The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - The ol' hot & juicy (Friends)

Episode Date: April 26, 2024

Frequent guest (and *almost* real-life-friend) Adam Jacob returns to share his spicy takes on all the recent "open source meets business" drama. We also take some time to catch up on the state of his open source-based business, System Initiative.

Welcome to ChangeLog and Friends, a weekly talk show about mojo bags and rubber chickens. Thanks to our partners at Fly, the home of changelog.com. Launch your app near your users. Fly makes it easy. Learn how at fly.io. Okay, let's talk. Well, CloudFlyers Developer Week is over, but there is so much to cover from that week. And I'm here to give you a roundup. So here we go. Their fully distributed serverless database, D1, went GA. It now supports 10 gigabytes of data and they added new exporting solutions and insight tools.

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by the way, also went GA. That's right. Production grade global AI inference that you don't need to deploy. All available seamlessly in workers or directly from a REST API call. They also announced a partnership with Hugging Face. So you can now quickly deploy an app using these models. And fine tunes are here, y'all. That's right.

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Check it all out for yourself at cloudflare.com slash developerweek. Once again, cloudflare.com slash developerweek. Today we start with a newsflash, because not only is it big news, it's hyper-relevant to this episode. In fact, we recorded this in the morning on Tuesday, April 23rd, and it was just hours later that the rumor of IBM acquiring HashiCorp hit our Slack community. On Wednesday, the rumor was confirmed by IBM that they are indeed purchasing HashiCorp for a cool $6.4 billion. Now, had we known that on Tuesday, this conversation with Adam Jacob would have certainly been different. So keep that in mind and maybe play the metagame as you listen. What would we have said had we known about this acquisition? But don't worry, us being unaware of the news won't ruin the episode

and you definitely want to hear adam jacob drop hot fire throughout so if you were thinking of skipping it i think again okay let's freaking go so we're just gonna riff for about an hour maybe an hour and a half great yeah man let's go all right sweet sorry sorry you have to cut that one but you know we will bleep you yeah like deadpool let's freaking go if you say 20 f words it's gonna be hard so we might not but Sorry, you have to cut that one. We will bleep you. Yeah, like Deadpool. Let's freaking go. Well, if you say 20 F-words, it's going to be hard. So we might not.

I'll slow it down. I'll slow them down. Yeah, I'll slow my roll. Give us a heads up before it comes. Like, here it comes. It's about to happen. I feel it in my throat. Yeah, I'm getting worked up over here.

Yeah. Well, stop going on vacation. I wasn't on vacation. Every time you leave the internet, open source does something. Yeah, that does seem like a trend. It's either vacation or a break or something. Anytime I leave Twitter for a second, everything goes down. Well, where were you this time?

And what happened? Where were you and what happened? Well, let's see. I had taken like a small... Well, the what was the original one the original one was hashicorp where i was like i i was going on vacation and relicense yeah and i sent a tweet that said hey i'm going on vacation don't burn open source down while i'm gone something like that and then of course all that happened and then everybody was like, you burned down open source. And then now every time I take a break, the internet burns down.

Something, yeah, something fluffs up. So this time was the cease and desist? The OpenTofu cease and desist? Or what happened this time? Yeah, probably. I mean, probably OpenTofu. Okay. Although I was pretty, I think I was pretty present for that because it really, it really worked it really worked me up i was gonna say you were the first one that i heard about it from

i was so grumpy about it twitter for you just said here's one for you jared and they showed me yours yeah i mean yeah it's pretty on brand i suppose i just yeah yeah i man that article that matt ac wrote just got up my nose in a way that really bothered me. You sure it was your nose? I mean, you told me I'm not supposed to swear. So I'm doing a good job, you know? All right. Just write that one right up my nose.

I don't think it was my nose. I think, yeah, I just, you know, I've known Matt a long time on the Twitter land. I think we've met maybe twice in our lives and i like him we disagree about a lot of things but i always felt like he was like for all of our disagreements he was never i never felt like he was like a bad actor i didn't feel he was acting in bad faith you know what i mean like yeah i always felt like he was he was just saying what he thought and what he thought I happened to not disagree with. But that doesn't make you a bad person.

It just makes us, you know, people who disagree, right? Yeah, you see the world differently. And he was always ready to engage sort of in the back and forth about the fact that we disagreed, which again, I appreciate, you know, like without a whole ton of vitriol. That article, though, it was just, it reeked of bad faith from the jump to me, where it was like, here's this really scathing article about this individual engineer. So like, you know, if you'd done any research at all, beyond what he posted, and what he posted was very much a reflection of what HashiCorp later put in their cnd so you know let's speculate

for a minute wildly about how that happened but like you know he writes this article basically accuses this engineer of theft not basically he does he says they stole it right which is a pretty explosive accusation you know if you're if you're that engineer and you're getting paid to write software for a living and someone accuses you of theft, like that's a career burner, you know, that's a, that's going to be a, that's going to be hard for you. Right. But he didn't even think about that because, you know, the outcome aligned, what he saw was what he wanted to see. Right. was what he wanted to see, right? He wants to see that the large cloud providers or the consortium of large cloud providers or whoever it is, are taking the money from, you know, scrappy startups trying to like do their thing. And so that's what he saw when he looked at the evidence.

And then as soon as everybody started telling him the evidence was flimsy, which was a pretty large corner of the technical internet that interacts with matt right you know me brian cantrell a bunch of other people we weren't the only ones there was a ton like both in public and in private i think i was more in public than a lot of people were because it got up my nose so much and he just was silent about it you know like that also crawled up my nose because i'm like obviously you didn't actually either the slander was the point right where you what you wanted was the was that in the world for whatever your reason or agenda was or it wasn't the point you'd been found out and you let

it hang which means you just didn't care at all about the impact on that person's life or on you know on those people doing that work all of which just hits my justice button you know like super hard so you're saying if matt had gone to bat for his piece in the aftermath and actually backed it up in on social media etc or written a follow-up or whatever then it wouldn't have bugged you as much but the fact that he went quiet afterward at least at that moment you'd have been like well at least you had the courage of your conviction right but no you know as soon as there was actual work done to actually analyze the source code and respond which is what the cncf did which of course they were going to do. He was like, they responded so kindly.

It's a community I want to be a part of. And I'm like, I'm going to swear now. Can I swear? Okay, go ahead. We're ready. I'm like, mother, no, no, no, no. Come on, come on. So this was in the aftermath of the response.

Yeah, come on. He waited until the response. Yeah, you waited until it was so clear that you were wrong. And then you were like, I don't know if I should even retract it because, you know, nobody really read it at all. And it's like, ugh. Yeah, that part was a little bit weird to me. That was weird. It was just very, it was like, hi, Matt, if you're listening.

Like, what the heck? Like, do better. What the heck? Like, I want you to do better because I like you. And as your friend, I'm disappointed because I don't, like, I think to do better because i like you and as your friend i'm disappointed because i don't like i think you're better than that yeah and you know i try to avoid the conspiracy theory look of it but i don't even think it's that much conspiracy theory like hashicorp what hashicorp needed it was exactly what they got out of sending that letter which is

this is a sales problem for them, right? They're like, Linux Foundation has OpenTofu. It's not like OpenTofu is like a ragtag band of rebels trying to scratch out a living. It's pretty serious. It's pretty serious now. They got Jim Zemlin money, you know? They got the blessing of the Pope, you know? And so now, like, when you go into those sales meetings, you know, they put a number out when you go into the, to those sales meetings, you know, they put, they put a number out there like, Hey, here's what you're going to pay. And the response from the other side of the table is I was going to be, why shouldn't I just use OpenTofu for free? And they need an answer. And the best answer is we can't trust those

OpenTofu guys. They stole from us. We sent them a cease and desist. We sent a DMCA takedown letter on and on and on. It doesn't have to be true that they stole from you. It just has to exist. They just need the evidence in the universe. Because once the evidence is in the universe, you can be like, well, some people say, you know, some folks work pretty sure. They, the fictitious they. Yeah, we stopped short of suing them, you know, because that's crazy.

Like they're not going to actually sue anybody over this. Cause that would be a step too far. They don't need to sue anybody in order to get what they needed. And, you know, so what was the phone call? Like where that evidence drops to Matt and then Matt writes that piece before the C and D's come right. But talks to no one,

you know, cause you got a hot scoop or whatever and i'm like man you got you got played so you're you're literally saying this is orchestrated this is orchestrated from hashi corp he's too mad theorizing to okay well he's saying it jared he's not theorizing he's saying it i'm absolutely theorizing okay because i have no evidence i have no data i have no i don't have a smoking gun. Fine. He's theorizing, but, but I am theorizing because if you look at the evidence that HashiCorp presented and you looked at the evidence, maybe Matt did his own research.

Maybe Matt was hanging out, digging around in the pull request archives. You know what I'm saying? Of, of open tofu. Maybe the timing is suspect though. I mean, who's hanging out and pull requests and the same timing of the season to see what I'm talking about so you're theorizing Adam now Adam's yes okay well I'm

shedding light on the theory okay Jared okay light and I'm not saying it happened I'm not saying that's what happened I'm not but I am saying that it feels like it might could have and that's even grosser it is grosser because that sounds like, you know, Big Corp still has a stranglehold on what was once open source and what open source represents because now, you know, like you had just shared, Open Tofu can seem blemished because there's been X, Y, and Z. Right, exactly. It is blemished.

In the eyes of a Terraform would-be adopter. Yeah, but nobody even read that. Yeah, but nobody's even read the piece, you knowform would-be adopter. Yeah, but nobody even read that. Yeah, but nobody's even read the piece, you know? It's a small thing. Yeah. Well, I mean, help round out, help flesh out, for those who don't know who Matt Acy is.

I mean, is he a journalist? I've heard he's a lawyer. I know he works at MongoDB, but a journalist would go through the evidence. He's not a journalist. He's an opinion columnist? He's an opinion columnist, publishes in Inf. He's not a journalist. He's an opinion columnist. He's an opinion columnist, publishes in InfoWorld, not a journalist.

We don't need to hold him to journalistic standards. He basically writes a blog on InfoWorld, right? Yeah. But does have a pretty large readership. Previous lives, he ran what we would have called DevRel, but at the time didn't exist for like Ubuntu. So he's been around.

He knows the industry very well. Been around for a long time. Yeah. Worked for, I think, had a stint at AWS. I think maybe had a stint at Microsoft. I don't have his LinkedIn up or whatever, and I haven't memorized his resume. But it's a great resume. He's a lawyer.

He writes interesting, thought-provoking things. Absolutely. Matt's an interesting character who's been around for a very long time. Like, and I don't know. I just felt like he should have known better. And, you know, whether my theorization is correct or incorrect, I'm not wrong that Hashicorp wins out of this whole thing, no matter what happens. Because I am 100% right that that's the reason you send those cease and desist letters. Because Open Tofu got dragged.

The reputation got dragged regardless is what you're saying. Yeah. And the reputation dragging was the reason to do it somebody replied to me on twitter and called the cease and desist letter the old hot and juicy which i think is like one of the greatest phrases i've ever heard to describe uh a uh a cease and desist letter because like i've sent cease and desist letters before i've definitely sent people the old hot and juicy and this is precisely why you do it you're like like, hey, what I need is just a little, I just need you to know that I've got eyes.

I'm watching you. I'm watching you. What I think you're doing isn't cool. And your toes are up on the line. And so I'm just going to send you the old hot and juicy. Make sure you know and I know that your toes are on the line. So if you really leap over the line, I'm going to get you. You know? And like, so I'm not like, I'm going to get you. You know?

Right. And like, so I'm not like, I'm not upset about the existence of the old hot and juicy. It was a warning shot. Yeah. Like you want to like. It's a horse head on their bed. Exactly. HashiCorp wants to put a horse head in open tofu's bed.

I get it. From a business point of view, I get it. Like you need to send the old hot and juicy. Fine. Right. The part that really crawled up my nose was the part was the part where we pretended it was like that it was like a magical discovery you know what i mean and like you know it's one thing for hashencorp to send the old hot and juicy

it's another thing for anyone to not think to never think about that person's career like there was a human being on the other end of that PR and you accused him of theft and you never even talked to him. You didn't ask a single question of anyone involved. And like journalist or no journalist, it just felt, it's just gross. It's gross. Like you should have at least asked a question

and you didn't. And like, that's a bummer. Well, we don't know, Matt. We definitely appreciate you should have him on the change lots of times we've invited him on the show at least three times right adam at least three several enough never it's like come on he always declines that's weird he should come because he's i think so he's a delight like he's not a bad guy i like i'm no lie i wouldn't have been as upset about it if i didn't like him right Right. Like, I do like him. I still like him. Yeah.

Like, I don't think he's a bad person. But boy, it just really felt like he got manipulated here in a way that's disappointing to me. And that might be true, too. I'm glad you said that because that might be true. I think it probably is true. I mean. And like, but he's not saying that. He's not saying that.

He's not. Maybe he can't say that. He probably wants to just move on, like know to the next yeah it's like wait can we can we just you know take two steps back and delete that yeah nobody read that nobody really read it yeah you know and but it's not because like like i just i can't say enough my disappointment in it is because i like matt like it's because i like interacting with him i like i respect matt had respected matt this is the first moment where i lost a little respect for him. Cause I was just like, I oof,

oof, oof. Right. And there, and his position at MongoDB. Yeah. You know, he's often accused of having this slant again.

He definitely, I mean, accused, there's no accusing. He a hundred percent has this slant. Like, and I like, and you know,

up in like, I've always believed, I still believe that he genuinely believes that he's right. Like, I think he genuinely believes that the relicensing is necessary, that these companies have to do it, that if they don't, they're going to be eaten, that they're preserving the shape of their feet. I think he genuinely believes that. And that's okay. Like, I can respect it.

Like, it's a, I see how you get to that. I think a lot of people believe that. Yeah, I don't think he's alone, right? The Sentry guys certainly believe it, right? And again, I like the Sentry guys too. People, guys. I have a thing. The folks over there.

Yes. We like Sentry as well. They're all good people. And yeah, I think very genuine in their exploration of what they want and what they feel like they need for themselves and for their business and how it relates to community and open source and very genuine. So like,

you know, we just, I disagree on some levels, but like, it's not like I don't understand their problem, you know, or that it's a problem. Like I do.

you've long been a loud voice representing your and others take that, that you differentiate on a product versus a project and that the open source business model is not a business model, but you can make this whole deal work and people have and people do. And you're trying it again, aren't you, with System Initiative?

I mean, you're going after it using your convictions. Yeah, definitely. And I'm trying to write down, I'm in the middle of trying to write down how what I'm starting to come to understand is that when we talk about these as problems, we tend to conflate the open source, what I call the open source hippie side of it, right?

Which is about principles and about the nature of software and about how it impacts the lives of other people, all of which is incredibly important. And then we also conflate the business side of it, which is how do you construct a business model that makes sense where the incentives stay aligned over a long period of time? And when we conflate those two,

we make it very difficult to talk about either one. And I think we've been conflating them sort of as an industry, certainly the whole time I've been around, which is whatever, I'm 46 and I started at 16. So I've been around long enough. I think my suspicion is that we have to separate those two and we have to start talking to people about here's how you align the incentives of your business model over time in order

to use open source in a way that as you grow and you get to the MongoDB level or you get to the HashiCorp level or you get to the HashiCorp level or you get to the whatever level, those incentives don't flip on you. And that's a business model construction problem. It's a question of who's my target market? What price do I sell it at? How does that impact my serviceable addressable market? How do all of those things align so that the price point of what I'm selling is high enough that I don't need to eat my young eventually? And I think what we see in a lot of these things is that, in fact, that $0 price anchor that we're setting when we typically do open source is a mistake. And it's actually kind of easy to show because like the calculation for total addressable market is the absolute number of people who could ever buy your product multiplied by the average selling price. And the trick we love to pull when we're starting open source companies is we don't count the zero. The zero dollar part in calculating the average,

we don't put that in the average. We only look at the part that we sell and we go, what's the average selling price for that? But that's not true. Like, obviously, the price actually starts with the factor in the numbers that are zero. And when you do that, whoo, suddenly you watch the TAM shrink somewhat dramatically, right? Because the right hand side there, you know, the left hand side of the equation is kind of fixed. Like, you know, the birth rate is what it is. There's only so many people, there's only so many companies, you know, there's a global, let's call them 3000 5000 companies that are going to buy your enterprise software. That's kind of it. The right hand side of the equation, though, how much I sell it for, that's in your control. And that's what drives the difference between,

you know, MongoDB. and let's call it Chef, where like MongoDB is making what, 1.58 billion or something like that. That sounds really specific because I read it the other day. I think I'm right-ish. But they're still growing like 30% year over year on $1.5 billion. You know, that's a big company. Like, that's a big, healthy company. And that's because the right-hand side that tam equation is high right it's not because they magically discovered more businesses to sell

mongodb2 it's because the price they sell for mongodb continues to go up right and starts high stays high but we don't talk about that when we talk about open source and business right we talk about how you should relate to the community we talk about all kinds of stuff but we don't talk about how to start to the business side of it so i'm starting to think about how do i talk about the business side of it in a way that i can explain to people how the dynamics actually work are you writing a book you're writing some blog posts what are you writing i don't know i don't know if it's going to be a book a book feels like a lot of work so if i think about it as a book it kind of freaks me out i don't want to anymore, but maybe it'll be like another long blog post. What's up, friends?

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Once again, imageproxy.net. Check out the demo while you're there and check out the advanced features for the pro version. Once again, imageproxy.net. So when you do that math, it seems like our story we tell ourselves, which I guess has some truth to it because we tell it to ourselves, is that we can exclude the zero because those people were never going to buy it anyways. Isn't that part of the story?

Yeah, well, when you think about the business model math, so this is not like hard business model math. This is the basics. So you have the idea of total addressable market. That's all the people who would ever buy your product times the average selling price then you have the serviceable addressable market the subset of the total market that could buy it today but given the set of things that it does today they could say yes right so there's you know imagine you have a market that's like the big enterprise and they need um they need fips support and you don't compile a fIPS compliant version of the software.

So they're out of your SAM. They're in your TAM, but they're not in your SAM, right? TAM, SAM, serviceable address market. So think of it as rings, total market, serviceable market. And then the inner ring is called the SOM. And that's the number that you're actually going to try to sell right now. So out of everyone who could use it, like how much do you think you're actually going to try to sell right now. So out of everyone who could use it, how much do you think you're actually going to get?

So it's big circle, everybody possible. SAM, everybody who could buy it because you have all the features they need. SOM, the amount you'll actually win. What's that one stand for? Serviceable, obtainable market. Obtainable. Obtainable market. You got the TAM, SAM, and SOMR acronyms for three metrics to describe

the market your organization operates in. That's right. And so business model kind of 101, right? So when you talk about excluding the zero, right? Obviously, the people who take the software, if I produce a product and I set the price to zero, those people are in my TAM.

Obviously they're also in my SAM because whatever it was that the software does is good enough for them. They can use it. They're also in my SOM. They chose to do it, right? They took the software from me and then now they use it. They're by definition in the business model. But we said the price is zero. It's the same as saying I have a free tier that's infinite, right?

And no one would look at a proprietary business and be like, exclude all those people you give the product away to for free, right? If Kleenex started giving away free Kleenex and then their business burned, you'd be like, well, that bad business. He'd be like, that was dumb. Shouldn't have given all that Kleenex away for free. I say Kleenex charge money for the Kleenex, right? So yeah, this is the same. And so when we do that math to justify to ourselves, hey, here's how my business is going to work in the long term. It's all fun and games, you know,

got to a lot of ARR. But when you look at the destruction we wrought there were you know the average selling price of the people we disrupted blade logic opsware all of those people three times four times higher than chef was or in puppet was right so like we decimated that market we took a ton of money out of it and we told ourselves that it was going to grow that we were going to grow into it you know which works you can look at hashi corp and you can do it. Like the power of that open source lift is so strong that if you, if you get the SAM wide enough, then it's, it's okay that the right-hand side of the equation is a little small for a while. But once you reach saturation, right? Once you're like, well, everybody, most of the people who could use it are using it and a lot of those people are using it for free suddenly where's the growth come from right uh

because it's not coming anymore from the expansion of the sam right like if the psalm and the sam get too close together like we have to grow by increasing the right hand side of the equation we have to grow by raising the price and the question is the most obvious place to raise the price is not on the people who are already paying you a million dollars right it's actually all the people who are paying you zero dollars and if i can suddenly convert those people to 10 now i'm docker this is this is what docker did they went from no arr to 100 million plus probably and the reason is that they suddenly said everybody who used docker desktop has to pay me 10 bucks ta-da and everybody got really mad they were like i can't believe you're making me pay for it i don't want to do it but like there's the 100 million like i so upset

but you still paid for it and like linkerd this is happening to them too i had i talked to the linkerd folks about this they like decided not to make stable bills i was like will this is happening to them too. I talked to the Linkerd folks about this. They decided not to make stable bills. I was like, Will, this is going to work. It's going to convert. And you should maybe go even further. Maybe stop making any builds at all that aren't the ones you sell for money. Because that would work even better. And he was like, that feels a step too far for me.

But I was like, get that money, Will. And I think he's getting it. I think that money's showing up in a way it wasn't before. And that's because what he did was raise that right hand side of the equation. There are a bunch of people using Linkerd, most of them paying $0. Suddenly, that ASP number starts to climb up. And it's magic what happens when the number on the left is big, and you raise that number on the right it's just multiplication it's not rocket science tree and this is why i think we have to split the conversation between the business and and the open source part because the business part is very clear those incentives are obvious you can put them in a spreadsheet you can see what their impact is

the open source piece of it you you cannot. It's feelings. It's vibes. There's a lot of stuff it is, but measurable is not on the list. And we tend to like things we can measure. We tend to believe things we can measure. And so, yeah, I think we have to start measuring it more. So in Linkerd's case, you're saying that the lever they pulled was to not put out official builds of sorts or verified builds? Yeah, so Linkerd, there were two projects.

There was Linkerd and then Buoyant Enterprise Linkerd. And Buoyant Enterprise was the paid product and Linkerd was the open source product that came out through the Linux Foundation through the CNCF. And what they decided to do was to stop producing stable builds through the CNCF.

So now the linker d builds are just nightlies and you can use the nightlies for free but like you're on your own right could be bugs could be bugs maybe it works maybe it doesn't no backwards compatibility yeah yeah you get what you get which their target market is the enterprise they're not running nightlies yeah like they're not they like, that's not a thing. And they also changed their pricing because now they were having more realistic conversations about the actual value of Linkerd, right? And now suddenly all those people that you've been trying to sell to who were saying no, they're not saying no, because you built a valuable product

and you're not giving it away for free anymore. And so now they're forced to look at the question, is our life better with Linkerd paying for it or without Linkerd not paying for it? And look, that is the sales razor. If you can get it for free, I'm not paying you for it. Some people will that whatever, right? They'll be like, I love you. Right. I tipped, like I tip you good for my, like, you know, I was in Austin at this team retreat

and the, I had like a big pile of people at this table and we all just like drank tap water for like an hour and a half in this like restaurant and i felt bad about it i ordered like a coffee so our bill was like two dollars so like i tipped them whatever 25 because i was like you know we didn't do anything and that sucks and like that was nice or whatever. I tell that story not to show you what a nice person I am. I tell you, I just to say that there's people who will tip you. Right. You know what I mean? There's people who will be like, I got real value out of that, but they're tipping you. And you know, it's a lot better when you,

if you're, if your goal is to make money, it's a lot easier to make it. If you're like, you can't have it if you don't pay me. What I find interesting in that example, though, is that you said it's a no. I think it was more of a, there was no request for money. Oh, there was definitely a request. If you're giving it away for free, right. It wasn't a no. There was 100% a request for money. In Linkerd's case? Oh, yeah. They'd been trying hard to sell buoyant enterprise Linkerd to all the people who use Linkerd for the entirety of that project's life.

And the deal they made while also giving the stable builds of course yeah because it was an open source project because the belief was right that the open source piece increases the serviceable addressable market faster pulls more people into the into the market you can sell to the sum and that that acceleration is worth it and my point is i don't think it's worth it if the if it comes at a price of zero like it's obviously not worth it if the price is zero like if everybody in like there's a lot of enterprises running linkerd is not an unsuccessful project but they were not making the money commensurate with their success of course

they weren't it was free not only was it free it was free and it came through a trusted third party the cncf do i trust cncf more than i trust buoyant absolutely who's buoyant now the answer is all the people working on linkerd publishing it through cncf that's all they're ever when cncf's not doing anything for linkerd except whatever stamping it you know i'm sure there's some marketing hoo-ha that's lovely some hoo-haha behind there. But that hoo-ha didn't help him against Istio. Didn't help him against Zillium. You know, like that hoo-ha is available to anyone who wants it. So it wasn't like an exclusive marketing hoo-ha, you know?

Right. Look at what a good job I'm doing not swearing. I know. These are nice euphemisms. These are great. So the difference between Linkerd and what HashiCorp did is HashiCorp, they both wanted to raise the right hand side of the equation hashy corp wants to do it through relicensing linker d did

it through packaging or building or productization right exactly so the core problem is the same right which is the right hand side of that equation sucks i need to raise my price how do i raise my price and that's how now hashicorp in the case of of hashicorp they did it through saying well the only builds that are available are the ones that come from us under our commercial terms you'll see those terms ratchet up over time so they you know they didn't want to freak everybody out so like they it's not like they've it's not like as soon as they did that they also ratcheted the right hand side intensely but they absolutely preparing for it they're getting right like of course they are right now they're in full control yeah they just need a little distance between the moment and the ratchet but the ratchet's coming because the ratchet's the point like like they're not doing

it because they don't want the ratchet like they totally want the ratchet same with mongodb they were like it's the big cloud providers no it was not was not. I mean, yes, it was. I'm sure. I'm 100% positive that when they sat down and talked about it internally, it was about the big cloud providers. And that's what worked them into a lather. And there was a whole bunch of people running MongoDB and not paying them a dollar. And there were a bunch of third party hosting providers running MongoDB making more dollars than they were making. And the way they wanted to make money on top of what they did was by hosting MongoDB, which they had not done. And so they needed to, at the same time, raise the right hand side by making it harder to

get a version of MongoDB that you don't pay for. They needed to eliminate the competition of existing third party hosting providers so that when they entered that market, they had the best offering. And they wanted to make sure that the large cloud providers didn't eat into their nut. And they did it all with one smooth relicensing cut of the sword. Yeah, fair enough.

Like, okay, this is why you have to take the hippie part out of it. Right, we talk about it that way from a pure business point of view. You're like, okay, I get it. I see what you wanted. Like, that worked. And it super worked.

You can't say it didn't work. It worked. It's obvious that it worked. The only time you can say it didn't work it worked it's obvious that it worked the only time you can say it doesn't work is if you fall back on the hippie thing eric raymond who i've never interacted with but like crawled into my twitter feed and was like when i said something to that effect and was like you're looking at the wrong thing and i'm like well tell me what i should be looking at and then he went silent because there's not because he doesn't have anything because he has vibes.

You know, he was like, obviously there's less MongoDB in the world than there used to be. I'm like, is there? Who's Eric Raymond? Who's Eric Raymond? Eric Raymond, ESR, he wrote. The Cathedral in the Bazaar?

Yeah. That Eric Raymond, okay. That Eric Raymond. Slid into your DMs with nothing to say. No DMs, publicly. Yeah, it was public. Publicly slid into your public. Yeah, slid into the conversation because I nothing to say. No DMs. Publicly. Yeah, it was public. Publicly slid into your public. Yeah, slid into the conversation because I was like, mom, go with the money.

And what did he say? It was something to the equivalent of like, it didn't matter. But anyway, it was funny. And also kind of delightful to me because how much did I love the Cathedral? What an impact Cathedral and Bazaar had on my life. So like. Do you believe in the multiverse? Yeah.

Adam, are you a multiverse believer? My mult, I mean, look, I'm superstitious about like everything. And I believe in like a vague and personal God that's sort of Christian and Buddhist. I'm like a Thich Nhat Hanh Buddhist. But I have a couple mojo bags hung above my door with a rubber chicken. It's been over the door of every house I've ever slept in since I was probably 19 or 20. Because like, you know, the rubber chicken's there to remind me that it's not the mojo probably 19 or 20 because like you know the rubber chicken's there to remind me that it's not the mojo bags that keep us safe you know and also it's the mojo

bags you know like i'm not sleeping i'm not sleeping in i'm not sleeping in my house without the mojo bags above the door you know not necessarily trying to get your religious beliefs but i want to i want to know if there was an alternate universe, a multiverse, let's just say, where HashiCorp made a different choice. What would have the choice been different? How could they have done differently? Yeah. Oh, that's a good question. Going straight for all the spicy salsa. I mean, look, let's start with some recognition that they hit a home run and I hit a double, right? What I mean by that is just, you know, I was like, my objective with Chef

was to build a lasting public company that lived forever. And I did not, which does, you know, I don't feel like a failure about it. We did great and better than most startups do. And like, I'm proud of our success. And, you know, you can't, cashier success versus Chef success. They're not in the same league, right?

So I just want to get that out of the way first. Then I'll pontificate about how I think the world could have been different. Yeah. So I just want to make sure people understand. Like, I'm not talking about this. Check yourself before you. Yeah, right.

It's not like I'm, so what do I know? And I've spent like the whole time thinking about it so i have thoughts so like the first is that when hashi corp started and sort of as they grew for them and i think they've said this publicly open source wasn't that wasn't a thing that they thought about as part of their business model it was a thing they did because that's what all the infrastructure software that they used was, right? They used Chef. Oh, they used Puppet. Mitchell never really liked Chef. But like, you know, they use Puppet. They used Chef a little bit. They used all kinds of open source stuff. And that market was saturated with open source offerings and tools. So in order to get into that

market, it would have been tough to build those tools in and not have them be open source. So they open sourced them. You know, they chose the MPL, which is fine. The MPL Mozilla public license applies to basically individual file copy left. Then the next piece of it is, how exactly is it that you grow with your own community? So if you think about like, who is contributing? How open were you to contributions? What was it like? You know, they've never open were you to contributions what was it like you know they've never been particularly open to contributions right that was from the jump it was sort of either you know what mitchell's show arm on show like they made decisions and you sort of followed them you can see this with you know like the feature open tofu just shipped around state

encryption i don't know when the first time that there was a PR to Terraform that had state encryption for the local data, but it was a long time ago. And that PR was rejected because it didn't fit in with the business model, right? It wasn't better for Hatchicorp. That was a proprietary feature. They wanted you to use Vault.

They wanted you to like tie into the suite. And so, you know, somebody had written the code and done the work and sent the PR and got the finger, right? That's a pretty common refrain when you look at sort of across the board on their projects, right? They just, they hired teams, those teams worked on the software. This is always what happens. It's not rare that the like primary funder of the project is where all the engineers come from. I promise I'm getting to the answer to your question. So from the beginning, they were pretty closed. I think one way to think about it would have been

you could have started out being more open. So Terraform, there's a plethora of competitors now and the infrastructure is code space. There's Pulumi, there's the CDK, there's the Azure resource manager stuff there's Microsoft even built another one whose name I forget I'm so sorry I probably should remember but you know there's a lot of them and part of the reason that all those things exist is because that ecosystem was so closed right so it did grow HashiCorpform, lots of people used it, tons of stuff happening there. But if you wanted to build a business on top of it, if you wanted to extend it, if you

wanted to collaborate in some way, if you wanted to build a derivative, like a lot of those avenues felt pretty closed because I think they were closed, right? And it meant that as the market grew, there was more space for competition because it's not like there was any part of the market that HashiC more space for competition because it's not like there was any part of the market that HashiCorp didn't want, right? And the growth of that technology and the growth of their open source market covered up the low ASP. So HashiCorp goes to market, hugely successful with Terraform.

Let's call them base hits on everything else except for Vault, which was another home run. So, and Vault's a home run for ASP, right? So like Vault's more expensive than the others. It's a security product, like kapow, right? So now you got Terraform home run, Vault home run, everything else is like, you know, we're, it's like slugging along, right? They had a press release not that long ago, like yesterday, maybe, where they were like, rebranding the HashiCorp cloud platform. And they were talking about how Nomad was a part of it. And then it was like, but you got to run it yourself. You know, so like, all of that, the alternate universe theory would have said, what if HashiCorp had been more open? What if they had actually been open to, let's call it open governance?

What if they had been open to allowing more people to use Terraform? And what if Terraform was a product they produced and they produced exclusively? And they could decide that the side of the market they wanted was the top of the market instead of the bottom, which is the part of the market they care about most. So they could have decided that the price for Terraform initially for a large swath of the long tail was essentially free. And they could have decided that the top of that market was very expensive, right? Closer to the ASP that they want now or that they had hoped to capture. And while they perhaps wouldn't have grown absolute share as quickly, I would argue that their ASP would be stronger now, right? And perhaps they could have driven more standardization around Terraform, for example,

than they did. Vault's a great example of this, right? Vault's ubiquitous in the enterprise. Lots of people use it, which which is awesome but it's not like hasn't like become it never became like a standard right in the way that like think about like elastisearch or redis right like redis redis was is like like the protocol of redis is the protocol for caching and that didn't happen for terraform didn't happen for vault either and it's because they were a little too closed right that there was not enough of that ecosystem you didn't happen for Vault either. And it's because they were a little too closed, right? There was not enough of that ecosystem. You didn't see the AWS Vault provider. You didn't see an Azure Vault provider, GCP Vault provider. If you did, Vault would be the standard by which we all get our certificates all the time, but we don't. And so now they're in a much more vulnerable

position later in the game. Because now as the game gets later, you're like, okay, growth slowing. We've kind of reached saturation. Competition got harder. Now that competition isn't with ourselves or with a derivative of us. It's not we're competing with AWS to be the best vault provider. It's we're competing with AWS's proprietary key management systems in order to be better than vault, which they aren't right. Vault's not better than AWS's proprietary key management systems in order to be better than vault, which they aren't right. Vault's not better than AWS is proprietary key management stuff. It's not better than Azure's

proprietary key management stuff for GCPs. Right. And so, you know, it's maybe better if I have lots of stuff in lots of places, but like Amazon will get you there. You know, if you're JPMC or you're chase or they're the same thing, your cityank or your whatever, like you'll find a way if that's what you want to do. So I think the alternate universe theory is one that says they should have built a distribution that they sold for money that was their brand and they should have operated like an open upstream and they should have let the rest of the market fill in the gaps. But that would have implied leaving that space and having a long term strategy about how the the right hand side of that dollar equation turns into a giant business. I don't think they had that strategy. I think the strategy was this thing's great. Everybody's using it. Mash the gas, which this is my strategy, too. That's how Chef speed ran every possible open source business model we were like people like it go which you know it's a strategy in in in arrears

only you know it's only when you look in the rearview mirror that suddenly you're like how strategic was i you know like in the moment they weren't being strategic you just went for it it's not like you raise that you know it's not like mitchell and armand raised that first round of venture capital and suddenly they became CFOs with a genius. No, no. They built software and sold it. It was awesome. And they didn't even think too much about selling it because it was killing it.

Because if you kill it and the open source part works, you're picking up leads like leaves. They're everywhere. You're just doing stuff. You're like, oh my God a we got an inbound lead from fidelity you know and it just happened like i didn't talk to them they just showed up in my life and we're like hey we're using a bunch of this terraform stuff what do you got you know like it's pretty awesome until it's not and i think that that misalignment of long-term incentives is how it could have been different i think you could have aligned the long-term incentives

not really changed much about the open source part of your growth trajectory, and kept that right-hand side high. And if you had, then I think you'd be able to remain in the community and of the community in the way that you hoped you could have. Potentially.

Yeah, yeah. Potentially. Who knows? Potentially. Wooga wooga. Yeah. Well, I think part of this is analysis, part of this is opinion, and part of this is analysis. Part of this is opinion.

And part of this is like, well, at some point in the future, someone's going to look at this podcast and this conversation and say, I need to make a decision about how I orchestrate and organize my open source project slash company I'm building around it. Is the best way a license change? What would an alternate universe be if I had a choice? And what would that example be? And I think HashiCorp in this example and OpenTOFA is an example of a fractured community, a fractured project, let's just say. And a community that built itself around it. Orchestrators, vendors that were implementers of Terraform. Built businesses around Terraform.

And they got the rug pull not cool situation happened to them. But they did that in spite of HashiCorp, right? HashiCorp. They did. HashiCorp didn't want them to do it. It's not like HashiCorp ever looked at MZero or Spacelift or any of those companies

and was like, glad you're pushing the Terraform Sam. You know, like they were always hostile to their existence. Yeah, but they could have. Right, exactly. So they disregarded free love. Let's just say, I don't even, I don't want to be like that kind of free love.

It was like literally free. It was literally love. There's the hippie side. Free love. But let's put the hippie side back into it. Like the thing about it is that nothing bonds stronger for a product than using that product to change the trajectory of your life.

100%, Yeah. When I look at the things that have changed my life, they are like, and there are numerous pieces of software. I was Mark Burgess, who wrote CF Engine changed my life, the entire arc of my whole adult life. My kid's going to go to college, everything I have, because Mark Burgess wrote CF Engine and wrote papers about it, changed my life, and open sourced all of it. And if he hadn't done that, I don't know what would have happened in my life. I'm sure I'd have been fine, but it changed the shape of my life forever. And there are people that I was at Disney the other day, not to name drop or whatever, but one of the stories that one of the people told me was how chef changed his life,

right? In a very similar way. He had like reached a part in his career. He was a little disenchanted. It wasn't having any fun. And then chef happened and suddenly open field running, right? Like he was reinvigorated for the, for like a second act in his whole career. And like, I didn't do that.

Right? Like you can look at that and be like, well, sure you did. Like there wasn't a chef and then there was, but that's not true. Like that person found that product, he fell in love with it. He changed his life, because that's what he wanted to do with that piece of software. That is the nothing bonds stronger than that in product land. Like, you're not that loyal to Kleenex. You know, you're not that loyal to LaCroix you're I see you buying Waterloo you know like because it didn't change your life it just it was yummy but the things that changed your life like they bond tightly and what happens when you constrict that when you when you ignore that hippie side of

it is you make it us versus them again you take this thing that has the potential to bond so deeply into the fabric of someone's life that it alters them permanently and forever. And you turned it into a thing that was just about extracting a dollar. And you know, like, yeah, what a bummer. And how much more possible how much more money is available? If you could have kept that other side, if you could have kept that life changing impact, if you could have said to the to all people that are in OpenTofu, great, let's make Terraform the industry standard for this thing together. Let's push that forward together and improve the shape of what it is, and we'll compete. And look, HashiCorp's going to win. There's no version of that scenario

where they don't win. They win. They win 100% of the time, but they didn't want it because that, you know, to some degree, it requires a bit of faith. Like it does require a little bit of belief in the hippie side of it in order to get yourself there. And at least in that first moment, because if you don't believe that that's true, well, you know, there is a spreadsheet I can look at

that's deals won or lost. And some of them go to Spacelift. Some of them go to M0. I don't like that that's true. Well, you know, there is a spreadsheet I can look at that's deals one or lost and some of them go to space lift. Some of them go to M zero. I don't like that spreadsheet. Well, of course you don't like it because the ASP was already too low and you were reaching market saturation and you couldn't, you know what I mean? So like, right. And they're taking some of your customers. Yeah. It makes total sense. It makes total sense. One of them's hippie in love. The other one, hard spreadsheet, sitting in a room with a sales rep, losing their job because they couldn't make a deal that quarter because they lost it to M0.

You know? Do you think that Open Tofu has a real chance of doing that? What? What Terraform didn't do. No, I don't. You think that they don't stand a chance to be a viable fork even?

I mean, I'm sure it'll be a viable fork. But at this point... Too late? Yeah. And like, I mean, look, I'm busy building a product that I think is going to disrupt all of that part of the market. So like, again, just while we're laying it all, cards on the table. You know, I'm over here pontificating

about how HashiCorp could add a better exit and Mitchell's flying in his private plane. Like, yeah, I think that ultimately I think all of those companies are dead ends because i think the actual foundational technology is also a dead end for as beautiful as it was i'm so thankful that is the direction we went again changed my life and it's not getting better so um like i don't think it gets better because you put a better, you know, cloud UI on top of it. I just don't. I think it's sort of, it's as good as it gets.

Sorry, was that two shots firety? No. Makes for a spicy podcast. No, it's all good. You hear that Open Tofu? You're dead in the water. I mean, I don't think they're dead in the water. I think it's fine.

I just. Oh, I thought you wanted to get spicy. I had to figure out spice it up even more. I just, I just think that like all of those companies now have a different problem, which is let's talk about the business dynamics of open tofu for a second. So there's all these companies that are contributing to open tofu right now. All of them are doing it because they use open tofu in their own products. So in my terminology that no one else but me has ever adopted, I call that situation a free software Island. So what that means is they've all agreed that they're going to cooperate together on Open Tofu and the CNCF. They drew a circle around it. They said, that's Open Tofu. And in Open Tofu,

where it's common ground, right? Every Apache project is also one of these. It's also a free software island. So from a business point of view, how do I maximize my ability to make a profit off the free software island and to compete against other people who are also pulling off the free software island? And the correct move there is to build proprietary extensions. So the winner of the OpenTofu war, which will happen internally to OpenTofu because they're all competing now on top of OpenTofu for the customer dollar, right? So they need to grow the size of OpenTofu. They need to grow the right-hand side of their ASP. Yeah?

The best move there, over and over again, focus as little as you possibly can on OpenTofu and as much as you possibly can on the proprietary side of your product. So whoever's listening, if your strategy right now is we're all in on OpenTofu, you got 20 engineers, 18 of them are working on open tofu, and two of them are working on your proprietary extension, stop needs to be 18 to two, or more. And the reason is that the diff the delta between you and your competitors will never be a feature you put an open tofu by definition. So the way that you win in the business version of that market is you build

the best product the other people don't have. It's not that hard. And somebody else is going to have the opposite strategy. They're going to be like, no, we're the most vanilla open tofu worse. You know, like it's all the open source good times. This, you know, this is the Hadoop story, right? This was what were their names? It was Cloudera and Hortonworks. Cloudera strategy was the one I just described. Hortonworks was the open source one. Their whole thing was it's vanilla Hadoop delivered in package to you, but it's all open source and ready to go. And they had a merger of equals. They're both public companies, both successful. Cloudera bought Hortonworks 60-40 merger of equals. I don't know about you, but 60-40 isn't a merger of equals to me. And it was 60-40 merger of equals. I don't know about you, but 60-40 isn't a merger of equals to me.

And it was 60-40 because Cloudera made more money because they had proprietary features that Hortonworks didn't have. And so they owned the higher end of that market. So that's what's going to happen to OpenTofu. One of them is going to figure it out that the right move here is not

to put more effort and energy into OpenTofu. It's actually to put effort and energy into your proprietary product because you don't have a choice. Now, HashiCorp could have had that same energy, right? It would have actually been a pretty good move for one of those people to be like, we're the number two contributor to Terraform. That's actually a pretty solid competitive wedge if you're competing for a segment of the market, HashiCorp's not in like, that's actually pretty great, but open tofu, I mean,

there's none of that. Right. So yeah, I, I think ultimately all those companies still have the same basic problem they had before. Only now the problem is that they also have to maintain open tofu and before they didn't.

And so that's going to be a real drag. And everything they put into OpenTofu helps their competitors. That's going to also be a drag. So yeah, I don't know. You know, I'm sure they'll do fine, but I wouldn't predict it's wild runaway success. Well, the question is, what are they optimizing for? Are they optimizing for HashiCorp IPO success? Or are they optimizing for let's keep what we were using like you said the open source island what are they optimizing for every single one of those companies is a venture-backed startup there was only one outcome they all wanted and it was hashicorp levels of success or they're playing the wrong i'm going to swear again you ready the wrong

game if that's not what you want, why'd you take that first venture dollar? There's no version of those companies where what they wanted was not to win and to win big. That is the whole game. So like, you know, they might- Does that describe OpenTofu's direction though? I mean, that they're users of the technology,

not the technology itself, the company. I don't mind misunderstanding. I mean, remove OpenTofu from all of those companies. Remove Terraform from those companies. What do they got? The answer is nothing. Terraform extensions. They got nothing.

Terraform extensions. They got nothing. It's the heart of what they do. Yeah, it's a foundational bit. It is what drives them forward. So is the user base of OpenTofu a bunch of competitors, essentially, that integrate Terraform? And they're all competitors? Yep. Is the user base of OpenTofu a bunch of competitors, essentially, that integrate Terraform? And they're all competitors?

Yep. And so now there's users of OpenTofu, people who use OpenTofu. They're now getting a great enterprise product at $0, stamped by the CNCF, Linux Foundation. So how much value do I, as an Env0 or a Spacelift or those people, get to extract from my investment in OpenTofu? Zero. No dollars. Zero dollars. It's worth nothing. Okay? space lift or those people get to extract from my investment in open tofu? Zero, no dollars, zero dollars. It's worth nothing. Okay. So it's worth nothing. So we all have the same problem, right-hand side of the TAM, left-hand side of the number. We know the left-hand side of that number is really big, but has reached saturation. Right-hand side of that number, quite small. How do we make the right-hand side of the number bigger if we can never extract any value at all incrementally for our investment in OpenTofu? The answer is never invest in OpenTofu.

Invest massively in the other right-hand side of that thing and try to capture as much of that market as you can as quickly as you can. Any other decision is kind of dumb. Not because of the hippie part, but just the business part. Just think about it you're like oh well like not through difficult math either this is just multiplication so like you know oof so like it's not like it's not gonna work it's gonna work they're gonna make money it's probably sustainable for the long term i i'm sure that it'll become an open source project that lives and people maintain and there'll be an open tofu you can rely on and you know like open tofu does rely on no in no small part on the success of those companies that need it to work and those companies are going to be successful because they

can make money on top of open tofu and you know how much of that to do that they got to compete with hashicorp they got to compete with each other and they got to get you convinced that open tofu is the way and open tofu is going to become more and more not Terraform over time. So I don't know. It's going to be a squeaker. So you're predicting some form of stasis. So they'll probably continue to have success. The project will go along just fine.

But we aren't talking home runs. We aren't talking. Is there going to be a breakout winner that goes public? I mean, no. It is a weird incentive, though, when you have competitors playing what is effectively a zero-sum game, all collaborating on their foundational stuff. And like you said, the incentives are perverse because you are incentivized to invest as little as possible in the foundation and as much as possible

in your proprietary extensions. They're all incentivized that way. Yes, every time I've ever looked at anything that worked this way, that's the answer. And I guess the kumbaya only lasts so long, right? I mean, at some point, we've got to get paid. And if we don't get paid... Given this, let's just say it's a fact,

given this truth, what does HashiCorp move? I mean, they're doing it right now. Like, they're just going to continue... Ratchet. It's the ratchet. They're going to continue to close up. They're going to take the free part and squeeze it.

So it's harder and harder to get a thing that's totally free. So they'll ratchet down on how much functionality or how much price you can get for free. Right. If it was me, I'd say you can't get it for free at all anymore.

I would have just been like, and now you're like, we are only choices. My free tier, right. It would have be worse if I was in the seat. Like maybe there's people who are like, if Adam ran hashy corp,

boy, he wouldn't do the evil that Dave McJann did. I'm not sure, you know, like if you ran hashy corp boy he wouldn't do the evil that dave mcjann did i'm not sure you know like if you made this choice right if you made this choice to relicense given this choice yeah given the choice given the place where we already are like man i'd ratchet so hard because what am i trying to do i'm i'm trying to appease the open source people man they're so mad at me they made open tofu you already did that you you ruined that i already did that i'm already soaking that pain and it'll be out of the news cycle and in no time lickety split so like man yeah i'm just the ratchets coming and i would and if it was me i'd ratchet hard because like you know if i could pop you know think about it your growth slows a little quarter

over quarter not it's not like it's stopped. They're still growing, but they're not growing like they were. Their stock price is taking a hit. The macro is tough. If they can pop 10 million more in ARR, 20 million more in ARR, that matters. That changes the game for them. That's a big swing in that stock price. And what do they sacrifice? Zero dollars?

Theoretical market share? Let them go to open tofu zero the zero of the of the uh tam the zero of the tam so let him be a let him be a drain on open tofu right it's only going to make it worse for open tofu let him have all those people that weren't paying you anyway what do you care like what you care about are the people who buy it and the people who buy it aren't paying you enough. So make them pay you more so they care. And then when you sit down to sell it to them, be like, you don't want to buy open tofu. I sent him the whole hot and juicy.

And, you know, Matt Aces Arter is pretty sketchy. Show title. It's not a bad plan. It's not, right? No, it's not.'s not it's like if you're gonna go to the dark side you might as well be emperor yeah you know i mean you might as well what game are we playing right and you know everybody likes to believe that in that same situation with those same with all those pressures and all those people that would they would some suddenly be different i'm you know i'd like to believe i would be too would i i don't

know like i kind of see it yeah so it's tough it's an interesting problem and like i'm convinced that it's you know there's an argument that you know like matt ac is making that the most important problem in open source is actually that we're not paying the low-level maintainers of all these libraries and that there's this small number of people who relicense and we should not pay attention to the man behind the curtain. And instead, we should focus all our energy on figuring out how to get the maintainers paid. That's sleight of hand. I think they're two very separate problems. To me, actually, the more existential threat to open source is not whether we can pay the individual maintainers. It's whether or not we figure out how to rewrite these incentives and teach ourselves how to build long-lasting companies

that take the part of open source that's beautiful, which is your ability to build a life on top of it in the way that you want or need to. And how do we build companies that their success and their growth and their future sustainability never comes at the expense of your ability to create the life you want.

Because that's the magical part about software. Like, you can do that and it harms no one. And the supply never runs out. It's glorious. It's unlike anything we've ever seen in the history of the world. And because we can't figure out how to, like, align the business model incentives, we can't have nice things when they get big. All of that has to accrue solely

to the company that brought you. I just don't, I don't want it to be true. In my heart, I don't want it to be true. And so I'm gonna do whatever I can to prove it. But like, am I right? I think so. You hope so. We'll only find out.

Because to be right, like it's not like you can be right just because you get the business model, right? Like I can be right about everything I just described to you and system initiative still fails. Because in order to be great, it has to be a great product, people have to want it, they have to use it, all that stuff has to be true. And in the end, I'm going to be judged on whether or not my business succeeds or fails on some metric. I had some dude on twitter the other day like i think this is the ceo of oso or something a security startup and somebody had asked me my opinion about mongodb and he replied like why are you listening to that guy he didn't build a

sustainable business like what's he know anyway and the person who asked the question was like well he did make 75 million in arr which is like pretty good and he was like but it wasn't sustainable you know but it was i was like well what are you gonna do you know like can't win for losing what's up friends this episode is brought to you by our friends at sentry check them out at sentry.io s-e-n-t-r-y.io code breaks fix it faster with sentry don't just observe take action the only app monitoring platform out there built for developers that gets to the root cause for every issue 90 000 plus growing teams use sentry to find their problems fast github disney vmware Fast, GitHub, Disney, VMware, Airtable, Autodesk, Monday.com, Miro, Tunnel. I could just go on literally 90,000 plus teams, trust Sentry to fix their problems fast.

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Well, you're giving another shot. How's it going, man? How's it going? You know, it's going pretty good. We're creeping up on being able to let people use it in production. I think summer, it'll be ready. The big problem was that it was slow and now it's not slow.

It's now very fast. So, you know, I think when we show it to people and they see what's possible, you know, the response is always is always fantastic like there's a lot of incredible things you can do with system initiative and i'm really excited to get it into the world more broadly i think we've been really careful and remain really careful about because it's so transformative i can't i can't get over my skis and telling you how great it is do you know what

i mean it's better felt than tell kind of a thing. Yeah. I just, I don't think you can like, you don't sell things to developers by telling lies because they're going to learn pretty quickly that you're lying because they'll try it and they'll be like, this didn't do what you said it did. And so system initiative right now, it's in the middle of basically having an engine rebuild where we went from, you know, some calls taking tens of seconds to now taking, you know, milliseconds. And that's a humongous improvement that like changes the interaction model and

changes how the product feels. And I think is really integral to its success. But it just means that when you have things like that in your way, you just, you have to get all the way through them and you still haven't gotten to the thing that's most important, which is, you know, can I put that product? I want to disrupt the way that we work that that entire part of the DevOps industry functions. Like my, the game I'm playing is, is entirely the big game. And so if that's what I want, I can't put a product in front of you and tell you, you should use it in production. If it's not great, it has to be great. And it is really, really great. And it's like, it has to be great and it is really really great and it's like it's right there so summer when you do disrupt who will you disrupt if you just say everyone that's cool

no i'm not gonna say everyone what a what a weasel look first it's gonna be you know infrastructure is code right um so all the terraform providers out there yeah for sure um this is such a better way to do that work. It's crazy better. It's not like a little better. It's bananas better. And so and I really believe that that's true. So, you know, that's the first one. But as a platform, what it allows you to do is think differently about how the takes all of the information about all of your infrastructure and your applications and all that stuff, and turns it into data data and then allows you to build to interact with that data and to make that info and then to make that data in reactive through writing reactive functions and then executing them at speed and scale that capability is bananas when you think about what you can build on top of all that infrastructure information right so if

you're like i have i have all this information about what's happening because the people doing the work are interacting with the more because it just makes sense that if what I have is all of that data, both about the real world and what you hypothetically propose, that I can start to deliver user experiences to people sort of around the horn in the DevOps lifecycle in a way that no one else can. So eventually everybody, but at first infrastructure is good. Are you coming back to Austin here soon for DevOps days here in Austin? I'm not. Do you tour much? I will tour more. You know, right now my existential problem

is I need System Initiative to be good enough that you can use it in production so that I can sell it to you for money. So I'm kind of all focused on that right now. And, you know, me doing more outreach or being in the world telling you how cool it is, like, the next talk I give about system initiative

needs to be the talk that ends with, and you should go use it now because it's ready for you. Getting it there this summer. Yeah, getting it there right now. It was slow two weeks ago, now it's real fast. And it's both an open source project and a paid proprietary distribution? Yeah, it's completely open source every line of

code is open source all of its open source system initiative is a product made exclusively by system initiative and sold for money so you can get it from me under my commercial terms it has a very generous free tier like nobody's paying any money for system initiative right now so right now the terms are zero for everyone um but yeah, I'm going to sell enterprise products and I'm going to call them system initiative. And the doors are open for anyone who wants to use system initiative to change their own vector and whatever they want to.

What they can't do is call it system initiative. The only people who can make system initiative are me, right? My company, like that's what we do. But you want to make the change log, you want to pivot the changelog into a company that builds a distribution of system initiative. You're so welcome to do that. I can't wait to collaborate with you on that upstream. I can't wait to see what you build. I think it's transformative technology. And in order for it to actually transform the way the industry works, you have to be willing to allow it to transform other people's lives than

just my own. I really believe that. I think that's cool. I think that you're really putting your money where your mouth is. You're putting the, the, the model to a test. It's going to work.

With your baby. Of all the things I have confidence in, the model is the thing I have the confidence in the most. The hard part is getting the product to be awesome and people loving it. If the product's incredible, the rest, like product market fits the whole game. So like, can you build something that's actually great? If you build something that's great, then the rest will work itself out.

Terraform was great. That's why it worked. It didn't work because it was open source. It worked because it was great. It also was open source. Therefore, it grew faster, right? But greatness was the requirement. Like all things, greatness is required to be great.

If you want it to be awesome, if you really want it to be incredible. That sucks. That's not great. Yeah, if it's not great, it doesn't matter what your licensing scheme is. It doesn't matter that you really understood business model math. Did you hear Kelsey Hightower's feedback on System Initiative? TypeScript, no. He said TypeScript, no. you know like did you hear kelsey hightower's feedback on system initiative typescript no he said typescript no i mean sure like everybody's gonna have an opinion about that the thing about it is if it's if you pick another language one of the things about i learned this at chef is you know we chef was all ruby and erlang two very esoteric things eventually they had some stuff

written in go and then also rust but you know the dsl was in ruby and we taught a lot of people to program and that was awesome but ruby was a language that over time stopped being as popular as it was at sort of peak rails you know and so when you look at like how do you think about your go-to-market you could have picked python you could have picked go could pick lua like could have picked ruby could have picked Lua, like could have picked Ruby, could have picked Lisp. Like there's a million languages you could have written these little functions in. But if you think about it, what's the one language that's in every enterprise's stack? Where, forget about all the other arguments. You're a Java shop. You're a, you're a, you're a Python shop. You're a Go shop. You're a whatever. The answer is

JavaScript. JavaScript's in every single stack, everywhere're a Go shop, you're a whatever, the answer is JavaScript. JavaScript's in every single stack, everywhere, in every company, anywhere on the planet. But not really with your SREs and your, like, that's the backend folks.

Who cares? Who cares? Well, aren't developers going to choose this? Ask every single one of them, could you write a function, just a function, not a program,

could you write a function in JavaScript? Every single one's going to say, of course they can. They're going to crack their knuckles and be like, no problem. And then they're going to complain about it and be like, I can't believe it. I hate the way the regular expression library works and

numbers are insane. That's all true. And most of the time in system initiative, you're writing functions that are sub 100 lines long. If you're at 100 line long function in system initiative, it's an incredibly long one. So like, is it better in Python? No.

It's irrelevant. And what matters is that it's a thing that exists in your house, that it's not Erlang. It matters that it's not esoteric. And it's the least esoteric language in the universe. It's just everywhere.

It's got a pretty solid debugger. You kind of already know how to do it. Do you know how got a pretty solid debugger. You kind of already know how to do it. Do you know how to write Python? If so, you kind of already know how to write JavaScript. Do you know how to write Java? Well, guess what? You kind of already know how to write JavaScript. Do you know how to write C? Guess what? You basically know how to write JavaScript. Do you know how to like JavaScript? It's just fine. It's fine. It's some people's favorite. Those people are weird. Everybody else, it's the thing that you just have and it's everywhere and it's fine. And that's, so yeah, I mean,

Kelsey might be right. I built a little escape hatch so I could always write another language binding and be like, and now. Well, it's interesting to me that Solomon Hikes and the Dagger team have gone multi-language with their stuff. And I was thinking, hmm. Yeah, it makes sense. It makes a lot of sense in Dagger because if you think about the way that you described the products, the pipeline, right? The way that those things come together,

it makes a lot of sense that you would want people to be able to write their CI pipelines in the same language, their delivery pipelines in the same language as the application, right? Because part of the idea there is that the the end developer is the one who's doing that, that work, as opposed to necessarily like an ops person, which is fine. But you know,

in system initiative, you get this big hypergraph of functions, like, you just need a language that runs fast, that you can like write a function in that has a ubiquitous number of libraries, if you want them and everybody knows how to write. And if it's Python, there's somebody who's like, I don't know Python, but there's nobody that's like,

I don't know JavaScript. The worst answer you hear from JavaScript is, I don't like JavaScript. Or not really, but I could do it if I had to. Because every single developer has to sometimes and does. Is there a world where both Dagger and System Initiative thrive? Or are these two things competitive? No, does is there a world where both dagger and system initiative thrive or are these two things competitive no there's totally a world where they

thrive right i mean a thing that you have to remember is that even in the in the case where we you know we both go public and and we're both big thriving forever concerns like it's a humongous market not everybody is going to do one thing or another, right? Even if, and the pieces of that puzzle, like system initiative is a different way of thinking about some of that information, but like, you know, I don't use system initiative to make builds in my software. Like I use buck two to do that. And I use buck two because I need to be able to write a program that understands the shape of this complex monorepo we've built and then makes the CI pipelines and the delivery pipelines easy to run. And like, you know,

could I imagine a world where you use system initiative to model that part of the process? Yes. Do I think it would be qualitatively better than what you do in source? No, you know, maybe, but probably not. And like, I think, you you know there's the grandness of your ambition john lewis gaddis has this definition of strategy that i love which is it's how you align your limited resources to your unlimited aspirations across time space and scale so i have unlimited aspirations solomon has unlimited aspirations all the people that work at open tofu i mean all those companies they all have unlimited aspirations their strategy the people that work at OpenTofu, all those companies, they all have unlimited aspirations.

Their strategy is how are they going to align their resources across those things? There's absolutely a world where we all exist. I hope that that world happens because I like Solomon and I hope for his great success. I feel the same way about the OpenTofu people. I hope they don't feel like I did them dirty

by saying that they're now in a precarious situation because I hope they figure it out. I hope that they win i hope i hope they all do they won't but that's not because i that's not because i don't hope that they do you know sure so yeah of course there's definitely a world where they'll live i mean i think we're going to be very disruptive to the infrastructure as code space i don't think that means that those companies won't matter or that no one will use them do you know what i mean like it's not it's not it's not a zero-sum game like that yeah i was trying to understand the breadth of system initiatives yeah offerings in terms of like is cicd pipelines something that

it wouldn't maybe or not i don't know not not out of the gate maybe eventually yeah i mean one thing that happens when you have something like system initiative is that like for the infrastructure pieces you don't need a pipeline anymore because i have a simulator so like that whole point of having like you don't need to like run tests early in the pipeline to see if it would like it just tells you in real time whether what you're doing makes any sense or not so like there's no pipeline there because it doesn't make sense to have one because what you're doing is any sense or not. So like, there's no pipeline there, because it doesn't make sense to have one, because what you're doing is writing is like programming a simulator on top of the data, which is like, mind blowingly different, right? But it doesn't make sense to have a pipeline. It means that we had to go build source control differently for the data we had like tons of that. That's why it's taken four years to build, right? But the

user experience of not having a pipeline, I can tell you is delicious. So, you know, will I want to also have the experience of being able to write a hypothetical model of how my application deploys that tells you whether or not you're doing it right or wrong? I think I probably do. That seems pretty dope, but you know, baby steps, like we know it's great for infrastructure as code i have a suspicion it's going to be great for applications and in the in the broad and in in more complex use cases and higher levels of abstraction but i don't know that yet because we're not there yet but i don't see why it wouldn't be you know what's that mean for like ci probably nothing what's it mean for cd maybe a lot i don't know you know you still got to run

your test somewhere. Do I really, you know, but when you have like a remote code execution sandbox, kind of everything looks like I, you know, you're like, well, I could, I could build your code in one, you know, I could, should I probably not, you know, like, probably not. But I don't know. What is it you're optimizing for is it speed to production is it speed to hypothesis is it speed to change of infrastructure and how would it work what do you what are the main levers you're trying to optimize for i'm optimizing for developer experience primarily so i'm if you think that that's kind of obvious but when you think about it the results what drives good or bad outcomes in dev DevOps tends to be how good the experience is

of trying to get those changes into the world, right? How tightly do we collaborate together? How clearly, how cleanly can we work together? How quick are those feedback loops? Right now, they're incredibly slow. So, you know, think about how long it takes to know that the infrastructure change you made to Terraform was right or wrong. And in system initiative, it would happen in real time. You would open a change set, you'd change the architecture, the qualifications would run, and they would tell you if it makes sense or doesn't make sense, and it happens immediately. That's a dramatic transformation in the experience of what it means to do that stuff. So the outcomes that we produce are also therefore going to be better because the collaborative nature of the work, like one of the things that we produce are also therefore going to be better because the collaborative

nature of the work, like one of the things that we saw when we built system initiative with system initiative was because we're going to run this as a SAS product, right? So like watching our own team build system initiative with system initiative, they did it in real time, not by like being on zoom, watching one person drive like you would if you were pair programming. But instead, all three of them were logged into the same workspace at the same time. And they just split it up and they were like, you go build the VPCs, I'll go build the ECS cluster, you go build the IM rules. And they just like all took different parts of this big graph and they

just went to work and they did it all in real time together. And it was incredibly cool. Like we had them all share their individual screens. So as spectators, you know, you can't see this on the podcast, but our faces are like three up basically. And the thing that's actually doing this and, you know, we watch them three up on each of their screens and they're collaborating together in the same change set in real time, watching the infrastructure come in, things are going red, things are turning green. They're talking more. It was incredible. It like I haven't worked that way. Since I was building systems by hand for an ISP in the late 90s with my best friend.

And I was like, Oh, you know, like, that's something we lost. People don't even know we lost it. Because you have to be old enough to predate the automation we gave you to really remember that there was a time that we did that work together where that was the norm. Anyway, it's beautiful. And I think that that like, that's the number one, most disruptive thing that system initiative is going to do for people is it's going to let them see that stuff happen again in, in a way that feels more real time, that feels more iterative, but gives up none of the power or control that comes with the, with the code and to be able to do it

together, which is what we know brings about the best outcomes. And so I think as you climb up the stack, when you start to get to like, you know, I'm an application developer, you're not going to want to see that the application's full of stars, you know, like you don't necessarily need to see all the infrastructure that builds your application, but it'd be great if you could dive down to it if you needed to. It'd be great if you could dive down to it if you needed to it'd be great if you could be like hey the application's not quite doing what i wanted to do can you come take a look engineer and summon that person to a change set and show them directly the changes you're trying to make right like it's it's i think very cool come in the summer come in this summer is that right yeah god willing in the creek don't rise you plan to be production ready this summer

is that right yeah that's what we're trying to don't rise. You plan to be production ready this summer. Is that right? Yeah, that's what we're trying to do. So to be honest, like it's been very difficult to build because it's a high bar because the status quo is fantastic. So it's not like in order to be better than infrastructure as code,

I can't bring something out that's mediocre to you. It has to actually be better than infrastructure as code. And infrastructure as code is great. So who is this earliest version for? This summer version or this first GA version? Will it be GA in summer or will it be production? What are you going to call this summer's goal? Yeah, I think we'll call it production ready.

And we'll see if we, the software will be production ready. We'll see what the right go-to-market is for our SaaS. So whether it's like we throw open the doors and we're just like everybody can come or whether there's a wait list and we let you in they'll probably be a wait list for some period of time so we can like watch it scale you know and you said it was aws at first was the i think recall the last conversation we had was yeah a lot of so one of the things you do is you you build these models and then write functions that describe their behavior and we spent most of our time modeling stuff in AWS.

Our expectation is that as it reaches GA, that you'll see more and more people building models. So sharing the models, for example, that you create, there's a button in the UI that as you write those functions, you just hit share and it'll automatically publish it. And then anybody can come find it so if you you know write the best whatever azure compute resources you can just bundle them all up and share them and then there'll be a catalog and people can pick so and it'll be like code inside the platform that will be version controlled and get on github nope not in getter

github because you butch around yeah because all this stuff is data and not code. So like the source code part is code. That's true. But when you think about what it is, it's a function that's attached to the data that lives on this hypergraph. And so you need to be able to allow people to then change the code

and then have that change the behavior on the graph. And so it was actually a lot harder to try to like put it in Git, because the user experience of Git right now I have to make commits, I have to push them, I have to pull them, they can change from outside the platform, you don't really know when things happen, and you start to lose provenance. So like, I need to be able to let it be like, if you write a resource that like fixes up Azure. So right now, like Terraform providers are a good example of this. Let's say that there's a bug in a Terraform provider and you want to fix it. What you do is fork Terraform, fix it in or fork the provider, right?

Then write the code that fixes the provider. Then publish that code. Hope that it gets into a release. Then wait for, you know, like after all that stuff's done. There's a lot of cycles. System initiative, you literally go to a modeling screen, you could look at the function that Jared wrote, and edit it directly. So you could literally just open the function and start typing. And it knows that your function is a derivative of Jared's. And it'll track that over time. So

when Jared publishes a new version, we know that we could automatically take your function in Jared's and rebase them. If you want it to, we could be like, Hey, Adam, you made changes to Jared's Jared's. Like, do you want to incorporate those changes? Right. You could send them directly to Jared. You could be like, Jared, I fixed your bug. Right. And then Jared could receive it, see how that's happening. And then Jared could decide to republish it. So like, and all of that works because the fundamental nature of the data structure is that it's a giant hypergraph and it's tracking all those things over time,

which is bananas, but very, very cool. Totally bananas. I'm almost lit. Yeah. It's, it's a little closer to,

um, most people haven't tried it, but if you look at how like Unison, um, or some of those things are designed, which is basically a different way of thinking about storing code where it basically stores all your code in a big database and it's a content addressable hash and so if you make a change to a function in unison it all happens in real time but the old functions are still there that's

exactly what system initiative is basically doing like every time you're writing that function out i'm actually storing a new copy with a different content addressable hash and then building a merkle tree so anyway it's bananas but very cool it is bananas but very cool sometimes it's just bananas bananas it is very it is very very cool so so yeah and i think you know this summer i'm going to stop saying that that who it's for is for the diehards who are like really deep in the soup of how it's built and how it's different and instead i'm just going to be like try doing it this way instead of that way and see how much better it is is it usable right now like if someone's listening i can't wait for something yeah right use a version of this net right now if you're diehard if if you're pretty diehard

it's tough right now so like we're in the middle of basically swapping the engine so the like core part of that graph was built in a way that just wasn't scalable. We thought it would, but it didn't. And so we've been in the middle of rebuilding it for speed and scale and that work is landing now. So I suspect in the next couple of weeks, it's going to be aggressively more stable. But right now, if you like check out system initiative off main, it's pretty, it's pretty tough. Like you're going to find bugs, but bugs that weren't there five weeks ago uh before we merged the new engine domain but what you'll see is that it's like

incredibly fast in comparison right so yeah i'd say it's a couple of weeks away from being staple again and then once it's staple again then it's sort of marching toward like what's that release cadence look like what's the sass look like we probably do all of that at once because i think like it's a pretty incredibly good user experience to like hit a button get a new workspace and then just start working which is basically what the onboarding experience of system initiative is so like you know it's all coming i think if you're if you can't wait then what you should do is come join the discord we got a big discord full of people you can look at the software now you can run it you can talk to us in discord you can use the branch from before we merge the engine which is slow but but worked more stable so well if you like to steal adam's

model which i'm sure he's happy for you to do everything is laid out in great detail on system init.com slash open dash source. This describes both in a really short version and a short version and then a long version exactly how he is laying out the open source, the proprietary, how you can work with system initiative, how you cannot. And so that seems like a recipe for anybody out there

building similar software who would like to productize and open source and create a product, create a business. You can take that page and just run with it. It's all good. Global find and replace. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you probably want to also take it exactly as is. Yeah. You probably also want to think about engaging some trademark lawyers and some, you know, writing, having actual lawyers write your licenses, but like, yeah, you can, but it's a good starting place. I think, yeah, for sure. So we'll link that one up in the show notes for folks. I think that's a great resource for anybody

finding themselves in a similar situation or maybe just thinking about it. Cool. Anything else? I think we could open up a whole new can of worms, but I'm not sure I want to maybe bring them back for the next time. I mean, I could go go all day I love talking to you this is my favorite topics so it's not like I run out of steam like ask me more questions about myself anyway you want to talk about comic books

the X-Men we know you like metal as well I do love metal yeah we can talk about metal you and Adam went off on some metal rants last time around right at the end Guns N' Roses I and my favorite axl is not the same to this day i mean like obviously age happens do you listen to old metal or is there like modern day things that you listen to like they're still putting out new music or is that over with yeah i listen to all of it i listen i'm voracious i was listening to this so what's like a modern day heavy metal band that's

like putting out new content new songs that you love and would recommend people check out? Oh, that's a good question. So in the last couple of weeks, I would say there's a band called Neck Rot that put out an album called Lifeless Birth. Neck Rot is a Bay Area band that's been putting out pretty traditional sounding death metal for a really long time. Neck Rot's fantastic. Lifeless Birth's a great record. there's a band called midnight um midnight's like the solo project of this one dude and he writes like kind of filthy it's like a little punky but like yucky in a way that's weird you know um but also good he wrote an album called hellish

expectations uh if you haven't listened to midnight, midnight's pretty great. The new Taylor Swift record is not metal at all, but it is quite good. Judas priest put out a great record in the last year called invincible shield. That record's really good. There's a band that doesn't tour a whole lot called Shiloh.

That is like a no vocals, but like great, like rhythmic heavy metal. Shiloh, like the place or like low no like shy comma low okay it's a play on words oh there's a band called go ahead and die that is a um max cavalera kind of joint so if you liked like nail bomb back in the day go ahead and die is a little it's pretty great the record's's called Unhealthy Mechanisms. What about You Suffer from Napalm Death? Of course. Who doesn't love Napalm Death?

Yeah. Yeah. It's like a one second song. Yeah, exactly. Is that a Silicon Valley reference? Yeah. I knew it. I'm onto you now.

You're sneaking them in. I'm catching them. Nails is another band that's kind of similar. But I listen to all kinds of stuff. Like the dude from Firehouse. Do you remember Firehouse? Firehouse was an air metal band. Had a couple of big ballady hits.

But he died not that long ago. And I was listening to Firehouse records. Dickie Betts just died. Love the Allman Brothers. I love the Allman Brothers band. He's a hard player in the Allman Brothers band. There's a guy named Marcus King,

not metal, super good. Here's a guy who's metal, but is not metal at all. But I'm thinking about him because you're talking about people dying. Billy Joel, not dead, 74 years old,

just played his 100th consecutive sellout of Madison Square Garden. It's incredible. Yeah. And I watched a little bit of it the other night with my dad. And it was just, I mean, the guy is such a showman. It's amazing at the age of 74 what he can still do.

Yeah. I have a confession to make. I hate Billy Joel. Okay. I hate Billy Joel. I just, which is wrong. That's fine. I know it's my problem.

It's my problem. What do you hate about him? I just, I would always rather be listening to Elton John. Really? Yeah. I'd rather listen to anyone but Billy Joel. So I went to an Elton John, Billy Joel mashup concert. Yeah, he used to tour together.

He used to tour together. And I went and saw both of them. And then they came on stage together. And I will tell you this, you're going to hate this. Billy Joel just completely wiped the floor with Elton John. He was so much better. I believe you. I do. It just was true. It just completely wiped the floor with Elton John. He was so much better. I believe you.

I do. It just was true. It just was obvious. You're like, wow. In what way was he better? Was it the song and the way it was played live? More energy, more entertaining, the way he sung was better, the way he played was better. Elton John was still very good at not bashing on him.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But Billy Joel was just like, holy cow. Yeah, I mean, I just. This was a decade ago. There's something about, I've tried. My wife loves Billy Joel and I have lots of people that in my life

who I care about who also love Billy Joel and find this opinion offensive to them at like a fundamental level. Yeah. So like I respect Billy Joel. You just don't like him. I just, you know, I think he goes home at night and he's Billy Joel in a way that I don't love.

And it doesn't make any sense. I feel the same way about David Bowie. Like I think David Bowie was always Davidid bowie and i'm like yeah you know like i don't know why i just don't like i don't like david bowie either it's obviously a me problem david bowie right not like obviously amazing it's not like i don't find myself grooving along well you don't sell out madison square garden 100 times in a row by sucking people yeah and like and i there are moments where billy joel is I'm like, this was fun. That was good. Thank you, Billy Joel. Just like with David Bowie. You can't dislike piano, man. Do you dislike piano, man? I just, if I never heard piano man ever again, I'd be fine.

Nothing, nothing bad would happen. And like, I wouldn't even notice it was gone. People with Hotel California and the, and the Eagles, they just can, they just load that song. Like it's just overplayed. I would Hotel California and the Eagles. Exactly. They just low that song. Yes. Like it's just overplayed. I would rather listen to the Eagles than Billy Joel though. Yeah. I mean, the greatest hits one and two was. Now I'm starting to get offended.

You know, I wasn't offended at first, but now I'm starting to. Right? Yeah. I'd rather. Yeah. The Eagles? Come on. I would absolutely rather listen.

The Eagles were better than Billy Joel for me. Wow. I mean, certainly a tie in a lot of cases i mean they have more people in the band so they win would the eagles sell out madison square garden 100 consecutive but he has a song called the new york state of mind i mean there's certain some inherent love in that state in that city too i was gonna say he's a little playing to the crowd you know that's like being, he's a little playing to the crowd. You know, that's like being like. he's literally playing to his own crowd,

but still. It's like would Springsteen, you know, sell out in Jersey? And it's like, yes. Yeah, but Bon Jovi,

like if Bon Jovi decided to play 100 days in a row, he didn't play 100 days in a row, did he? It was just this 100th consecutive sellout. It was like once per month.

It was like over the course of years. Yeah, which is insane. Like one show a month. Which is insane. Really? One show a month? That's an achievement. That's's a little bit different it's an incredible legacy for a hundred hundred it's an incredible like 100 shows period sold out as an achievement let alone in the same place and not as a young man i mean he's elderly and he's selling

out the garden there's a lot of people it's not like the garden's a small venue it's a big venue a lot of tourists though so i mean it's not always new yorkers small venue. It's a big venue. A lot of tourists, though. So, I mean, it's not always New Yorkers there going to the Madison Square. A hundred percent. Yeah. It's like, you know, there's tourists swinging through, visiting there, that iconic place.

Sure, sure. But you can't, look, you can't rob the achievement from the man. He's incredible. But yeah, I could. I still don't like him. But I don't, but I still could never hear Piano Man again

and I don't care. And, you know, like, or like, you know, like we didn't start the fire and stuff like I just okay. Not his best song. Sure. Like yeah I listened to that song too who didn't and like it was kind of good or whatever but like no I'd rather listen to

Elvis Costello right who like gets shaky there in the later years. It's tough on those later era Elvisvis costello records but like yeah i just billy joel it just doesn't uh doesn't happen for me fair enough yeah i still like you i'd go to see billy joel at the garden you know like i would 100 buy a ticket and be like yeah i'm going to billy joel at the garden like it would happen i think it'd be worth seeing even if you didn't like him just to be there yeah But if in that same moment, it was go see Billy Joel at the garden or go see LA Guns

at like a dive bar in Jersey City. I'm going to go see LA Guns at a dive bar in Jersey City. I'm telling you, he wiped the floor with Elton John. I know, but you know, Tracy Guns, you know? Fair. Well, everybody has their taste, you know? All right. Well, I'm glad we did this.

I'm glad we went there. Me too. I think we're actually close. I think we bonded over your disdain and my enjoyment of it. And that's a rare thing. I mean, you know, it's because if we keep doing it, we're going to be actual friends. Yeah, I know. Eventually we'll get there. I mean, we're friends now, but like, you know, but like there's like layers of friendship, you know? We're internet friends. Yeah. If I had actually made, if I could have seen Adam, like we had a shot, we could have been real life friends and I blew it. Well, when you go back on tour,

maybe you'll see us out there because we will be, we're out there. I will definitely, because I'll be on tour. Well, and I can't decide. I got to talk about open source business models. So maybe I'll decide to do it in podcast land and then maybe we'll figure that out. So that might be easier than writing.

I think Adam and i are more ready for that than even our listeners are ready for it because we just continue to discuss this thing over and over again i don't know maybe they like it maybe they don't but some of these shows are for us too and that's right open source slash business like that intersection is just it's a it's it i agree i think it's the most interesting thing because it does have those layers of emotional and human and then pure corporate

capitalist avarice. And I like both. So many facets too. Different little verticals in there. All right. Good to see you. Bye friends. We can talk to Adam Jacob Good to see you. Bye friends. Bye friends.

We can talk to Adam Jacob for hours even despite his despisement for Billy Joel. I forgive you Adam. I forgive you. And in fact, we weren't finished talking, so there is a hot and juicy Changelog++ bonus coming up right after this. We get Adam's take on Scott Chacon's take

on the term open source from our episode a few weeks back. If you haven't hooked yourself up to the Plus Plus feed, learn all about it at changelog.com slash plus plus. It's better. Thanks once again to our partners at Fly.io, to our beat freaking residents, Breakmaster Cylinder,

and to our friends at Sentry. Use code changelog when you sign up for a Sentry team plan and save yourself 100 bucks why not right? next week on the Changelog news on Monday Dustin Block the new owner of the Castro podcast app

on Wednesday and one of our favorites Ron Evans yes dead program from Tiny Go and GoBot fame returns to the show on Friday have a great weekend send me your five-star review if you want free stickers and let's talk again real soon

did you hear our conversation with scott chacon no let's throw this bonus that well see he has to listen to it though i don't want to represent Scott's stance. Well, because Scott, with Kit Butler, he just put it under a source available. It's better.