The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Sustaining Open Source and Building an Open Company (Interview)

Episode Date: May 9, 2013

Adam Stacoviak, Andrew Thorp and Kenneth Reitz talk with Chad Whitacre about sustaining open source through Gittip, building an open company and more.

This is the Change Log and I'm your host Adam Stachowiak. We're a member supported blog and podcast that covers what's fresh and new in open source. Tune in live every Tuesday at 3 p.m. Pacific, 6 p.m. Eastern at thechangelog.com slash live. And this is episode 0.8.7, recorded April 30th, 2013. We're joined today by Chad Whitaker, the creator of Get Tip, also known as Get It. If you found this show on iTunes, we're also on the web at the changelog.com and if you're on twitter follow the changelog because that is us enjoy the show welcome back everybody this is the changelog it is third no it's not thursday it's tuesday i'm so Welcome back, everybody. This is The Change Log. It is Thursday.

No, it's not Thursday. It's Tuesday. I'm so used to saying it's Thursday, but it's not because it's Tuesday. We take this show live every Tuesday at 3 p.m. Pacific, 6 p.m. Eastern. Got an awesome show lined up today. If you have not heard, the podcast is back. This is the third one going out. If you're waiting for 0.8.6,

it's coming soon. I'm sorry about that. It's just taking a little bit longer than normal. But we do have some fun guests with us. We've got my ever-popular, always fresh, always new, Andrew Thorpe. How's it going, Adam?

How is it going? And we've got Kenneth. Kenneth Wright's here. What's going on, Kenneth? Not a whole lot. How's it going, Adam? How is it going? And we got Kenneth. Kenneth Wright's here. What's going on, Kenneth? Not a whole lot. How are you doing? I'm fantastic, man. I'm just, it's, you know, it's such a good day.

Today is a good day. Such a good day. It's a little overcast here, unfortunately. Where's here? Because, I mean, you never know where you're at. In the hills in Virginia. Next week, if I'm on the show, I'll be in Amsterdam, though. Oh, boy. I'm going to try to do it. We'll me tell we'll have to get you on the satellite for that one yeah yeah that new rig you just you just had commissioned right

yeah with all the t-shirt money well what the thing is is we were promoting uh uh what is it open.nasa.gov and so they gave us a satellite it's pretty sweet it's awesome yeah it's just like that and and speaking of satellites we got the uh get up extraordinaire with us chad whittaker what's up bud how's it going man thanks for having me on the show so we're here today to talk about sustaining open source can you help us talk about that chad oh my heavens not quite yeah we actually have to get started maybe maybe a quick introduction of who you are absolutely all right so chad whittaker is my name get it is my game get it.com is a website which primarily right now is being used by open source developers and the companies that love

them and it's a crowdfunding site where you can go and you can set up a dollar a week or $3 a week or 25 cents a week as a gift to someone whose work you love and admire and are inspired by. So it's ongoing, sustainable crowdfunding. Every week, every Thursday, we pull money into the system, we shuffle it around in the system and we push money out into people's bank accounts so they can buy beer and you know pay a bill or something or whatever they want it's it's gift money that's what it is gift money so

yeah before we go too deeply into the show just for the listeners sake who are out there thinking it's get tip how do you say it well it depends i say get it and that's a change i used to say get tip and a lot of people still do say get tip and if you want to be old school you can keep saying get tip i say get it because the vision for this thing is to take it beyond the tech community and the open source world and to get musicians on there, to get bloggers on there, to get artists on there, people that have no clue what GitHub is, for example, or Git, right? And in my experience so far, folks like that, when they see the word, they say Gidip. That's the first thing that comes out of their mouth. So I'm sort of

trying to skate ahead of the puck on that one and get myself used to saying get it because I think in the long run, that's how it's going to end up. And do you say puck because you're a Penguins fan or what? Uh-oh. Yes. Let's go with yes on that one.

Do you miss Lemieux or what? Wow. Lemieux. Don't we all? I don't know. Yeah. Are you a big hockey fan? Absolutely, man.

I'm from Pittsburgh. I love the Penguins, man. Yeah. 100%. I'm not a big hockey fan, but I like – Well, did that get mentioned on the air yet? So I'm here in Pittsburgh. Yeah.

We were talking about that. Yeah. We definitely aren't worried about saying where Chad is from because he's very personal in his Twitter profile. You know, yeah. I mean, right, that's a thing. Can you explain? Well, so I was on this Reddit thread like a year ago. I had this thing where I was like, I'm going to friend everybody on Facebook, right?

I was like, I'm going to try and friend like all 750 you know, 750 billion people or whatever it was at the time they're on Facebook. So I started this thing and, you know, some folks on Reddit got interested in it. And so we started trying to friend each other. Long story short, this one guy on the thread was like, I look forward to being friended by you, you know, in five years or whatever when you get to me. And I, I essentially doxed him, right? Like I took his handle on Reddit and found out, you know, like where he was graduating from high school in two weeks kind of thing, you know, and it kind of freaked me out. And that was sort of a wake up call for me about digital privacy, right? And how there is none. And that was the point, you know, I ended up like backing away from doxing this kid and like

deleted my comment or whatever. But I was like, well like well you know what have i got to lose you can find it all out anyway you know might as well just live out in the open so i mean it's part of the whole open this shtick but that was like that was the event that precipitated it it's like i'm gonna try this see what happens so now in your bio you have your address and your phone number right exactly so my twitter bio uh what does it say i'm gonna go click to it but yeah it says you know yes that's my address my phone number does it really yes address founder of get it.com call me at i'm not gonna say it email me at i'm calling me at 412-925-4220 email me at chat at zayweb.com and when i say visit me at 716 Park Road, 1503.

And so what does your wife say about this? You know, it almost came up the other night. Does she not know? No, she kind of knows, I think. She's not a super online kind of – she uses Facebook some. She's got a Chromebook like two weeks ago. and so now she can actually get on the internet. Before that, she had this like old laptop that barely worked. Yeah.

Yeah, she's less open about – she's less gung-ho about it than I am, but I mean that's – she knows who she married. I'm not going to say one way or the other about it and not to sound awful, but when all that stuff was going on with the PyCon stuff, that was one of the major reasons why. I started to almost feel like whatever semblance of digital privacy I can achieve, this is the reason why I would want it is to prevent this from happening. And that stuff, I mean, shoot, we don't need to talk about that because I don't want to shed light on it. But that's something that, like, I don't know. In a world today, it's something that people have different opinions on. And, I mean, you're rightfully so.

Yeah, it's a brave new world, right? I mean, I sort of have this idea, like, you know, at some point there will be a scandal, right? I'll be, like, dragged into scandal and somebody will be like you know from one side or another to be like chad did this or chad did this and i don't know i sort of i'm hoping by getting into the habit now of being open that it will make it easier when it's tough you know i mean that's not true just in this the case of scandal but just in you know in general it's like you know you gotta you gotta start early when it doesn't hurt quite so much

if you want to have big things that are also open. I don't know. Yeah, that's where it's coming from. So transparency is a really big part of what you're trying to do. Do you want to talk about open companies at all? Oh, goodness. Yeah, so open companies. So I'm trying to run Gidip as openly as possible.

Well, before you do that, let's talk about what Gidip is just so everyone kind of knows before we kind of get into the crux of it. So why don't you give like a, you know, just the short and dirty of what Gidip actually is. Man, it would be great.

Okay, so it's nice to do this with some screenshots, right? Like, so if you go to Gidip.com and you look at the homepage, you're going to see, right now you see a list of the top receivers and the top givers and the top new participants, right? People that have just joined the site. And you click through to one of those and you see a profile. So you get a profile page on GetUp, right? You sign up for GetUp, you get a profile, and you have this opportunity to sort of make a statement.

In the database, it's called your statement. That's the column. Your statement, I am making the world better by dot, dot, dot, fill in the blank. So the idea is that we've got these industries, open source software, the software industry being almost chief among them, where you've got all these people giving their work away for free, right? I mean, that's like the heart and soul of open source, right? You're doing it for the love. And so Gidip is a way to give

back. So you go to somebody's profile page and you see, you know, I'm Mike Bayer and I, you know, write the SQL Alchemy library, which is a really popular SQL library for Python. And, you know, I do this other stuff too, right? Then you have an opportunity there to click a button, $1, $3, $6, up to $24 or 25 cents is the minimum. So it's a small gift. You know, you can't give them $100 a week. You can't give them $500 a week. You can give them up to $24 a week. You set up that gift. The idea is you're going to set up these gifts to a bunch of different people and that's going to tick over every week. Then you're both a giver and a receiver on the site. As soon as you've signed in to give to somebody

else, you're also open to receiving gifts on the site. The idea is to build a social network where you're linking people according to their relationships they've already got. But there's money on the line. Try to take it to the next level here and see if we can stir some stuff up with it. So that's the basic mechanism is you go to somebody's profile, you read their profile, you set up a gift to them, and that gift is recurring. So it's every week. Right now we don't actually support one-time gifts at all.

It's a big feature request, and we're talking about it. What's the feature request? One-time gifts. So I'll give you $20 and then walk away. That's not the essence of Gidip. The essence of Gidip is weekly recurring gifts. Yeah, because you're trying – I mean this is the play – Kenneth, I know you mentioned talking about the openness of it, which is so unique to the way you're trying to build it. But the sustaining part is – I know that there's a lot of talk out there about just – I know you said – I didn't know you were taking this beyond open source either, but that was news to me. But I know that sustaining is a big topic at least over the last couple of years really because people get burned out and just – there's lots of this.

I mean how long have we had donate buttons on open source projects, PayPal buttons on open source projects, Pledgy? We've had these mechanisms, but what I'm seeing is that one-time gifts aren't enough. Because on the one hand, my bills are recurring. My bills aren't one-time. Rent isn't a one-time thing. And then on the other hand, awesomeness isn't a one-time thing, as my friend Bruce Adams said, you don't stop being awesome tomorrow. Like Gidip is built on this idea that you're really buying into someone's story and what – like you're inspired by the work that they do and you want to support them. Do you guys know about the MacArthur Genius Grants? Is that on your radar?

I'm not familiar with it, no. Yeah, so OK. So the MacArthur Foundation is this big nonprofit philanthropic foundation and they give out these grants and i think you know it's like 30 or 40 people a year get these it's a half a million dollars no strings attached and it pays out over like five years right so it's basically like a solid salary for five years no strings attached no questions asked and they call it the genius grant right because the idea is like you're such a genius that whatever we told you to do with this for five years, no strings attached, no questions asked. And they call it the genius grant, right? Because the idea is like, you're such a genius that whatever we told you to do with this money

would just be dumber than what you would come up with, right? Because like, you're the genius, you know? So we're just going to give you this money just to see what you're going to do with it, right? Because like, you've already proven yourself, like you've done all this awesome stuff in your field and it's across all different fields, right? So you've done all this awesome stuff. We're going to give you this money just because we know you're going to do something awesome with it. And so that's one way to think about Gidip, right? Is it's sort of crowdsourced genius grants. So very much sustainable. We want people to be set free to pursue their passion, right? And, and work, uh, you know, work on what they love. And so why did you decide to build it as kind of mentioned earlier in this open,

this open way that you're doing it? Why? Well, it's the only way to do it. I mean, first of all, just because that's, uh, I mean, that's a part of my personality, right? I mean, hanging it all out there on Twitter, like we were talking about, um, you know, I know, I mean, that's the way I want to live. You know, it's the future I want to live in. I want to live in a future where we've got transparent, open institutions. That's one of the things I love about open source, you know. You know, the best of open source, you can go and you just find out how it's made.

Like, if I want to find out, you know, so I'm coming from the Python world. I'm starting to make connections in a lot of the communities. But Python is sort of my scene. So if I want to find out how Python is made, I can just go on the issue tracker. You know, I can get involved in the mailing list. And that level of transparency and openness, I think it's just a really good thing for humanity. You know, I think it's just something I want to see more of. I look at, you know, I look at all this stuff over the past few years with the financial

industry, right? And, you know, people are crying out for openness and transparency in government and in corporations. And so this is sort of a, you know, get up as me planting a seed and saying, can we get to a stage where our big entities, like our big organizations and the ways that we organize ourselves are done in this transparent way? You know, it our big organizations and the ways that we organize ourselves are done in this transparent way. You know, it's trying to apply the insights of open source software of the open source world to wider domains, to paraphrase Eric Raymond at a certain point. So I don't know, man.

I mean, it's, it was the only way I could think about doing it, you know? I mean, why would you not? Why would you, you know you know push it back like why do something closed anymore it's no fun i guess the sometimes the reason why people choose well i guess not sometimes most people choose to do closed things is is at some level in their humanity a fear of failure right you'd rather fail silently than you know in a room full of people and so i think i definitely have you failed silently no i mean yeah sure yeah i've had some silent failures before i'm cunning i'm i'm you're cunning yeah i'm sneaky

yeah you're right i mean you're right like you put your name out there you put you know you put something out there it's's a risk, right? I'm kind of with Andrew on it though. Like I, I don't want to be private, but there's a level of me that I want to keep personal that, listening, you know, you got lots of internet friends and inner pals that are really good friends. But, you know, those who are really close to you know who you are in your heart. It's a little different than your internet personality potentially, you know. So I think I kind of – I'll hold that a little sacred to my heart. Yeah. And we're just different though.

No, I mean, yes. A, people are different and people have different comfort levels. And the last thing I want to do is force anybody, you know, into a situation they're not interested in. You know, so another key part of the way I'm running this, it's voluntary, right? That's another part of open source culture. Like you're not, you know, you're not forced to work on something you don't want to work on, right? It's open source. It's free.

It's, you know, right? It's open source. It's free. Personal autonomy is prized. Yeah, so obviously there's stuff that I don't share, mostly at my wife's behest. Yeah, so there's some – right. I mean – all right. So to get back to maybe – maybe to get back to the open company idea, the way to define an open company is it shares as much as possible. It charges as little as possible, number two. And number three, it doesn't pay its employees. So I mentioned that.

That's a tough one, that last one. You said that one a little quiet too. Were you scared? It doesn't pay its employees. It doesn't pay its employees it doesn't pay its employees but we're hiring but we're hiring exactly right well i mentioned it because you know we share as much as possible but we don't share everything right like you don't have i hope the password to our database right uh you know you don't have our secret api keys right you know so we share as much as possible, but not everything, right? But if you want to sit on, on like the board meetings, those are, those happen in public, right? Pretty much. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. I had a company come to me today in private email and they were like, Chad, can we do this, you know, uh, you know,

promotional deal together? Can we do this cross marketing promotional thing? Uh, you know, and by the way, we respect the open company thing, but we want to do this privately. We want to plan this privately, and then we'll come out with a bang together. And I said, sorry, I can't do it. I can maybe try and work with you, but anything I'm going to do for this has to be done public. I just feel like I don't have the right to make any decisions privately because the GitHub community has entrusted so much to me. And I take that very seriously, or I try to. Yeah, so it's interesting.

I think the way that you have it on your frequently asked questions page is that you and only one other person have access to the sensitive data. And I think that makes sense. Obviously, you don't want to make – you can't make other people's information public when they've – when it's sensitive for them because like you said, you can't make the decision what other people want to share. Exactly. So if the company were to come to you and say we want to work with you, but we have sensitive data that we want to give you access to, but you can't share it. I mean you have to take that into consideration, right? Yeah, absolutely. So would you tend to just – like I see you tweeted about it a little bit and you kind of turned the offer down a little bit. But if it was something like that where it was more just, hey, you can't share our internals.

Like the plan of what we do together can be public, but what we share with you privately you can't share. And you're okay with that. Yeah, so that wasn't the case with the company I just mentioned. But let me bring out on the show right now Balanced Payments. Are you guys familiar with Balanced? Just from you tweeting about it all day. Because you've been pretty excited about it. Oh, especially today, man.

I love the way this lined up. So Balanced Payments is the payment provider underlying GetIt. And they're a really close partner of mine uh i went through two other payment providers in about a month uh at when get it first started and was kind of left high and dry so i was with one that got acquired by groupon and they disappeared off the face of the earth then i went to stripe which is gorgeous right i mean stripes top-notch product but i was violating their terms of service and they're not really designed for marketplaces. I mean, they're sort of bolting on some marketplace features

but, you know, the Gidip is weird enough that we didn't fit within the feature set that they had available. So they asked me to leave politely. I'm very professional about it. You know, so a month into Gidip, you know, it's going great guns. We're getting, you know, some Hacker News traction

and all this stuff and some growth. You know, first thing in a decade that I've tried, it's growing and all of a sudden, you know, the going great guns we're getting you know some hacker news traction and all this stuff and some growth you know first thing in a decade that i've tried it's growing all of a sudden you know the bottom falls out again two payment providers are gone balance payments comes along and you know is it a interesting point in their own development where they were you know they were pretty hungry and they came along and they said chad how about we submit a pull request to your repo to integrate with our service? Right. So this was a, yeah, I said, thank you. Yes, please.

Right. You know, so they showed up. I'll settle that one. And they did. They submitted this pull request to integrate with their service. You know, and the next week we were running unbalanced. And we did the PCI compliant transfer from Stripe over to Balanced. And we're off and running.

I've never looked back. So now I have a really close partnership with those folks. And it's been great. So I mention it in this context because last November, I don't know if it was on your guys' radar, but we had this bout of fraud. These folks showed up on Gidip and they plugged in stolen credit cards and started dumping stolen money into Gidip, which was interesting. But that was sort of – it was a bit of a test of our relationship, balanced and I, because fraud, anti-fraud is very, very closed as a rule. Traditionally, any information you leak is aiding, you know, the enemy, right, the fraudsters, and giving them, you know, a potential upper hand in the constant battle.

So that was something we had to work out together, you know, and I ended up on a phone call with, you know, their risk officer and their lawyer, you know, who I had met before that, you know, we were on friendly terms, so we got into this call and it was, you know, it was a little bit tense. It was like, so I'm trying because I'm trying to do this openly, right? So I was dealing with this fraud incident very openly and I was blogging about it and I was tweeting about it and I put out a whole page on our website, on the Gidip website, detailing who I was flagging as fraudulent, you know, and where the, who the money was coming from and going to write very detailed information. It wasn't hiding anything.

So we had this call that was like, all right, so where's the boundary line? You know, like you guys have to let me know when I crossed that line of your comfort, you know, when, when you feel, you know, cause we've, we've got to have that boundary established, right. Where you feel comfortable, uh, you know, and, and I'm able comfortable and I'm able to do what I need to do in terms of openness. And we work through it. But you're right, man. When another company has needs like that where they're like, we've got our own policies in place, obviously, yeah, I have to respect that. Yeah, so I want to circle back real quick. When Stack was talking about that I think a lot of people go closed because of fear of failure, that may be or may not be. I'm not sure.

But I think that we kind of hit on it a little bit. I want to kind of go into it a little deeper. But the beauty of open source and not necessarily open company because I think there's a lot more to that. I think we can get into a lot more to that. But the beauty of open source and how we're trying to hit on this right now is if you fail – or yeah, there always is failure. It's always an option whether you're an open source project, a closed project. It doesn't matter. But the beauty is like if you can get over your own personal fears

and you can make your code available to the public, the majority of this community wants to help and does not want you to fail. So if there's an idea and people can get behind it, then they want to help move that forward. So obviously GitHub is an open source project. So have you experienced that firsthand with people more encouraged to help rather than to watch it fail publicly? Oh, yeah. I mean, as I indicated a little bit ago, this is my first rodeo. I've been trying for over a decade to get something off the ground and doing different open source projects and different business ideas. And this is the first one that's really gotten any traction, which is super awesome.

And it's great. That's what gets me up in the morning. I lie in bed in the morning, and then I'm like, oh, crap, what are they saying on Twitter? Or, oh, that's right, there was that person I wanted to respond to, or there's that poll request I needed to get to. That's very motivating for me, the input of the whole community around it you know i don't know maybe i'm maybe i'm maybe after a decade i'm comfortable enough with failure or something can we pause there for a second then so you so this is becoming successful or successful and then and i'm trying to figure out what maybe exactly what is your commercial play you know not so much like you getting rich but at least how do you money yeah how do you make money how much money do you

make you know how much money do you make what's the what are some of the metrics there since you're so open how much money do i make well on get it i think i'm making i think i made 266 dollars last week and I gave away 88. So what's the next 180 there? So I'm making $150 to $200 a week on Gitip right now. So call it $600 to $800 a month on Gitip. And where do you want to go? Well, you're still – How about the company itself?

Like how does – you said you don't have any – I mean I've got to imagine you have costs and stuff like that. I'm sure those are being met. Yes. Do you keep money in the bank? Are you a corporation, LLC? Absolutely. So there's Gidip LLC. Gidip LLC is a legal entity that's owning all this, right?

And it has a bank account. And we charge, so point two of the open company definition is charge as little as possible. But you still charge something, right? That's the idea. So when you move money into GetUp or you pull money out of GetUp, I do charge a fee. GetUp charges a fee, and that fee is designed to be as low as possible. It's designed to barely cover – it's designed to cover your operating expenses and not wages and profit, essentially. So that's designed to cover credit card fees and hosting costs and other services as well as some cash reserves, right?

So there is a fee involved, but it's designed to be as little as possible. So if you put a dollar in, how much is the fee? Is it like five cents? Well, okay. So if you put a dollar in, then I'm going to charge you $10 and you're going to pay 68 cents in fee and $9.32 can be in your account and that's going to tick down over nine weeks. Your dollar gift is going to go nine times until you're down to 32 cents and at that point, it's going to charge you another $10.

So we charge you a minimum. The least we charge is $10 to minimize credit card fees. Does that make sense? Right. Yeah, so I mean it's a business, right? It's a business with a plan and it's got fees in there to cover the cost. Because, you know, I mean the last thing that Gidip is about is desperation, you know? And if I had to come to you all and be like look guys i need to pay my hosting

bill and i just need like 100 bucks please could i just have like 100 bucks to pay my hosting bill like that's not you know how does that help anybody that's not what it's about right so we've got the fees in place to cover the things that we ourselves are charged for and then beyond that get it is funded onip, so I personally am on the site, and the understanding is that anybody who's going to be working on the site is also going to be on the site. I'm not, that's, you know, point three,

don't pay your employees, you know, so I'm not, you know, I don't have any salaries to offer you, you know. I met with some people the other day. It was interesting. It was really, it was another, even more fraught meeting. These, a couple really top-notch marketing folks, actually,

who, you know, I had met in person here in Pittsburgh. They were interested in GitHub and interested in getting involved. I'm trying to figure out how to get marketers in, into the picture, you know, because we've got it, we've got collaborative development figured out for developers, right? So how do we bring, you know, how do we, how do we take that beyond just developers? And, you know, we reached this point where they're like, well, so like, what are you offering me? You know, like you're saying you don't have equity, you're saying you don't have salaries. And I reached a point where I was like, look, bring your own carrot, BYOC, you know, I have no carrot for you.

If you're going to be working on GATEF, it's going to be because you want to be here. Because that's why I'm here. And that's the open source way. At the best of it, you do the change log because you want to do the change log. So let me – yeah, no, definitely. I think we struggled over – or I struggled over the term labor of love. I was trying to remember what it was in our first episode back, but that's the truth. Like we can kind of empathize with you on that.

Like we do this because this is something we love to do, not – like what I said at the time, and it still rings true, not because we're going to become millionaires off the changelog. This is something that we – what we want to do is we want to shine a light on people like you that are doing neat things like this. And so you said that you're not going to pay salaries, and then you kind of said – talked about the fees. So those fees, they obviously – money that's going to get charged and essentially deposited in the LLC's bank account. So you might not be claiming a profit. So what do you do once you start to actually have more money than your expenses? Yeah, so we have a ticket. I mean we'll keep track of it.

I actually need to do a better job of making that information actually public because it's not fully public right now. What's the word? The people I look up to here are Watsi.org. Are you guys familiar with Watsi? No. Watsi, W-A-T-S-I.org. They are crowdsourced. You guys will actually really like this they

they crowdsource third world uh medical treatments right so you can go and you can see stories of you know kids all over the world you know and 500 bucks would make their you would turn their life from really sucky to awesome. Oh, and it's for specific children. Exactly. Yeah. So Watsi.org is another crowdfunding platform where they do this stuff and they are really awesome in regards to open finances. They publish – I got to dig it up for you.

I tweeted about it a while ago. If I can't, I'm going to get distracted if I go digging for it now. But I'll get it out of the show. They publish a Google Doc, which has all their finances unaudited. So they're basically crowdsourcing the auditing of their finances, you know. And they get people coming back. They're a nonprofit. And they get people coming back to them being like, you know, is item right you know and they're like no it's not you know so

talk about failing publicly right and uh i mean they're doing this right so i sort of look up to them as as an exemplar of open finances um there's some others right um patio 11 does this too right he publishes a lot of financial data uh yeah, so there's definitely people that I have stuff to learn from there. I'm expecting GitHub eventually to be a nonprofit. I haven't started filing that paperwork yet. If anybody wants to work on that, let me know. Because somebody raised the point. Even though I'm not making a lot of money off of it, there is still obviously value in the company.

And as long as it's a for-profit company, there's always a sort of shadow hanging over like, well, what if Chad turned around and sold the company, right? And sold out and it went down the tubes. So we do need to address some of those things just to shore it up and make sure it's protected. You want to reduce your bus factor? Yeah, yeah, yes, yes, reduce it even further. Is that the kind of thing you were talking about, Andrew? Am I answering your question? Yeah, I was going to actually clarify that.

I think, Andrew, were you talking about because it's an LLC and at the end of the year that money falls back on – because I'm assuming you're a single-member LLC? Correct. Okay, so that money at the end of the year when 2013 closes, that's going to fall into your personal tax. And then – so at some point, you're going to have to pull whatever profit, in air quotes, profit is out there in GitHub, whether it's realized or not, and you're going to pay tax on it. Well, and I'm not – I'm just saying there's lots of different ways you can kind of shuffle it around and do different things. But I guess my point is so there will come a point in time where it's not about like – OK, let's say yes. Let's say this year, the end of the year comes, and you realize, hey, we made a profit. So now you have to figure out what to do with that money. That's fine. That's scenario A.

But then you can look at it and say, OK, now I have actual data I can project and next year my operating costs, I can be more accurate with it. So how do you then prevent that from happening again? Are you going to look in the interest of – or look at maybe reducing your fees or cutting your fees off at a certain point or things like that? What's the big goal for that? Yeah, I mean the goal is to charge as little as possible. That's point two, right? So yeah, so we'll review periodically and we'll say, well, our fees are too high. I mean because honestly they are a little high right now.

It's 3.9% plus $0.30. I just picked that out of the air to get something going. Excuse me, balance charges me 2.9% plus $0.25 for credit card transactions, which is pretty standard pricing. I believe believe is what Stripe does as well. Uh, you know, for sort of the first tier stuff, you know, and once we get enough volume and we can do some volume discounts and whatever, uh, you know, we're going to pass that along. Absolutely. Uh, yeah. So we'll, we'll bring those down. It's not, you know, eventually, you know, the awesome thing would be to fully automate that, you know, so we can, those down. It's not – eventually, the awesome thing would be to fully automate that so we can compute each week what the fee is going to be that week based on projections.

I feel like the goal of an open company should be to have probably as few assets as possible, right? Yeah. I mean it's weird stuff. I just sponsored a conference here in Pittsburgh, the Steel City Ruby Conference. I was at an event last night. Nice. I was talking to some folks. It was like $300 to sponsor this conference.

They're good friends of mine, and they've done a lot to help me promote GateUp here around Pittsburgh. So I really wanted to be a part of this. I was talking to this friend of mine. I was like, yeah, I want to sponsor this. So I just paid for that out of personal, you know. Because I don't feel right putting that through Gidip. But, I mean, this is gray area stuff that's going to need to get worked out. I don't feel like it's my bottleneck right now, you know, and sort of.

But at the same time, like, I don't want to be, you know, I'm not looking to set Gidip up to, you know, for a surprise, right? I mean, that's the risk, right? Is that like, I mean, here's a big one for you. Even, you know, if you want to talk about risks and legalities, like the idea of an open company not paying its employees, well, how about minimum wage tax, right? Or how about minimum wages? Excuse me, right? You know, how about, I mean, the tax

issue is huge. You know, you're getting money for, you know, you're getting money through this, you know, when you've got hundreds of people and you don't know who they are. Yeah. I mean, how do you decide what's a gift and what's not? You know, so I actually did talk to a lawyer about this and she gave me this awesome two page footnoted memorandum, you know, digging back into case history on this. And it's really squirrely, you know, digging back into the case history on this. And it's really squirrely, you know, it's like the way, the way gift tax works in the U S uh, you know, it's, it's just not clear cut at all. Right. So, I mean, in some ways, Kickstarter is obviously the, you know, the gorilla that's sort of blazing the trail here. Uh, you know, so they're going through

a lot of this right now. It's just all – it's a gray area of the law. I mean crowdsourcing is new. Crowdfunding is new. It's new in the past few years. It's new in the past few years. So Gidip's not – Gidip's a little fish in a big pond at this point and we're keeping an eye on this stuff. Well, if you think about it in those terms of like gifts though, like like maybe I'm a guy that likes to use metaphors to understand things. So maybe the audience can just bear with me for a moment.

If not, I'll just be quiet. But I kind of think of it maybe in this terms as if I'm a really, really cool, popular open source person that is awesome, to use your words from earlier. And I'm on the proverbial digital street corner saying I write awesome code. Give me a couple bucks. That's essentially what getup is, but it's not begging. It's just an opportunity to accept a gift from somebody else. Is that essentially the metaphor you use then? Yeah, more or less. It almost seems like that kind of flipped on its head, whereas traditional financial pay for things is pay for service. Like I'm going to do a service for you, and this is what you're going to pay me. And so it's like the opposite of that where you're doing – you're not doing these services for pay. You're doing these services because you want to do them, and you're not even necessarily expecting someone to pay you on GitHub.

It just gives me, the consumer of the service, the opportunity to say you deserve something. Okay, so in the law though, it's much more about intentions than it is about how the parties frame it it turns out, and this is all – okay, so I am not a lawyer, and GIDIP is not in the business of providing legal advice formally, right? Yet. You know, so. Yet. Well, yeah, I mean, the lawyer I talked to advised me not to, you know, get it is not in the business of providing legal advice. But it gets really gray, you know. So, like, if Read the Docs has a Read the Docs account on there, right, and people are giving to the Read the Docs account, and for anybody who doesn't know,

so readthedocs.org is a documentation hosting website, right? And they're one of the top receivers on Gidip. They get $120 a week. So, you know, they're getting $500 a month on Gidip. And clearly, people are getting to Read the Docs so that Read the Docs keeps going. You know what I mean? Like, it's for that project, right? So the people on the other end of that, they're getting the money for that. You know, what's the, you know, what's, what's the status? Is that, is that employment for a job that they've done? Keeping Read the Docs online? Isn't it, you know, isn't it, it's the line for it to be a pure gift in, for income tax purposes is pretty, it's a pretty high bar. Switching metaphors there. I don't know. It's all about expectation and context.

Yeah. I mean, you know, when you go and you look at the case law, it's like, you know, so these two business associates in Detroit in the sixties, you know, one, you know, they both had two companies and they, you know, gave each other all these backroom deals and the one gave a Cadillac to the other. Right. And so the one that gave the Cadillac wrote it off on his taxes and the other didn't other who received the Cadillac didn't report it as income because he considered it a gift, right? And, you know, the auditor or whatever, the solicitor came around and said, you know, where's this Cadillac this guy wrote off? Well, it was a gift. And, you know, what they decided is you had to go in and you had to look at the specifics of each case and decide, was this given out

of a quote unquote disinterested generosity? Okay. It has to be a disinterested generosity, right? So it's a really high bar. A, it's a really high bar and B, it's a really messy line because it's not, you know, it's not clear cut. Like for them to actually sort this out, you know, what the courts do is they set up a tribunal, right? They set up a trier of fact and they go and they look at the facts of the case and they judge for themselves, right?

Like was this pure disinterested charity gift or was the, you know, did this have some sort of motive in it? And here's the thing. So, okay, here's the thing. I see Gidip as interested generosity, but then I don't, you know, but who am I to say, you know, there's hundreds of people giving to read the docs. Like who am I to say what their motives are? And so that's where it gets messy is like, how are you going to try the facts? How are you going to, how are you going to really dig into those hundreds or potentially thousands of people that are giving to you and

decide, well, this percentage was disinterested and this percentage was actually interested because of this library and then how are you going to decide like you know so mike bear's got five different open source projects you know which one was i giving to him for you know i don't know it's it's a huge thing right so yeah i don't know like it does get pretty messy it does you know i'm not trying not to be chicken little about it. I mean I'm trying – and I'm also trying not to be naive about it. Yeah. I'm just trying to forge ahead and like I said, I did talk to a lawyer this year.

And as we continue to grow, I'm going to keep on top of that stuff. I certainly appreciate the transparency on that. I think the – I guess there as a follow-up to that conversation there on the openness of it then. So when the year does close and let's say I made more than 600 bucks from getting up, whether it's a considered a gift or not a gift as by law, however you find that out, is it up to that, the receiver then to, to file that? Or do you provide paperwork? Is this something you have to eventually absorb as a liability and a cost? Yeah, so three things here.

So first of all, it's your responsibility. I, you know, Chad Whitaker personally, I reported my income I received on Gidip last year on my taxes under, I did it online. It wasn't even other income. I did report it. I found a line item to report it on. So I did report it. It is your responsibility. It's the person's responsibility. And that's in the terms of service. You know, that's, that's what's on the site. Two, what was two gang? We're talking about taxes. Okay. so yeah, two is balanced. Okay, two is... Where's he going?

Yeah. Come back. Two is there are reporting requirements that balanced is responsible for. So if you receive over 200 different transactions or over $20,000, balanced is obligated to give you a 1099K. So that's, you know, you have your bank account information stored with balance. They have your info. They have your identity.

So they're going to provide you a tax document in the case that you're over that volume. So does one month count as one transaction? That would be each week potentially. For each week, sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, the payout is also thresholded. So if you only have $5 in your account, we don't pay out.

So it could be every other week or whatever, right? But yes, so if you had – so you would only have 52 payouts at most in a year. So you wouldn't cross the $200 threshold, but you could conceivably in the future cross the $20,000 threshold. So balance will provide you a 1099K in that case. Three, when we get to... All right, so there's some features we're working on to deal in different levels of abstraction. Okay, so right now,

Gidip is most clearly individual to individual. And this is something we get to. We're starting to get companies roku involved and others so there's there's companies are starting to get involved there's projects like read the docs are starting to get involved get it itself of course there's an open company that's on there uh you know and then there's just open source communities in general that we want to deal in so these different ways of grouping people right that we need to deal in to get it somehow. And some of those ways are going to involve tax implications.

So I'm expecting that the people, for example, that receive money through the Gidip account. So there's a Gidip account on Gidip. Right now it's getting like $9.50 a week. And what we're experimenting with just in the past couple of weeks we started this is splitting that money up publicly in sort of a, in a voting, through some sort of voting mechanism, right? So basically the idea is like this is, you know, this $9.50 a week represents the wages and profit of G it right so the operating costs the fees are taken care of in the fees that we charge and then the 9 50 a week going to get it is for the people right

and we're you know we split that 28 different ways i think the past couple weeks and i expect as we grow that feature that that's going to include a tax document component, right? In order to receive money from this pool, right, when there's $100,000 going through that or whatever, $10,000 a week or whatever it's going to be, right? In order to receive money from that, you're going to have to sign an additional terms of service that says, I am a contractor of Gidip and I'm going to get a 1099 at the end of the year. And so GIDIP would start to get into the business of providing tax documents for that kind of situation. So, I mean, yeah, again, I mean, this is all, this is all tricky stuff, right? And I mean, we're starting to consult with lawyers and, and, you know, get feedback from people on this and, and try and be smart about it.

Uh, you know, so we don't, and and try and be smart about it uh you know so we don't so we don't get flipped down the road you know so we're kind of i don't know am i answering that question at all i mean it's it's well no i think i think it's a tough i don't think it's really answering i think it's just talking about it because i don't think there's really an answer to your situation as it is now i think i think on territory i mean i think andrew's got something funny to ask you but uh in a second or two, but I think that's kind of part of coming on this show and talking about not just GitHub but sustaining open source and how you're exposing yourself as the founder of this and then potentially the people that get involved in it. What's their exposure level? What's their risk level?

I think it's kind of neat.'s a cool discussion to to have and i think certainly cool that you're doing it but i don't think there's really an answer there's so much great stuff though man i didn't come on here to talk about freaking taxes well no but i think that it's it's a good point and that is like you're doing something that maybe has never been done but it's definitely not the norm. So if you look at like how companies operate, how – like if you're going to start a company, you can kind of look at the model. Like this is the way that you start a company. This is the way you close in on your Series A funding. This is the way that you do X, Y, and Z.

This is how you franchise a McDonald's in the limit case. It's all in the book, right? Right. And so for you, there's nothing like that. There's no manual. Yeah, and these are huge questions. These are questions that they're not easily answered. These are questions that you could easily answer it incorrectly and it could cost a lot. These are questions that... And so I think that it's interesting because this is where the open idea and you can get so much community input. Like who's to say that a very respected corporate accountant doesn't get one of this and say, I want to get involved in this or a very – some really good lawyers don't get behind this and say, oh, this is cool. Like I want to get involved in this, and then you have – who knows? you have free, you have pro bono law, you know what I mean?

And it's so serendipitous. I never know what's going to happen. And then somebody shows up, like the fraud thing. I got a dozen emails, private emails from fraud specialists, anti-fraud professionals, who were like, Chad, let's Skype. I want to help you out with this. It's awesome. It's fantastic.

Or I'm like, oh, crap, the second payment provider just dropped out from under me. And then balance comes along. Dude, I have to give a shout out before we slip past this. Balanced, I just learned today. So Mateen Tamizi, the CEO of Balanced, I'm watching them because they're on board with the open company idea and I'm watching how that develops for them because they're a payment provider, which is traditionally very closed. They keep saying, we really believe in this openness thing and we're trying to move our

business in that direction. I just read the thing I was tweeting about today. Mateen had a blog post in Fast Company where he's talking specifically about what it means for his business when he says it's an open company. What I learned in there that was really awesome is that they've open sourced their dashboard. Okay? So the new dashboard for Balance, like version 2 dashboard they're working on right now, is being developed in the on github which just blows my mind that like you know any like imagine any service that you use right and like you're using this service and you're like all right this dashboard is pretty good but you know this is just annoying

you know what i mean you know what i mean like anybody who's a web developer especially if you're a front-end dev like when you have those experiences, right? Like when you're using a product and you're like, man, why doesn't somebody fix this? You know what I mean? Do you guys know what I'm talking about? Absolutely. I mean like a little bug with a browser or – Exactly.

It could even be a way to get a job too. Yeah. Exactly, right? And so this is a case where now when you see that, like there's no excuse for you not to just go and clone the thing fix the bug submit a pull request and it and it's fixed you know and then like you said exactly that's that's exposure for you it's reputation for you it's good for balance it's good for all balanced customers i just that blew me away when i found that out today because that to me is just like it's a watershed it's going the extra mile with with openness and i'm i'm

really i'm humbled by how much they're doing openly. It's funny because you bring up something that – so there's this thing called usability, and then there's the UX stuff. They're kind of the same thing, but there's some differences, right? differences right so okay it's an interesting topic because if if like 150 000 people get used to the way this feature works even though it's not working the way it should and then a person comes and fixes that on let's say they fix it you know submit a pull request and it gets merged in and deployed to production so now all the people that have become accustomed to the feature as it was you know you you, how like, okay,

Facebook releases a redesign and, uh, everyone complains like if they don't go back to the old version, I'm quitting. And then Facebook will release their white papers that show actually like our usage spikes tremendously when we receive these, when we update these, even from you.

And so like, um, it's funny because now the companies are going to have to answer for that. So the bigger get up, get somebody submits a pull request. Everyone got used to whatever. Somebody submits a pull request to fix a bug, and now that feature doesn't work the same way. So how do you respond to that as a company?

Okay, so the company has to answer for it, right? Yeah. And the answer is, here's a link to the GitHub thread where we talked about it openly and publicly, right? Like you could have participated, you know, and and you can next time and now you're educated. Kind of like saying the reason your town is gone is because we posted it downtown that you're going to get your home excavated. Exactly. You should have moved.

This is how it works. Yes. So I can only see that as positive. I mean it's transparency. This gives a place – like yes, all of, when Facebook changes something, what do we do? We grouse on Facebook because we feel powerless, right? It feels like there's us and there's, you know, them, right? And the them is the people inside Facebook that get to make all the decisions, this cloudy conspiracy, right?

Like humans are so prone to conspiracy theories, right? And you just, we see it, or I don't know, I guess I, I, all right. So I have a tendency to see it, you know, it's like the behind the stuff that happens behind closed doors and, and, and here we're just throwing it wide open, you know? I think it's extremely important when you're, when you're doing this to have a BDFL in the projects as well, because if you just did everything that all your users wanted to do, you know, it would, it would collapse within minutes, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, it, it, it would collapse within minutes, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean it's a whole new kind of leadership that's needed for this kind of project and this kind of product and this kind of thing.

That's a good point right there. I like that. I'm glad you said that because you're right. I think it takes a different – not a skewed perspective but definitely a different perspective because like we said earlier, at least I said this earlier, people, you know, they operate closed companies out of fear, fear of failing or acting a fool or being a fool in front of a bunch of people. Or competitors, right? Yeah, or competitors. You know, there's – fear is the basic component of the concern.

Yeah, exactly. Oh, my gosh. The number of people that have asked me to sign an NDA in a coffee shop. Come on, guys. Give me a break. Have they asked you to do that as you were representing Gitit? Yes, exactly. Like here I'm writing – yeah.

For me to tell you my idea. Yeah, but what did you start saying? You call it an open company. And I think that when I – and what we do and specifically because the code is open source, like obviously it's kind of we can kind of mix those two things up. But, you know, just listening to you talk, like knowing a little bit about you. And it sounds almost like the idea of an open company or your vision for an open company almost embraces like the minimalism thing more so than even necessarily like the open source thing because it's like to the lean minimal like use as little as you need to keep going and if you do that you can prevent the big you know big bloated company that is very inefficient that is very greedy or whatever you

want to say so i mean can you speak to that? Like, is there any, is there any minimalist influence in this open company? Yeah. I mean, I love minimalism, you know? I guess I don't, I haven't made that connection consciously before, but you know, it certainly could be there, you know, trying to learn the lessons of companies like GitHub, right. That do run a distributed team. You know, obviously open source projects have run distributed teams for decades and free software projects. You know, and companies are starting to pick up on this now too, right? Like we don't all have to be sitting in the same place to get stuff done. We can get by with less. But, I mean, you're right.

With Git, it's even more. You know, what goes on the corporate credit card and what goes on, on Chad's credit card, you know, more goes on Chad's credit card than goes on the corporate credit card, you know? Well, it's easy. Yeah. I mean, there's, it's, it's the open idea and then it's the transparent idea. It's the, it's that everyone knows it's so it almost helps to keep it accountable too. And you're, you're definitely like, you know, we kind of can keep going back to it, but

you're, you're definitely bucking the mold when it comes to this stuff. I'm having fun now. I'm having fun. I'm excited to see where it goes. I mean just because where Gidip is right now, like there's no reason to think it's going to be the same place in two months. Absolutely. And it's so refreshing because you can look at – even companies that you do admire and respect, like the GitHubs of the world. You know – okay, like Fab today, they had a huge pivot, and that never happens. Companies never pivot like that when they've established themselves.

So it's cool to see that Gidip is going to be this thing that I don't even know if you'll ever call it a pivot because you're going to be forever this fluid company that's changing and shifting the way that you do things. And it's based on community feedback. So, you know, success or failure, like it's just going to be a really fun thing to watch. Exactly. Chad Whitaker will be the new Eric Ries. Yeah.

The open startup. So do you feel like the definition for an open company is super strict? Like do you think there could be a form of it where a company does pay its employees yeah i mean so balanced is uh taking on board the terminology open company okay and of course they're doing it very differently than i am you know and and uh that's i'm fine with that you know uh they're they're allowed you know i don't have a trademark on the term open company so you're not you're not being a bit your installment about it no? No, nope, not doing that. No, I mean I love it. It's a huge win and a huge validation for Balance to be taking this on board and to own the term and to own it and to give it their own meaning.

That's great. I love it. I think the really great takeaway with your relationship with them and what you're trying to do is just all about consistency really because you know you have your your address up on your twitter account and you're all about open companies and get tip is an open company and then they're doing the same thing it seems like uh i don't know it's very very consistent super fun i don't know okay so now we get to now i want to talk about heroku two weeks ago starting to give on get it yes because it was awesome and and thank you, Kenneth. Are we public with this, Kenneth, that you were behind that? Can I say that now?

Yes. Yeah, that's fine. Okay. So thank you, man. That's awesome. Absolutely. I'm really excited. The thing I want to mention, and you and I talked about this, I want this to be public as well,

is that it worked because it inspired generosity. So the story is that Kenneth brought Heroku on board with Gidip to start investing in open source through Gidip. And you put Heroku on the top of the giver's leaderboard, right? Correct. Two weeks ago, was it? And then it was a tremendous validation of what happened. The goal was to try to lead the way so other companies would start doing the same. Because companies don't really contribute back to open source in that way often.

So MaxCDN now is the number two giver, which is perfect. And ideally, I want people to be fighting for that number one spot, right? And having 10, 15 companies do it. I think it would change everything. I know I've spoken privately to two other companies that are in the works with this. And I think we're only going to see more. But I want to say it worked in that the week that Heroku started giving on Gidip was the biggest. Okay, so you did that on a Friday and it runs every Thursday. So the next Thursday, you did a Friday night after we'd already run that day,

a Thursday night, because I was about to go to bed and then I sat down and I went on getit.com and I saw Heroku up there. I was like, what? You know, so I was up for a couple more hours. You know, so that whole next week, you know, we got the biggest bump in by percentage of givers that we'd gotten since month two. I mean, since last summer. So it was like givers total went up 12% in the wake of Heroku joining and setting that

example. That's amazing. And ideally, as more companies get involved, that number will continue to grow, and it'll be like a... Absolutely. I can't remember the term. It'll be like the cruft of the hockey stick, basically.

The cruft? Is that what you call it? I don't know. I'm in. I'm in. The cruft of the hockey stick. Sure, why not? Yeah.

Up and to the right. We'll get there. Kenneth, since you pioneered Heroku supporting GitHub and not so much just GitHub but those that are on GitHub that need support, what do you – so if there's someone out there listening to The Change Law, whether it's live or the podcast, what do other companies like Heroku not exactly like heroku like your technology but that that care about open source that use open source pretty much lots of companies right but what what should they know about github that heroku knows that can make them do the same well i mean i feel like it should be any company really because i feel like every single company that's doing something meaningful in the world probably has a set of software developers and they're probably using open source right in some way right so they should all they should sign

up for an account and uh start just contributing like you know five dollars a week to some developers there's code they use or as there's more projects that'll start to there's read the docs right now and there's get tip and ideally like you know there'd be like a django uh account right on get tip and they could just contribute to that and that would be huge and i i think um there's plans to have a page on get tip that'll kind of explain the pitch to a company on why they should do that right yeah chad yeah i i wrote i don't know if you saw it kent but there's a there's a ticket in github uh that has some notes towards that awesome yeah it's cool because um you see

like so there are obviously the one of the big problems there are obviously developed well-known developers right there are well-known developers that do get paid a lot of money on their in their day job or they do get paid a lot of money to speak at conferences or you know well you know what i'm saying but there there's this notion that only those developers could very easily get noticed. You know what I mean? Like those are the guys that are out in public that are doing things that you see. So it's easy to say – so someone like Kenneth, you obviously work at Heroku and you go to conferences. You do other things.

So you're one of the top receivers on Gidip and I think it's cool and I think this is an opportunity for you to conferences, you do other things. So you're one of the top receivers on Gidip, and I think it's cool, and I think this is an opportunity for you to say, okay, I'm just going to be a funnel. Like people can support me on Gidip, but then you're also one of the top givers. So then you can turn around and give that to other people that you've encountered. And hopefully, I mean, I would love to see that happen where just because you're receiving money on Gidip, that doesn't mean we need the rich to get richer. And I'm not trying to say you're rich or anything, Kenneth, but you know, just to say you as a model, like it's cool to almost see you as, like I said, a funnel, like money comes into you from GitHub and then you can disperse it to things that you

use and it can keep going. And it has this effect where it can kind of chain like that. I think that's really cool. I think it's also really important that if you're receiving money on GitHub to consider keeping it all too too because like it needs to leave the system for it to work right right and i feel like a really big part of it like ideally i think every like major open source contributor i feel like in in get tips goals basically their long-term goals is like they'd all be receiving like you know two thousand dollars a week and that would be like their salary and they wouldn't have to work anymore they could just work on on open source all the time so funneling things all the time i don't think could work but it depends on the sustainability

of your situation and all these other things right i don't know chad do you have any thoughts about that like absolutely i mean you know the goal is for people to make a living through get it the goal is for many people to make a living through get it not just the quote-unquote rock stars that's been a huge subject of conversation in the uh in the issue tracker especially and we've got some features in the works to work on that one of them is this project thing that i think i started talking about with, uh, with,

you know, how did I phrase it? When I was saying that we're trying to introduce these levels of abstraction, right? Layers of abstraction so that you've got groups as well as just individuals, right? So we're hoping to do, you know,

implement those in a way that helps the long tail helps keep our genie index down. Genie is a measure of inequality that's used a lot and that is one index that we're starting to track um i lost the train i lost genie index the rock stars rock stars right we Rock stars, right. We, man, I want it to work for everybody, right? I want it to work. I want it, okay, here's something I was thinking when we were talking about this. Open source projects is a big part of it. I'm interested, maybe this is a place to introduce this, not just open source projects, but open products, which is an idea

that has been floating around in my head. And I'm actually, I think you guys have seen, I'm hoping to get, uh, get together a blog post for the change log about this, but sites like Gidip that are primarily a single hosted product, but just happened to be open source, right? As opposed to something like WordPress, for example, which has a hosted version, but is really like an open source project that also has people that will host it for you. Do you catch that distinction? You know what I'm talking about? Like, for example, the balance dashboard, right? Like, this is a great example.

It would be what I would call an open product. You're not really, you know, it's not primarily designed for you to go set up your own instance of it, although you could, and you know, you're not going to be stopped from doing that, but it's really supposed to be like, you know, the balance dashboard and it happens to be open, right? I feel like read the docs is probably the best example of that today. Say again? Read the Docs is probably the best example of that today. Say again? Read the Docs. Yeah, so Read the Docs.

GetSentry is another one, getsentry.com, right? Travis, Travis CI. We've got these instances of – and again, it's starting as open source itself does with the developer tools, right? It works for those, you know, for those products because they're developer focused. So I'm really curious how far we can push the limit with how far we can push the envelope with consumer facing products that also happen to be open. You know, I mean, the sort of the canonical thing in my mind is just like what if Twitter were open source? What if Google were open source, right?

So I had that experience like we were talking about earlier where it's like there's a little niggling misfeature or bug on Twitter.com or on Google.com, like Facebook.com, big consumer applications, big consumer products. What if they just happen to be open? You know, that sort of, that what if is sort of, you know, out there in the future that I'm sort of aiming towards and why I'm so happy about this balanced thing today with their dashboard being open. So that's the kind of world I want to live in. want to live in a world where I feel empowered I want to live in a world where we have openness and transparency and where it's more fluid

where I can go get involved in this project because look, we're already doing it I was talking to somebody who was I talking to yesterday that was saying for top programmers in the valley it's like four months is your employment, your term of employment is not unusual. You know what I mean? I mean like two years ago, it was two years and now it's four months.

I mean come on. Like clearly employment – do we want to use the word broken or what? I mean clearly employment is shifting and changing, right? What does full-time employment mean when you work for four months and then you move on to something else for six months? You know, so like, why not? So part of what I'm trying to do here is loosen it up so you can work on something for four months, you know, without, and you can ease into it, you know, like you don't have to go through this big hiring process and all this paperwork and everything. Like you can ease into it. You don't have to go through this big hiring process and all this paperwork and everything. You can ease into one and then gradually fade into another project.

And somehow civilization goes on. I don't know. Push the envelope in all directions. Yeah, for better or for worse. I don't know. In some ways, it's like you're going to be a pioneer in this area. You can see it because this is going to be something that it's just going to grow. And it's not necessarily just GitHub is going to grow,

but you can just kind of see that the mindset that's behind this is going to be something that grows. Somebody's mentioned Reddit in the chat room too. That's another great one, right? It's open source. You can go run Reddit if you want. Oh, yeah. That's great. That's actually a great one.

Sorry, I didn't mean to jump in on the end. I always forget. Everyone always forgets about that. Changelog needs to be funded on GitHub. We need – because it's not just for programmers, because storytellers, right? Like you guys that are surfacing all this great stuff that's going on in the community, like that's a really important role, you know? That's something we need to tie in to get it more, right?

Is like how to tell stories because developers aren't necessarily good at telling their own stories. So that's another thing. It's another part about getting people who aren't rock stars taken care of is helping them tell their stories. To be like, look, you know,

I spent the past six months, you know, deep down in the boiler room of the kernel, you know, and here's, you know, I spent the past six months, you know, deep down in the boiler room with the Colonel, uh, you know, and here's, you know, I'm, I'm not going to toot my own horn, but you guys are the ones that can bring that out. You know what I mean? And originally you could sign up with a GitHub account to have a profile on get tip. And now you can have a Twitter account, right. And that's to open the door for everybody. Is there any other services like that that you're hoping to have? How about today? I never sent it to into facebook i happen to send into facebook today and uh an acquaintance of mine had had posted unbeknownst to me on facebook all about get it right and she was super pumped about get

it but she's starting to tell all her friends about it she's not a developer at all you know she's like um i actually met her at occupy pittsburgh believe it or not. She's super pumped about it. So Facebook. So now Gidip's on Facebook. We've already had a Facebook page. But yeah, I think there's a lot more communities that can really find interesting uses for Gidip. We want to support them. I think there's so much more that we can go into i think we're

gonna have to have you back for another show um so we're kind of running out of time so uh let me ask you ted who is your this is kind of the uh the changelog question who is your programming hero somebody that you have looked up guido van rossum so i've been trying not to say that throughout this show because i've been trying not to to fanboy about Guido and use him as an example because I knew you were going to ask me this. So here's a little quirk about that. So at PyCon this year, I don't know if you guys have seen pictures online or whatever, but I have this penny puncher. I have a two-foot hole punch, right? And it puts holes in metal. I got some

custom tooling made for it so I can put hearts in pennies. Is that legal? You're going to have to talk to my lawyer about that. I put hearts in pennies and I had a booth at PyCon and we had this penny puncher there. So it was a huge hit. A bunch of people came by the booth and we had them punching. We were punching holes in all kinds of different currency.

It was a whole lot of fun. And I found a penny. I went and I found a penny. It was a 1991 penny, which is the year that Python was first released. And I put a heart in this 1991 penny. And I went out and I found Guido. And I said, Guido, I want to give you this penny. And he said, oh, that's so sweet.

But I'm not taking any swag this conference. I just hung my head in shame. Because he had tweeted about it the week before the conference and i hadn't noticed or whatever you know what i mean so i just i every every time i try and yeah talk to that dude i just like you know start drooling or whatever and just you know make fool out of myself but yeah i mean like i started when i started get it i was like i just want to give guido money like i just love python you know i. I love the language and I love his leadership style. We mentioned it briefly earlier.

I just love the way he runs the scene. So I look up to him a lot. Maybe someday when we're not at the conference he'll accept a hard coin from me. Until then. Keep plugging away.

We'll get there. So like I said, there's so much more that um we're gonna get into i think it'll be fun to have you back maybe in a few months when we see kind of where this thing goes and uh the fluid of it and and we'll be talking about who knows i mean we'll be talking about some you know like i live in nashville now we'll be talking about some small time you know musician that's being funded on get it and it'll be real cool to to have that conversation. Can we talk about one more thing before we close, Andrew? Yes.

So, Chad, I know when we had that conversation, I kind of wish part of what we talked about could have been podcasted somehow, but one thing you mentioned, and we talked about it in the show, is that it is open. You don't pay anybody, but you are hiring, and you have a huge stack of issues to go through. So if someone was out there listening right now and they wanted to kind of like,

yeah, I want to get into this open company thing, you know, how could they, what is the easiest way besides just saying, hey, go check out the issues and just jump in? Do you have like a list of like your top ones or what's the big move right now? So this is the biggest problem I'm trying to crack right now, right? Is how to scale the community of developers. I mean, if you're,

you know, if you're, if you're like you're talking about Andrew, the blueprint, right? I mean, you go get some VC funding and you hire your team and you're off and running, right? So that's not available to me because I don't have any profit to share with venture capitalists. So I can't just go, you know, take salaries out and hire people. So we've gotten a lot of contributions from a lot of great people, which is awesome. What I see, really what I'm trying to do is get that GIDIP funding in place, that funding mechanism, so that as you're working on GIDIP, there is that incentive where you are going to get a slice of the pie as you stick around and as you grow the whole system.

So that's piece number one that I'm working on. Number two is, in the meantime, I'm trying to piece together a lot of things. So there is a page on Gidip right now. On the About page, there is a Get Involved section, which does list a couple different mechanisms for getting involved. It links to the issue tracker. It links to irc you know free node pound get it and it also links to a newsletter i have been experimenting with a weekly newsletter that kind of you know it's a summary it's a digest of what's going on from my point of view in the community of people that are actually building get it so right now that's the best way to get involved is to go to Git.com slash about

and under Get Involved sign up for that newsletter. We'll see how that evolves. That's an experiment. This is all an experiment. I'm hoping Kenneth indicated earlier, he tipped our hand, that we're hoping to get some pages out that explain, that go into more detail about getting involved. Whether you're a company that wants to start investing in open source on GitHub

or you're a person that wants to start developing or you want to give money or you've got an open source project and you want to receive money, I'm seeing that as a priority to just explain it for those different audiences in more detail. Here's what the community is like. Here's how to get involved. Jacob Kaplan Moss gave a great talk at Heroku's Waza conference a couple months ago.

And it was about growing a community. It was about lessons learned from growing the Django community. And that's one of the ones that stuck with me. The idea of really documenting your contribution policies and ways to get involved. It sounds like that's something they really focused on. I mean, they have great docs overall, but in particular, how to get involved. So that's something I'm hoping to work on in the near term with Get It so it's easier

to do. But for now, check out the newsletter, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. Check out the newsletter. So is it on the homepage or where is it? Yeah, you've got to go to about. It's on Tiny Letter. So it's tinyletter.com. We'll get you there too.

Oh, man. You've got to move the campaign monitor right away. You can't be there anymore. Look, where I want to move is Medium. Have you guys tried Medium? I just got my invite over the weekend and I've got like two, three. They're the first people that have actually cracked WYSIWYG that I've seen. I mean, tiny letter.

WYSIWYG is the Achilles heel of all content web apps, and I love Medium's implementation of it. Maybe there will be an open product someday. I don't know. Maybe. Maybe. We'll get there. Well, so I think that we will find a way via the changelog to try and take up the Heroku banner and start to give through Gidip. I think that'll be fun to start to pick people and pick little projects to support.

Because we use a lot of open source stuff at the changelog. Well, dude, the big one for you guys, man, you just got to link to people's accounts. I mean, PyCoders Weekly, I believe it is, they have a weekly Python newsletter. And each bullet point, they put a link. They just have a little GitHub icon, and it links out to that person's GitHub account. I mean, those kind of things. The more we can build a network and weave the mat denser, I see that as a great role for you guys. Yeah, we can definitely start doing that more when we cover different projects

or in some of the editorial stuff we're working on. We can definitely start doing that more often. It's something we certainly want to do because we like what you're up to and we like supporting people, obviously. Thanks, man. Yeah, we'll talk about it offline. Cool. Privately?

Yeah, privately. Sorry. Off the call on a GitHub issue. How about that? There, privately. Sorry. Off the call on a GitHub issue. How about that? There you go. I want to thank everyone for tuning in. Again, we do this every Tuesday live at 6 p.m. Eastern, 3 p.m. Pacific. Specifically, thanks for being on the show.

I want to thank Kenneth and Adam, and I want to thank you for hanging, Chad. It was a good time. Absolutely. For sure. It was a super fun time. Thanks for having me, guys. Before Chad goes, I want him to thank you for hanging, Chad. That was a good time. Absolutely. For sure. It was a super fun time. Thanks for having me, guys. Before Chad goes, I want him to say my favorite quote from him. Uh-oh.

Everybody. I'm not building Gidip. I'm building a community that's building Gidip. Is that the one, Kenneth? Yes, that's it. Thank you. That's a good one. I like that.

It's a great one, and it's extremely important. Yeah. It definitely pulls back the curtain a bit more. And when he was making waffles for me the other day, I was at his place, and he said he was making waffles. He wasn't making waffles. He was making the community that was making waffles. We had a good time.

Yeah. Anyway, sorry. Anybody who wants waffles, 716 Park Road, 1500 3rd. Next time in Pittsburgh. Nice. All right, guys. Again, we are member-supported here at The Change Log. One fudge is in the throat. Next time in Pittsburgh. Nice. All right, guys. Again, we are member supported here at the ChangeLog.

You can visit us at thechangelog.com slash membership. You can visit us at thechangelog.com slash store to buy a shirt and, as Adam likes to say, to hack and style. Yeah, hack and style with the ChangeLog team, man, for sure. All day long. All right, guys. Thanks for being on the show with us. Very good. Keep real. Okay. Thank you, guys. all day long alright guys thanks for being on the show with us very good keep real ok thank you guys

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bye bye bye bye bye See it in my eyes So how could I forget