The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Indeed's FOSS Contributor Fund (Interview)

Episode Date: April 30, 2020

Duane O'Brien (head of open source at Indeed) joined the show to talk about their FOSS Contributor Fund and FOSS Responders. He's super passionate about open source, and through his role at Indeed Duane was able to implement this fund and open source it as a framework for other companies to use. We talk through all the details of the program, its impact and influence, as well as ways companies can use the framework in their organization. We also talk about FOSS Responders an initiative to support open source that has been negatively impacted by COVID-19.

When you look at the way the FOSS Contributor Fund was structured, the intention is very much that you give engineers some ability to influence where these dollars are going, but you also give them some incentive to get involved in those projects in other ways. companies to flip, right? It's easier for most companies to write a check than it is to give developer time. By setting up the structure for the FOSS fund the way we did, there's some encouragement to make your open source contributions and to be involved in a way that wasn't there before. And we've seen some change in behavior as a result of that. Being with her changelog is provided by Fastly. Learn more at Fastly.com. We move fast and fix things here at ChangeLog because of Rollbar. Check them out at Rollbar.com. And we're hosted on Linode cloud servers.

Head to Linode.com slash ChangeLog. Linode makes cloud computing simple, affordable, and accessible. Whether you're working on a personal project or managing your enterprise's infrastructure, Linode has the pricing, support, and scale you need to take your ideas to the next level. We trust Linode because they keep it fast and they keep it simple. Check them out at linode.com slash changelog. Welcome back, everyone. This is the changLog, 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. Today, I went solo to talk with Dwayne O'Brien about FOSS Contributor Fund and FOSS Responders.

Dwayne is super passionate about open source, and through his role at Indeed as the head of open source, he was able to implement this fund and open source it as a framework for others to use. This fund lets companies financially support the open source they depend on and encourage participation. And we talk through all the details of the program, its impact and influence, as well as ways companies can use this framework in their organization. And we also talk about false responders, an initiative to support open source that has been negatively impacted by COVID-19.

So I actually found about this initiative you've done, originally called the FOSS Sustainability Fund, that you're doing it indeed Dwayne with this talk you gave at FOSDEM which was awesome we actually logged the video to our newsfeed and newsletter which was awesome people love that but it's since matured into a much bigger deal where it's

a it's actually called FOSS Contributor Fund now and it's a little bit more mature you're six months or so into this I think this is about a year into this, right? More than a year into doing this? Yeah, this is our second year running the FOSS Contributor Fund. I had my notes off then. So two years in, I mean, what's it about? What are you doing? The FOSS Contributor Fund is a way for us to reach out to anyone at Indeed who uses open source

and involve them in the process for deciding which open source projects we support with financial donations. So anybody at Indeed has the capability to nominate an open source project that we use to receive a $10,000 donation. And then all those nominations are voted on in a given month by anyone who makes an open source contribution. So it's April right now. Everyone who makes some kind of open source contribution during the month of April gets to vote on the nominees for April. And whichever one wins the voting process will get a $10,000 donation. So it's a once a year thing that happens.

And so there's a lot of a process involved in terms of like nominating and voting and then obviously issuing the funds. We run this once a month. Oh, once a month. So every month we give away $10,000. We gave away $120,000 last year to open source projects that we use. We're slated to give away $160,000 the same way this year. We added a quarterly event in, so we'll do a $10,000 donation once a month and then a $10,000 the same way this year we added a quarterly event. So we'll do a $10,000 donation once a month and then an additional $10,000 donation once a quarter. Gotcha. So each month there's one project that gets supported. Right. That's correct.

So theoretically 12 and then plus the bonus 10, is that right? Or bonus 10 per quarter, so that's 14? Yeah. So there would be 16 this year and there were 12 last year. And we constrain it to once a year. So within a 12-month period, a project can only win the nomination once. There's other criteria as well. It has to be an open source project that we use. They have to have an OSI-approved license. They have to have some way for us to

actually give them money. And it can't be a project that's owned by an employee that creates all kinds of problems for everybody. The first one in the list there too is that Indeed or one of its subsidiaries uses it as well. Right, yeah. So if it's a company that we acquired and they use it, that's also eligible. Which makes sense because when you think about the motivation for a for-profit business to donate to open source, in some cases the value is blurred. Obviously it's a good thing to support open source because, hey, most businesses use tons of open source and it's just a good thing to do.

But whenever you think about the balance sheet and giving money, it's like, well, what do we get in return? So the exchange of value is difficult. And in this case, the framework seems to point back to, well, the value exchange here is, hey, we're letting our employees nominate projects they care about that are in line with our company's goals. And you're kind of giving the power back. And so that's the value switch there, rather than just simply money at the door, hard to sort of track back value. Yeah, it's definitely a big part of it. When I think about supporting the projects that we use, it's a little sloppy to think about it this way, but I think about making sure that the supply

chain for open source software is stable, right? If you rely heavily on an open source project and you want to make sure that it has what it needs to survive and to be sustainably developed and to be well maintained, the only way to know for sure is to be involved in that process and to put some skin in the game, whether that's money or code contributions or just taking part in the project itself. And so we do get a lot of value out of pushing out to the engineers, this decision-making process, involving them in the decision-making process. They engage with the program. They tell us about the projects that are important to them. And we get broader visibility into sort of what's important to everyone. But we also just see the benefit in making sure that these projects that we use

have the funds they need to do their maintenance work, get their developers together. We try to stay out of the business of what are you going to do with the money? Because A, we don't have any idea what's best for the project or what's best for them, right? Once we give them the money for their project, we want them to use it the way they see fit. So in some larger projects, they've put it in to a scholarship fund. Other projects had been talking about getting their developers together for a meetup. This was obviously prior to travel being restricted. We were talking about getting all their developers together for another developer sprint.

And we're musing about how to get the funds together for that. And we made a large donation to the project in a timely fashion. Yeah. Well, that's good. You're keeping your marketing hands out of it where you're letting the project determine the value of the money being used, the funds, however is of value to the direction of the project. And that would make sense, right? Maintainers know what they're doing.

Yeah. Theoretically, right? No, maintainers know what they're doing. Yeah. They know what the project needs. And in a lot of cases, they've offered to engage with us in other ways as a result. Yeah. We've had some Zoom calls.

We've talked about ways to do sort of mini hackathons with some of those projects. And it just opens up a conversation with them in a way that wasn't open before. That's interesting to think about, too. So initially, this began as a contribution of dollars. You've been doing this for two years now. I mean, has there been any other side benefits to it? Like you mentioned hackathons, other tangential ways once you've sort of identified who to fund, right?

Let's say they win that month. Now that you're sort of part of this, I don't want to say club, but you know, once you're part of, you know, the pool of projects, you know, in this fund that you have some benefits like, okay, you got a small network to tap into. You can, you can initiate some sort of hackathon we'll cover some of the costs or whatever. I don't know. Have you considered those things too where once you're past that funding point

to do other tangential things to support? One of the things that's come out of this is that it's a little different from what you're talking about, but it's one of the more interesting aspects of running the fund from my perspective. It's identified for us folks inside the company who were passionate about open source who weren't necessarily on my specific radar, right? There's a group that's really involved in sort of geolocation and geodata in general. And that group has put forward several nominations for projects that, in some cases, I didn't even know existed, but were important enough to this team for them to rally around and come together to support and to get involved in those projects in a way that they

weren't before to help ensure that they would be eligible for receiving the funds and that they would stand a good chance of winning the nomination. I believe it's driven engagement from folks like that, but it's also helped us uncover these sort of footholds in other parts of the company for people who are passionate about open source and finding people for us to engage with from that perspective. And that's been really interesting to watch as it unfolds. We've also had some conversations with the receiving projects who want to engage with us in other ways and talk about creating issues that would be sort of well-suited for engineers to pick up that hadn't been involved in the project before, just other ways to deepen that relationship. And definitely when you look at the way the

Files Contributor Fund was structured, the intention is very much that you give engineers some ability to influence where these dollars are going, but you also give them some incentive to get involved in those projects in other ways. So money tends to be an easy lever for companies to flip, right? It's easier for most companies to write a check than it is to give developer time.

But by setting up the structure for the FOSS fund the way we did, there's some encouragement to make your open source contributions and to be involved in a way that wasn't there before. And we've seen some change in behavior as a result. I want to get into the mechanics of building this fund, which you've played a perfect hand into, but I kind of want to rewind a little bit to sort of paint, to some degree, your history with Indeed because you haven't been there forever. I think it's been around the two-ish year mark. I could be wrong. You can help me out on the timeline, but you came in as

I'm just going to make up a term, open source czar. I don't know, advocate huge person. You came in to run open source for Indeed and in many ways, what you're trying to do is advocate for open source. And this fund, this contributor fund, is one part of your work. So I'm curious of the change, if you can speak to that, at Indeed around open source, if there was a change, and then how that led to defining this blueprint for other companies to potentially follow to support open source?

Sure. Yeah. I joined Indeed kind of just after Thanksgiving in 2017 to build out their open source program. I didn't pitch the title open source czar when I came in. That might have been an easy sell. I just went with head of open source and moved on. It's got a good ring to it, though. It does. And part of getting the job involved, putting together a presentation for my boss and some other stakeholders for my vision for what the open source program would look like. What kind of program is it that I want to build? And so it opened with an explanation of why you always see me in a jumpsuit and went on to talk about sort of the many different ways that you can give back to the open source community. And as part of that and as part of the process for putting it all together, I was asked to do sort of a 30, 60, 90 day.

Like, here's what you're going to do in the first 30. Here's what you're going to do in the first 60, first 90 days of the program. Somewhere, I think it was on the 90 day slide, you know, I said, I'll do these things. And one idea you're probably going to hate is what it said on the slide, right? That's all it said. That's all it said. One idea you're probably going to hate. Okay. And my boss at the time said, can you give me an example of that? And I said, not really. I'll get in and I'll figure something out when I'm there. And like most of the things in my 30, 60, 90 prediction, I missed most of them. But I landed on this idea for what I was calling at the time a FOSS Sustainability Fund about six months after I came in.

And I wrote a one page treatment, you know, it was a summary of what I wanted to do and sent it off to my boss. So this was, you know, around April of 2018, you know, we were well past the budgeting conversations and everything else for 2018 by

the time I joined. And, you know, I put right at the top, you know, here's the TLDR. I want $120,000 for a sustainability fund, and here's about how it would work. And I went back and forth on that number a lot. I didn't know if I was asking for too much. I didn't know if I was asking for not

enough. But I wanted to break it into $10,000 chunks because I wanted it to be a big enough to be meaningful donation for most projects. If we showed up to Babel and we gave them $100, that's not going to do a lot for Henry. It just isn't. But $10,000 is a big enough chunk of money that you can do something significant with. You can make some plans with that kind of money. Yeah. there to be a lot of selling that was necessary, but it clicked with my boss immediately. And for most people that I have talked with who are involved in open source program offices or kind of otherwise involved in growing open source culture at their company, when we draw that picture, it's $10,000 a month to something you use. But if you, it's decided on by people who, you know, work at the company and contribute to open source if you want to vote on where it goes you have to make

an open source contribution most people have gone aha i see the alignment i really like it and i'd love to say that there was you know a diligent intentional thought process that led me down this path it would be more accurate to say that the alignment of those three things sort of occurred to me at one point and I blasted it out to my boss and had no particular expectation that he was going to go for it or not. I knew it was a big ask, but it worked out. What I like about that though is how the value changes. I said that before where when a company, especially in an open source program, is asked, how do we give back and just donating straight dollars to the community? It's difficult if you don't have

just simply say yes, because of course you want to support open source. And in particular, even the four bullet points of like must be in use by the company or subsidiaries, you know, have, you know, necessary open sourceness. And one of the kind of core ways you define that, which is debatable depending upon who you speak with, is the OSI approved license. There are some people who will debate that to some degree and some of the other mechanics around it. When you just give money, it's difficult to just say, what do we get in return? Where in this case, to me, one of the core values for the company is that we get to enable our employees who are deeply like as you

said these unknown passionate open source people that you didn't even know of that that have now bubbled up to you because of them voting for certain projects well now it gets everybody thinking about open source differently whereas in a traditional model just giving money which is great does work it has less of this sort of like stickiness, this sort of terrible word to use right now, infectiousness. You know what I mean? That other people think, okay, this is how open source is used. This is how it gets benefited by our company and us using it and then funding it too,

and then finding other ways to support it in the future. To me, that's genius. Yeah, and the thing that I really want us to drive sort of as an industry is the idea that deciding which projects you're going to support is not a thing that happens high up, right? I tell a story as part of the FOSS Contributor Fund process and kind of how we got there I tell a story as part of the FOSS Contributor Fund process

and kind of how we got there about the budget that I inherited when I came in. And it had this $10,000 carve-out specifically for Webpack. And we had organization memberships and one large conference and then this single software project that we were going to give $10,000 to. And, you know, it wound up in the list because, you know, someone fairly senior in the company said, hey, they're asking for money and we use it a lot and we should give it to them, right? And that level of advocacy is not open for everybody. And I wanted the FOSS Contributor Fund to open up that kind of advocacy for anyone, right? Yeah.

So not only does it give people the opportunity to voice where our dollars go, but I want it to help people internalize the idea that if you want to get involved in this project, this is a thing that you can do. You don't have to wait for somebody higher up to tell you this is where you should be making contributions. You use it every day. You care about it enough that you want

us to give them money. Open an issue. Comment on an issue. Run a test for them. Give them some code. The only one speak I would be curious about, especially having been two years in, is if your learnings have said, well, well ten thousand dollars is a lot of money and you have a lot more open source advocates let's say as more people become more and more aware of its value and the value of the company funding it or supporting it in some way if there wasn't room for you know tiers let's say a ten thousand dollar and let's say a micro like in the five hundred dollar to thousand range that way you're still kicking some dollars around and you're still – you can give people who don't need $10,000 some dollars.

You know what I mean? Like not everybody needs 10 grand. It's a good number and I understand your initial interest in that number. But have your feelings around that changed? My feelings around it haven't changed specifically. I still think $10,000 is a good place to keep it pinned for us. But I recognize that there's a lot of room to try different models there and try different things, right? There's been proposals to break it up, maybe do like a $5,000, a $3,000, and a $2,000 donation one month.

Or to just take it and divide it evenly between all the people who were nominated and be done with it, right? One of the problems with doing this on a monthly basis is you get about 12 different chances for an experiment in a given year. And if you want a consistency in the program, you want to kind of maintain the way you're doing things over the course of the year. So you don't get as many opportunities to try new things as maybe you would like. One of the benefits I see of opening the program up for other companies to adopt and helping other companies to adopt it and to encourage them to run their own experiments is that they can run it in their context, tweak the criteria in a way that works for them, and we can double how much we're learning. We can triple how much we're learning, right? The more of us that do this and that try different things while we're running our own FOSS contributor funds, the more we can

all learn together. And that's, I think, pretty exciting. I have been resistant to changing things on a month-to-month basis. But when we put the fund together for this year, we added these quarterly events so that we could try new things without disrupting the main flow of the program. Yeah, help me understand those quarterly events more. What are the details around that? So the vision was we would have once-a-quarter events

where other FOSS funders would come together and try something new or try something different. And I was optimistic coming into this year about how many other companies I could convince to adopt a FOSS fund and how quickly I could get them to adopt the FOSS fund. I'm aware of three other organizations right now who are in various states of either executing or bootstrapping their initiatives. And I envision to the quarterly events is let's all come together and do something collective, like whether that is running one poll across all of our contributors and across all of our nominations to see what happens, whether that's doing some analysis of the dependencies that we

all share in common and directing funds toward things that have been a consistent second place, you know, appearance on the list, or just like try something new to see how that would go and define what something new meant when we were all, you know, there and talking together. The Q1 event, we ended up taking the funds that we had earmarked for that and directing it toward the open source speed dating event that the Moss Fund folks did at FOSDEM, where they issued seed grants toward projects who had ideas that could move forward with a little bit of assistance. We showed up with some funds. The Moss Fund folks showed up with some funds, as well as the Ford and Sloan Foundations.

How much time does your team spend building and maintaining internal tooling? I'm talking about those behind-the-scenes apps, the ones no one else sees. The S3 uploader you built last year for the marketing team. That quick Firebase admin panel that lets you monitor key KPIs. Maybe even the tool your data science team hacked together so they could provide custom ad spend analytics. Now these are tools you need so you build them, and that makes sense. But, the question is,

could you have built them in less time, with less effort, and less overhead and maintenance required? And the answer to that question is, yes. That's where Retool comes in. Rohan Chopra, Engineering Director at DoorDash, has this to say about Retool. Quote, the tools we've been able to quickly build with Retool have allowed us to empower and scale our local operators, all while reducing the dependency on engineering. End quote. Now, the internal tooling process at DoorDash was bogged down with manual data entry,

missed handoffs, and long turnaround times. And after integrating Retool, DoorDash was able to cut the engineering time required to build tools by a factor of 10x and eliminate the error-prone manual processes that plagued their workflows. They were able to empower backend engineers who wouldn't otherwise be able to build frontends from scratch. And these engineers were able to build fully functional apps in Retool in hours, not days or weeks. Your next step is to try it free at retool.com slash changelog. Again, retool.com slash changelog. so thankfully you've done all the hard work for most anybody listening to this that might be wanting to use this contributor fund as a blueprint for their business or their organization to fund open source so you've got the foss contributor fund as an overview on GitHub. It's an open source repo. It's on IndeedEng.

Was it you particularly that you're the only contributor to this? I've got two contributors here. Who is it? Just you and someone else. Did you do most of the work? Who else is writing this with you? This was a blueprint that we pulled together that described what we thought was the minimum amount of information that would

be necessary for someone to take and run this at their own company, right? I don't have the repo up in front of me, but I suspect that other contributor is also someone from my team who was helping me to kind of get it in shape for folks to be able to use, right? Gotcha. Jade Applegate. Thank you, Jade. Yeah, Jade Applegate is in fact from my team. And yes, thank you, Jade. And so, you know, we wanted to get something out there for people to use as a model and kind of get a stake in the ground in a timely fashion. We wanted to release something in time for All Things Open last year to invite people to join us as FOSS funders and sort of building up this community of people who are running similar experiments. And it is the first part of documentation. We have a couple of other things that are in flight, a playbook that's a little more detailed about how to execute a FOSS

fund. The idea is that we want to have something that we can give to anybody that is a little more detailed than the blueprint, right? It's more like a build plan, so step-by-step instructions on what you would need to do. And then some other pieces of documentation of the process as well. We're trying to be as open and transparent about it as we can. Do you see this as the easy button to some degree for those who are taking up the helm of an open source office? Like you have with Indeed? Like, is this something that it's not the only thing an open source office does for a business, but it's one way to give back to open source. So is your hope that many and lots of open source head of open sources like you are,

open source is ours, even take this and, you know, is that the hope for this so that everyone does this and kind and follows your lead? Or blueprint, for lack thereof. That's definitely the thinking. This would not, by any stretch, be the only component of someone's open source program. There's so much that goes into running an effective open source program. You have to deal with policies and compliance and sponsorship activities and writing checks for organizations or for projects is just a part of it.

But I've been having a series of conversations recently with folks talking about what it looks like to have a well-rounded program from the perspective of supporting your dependencies, from either whether you're giving code to them or whether you're giving money to your open source dependencies, I think there's like three areas

where you would see that kind of activity that kind of represent three different ways of going about it. You would have some support that's given based on analysis. So, you know, someone has taken a look at what you use and made some kind of determination about which of these things is most important. There'd be some kind of advocacy coming from higher levels, people to other folks in the company and giving opportunities for

them to talk about or request that the company support projects. And a lot of companies, I think, can benefit from implementing a project like FOSS Fund as a way to ask people in the company what they should be using and kind of democratize that decision making process out. We wanted to make it as easy as possible for other folks to adopt and we continue to work on documentation that will enable them. Based on the timeline from Git, I can't tell if this is the initial commit. I guess the last commit was six months ago. How long did it take you to sort of put this into place at Indeed, iterate through it enough to then be able to document it in this capacity to share it?

What was the timeline there? So if I walk through the whole timeline, it's really kind of funny. I had written the initial pitch document to my boss in April of 2018. It was in October that I had gone to one of the sustained summits in London, and we had asked for the money in the budget at that point, but hadn't gotten any signal for if it was going to get approved. But at that sustained summit, as I was talking about the idea, I got such positive signal that I came back and really was advocating strongly that we run the program. We didn't get confirmation that we had the funds until kind of late in the year. And so the turnaround time from, yes, we're able to run this program to hitting the ground running at the beginning of January was very, very short. So we were building it and bootstrapping it while we were also executing it. And we learned some things

kind of early in the process about how to tweak the program and how to kind of run things for ourselves. I would say we had a good enough handle on what needed to be in the blueprint after running it for about six months or so, and then went through the process of documenting it and wanted to get something out in the timeframe for all things open last year so that we could get out in front of people as they were making their budget requests for this year and invite them to join and participate. So there haven't been many updates to the blueprint since we pushed it out,

but we have either discussed it with other folks who are in the process of adopting or, or kind of workshopped a little bit with some other folks. I think you mentioned earlier whether or not having an OSI-approved license was up for debate or not. And I believe in the blueprint we call out that it's important to have some kind of licensing governance document, whether you use the OSI approved list

or the Debian list or the free software list. What's important is that there is clarity around the license and what list of licenses are going to work and which ones aren't. And that that not be a decision that's being made on an ad hoc basis, project by project. And some of that is about making sure that things are being treated evenly and fairly. And some of that's

just about reducing the burden on the person who's executing the program. If you have to go out and check every license by hand or verify every license or make a decision about every license for nomination, that's going to take up too much time. Well, I think the time to, the point is not to invest time in those kinds of things, but to invest time into, you know, the nominations, the process, helping, et cetera.

You know, I think OSI approved license is a great place to start. It's just, my point was just that some people, I'm thinking like open core companies who still want contributions that are sort of like open eventually, likery might be, for example, had David Kramer on the change log, I think, late last year talking about their change to open source. And so there's this blurred line where, well, David says he's open source and he agrees he's open source eventually. It's just those kinds of projects get – and maybe that's the great case because it is an open source eventually it's just those kinds of projects get and maybe that's the great case because like it is an open source business you know and so that would be not the best use of indeed's money or other open source offices funds so that that would make sense but OSI approved license is a great place to to start and just my point was just that some people will debate what is open source these days and that's not me to debate it's just that some people will debate what is open source these days. And that's not me to debate. It's just that that's often the thing.

I think what I want to cover really is some of the takeaways. So we talked about the Blueprint itself. There's some learning process, right? When you put something like this into work and then document it and then ask others to follow it, what are some of the things you've learned over time after launching it? What are some of the takeaways you've sort of gathered by doing this for so long around this kind of thing for a business, for a company like Indeed to support open source? One of them is that obviously what works for us is not going to

work perfectly for the next company. We have a process where we can vet nominations more or less by hand. If we had 10 times the number of developers that we do have, that would get really hard, right? Yeah. The nomination process is kind of an interesting one. I had identified in that FOSDEM talk that you referenced earlier that we might have to ultimately curate nominations for a number of reasons. And we learned fairly early on that there was a disconnect in how we were talking about the nomination process with folks. They expected that once something was nominated, it would continue to show up as a nominated project until it fell off the list

or won. So the nomination list is thrown away each month. You start from zero. That was where we started, but we saw a big uptake of nominations in that first month that we ran it. We had 20-some projects that were nominated, and there were some I'd never even heard of. There were some that I vaguely kind of knew what they were doing, and a lot of them I recognized and knew how they worked. But there were five projects I'd never even heard of. I had no idea what they were. And that was really exciting because that meant I was getting visibility into projects that were important to people that I wouldn't have otherwise gotten visibility into. So it was a really good result.

But there was a sharp drop-off in nominations in the subsequent month because people just expected that they were going to stay nominated. And where we landed was we carry some nominations over from the last month if nominations run a little short. That seems to have worked well enough for us. But in a company where there's a significantly larger number of developers, that would not be a nomination process that would work for them. Right now, leaning in the direction of recommending that you have sort of a nomination committee, three or four people who look at the nominations and add things into the nominations based on their analysis and observations of the dependencies that the company uses to try to balance that a little bit. But we haven't tried it yet.

We'll probably try it in the second half of the year. Gotcha. So now that it's a blueprint, it's in black and white, it's a repo on GitHub, is it open for contribution? I don't know, is it? Yeah, it's open for contribution. It's CC licensed. I would assume so. I mean, that is all open source. I didn't look at the license, that's why I was delaying for a moment there. Should be CC by.

Who's taking up the flag? Who's doing these FOSS funds in their own organizations? We know that Salesforce is running one. Josh Simmons over at Salesforce has tweeted a couple times about them running a quarterly version of the FOSS Contributor Fund. And we're still waiting to see what the results are going to be from that. There's a couple other organizations that are in various states of standing one up and who have not yet made public statements about it. And so I don't want to out them without their permission. But a couple of very large organizations who are going to learn completely different things from the things that we learned or that Salesforce has learned in their context. Some of them are very unique. So

yeah, really excited to see those announcements come out here later in the year, probably in the next couple of months as their work continues to evolve. In addition to the Blueprint document, we released the Starfish voter eligibility tool, which is the thing that we use to decide who gets to vote in a given month, that basically ingests a list of GitHub IDs and checks against GitHub to see if it sees activity in open source projects within a certain window of time and returns a list of people who should be invited to vote. That was another resource that we made available for running the fund. As one of the companies who's been bootstrapping their program,

as they have been using Starfish, they hit some limits that we didn't hit and have been contributing changes back into that as well. Good. Well, we'll link that in the show notes too. So if you're listening to this, head to the show notes, we'll have links to the Blueprint as well as Starfish. What is it? Starfish what? Just Starfish. Indeed. End slash Starfish. It's the voter eligibility tool. That's how I refer to it. Any feedback from Josh or Salesforce?

It seems like they've modified it a bit by doing quarterly versus monthly. Any other feedback from them? Not yet. I think it's early days for what they're learning. I don't know that they've made public statements about why they decided to go quarterly or not. But Josh and I talk on a regular basis. As they learn things, we're

going to share them with each other. We've created a small sub-community for the FOSS funders to get together and share their learnings and share their experiences and brainstorm on how to solve some of these problems. Let's talk about results. You do all this for the obvious reason, right? And we've talked about all the details of the blueprint, the thought process, you finding your way to Indeed, all the necessary mechanics to make this thing possible. What are the results? Is there a list somewhere where you've said that these are the open source projects we've funded?

Is that a desire for this? How can you quantify the monetary and project level results from all this effort? We did a six-month update about halfway through the year last year to talk about the projects that had won nomination in the first half of 2019. And those were Django, Git, Pandas, Homebrew, PyTest, and ESLint. And we have been talking about trying to get the 2019 wrap-up blog post out for a little while. Things have been a little wonky for the last quarter, as I'm sure you know. But I'm happy to talk about the projects that won, because there's a couple of really

interesting conversations in here. QGIS was one. Sentry was one, and we'll have to come back to that, because that's, I think, a really interesting conversation. Curl, OpenStreetMap, Prettier, and Let's Encrypt were the rest of the winners for 2019. So Sentry is on the list, huh? Sentry is on the list. OK.

That's one of the interesting conversations, because at the time that they were nominated, they had not moved to their BSL license, right? They were still a fully open source project. And when they won the nomination, it was interesting, right? They were nominated and I had taken the position that we weren't going to curate nominations and we were going to trust that the process would of the overall outcome for that. But the bottom line is they passed the money on down to their dependencies and they matched it and they set up a fund to support open source projects for 2020 of their own. I don't believe they're running it as a false contributor fund type thing, but it was a really interesting learning in the process and a really great outcome from that learning because it's certainly giving ten thousand dollars to a large project that was sort of fully owned by a vc backed startup wasn't the kind of thing that i was envisioning when i put up the call for what

projects we should be supporting and that is one of the learnings that feeds into the idea of having a sort of a nomination committee who vets and curates the nominations a little bit to make sure that projects that come through for vote are consistent with the spirit of the program but in this case you know had we filtered sentry out from that list they wouldn't have matched the donation they wouldn't have passed it on down to their own dependencies. They wouldn't likely have created a fund for their own program to support open source projects. So it was a good outcome. That's interesting, too, that aspect. I mean, I didn't expect them to be in the list.

And I mentioned David and Sentry and their change of license. And I left out the fact that the conversation Dave and I had was about their move to BSL license and the ramifications to Sentry and the open source project thereof because of that. So that was one detail I left out of my mention of that. But yeah, David's great. I love the fact that they took this and said,

you know what, thank you. Let's double the money and give to a project and kind of come up with their own criteria. And even if just for one instance, to some degree, adopted this FOSS fund you've got. I mean, that's kind of what they did. They took an internal look at, you know, from Century Engineers, et cetera, to nominate projects similar. So not maybe the full fund process you've got, but a variation of it as a result, which is cool. Yeah, they ran a little mini version of it for themselves and had great results and overall just worked out well, I think.

We had a few projects that came through the nominations earlier that didn't make sense for us to make contributions to, but the voting process tended to select projects that were more in line with the spirit of the program. So that was a really interesting outcome from the process and really interesting learning. It definitely, when they re-licensed after winning the nomination, it was a thing we had to think through, but they were eligible when they won, so we followed through with it.

Well, too, the license applies to future code, not past code, right? Because that's what the whole point of the BSL license, and I suppose, and this is sort of getting into the mucky waters of its open sourciness or not. But when the change went to, and this is sort of just too much detail probably but interesting as a tangent that once you transition to the BSL license or change the license, it's not passcode. That previous code was still licensed as previously licensed. It's future code that's now under the BSL license, and that had its own parameters, which we cover at length in that podcast. So if you're at all curious, I would suggest you listen to it. I'll put it in the show notes, but we talked at length about its open source evangeliness, which is a pretty interesting aspect, I think, for a company like Sentry to build a business around an open source project

and eventually open source their code. It's an interesting process, let's just say. You know, it wasn't the only project that put us in sort of this interesting position regarding the criteria, the eligibility criteria, right? Yeah. And I'm going to sort of this interesting position regarding the criteria, the eligibility criteria, right? Yeah. And I'm going to sort of sidestep the bigger question of do we call the BSL an open source license or not, while adding on the drive by addendum of it's not because it's not on the OSI approved list, but that's not what I want to talk about. The other project that put us in that position was OpenStreetMap because it's an open data project. And an open data license can't conform to the OSD and can't be an OSI-approved license. It's not actually possible for it, I don't think. But when it won the nomination,

we kind of went back and looked at it. OpenStreetMap is an OSI affiliate. They were sponsored to be an OSI affiliate based on the actions of a board member of the OSI. And it was about as strong of a recommendation that you could get for them to be qualified. And so we'll let it stand as it were. Curl was another interesting one because Curl's license is almost MIT. But not quite, right? But it was widely recognized to be an open source license, and at the time, it was the largest single

cash donation that Curl had received from any one entity. That record stood for about a month, and then somebody else wrote them a larger check. Yeah, Curl is interesting too. I mean, we've had some conversations with Daniel Stenberg, and we've sort of mapped that. It's an interesting open source project too, generally, because it's largely Daniel's work.

Obviously, there's a lot of community involvement there, but it's largely Daniel's opus. You know what I mean? Right. His life's work essentially is curl. And that's an interesting perspective. But I think it comes back to when I hear you say these two examples and if there's more, I'd love to hear them. But I think what comes back to it is having that firm foundation of your criteria of licensing.

Like you mentioned before, having that as clarity because clearly the clarity for you has given you the guardrails to push back on and sort of maneuver around. And so if you don't have those boundaries and that criteria in place, you're going to have internal wars if you don't have that clarity. Because someone's going to think they're going to have a different variation of open source. They're not going to care about the blurriness of open street maps and OSI, etc. They're just going to be like, hey, this is a project I support. It is open source. Why not do it? That's the reason why you need that clarity around licensing.

Right. And at the end of the day, for the projects that were arguably on the bubble, it was good to be able to err on the side of generosity. These were projects that were, you know, someone at the company felt passionately enough about them and how we used them that they nominated them for us to support.

And so finding a reason to say yes to those, we just felt more aligned with what we were trying to do. I'm Jared Santo, GoTimes producer and a loyal listener of the show. This is the podcast for diverse discussions from around the Go community. GoTimes panel hosts special guests

like Kelsey Hightower. And sometimes you can leverage your cloud provider and make margins on top. That's just good business. But when we're at the helm making the decision, we're like, yo, forget good business. I'm about to deploy Kafka to process 25 messages a year. It's nerd pride, right? Picks the brains of the Go team at Google. You don't get a good design by just grabbing features from other languages and gluing them together. Instead, we tried to build a coherent model for the language where all the pieces worked in concert. Shares their expertise from years in

the industry. Don't expect to get it right from the start. You'll almost definitely get it wrong. You'll almost definitely have to go back and change some things. So yeah, I think it goes back to what Peter said at the start, which is just make your code, write your code in a way that is easy to change. And then just don't be afraid to change it. And has an absolute riot along the way. Yeah, you know, that little small voice in your head that tells you not to say things. What is that? How do you get one? You want one of those like an in-app purchase it is go time please select a recent episode give it a listen and subscribe today we'd love to have you with us There's a new initiative you're working on now. It's called FOSS Responders.

And if I understand correctly, it started out as an organic thing led by you and Megan. I'm not sure how to say her last name, so I'm not going to try, but maybe you can for me. What's this about? Bird Sanicky is how you say Megan's last name. There you go, Bird Sanicky. Thanks, Megan. To FOSS Responders is about mobilizing resources to help people who have suffered irrecoverable losses due to conference and event cancellation due to COVID-19 and the associated effects of that. So I do a lot of conference speaking, or at least I did a lot of conference speaking. Hence the jumps that you mentioned. Thank you for clarifying that too.

No problem. That's why it's your outfit. For your own reference, I wear those every day at work as well. I'm wearing one now. Okay. Yeah. So I do a lot of conference speaking. I had a pretty full card over the first half of this year for events that I was speaking at. And as we saw those events getting canceled, some of them very last minute, we knew the reality was that the organizers, they're losing money over it, right? And not just because people want ticket refunds, but they're losing deposits on spaces. They're losing food and drink minimums that they had guaranteed,

in some cases losing revenue because they generated revenue for their organization by selling tickets to the events, or they're losing fundraising opportunities because they don't have a booth at these events where they primarily were engaging with individual donors. And so seeing sort of this wave of cancellations, I had put out a call for people who wanted to get together to talk about how to support individuals and organizations who were feeling those effects, you know, acutely. And that has evolved into this FOSS Responders Initiative. And it is very particularly focused on taking on this one aspect of the problem, right? We use this metaphor when we talk about the open source community within our program, that we want people to think about the open source ecosystem the way you think

about the ocean, right? It's not about a few giant fish. It's about all kinds of healthy activity at a lot of different levels. You don't want to throw things in the ocean that nobody wants. And in that metaphor, conferences and events we think of as the reefs, right? This is where people come together and congregate for many different kinds of activities. And sometimes that's just, you know, getting together to get FaceTime with developers. Sometimes developers drop new releases at events or communities use them to build their base of adopters and a wide range of activities. In that metaphor, this wide range of cancellations is like a reef bleaching event, right?

If we want those reefs to be there in a year, they need some help. And so we want to make sure that these community events that support our wider open source ecosystem are going to be able to happen next year. Yeah, that's an interesting metaphor, honestly. The reef bleaching event, I hadn't considered that. And I've definitely watched things around the coral reef and its disappearance and the concerns around that for ocean life. And, you know, it's similar to COVID-19 and similar to the coronavirus. It was to some degree easy to say it's only happening over there when it was just somewhere else. Right. happening over there when it was just somewhere else right and now that it's happening everywhere it's obviously in your initial purview versus somewhere far away right so it's easy to to

remove yourself and not have empathy is what i'm trying to say but the metaphor of the bleaching event for reefs you know that's that's interesting because if you wanted to be there like you said when it's time again to have them next year or whatever it might be, you need to help them out. I hadn't considered it like that. I'm glad you framed it that way. Yeah. That's not a metaphor of the entire foster responders group. It's just the way that I've explained it to people, right?

Like, why is it important to support these events? Because this is where our community gathers, right? And we want them to be able to gather at these places next year. And some of the events won't survive, and that's kind of the nature of things, but we want as many of them to be around here for us and for the community next year as we can. So this was also an intentional choice to not try to address with everything that could possibly be addressed within the open source community

in response to COVID-19. There's so much work that's being done there between the open source ventilator designs that are going around and open data projects that are going around and the Moss Fund folks announcing their initiative to provide seed grants for open source projects that are doing work in this area. There's a lot of different kinds of work that are being done. We wanted to focus our effort on this particular area and really prioritize support for people who might otherwise fall through the cracks of the support system. So I'm much more interested in seeing a support that meetup organizer who's out a couple thousand dollars or that small regional conference organizer who's out a few thousand dollars because they're the the folks that are going to take it on the chin but you know there's a range of impacts right um the python software

foundation when they canceled pycon announced in a blog post like this is what we're going to have to pull out of our reserves in order to make up the losses. And it was hundreds of thousands of dollars. And if they have to shift focus away from infrastructure, maintenance, and improvements, and stop working on improvements to PyPI and focus on fundraising instead, that means we're not getting the work done on PyPI that we all need as a community. So it's a big problem. We're still getting our collective hands around how big the impact was on these conference and event organizers,

and as well the individuals who were out of pocket going to these events who weren't able to get refunds either from the hotel or from the conference. Most of us who travel for work, our work folks, you know, covered that for us. But if you were a designer who was going there to meet clients or a boot camp graduate who was going to one of these events out of pocket to try and secure your next job, the impact is felt much more significantly. So if someone needs financial help, where's the line drawn? Who is available to, I guess, submit? You've got three buttons here. The first one says, I need financial help or other help

because an event was canceled. The second one says, we had to cancel our event and we need financial aid. So this is an organizer in this case. And the last one says, we need people to help us organize or respond. So that first button really is about those individuals who need help. So the designers who are going to find a job that couldn't find it, etc. Or, you know, I was traveling out of pocket and can't get my money back from the hotel. Gotcha. And there's an open collective with funds in it that people have contributed into.

And there's a team that kind of reviews those requests and takes that on to try to help meet those needs. That second button is really about event organizers. And that third one is sort of opening an avenue for people who have had to cancel event and are rapidly trying to pivot to a virtual event of some kind or just need some help organizing their own response to it to request help that's not financial in nature. Not everybody needs money. Sometimes they just need expertise on how to run these things effectively virtually or organizers or coordinators. Well, to put it into perspective, you've got a dynamic list there, an air table

that is tech events canceled due to this crisis, this whole pandemic we're in with COVID-19 and coronavirus. That air table link that you're referencing is maintained by the wider community. So this is not a list of curated events that FOSS Responders is looking to address. It is the events known by the community that have been canceled. Last time I looked, there were, I think, approaching 70 events in there. Well, no, it's more than that now. It's 151 based on its dynamicism. I haven't looked at it in a minute.

Maybe it's growing. I mean, let me refresh it here quick. No, it's still 151. But the point is, I never really considered how many i knew there was impact but and i think the point of this conversation is is to raise the awareness to even listening audiences saying like take into account how much has been canceled due to this and you know i do like that analogy of the reef because we don't want it to go away. You know, and bleaching events do happen. Hopefully it can in a healthy way recover.

And I think the same can be said about these conferences. And some of them are ran by Microsoft and some of them are ran by, you know, large organizations that can potentially sustain that hit financially far more than a smaller individual or regional conference that really needs the help that, as you said before in your own words, takes it on the chin. So just having, not that you're trying to help all these in this organization, but having a comprehensive list of, one, is eye-opening, and then two, being able to whittle that down to those who truly need the help to get through and to come back the next year or the next season of conferences. Right.

And we're really relying on the people who have organized those events, specifically the people who need help because they were organizing a community event that got canceled and they're out of pocket on hundreds or thousands of dollars of expenses, we're really relying on them to come ask for help. We have a process in place where we're doing some outreach to some of those folks to kind of get our hands around the needs. And we're aggregating, you know, the public information that we find about organizations that we know are in need based on their cancellations.

That's where the Python Software Foundation information came from. The Drupal Association has also made some information available about what they expect their losses to be if they have to cancel DrupalCon. I don't think they've made a decision on that one yet. The losses for many people will be large, some larger than others. Unfortunately, some will just have to take that hit. That's just the, I mean, not everybody, I don't want to say it in like unempathetic terms, but like not everybody is recoverable, I suppose.

Like there's, I guess that sort of dovetails into like who should donate to this collective to do this. Because, I mean, some people are experiencing their own financial hardships, you know, whether it's a job loss or furloughed. I've got several friends, like literally several friends, close friends that had great jobs, great incomes, and are now furloughed, you know. So there's a little less money to go around. So I suppose when it says, you know, we can give and help, who should give? Like, who are you calling on to give to this collective to support this effort? There's a lot of us who weren't furloughed, right? Who were very fortunate and were very lucky to be in a position where we can effectively work from home

during a time like this. Some of us who already were, right? And who have watched the rest of the industry trying to catch up to what it means for everyone to be remote. But for those of us who already were, right, and who have watched the rest of the industry trying to catch up to what it means for everyone to be remote. But for those of us as individuals who have been fortunate enough and privileged enough and lucky enough to keep our jobs through this, this is the time for us to collectively kind of open our wallets up and help make sure that everyone has support. And in the broader sense, I think we've seen a lot of that. But I don't know anybody who works at a nonprofit who isn't sweating right now, you know, because, you know, while we've seen a lot of positive activity for people banding together to support each other and to support the things that they're passionate about, there's a lot of sort of belt tightening happening around as well, right? People who are holding back on giving that otherwise they would have done. At the individual label, if you've got room to spare, whether you donate something into FOSS responders or just donate it into some of your local causes, I want to challenge everybody to find what is a comfortable level for them to give and give it to their food banks, to their aid organizations in their areas.

But if you're someone who uses open source every day and you rely on open source projects every day, I really want to encourage you to check in with those projects. Check in with the maintainers of those projects and see how they're doing. If you've got the ability to give money directly to projects or directly to maintainers, you should do that. And you don't need to give money to FOSS responders to do that. Just go make those donations directly. If you're interested in helping kind of offset the individual expenses for people who, you know, had planned to go to these conferences and events and those events were canceled and they weren't able to get their funds back and you want to make contributions to weren't able to get their funds back and

you want to make contributions to FOSS responders, that would be great and we would love to have your support. I've been doing a lot of organization to organization work, reaching out to folks who either have adopted FOSS contributor funds or who have been talking about adopting FOSS contributor funds and asking them if they want to participate in the Q2 funding event that we're doing in support of the FOSS Responders Initiative. So I think there are organizations who are well positioned to open up and show up for the community and to increase their level of support for these event organizers and the organizations behind these events to help make sure that we still have a healthy open source and free and open source

conference ecosystem next year. You have an event coming up on May 22nd. This is a virtual funding event for raising awareness. What's going on there? It's going to be modeled off of the open source speed dating event that was run at FOSDEM. We're going to take a number of the applications from organizations who've asked for help because they had to cancel conferences. And we're going to work on matchmaking them

with organizations who can provide some funding to help get them some relief. When we put together those quarterly events for the FOS Contributor Fund last year, we already had some kind of FOS funder event on the books for Q2, and we just decided to direct that effort into pulling together the virtual funding event for FOSS responders. So Indeed is showing up with $10,000, and we're talking with another of other organizations

who are going to show up with funds as well. And the goal is to amplify the needs for these event organizers, make sure that everyone has visibility into them, make sure that we understand what they are, and to try to get them some financial aid as part of that process. The virtual funding event is one thing, but it's also pretty interesting for those who aren't really able to implement your full blueprint, to commit such a large amount each year to funding open source that they can come into an a la carte event, so to speak, and still play a role. Yeah, that was definitely the idea to

provide a way for people to show up with just a single donation and say, hey, I love this idea of the FOSS Contributor Fund. I want to get more involved in supporting the open source community. I can't get out money for an entire program for the year, but I've got some funds that I can show up for a one-off. So these quarterly events are a good opening for that. Somebody who's gone to so many events, what's this new normal for events? What do you think?

This year, there's so many canceled events. Do you see any? Are you anticipating any in-person events this year, this calendar year, 2020? Oh, that's a tough prediction. Anticipating, I'm hoping for. I think a lot of things have to go right for us to get there but the new normal for events you know there were already some conversations happening kind of around these events and around the industry about you know the the climate impact of doing all this travel and the climate impact of running

these events and there were already conversations about you know how can we reduce the amount of travel that's necessary to do these events. And I think that this particular conversation about how to bring our events virtual more effectively was barreling down on us one way or the other. It just got accelerated. So I expect we're going to see two things come out of this. I think we're going to see a wider range of virtual events based off of the rapid innovation that's happening

right now with people who are trying to pivot their events to virtual as quickly as they can and trying a lot of different things. So I think we're going to see a lot more of that and some kind of new standard ways of doing things for virtual events in the longer term. I think we're also going to see, you know, for organizations who relied heavily on, you know, a single event or a small number of events for either operational income or reaching out to fundraisers and everything else that's associated with that. I think we're going to see those organizations kind of use a variety of methods

of rising to meet those needs as a response. So we'll see fewer big one-off events that fund an organization for a year and kind of a wider range of smaller things to kind of diversify the risk there a little bit. That's what I think is going to happen out of this, but if you'd asked me what I thought was going to happen a month ago, I don't know that I would have been right. Well, I like your perspective on the

push to change around the carbon footprint and the flying and the impact to the environment because of that. Because that was naturally on there. I actually had some opportunities for some of our hosts. We run many podcasts and a lot of people are involved in change log media things. And so we have lots of places to go and lots of things to do. And a few of them were like, you know what, I'm respecting my desire for a shrunken carbon footprint this year and I'm going to resist flying for non-necessary events. And that's cool with me.

I'm glad you feel that way. And I think that's – you're right. That was eventually – it was already kind of on the doorstep of some folks considering that. And I think what's going to be – just to dovetail off that a little bit, what's going to be really interesting is to see this forced change for everyone and some sort of analytical look at the climate change because of the lack of all this flying from everyone vehicles you know i drive my vehicle like maybe once a week now maybe you know i got two cars and now i'm thinking like i don't really even need two cars well we've got two kids you know my wife and i having two cars is just very a lot easier for the family to be mobile individually now we're thinking maybe we just need one car you know and

so there's a lot a lot of uh you know carbon dioxide less out there now because of all these things and just less people doing things and there might be a look in and more data to say see if we change in these ways this is how the environment changes because of that and so we may we might be which is great because that's data right data forces change that is true scientifically true you know and if there's data to support this change and i think that you're you might be right that we might see more virtual events because we'll now have more data to make these wiser choices for the environment and the earth and in our health too i mean smog and all these things

are terrible for people's lungs yeah and i think the conference ecosystem evolved the way that it did because this was how we connected with each other. And I think there's a lot of us that are still looking for that same connection. We've seen people kind of building new ways to connect with each other over the last couple of months in the U.S. that just people wouldn't have gone for six months ago. Right. I can't imagine any of my friends saying yes to a virtual happy hour over video conference software in October. Right.

They just would have said, just come over. Yeah. What's wrong with you? Why? Yeah. Right. And, you know, by being forced into, you know, finding new ways for us to connect here, I think it's going to cause us to go back and kind of really rethink the ways that we have been connecting with each other at these events. And I think that the events themselves are still going to provide important sort of centers of gravity around activity.

And I wouldn't be surprised if some of them you know survive into the future as virtual events but uh if we want them to do that they're going to need our support during the transition and sort of making the jump so definitely you know for for people who sponsor events showing up for those events as a sponsor while they navigate this tough time is one of the best things that you can do for them. And continuing to do that makes it easier for them to navigate this and be here for us in the long run. Totally agree with that. You know, on the notion of connection, I do want to double down the emphasis on while this may be happening, double down on human connection. Get creative.

I'm going to take this chance to mention our podcast brain science so if you got a changelog.com slash brain science myself and dr mira reese we cover i say doctor because she's a doctor you know uh of clinical psychology and we explore the human brain to understand behavior change have a formation mental health and i think really more importantly what it means to be human. And what it means to be human is to connect, right? We're a social species. So if you're listening to this show and that piques your interest and you're disconnected more so from your community and you're feeling this crunch of missing your conferences and

missing your people, then I would encourage you to listen to that show and just be reinforced that the importance of human connection, right? There's no backup to human connection. You can't replace that with something else. Human connection is required to be human. It's part of who we are. Dwayne, it's always fun talking to you. I'm curious if you have anything to trail out on.

You got the ear of the open source community, developer community. You got this blueprint out there for open source offices and organizations to consider when looking at the way they support and value open source. More so even the people in the organization, how they support and value open source. And you've got this awesome thing for these tech events, FOSS responders, to be able to support them in this dire time. Anything else you want to close with to share with the audience? Yeah, I'm going to try to roll it up into four things. If you use open source, if you rely on open source, check in with the projects, check in with the communities that you rely on, and make sure they have what they need. If you're able to give to them to get involved in helping them organize to respond to

this, everybody needs help right now. I really want to encourage folks to get out there and support their maintainers, support their projects. If you want to help us as we organize the FOSS Responders initiative, if you go to fossresponders.com, there's all kinds of information there about how to connect with us on Slack, on Matrix, to talk about how to help organize. We have calls every week. We have working groups that need team members. And so if you're looking for a way to get involved, come join us. There's definitely room and opportunity for you to do that. Excellent. If you want to for a way to get involved, come join us. There's definitely room and opportunity for you to do that. Excellent.

If you want to try out FOSS Contributor Fund in your company, whether you want to run it once for a month for $10,000 or show up at a quarterly event with some money and participate in some way or talk about the blueprint and how it could work at your company, email opensource at indeed.com. That'll come to me, and we will connect and talk about how to support you there. And I want to give a particular shout out

to the Open Source 101 folks who, in the course of about a month, pivoted their Open Source 101 event from Austin to an Open Source 101 at Home event that they're doing virtually on May 12th. We're thrilled to be a sponsor of that event. Tickets are $19, and we know it's the same crew that run all things open, and we want to make sure that we show up and support them.

I'll echo that one as well. We love Todd. We love the work that they're doing with all things open and open source 101. So $19 for a virtual event is not much to pay whatsoever, and you get to support the thing to keep going. And hopefully the one that I'm still waiting for is if all things open happens this October. So we look forward to that each year as well. And I know you do as well because you're a staple there.

I've seen you there several times. Yeah. In fact, that's where I first met you. I've forgotten about it. Is that where we first met? Yeah, it is. Yeah. That's where we first met.

2016, I believe it was. So that was like forever ago. But that's where I first met you. You've got a sharper mind for it than i do but yeah because we met we were talking about i made a point to come up and talk to you about the peter hinchin's episode which is still wow yeah i think a stellar stellar episode of the changelog oh man you bring that show up i almost come to tears just thinking about it man that's such a good show yeah i i do every time i listen to it i was thankful that you came up and said hello to because you know that's an open invitation

to anybody like you may not see me at an event anytime in the near future but when and if you ever do when it happens again like you Dwayne it was awesome like I really appreciated you coming and saying hello because I didn't know you I didn't know you were a super fan of the show I didn't know what you did at all and because of that one

act of you know that act of vulnerability to come and say hey Adam I'm a fan nice to meet you whatever we're now friends you're back on the show didn't know what you did at all. And because of that one act of, you know, that act of vulnerability to come and say, Hey, Adam, my fan, nice to meet you, whatever. We're now friends. You're back on the show.

We follow what you do. We support what you do. And we're very, we're very close. I would say, you know, we want to support however, support however we can.

So we become friends. You know, I, I think it's important to, to say thank you when someone does something that you love. Right. And advice. And whether that goes for, I think it's important to say thank you when someone does something that you love. Good advice. And whether that goes for podcast hosts or teachers or your favorite open source maintainer, if all you do is say thank you, you're going to do something that maybe nobody else has done that day.

There you go. Adam, thanks for running a great show. Thank you, Dwayne, for saying so. And audience, that's great instructions for you. Go thank somebody. Gratitude is going to help you start every day with gratitude. Be grateful for so many things to be grateful for. Even in the midst of down times, there's still grateful things to be had.

And say thank you to those that are helping you and you're helping. Thanks, Dwayne. Thanks, Adam. All right, let us know in the comments what you think about this FOSS contributor fund. Will your company implement it? If it was implemented, would you have a better influence over the open source that you not only want to support, but the open source that you rely upon in your day-to-day work? Of course, you can comment on all our shows at changelog.com.

Open your show notes and click discuss on ChangeLog News. We love to hear from you. Support us by telling your friends, send a text, send a tweet, write a blog post, make a list of your favorite podcasts. Whatever you want to do, we would appreciate it. Special thanks to our core partners who get it, Fastly, Linode, and Rollbar. And of course, thank you to the beat freak, Breakmaster Cylinder, who brings us all of our beats. And we have a master feed that brings you all of our podcasts in one single feed. It's the easiest way to listen to everything we ship. Head to changelog.com slash master to subscribe or search for ChangeLog Master in your podcast

app. You'll find us. Thanks for listening this week. We'll see you next time. Bye.