

part of this well you're trying to establish a social norm you're trying to shame people, but it's like, you know, we're trying to be like, hey, come on, like we're all part of this. Well, you're trying to establish a social norm. You're trying to establish a social norm, which requires a little bit of pressure because here's an expectation that we all have. And we might ask you about it or we might look at your company and say, I don't want to work there. I mean, this is something that developers, we've kind of lost a little bit of our leverage in the last 18 months, right? But when we are in super high demand as software developers, we could take that and we could say, I got a little bit of lever here. I can pull this lever. Oh, what do we, you know, in your interview questionnaire, how do you support open source? Is this a place I want to work? That's one way that we're kind of just establishing a social norm. We don't want to be, I don't want to think like, let's create a website

of people who don't do it. You know, like, let's not have. We don't need a list. Yeah. You need a list. Are you on the list? Like, let's promote the positive, right? Let's be like, here's the companies that are doing it. And, you know, I do think that what, Dwayne, you started with Indeed and the Fuzz Contributor Fund has shifted the social norm in the past, like, five years. I mean, this is.

I agree. A totally different conversation than it looked like. Yeah. I mean, this is a totally different conversation than it looked like five years ago. Even open source program offices was less and less a thing. I think as open source program offices become more and more normal or more and more needed or legitimized in organizations as they grow, the need for a FOSS contributor fund inside that office grows as well. I mean, that's just anecdotal feedback for myself.

It's what I see kind of happening through the tea leaves, not necessarily a headline I can point you to, but that's how I see it happening. Like these have become more and more popular. And it begins with someone who cares. And that's you, Dwayne. You cared enough to use your leverage then. Y'all are going to make me verklempt over here, but thank you. I am very

proud of the work that I did at Indeed, you know, and things ended the way that they ended. I don't bear any particular ill will. Everyone has gotten hit by layoffs and you have to make hard decisions in that. And I don't think it was indicative of how my work was valued or how the team's work was valued or anything. But we did great work in building out that program and providing a blueprint. And it shows, I think, that there is hunger for other frameworks and blueprints to follow because someone mentioned earlier sort of the paralysis of choice. There are so many projects to support.

How do you make any kind of decision? I firmly believe that one of the strongest benefits of running a funding initiative that is focused on supporting your open source infrastructure is not the funding. It's how much you come to understand this ecosystem for yourself, how much you begin to understand who are the important people at the heart of this ecosystem who are the important foundations and how do you show up as a member of this community like that analysis is so educational it's worth the money that you spend to fund the program in the first place and so everything that gets you closer to that and gets you more in touch with that

just helps you show up better for the community i think a principle to remember here too is iterative we come as software developers to iterate like duane you know i had that conversation i want to say like five years ago when you first started that fund i can't remember the number but i think i came on in 2019 sounds about right so yeah yeah it it was a little bit back then and chad you started started GetUp, GetTip, Gratapay way back when. You were 10 years plus deep in this adventure. Alyssa, I'm new to your history. I'm sorry.

I know that you said you worked at Open Collective. I'm not familiar with your work. Because this is the first time you're on the show now. But now I'll know. So I'm not sure of all of your history. But I'm sure you've been kicking the tires and doing lots of cool stuff out there for a while. Every level, there's iteration. So we come to this conversation here today as part of maintainer month.

And we were a part of it last year and the year beforehand. And we have conversations each and every year around this. And it's about iteration. So this is one rep. What will next year's maintainer month conversations look like? We have one more show coming out as part of this, May 24th. So this is the May 10th episode. And that's how we're playing a role in this.

But maintainermonth.github.com. It is a month of open source maintainers to gather, share, and to be celebrated. As I mentioned, our show's on May 10th. You're listening to this already because that's already out there. And May 24th, look for that. We're going to be at Open source summit north america we're there now basically if you're listening to this we're speaking in the future about the past that's how podcasts work but you know we got to show up we got to keep iterating we i keep i suppose having

patience for the process too we can't just imagine microwaving perfect open source microwaving perfect funding and funding programs we have have to be patient. We have to be willing to keep showing up. We have to keep providing these on-ramps. And I'm a firm believer of setting clear expectations. So we can't expect companies or people to show up and fund and support if we don't give clarity around how to do so. And so I think this idea you have, Dwayne and Chad, I think that's tremendous. I want to see what comes out before May 10th and what's out right now because the show's out there as part of that. And I would like to play a role in it however we can because we need to provide

on-ramps and clarity. How can you play a role? How can you give money? If you have questions on what's the best way to begin to look at your dependencies or how your company's benefited from open source, let's give people that guide. Because we can't expect them to do something if there's no clarity on what to do. Adam, let's give the shout out here since it's maintainer month. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you to all the maintainers out there. Oh, yeah. Community supported, open source maintainers. We appreciate you very much. Thank you. Very much appreciate you. I would love to sort of bolt onto that and sort of challenge everyone on the call, and

I'll talk slowly and go first, to provide one tangible, specific recommendation that any of your listeners can do after listening to this episode to show their appreciation or to otherwise show up for a maintainer during maintainer months. My recommendation is going to be specifically for people who work in an organization or who otherwise are sort of interfacing on behalf of their employer. You don't have to find all the maintainers. You don't have to understand all of your dependencies. Pick one. Find one maintainer of one dependency that you use every day. If you don't have any funds to give them a sponsorship because or if they're not signed up for sponsors, just take the day, take a moment to say thank you to them for the thing that they built.

Overwhelmingly, what maintainers hear is negative feedback, bug issues, sort of constraints on their time. Just taking a moment to appreciate the work that they're doing can go a very long way. If you are able to make a funding decision, great. Pick one maintainer, give them a little injection of cash. That's my recommendation. I don't think I have anything better. little injection of cash. That's my recommendation. I don't think I have anything better. Yeah. You guys. That's all right. You don't have to have anything better. Like pick a thing that's yours, right? Like not everybody will be able to do that.

To fill that out even further, one of the hardest things to do to give money to open source projects from within the company is honestly just the bureaucracy, right? So this maintainer month, one great thing you could do would be to go through your procurement process at your company for Open Collective and or GitHub sponsors. You know, there's some newer platforms out there, but let's start with GitHub sponsors, open collective, go through the procurement process, get them in the system as a vendor. That's honestly like the biggest hurdle for most companies is that, or one of the huge hurdles is just having them in the system. You know, so even if you can't, even if you don't have any budget yet, or you can't, you know, dedicate a lot of budget to it, just go through that procurement process. That'll be a huge win. For sure.

Adam, Jared, I know the procurement process is really onerous at the changelog. There's a lot of bureaucracy there. Nah. I was actually going to call out just something actually Jared put on changelog news a while back. It was Swift on security. This is from 2018. And this is a tweet that said, Corporate purchasing and policies make funding open source literally impossible.

Nothing's going to change until you make them pay you. Someone thought a bug? Support contract. Someone wants a feature? Support contract. It's literally easier to pay you $1,500 a year than $25 one time. And that's kind of still true. And I agree with what you're saying, Chad. Get something in the mix so that it's just easier to put that dollar out into the known, trusted ways to fund open source. Big help.

I mean, if I can, something that I would challenge us to do for maintainer month is really a bit akin to what Dwayne was saying, was like to show up for projects and for the people that are there. And we have been like really helping to support like volunteer hours for people to take, you know, so much of open source is on the backs of volunteer time and really trying to recognize that that is like investment and time and give space and support for that as like an organization. So whether it is a thank you or, I don't know, a nice comment or just like, you know, a plus one, I just, I feel like, like showing up for each other positively,

like is, it would be a really nice thing to do for, I mean, for any month, but it's something we can all take on for maintainer month. I will share something that Dwayne covered, but here's a very tactical way of going about it and I think this might be controversial for some but I think they're wrong so are you stirring the pot? yeah I'm stirring the pot this is tactical advice if you disagree you're wrong but you can go feel free to

find a project that you use that you love that you appreciate go to their github issues open an issue that is just thanking them and then close it for them. And here's why it's not wrong. Some people say, stay out of my issues. I don't want issues. As maintainers, we are so like anxious when every new issue comes in because it's almost always bad news. It's a feature request that we don't want to build. It's a bug that we didn't know existed.

It's, you know, it's something that we have to deal with. And there's like this every time, but if somebody opens an issue and they just are expressing gratitude and you didn't know they existed prior, you didn't know that you're helping this person in their life, you know, right. Write them a little letter, let them know how this affected you, or just open the issue. Say, I love this project. I use it every day. Thanks. That's all close it that will make a maintainer's day and so I would say do that although it's not as good as money but it feels

pretty stinking good closing it is key though yeah close it for them don't make them close it don't add work to their plate yeah it'd be cool to pair that up Jared with a funding process potential where they may not have the money but maybe Sentry or somebody like that comes and says well you know what for every on the repos that matter to us for every one of these we'll give a dollar or just some some nominal amount that

it's just totally achievable for every thanks to this and maybe it's just during maintainer's month you know like maybe it's just maintainer month thing and you know like that way it's encapsulated it's not ongoing but maybe that could be one of these, you know, challenges or. We might need to workshop that idea a little bit. Cause that could definitely, there's, there's two ways that could go. It will go both of them. If history is in any other care. It will go both of them. Yeah, exactly. It could go wrong. It could go right either way,

but this could be one of those ways just for this month. Like just during this month, think of maintainer. Are we on like a public radio fun drive right now? Is that what we're doing? No, but I mean, we all care about it and we all have ideas. If you want the mug and the scarf. I do have some very attractive tote bags that I can put into the mix here. Where's my AWS open coin?

I mean, that's pretty cool. That was pretty cool. I love that. Anything else? What's left unsaid? What are we not asking?

We're getting close on time here. What's left unsaid? Anything left to be covered before we call

this a maintainer month extravagant to show and call it done? I just, I love that, you know, like you said

earlier, this is an ongoing conversation. We're going to come back next year and we're going to see a connection between where we are now, but we're going to be in a different place. I'm excited to see where we're at next year with this. Love, love, yeah, love working on this with you all. Yeah. Yeah, appreciation for the people that are helping to sustain open servers as well. I could go another hour.

I got, I got all kinds of stuff, but that might have to be its own episode right like i i we do we are episodic we do produce more than one show a month or in a year we produce a lot of podcasts so there's always more room for more conversation for sure so y'all are welcome back here but chad alissa dune thank you so much for your time today thank you for being in the trenches thank you for caring enough to put your time which is so I mean we don't quantify how time we spend our time we get finite amount of times as individuals and you're spending it in this way shape and form to push this forward to iterate this forward and that's this is like so appreciated by me I'm sure Jared feels the same way and the entire open source community just really thanks you. So thanks for coming on the show today, sharing your perspectives and the things you're doing and for your time. We appreciate you. Thank you guys. Appreciate you too.

Thanks for providing voice to the community and a platform where we can share stories like this. Like we are, we are all building together happy to do it thank you maintainer month is upon us it is may maintainer may maintainer month i love it and i'm happy to be standing beside our friends chad whittaker alissa wright and duane o'brien to celebrate maintainer month to bring attention to this great conversation about how to support maintainers how do we support open source i love this kind of conversation and more importantly i love how you all our listeners are going to pick up this flag gonna share this message at your companies with your friends with your colleagues and find ways to bring support for open source within your organization as i mentioned at the top of the show, we're going to be at Open Source Summit all this

week in Vancouver, Canada. Love to see you there if you're there. So make sure you come say hi. And coming up next week, we have Sarah Drasner. We've been wanting to get Sarah on the show for so long. She wrote a book called Engineering Management for the Rest of Us. And Jared and I dig deep into that book, into that conversation with Sarah. It is an awesome show and I can't

wait to ship it. Big thanks to our friends and our partners at Fastly, Fly, and also TypeSense. And to Break My Cylinder, those beats are banging. And to you, our listeners, hey, there is a bonus for our Plus Plus subscribers. Yes, changelog.com slash plus plus, 10 bucks a month, 100 bucks a year, no ads, closer to the metal, directly support us, plus bonus content. Gotta love that. Once again, changelog.com slash plus plus. That's it. This show's done. We will see you next week.