ANTHOLOGY — Packages, pledges & protocols (Interview)

23:32I'm like, no, but yes, it is. Like, it's the same people. It's the same project. CentOS isn't dead. is technically CentOS is the project. CentOS Linux and CentOS Stream were the distributions. But thankfully, we don't have that double thing anymore. We onboarded all the RHEL people, and it's just CentOS Stream. And I think my personal opinion is that we should one day just drop the stream and just say, yeah, this is just CentOS. Most people just call it CentOS, and let's avoid the confusion. We should have never had the overlap. It should have just been a clean break at a new major version and leave all the old major versions on the old model.

24:03That's not the way the transition happened. Clean breaks are good. Poorly executed transition, in my opinion. Some of it predated me. Some of it I was front row and center, but in doing what I could. Yes. Where are the open source lines drawn across these distributions, like Fedora, CentOS Stream, and then REL? So it's all open source. And everything in Fedora is just out there in the open, built in the open. There's nothing private. Everything in CentOS Stream is the same way. It's built in the public. It's all public, and you can contribute to it. REL, the contribution path into REL is through CentOS because functionally the way it works is it's the major version of REL.

24:37You've got like CentOS Stream 9 now is where all the RHEL 9 development happens. And then periodically they branch that into 9.4, 9.5, 9.6. So you can't actually contribute directly into a RHEL minor version because those are built inside Red Hat. But then the major version, you can get it on there. So from the developer angle, like you can do pull requests to master, but you can't do pull requests to the 9.4 branch. Okay. Sometimes the RHEL maintainers will say, yeah, we also have customer pressure to get it in these older minor versions. And then they can do that part internally. But then the After Effects is it's still all open source.

25:10It's still all published, all compliance with all the licenses. Once you have RHEL, you have access to the source for every package, even the ones with licenses that don't require it, like MIT or BSD license. So it's fully open source, top to bottom. So it sounds like we're in this rebuilder world where you have the Rockies and the Almas and the many others. I don't fully understand it. It seems like from an outside point of view or from a purview sort of point of view that it is more about trying to get what is literally the RHEL product, which is a product. And you can say it's open source and you can get access to packages and RPMs, et cetera.

25:53I tried last night with your help to find a way to download today in a moment RHEL. You said it's open source. I have to sign up for an account with Red Hat. I had to go through hoops essentially to get it and it may be literally open source But it's very challenging to play with what is the real product and what I mean by product it is Open source derived as a trademark product given to customers who pay for it With a license more so force for support and assurances and security Totally cool, right? I'll push back on you a little bit. Okay You tried real quick on your phone while we were drinking at the bar.

26:29That's I wasn't drinking you were drinking I wasn't drinking. I was drinking water. Well, very quick attempt on your phone. It's not the same as like sitting down like, yeah, let me create this account. Like, I won't create accounts on my phone. I'm going to wait until I get on my laptop again, right? Okay, let me push back to that. There's a little bit of a barrier, yes. You have to sign up. Let me push back to that. If I want to go play with the product called Ubuntu, what's the latest version? 2404? Yes. I can go and tap a download link. Well, 2410 now, I think. 2410. Well, LTS. Download the ISO.

26:57LTS. Sure, your point. I can click on it. Yeah, no account required. So there's no hoops to get to that product, but there is hoops to the rail product. So that's my point. It's challenging. I'll give you a throwback to one of your older episodes when you interviewed Adam Jacob. Sure. Fantastic interview. And he brings up the point of like, you make a product and you sell it. You don't give it away for free. I agree. Ubuntu's model is that they are giving their product away for free, which there are pros and cons to that. And I'm not going to, I don't want to criticize another company's business model.

27:29You know, I wish them all luck. I've got friends that work in Ubuntu and work for Canonical or ex-Canonical. But it gets back to that problem. You can have all of the market share you want by giving away your product for free, and it's hugely successful and popular. But then I know that my Canonical friends have told me before that Ubuntu's biggest challenger was always free Ubuntu. Everyone that's getting it for free because they can, and the conversion rate of people that should be paying for it to help sustain the engineering of that product is a vanishingly small number, and it's an extremely hard sell to say, here's why you should pay us when you can just get the product for free.

28:04Right. So Red Hat tries to take a different stance. I'm talking about access, not selling a product in this case. Well, the access is the same thing, right? Because access is part of that subscription, part of that product. What I'm trying to say is the angst. The angst is there was CentOS prior to Red Hat's acquisition of the open source project. And a lot of that is confusion, right? People looked at it as this is the free access version. This is the RHEL alternative to RHEL that's open source that I can use in production. It is blessed for production. What would I tell you if, what would you say if I told you that, one, it was never blessed for production, and two, that there's even a website - It was marketed as that?

28:43No, it definitely wasn't. Show me a page that says it was blessed for production. But anyways, that's a tangent. Wasn't that the case? I mean, that's the major issue is that people are using it in production. That's what people said. There was no blessing, right? But that's a minor point. Yeah. There's some nuance to it. There is nuance there. That's not the point I'm trying to get you to. What would you say if I told you that I can show you a page right now on the Red Hat website that says RHEL is not intended for production? We had this conversation last night. I'm down for it. Yeah. It's because on the page I'm talking about, it's in the product store where they say it's a self-support RHEL where you can buy just access to RHEL and can't file support cases.

29:18And it says this is not intended for production. Because? Because Red Hat thinks that you should have support for your production instances. It's that simple. So when they say that there's also a blog post that says Sintoist Stream is not designed for production or intended for production because it doesn't have support. It's around that part, but it's been misinterpreted to say even Red Hat says this isn't good enough for production. Right. And there's other interviews with other Red Hatters, like from the Fedora Flock Conference, Brian Exelbeard, He said that just because we don't say you should use it for production or we don't intend it for production doesn't mean you can't, and there's lots of companies that do.

29:56I've got some friends over at Meta, Facebook. Their fleet is probably the largest fleet of servers in the world. I think the last PR-approved term they got to use was millions, plural, of instances, and they're running Sinto a stream everywhere, and they get on the new versions as soon as they can. They're active contributors, and they're deploying this stuff regularly. they use it at massive scale in production. So it certainly can be, it's still RHEL-like, and it can be used in production. Your mileage may vary, right? Your risk factor is your risk factor. What I'm trying to get to is not to say you are wrong or right, meaning the proverbial you is in terms of Red Hat.

30:31It's this angst that allows or creates the need for the rebuilds. Yeah. Alma, Rocky. And the angst there is they want RHEL for free. Yep. Basically. 100%. Right? And there's even more detail to that. We talked about that partner ecosystem stuff. The whole idea of being RHEL compatible is because they want access to that ecosystem. The RHEL brand name. Even the brand name. Yeah, a little bit of that. There's some of the confusion. That's going on now with the whole automatic and WP Engine stuff around brand name and how you identify that. But the bigger thing is they're like, oh, I don't care about having RHEL.

31:07I care about this app I can install and it works on this hardware. That whole ecosystem, that is what they're buying into. And that is what Red Hat sells. As a product. Yeah. Which I'm cool with. I get that. The whole idea of being exactly real compatible is the idea of getting a foot into that ecosystem and taking advantage of that ecosystem from people that did not spend decades building it and countless dollars building it. Right. And it's just weird that there's this angst out there because they essentially want, if there were other people here who could argue against it, they would probably argue against it.

31:37But my opinion, my summarization of what I understand about it is they essentially want what RHEL gives as a product for free, as in freedom of open source, and free, as in cost. Yeah. And that conflation is a sticking point for a lot of people. And CentOS, CentOS, used to give it, I'm quoting, used to give it prior to being acquired by Red Hat. Now it's upstream from RHEL in terms of a visual diagram. Yeah. It was acquired by, as it was acquired by, now it is where the active development happens, which ultimately lands in RHEL the product. And so the angst there is the folks want what is enterprise-grade Linux RHEL.

32:22You're considered the standard, the gold standard of enterprise-grade Linux. They want it for free. That's the angst. What I realized around that angst is that we made all those changes, and some of it predates me, some of it was right around when I was getting hired. but what I learned about the CentOS community was they're basically two different personas and it kind of splits evenly in the life cycle. There were the people using CentOS in the first five years of the life cycle. New version would come out, they would say, yes, I want these new features, I want these new capabilities and I'm also frustrated.

32:51Those happened to be the same people that were frustrated that they couldn't contribute to it and make changes to it. Then there were people kind of using it in the last five years instead of using RHEL. For them it was just the free unbranded RHEL. They were never going to contribute. they don't care about being able to contribute they just want to get the product for free and they want it to be maintained for as long as possible so those two personas were kind of where we unintentionally divided the community people that liked what we were doing with CentOS Stream being able to contribute and it still has a five and a half year life cycle which I mean that's the same thing Ubuntu LTS gives you without the pro subscription five years so it's still a pretty long time it's still an LTS those people they're like yeah I like these changes this makes a lot of sense to me and the people that do not care about contributing, do not care about getting their bugs answered, they just want to get the product for free, they're like, oh, no, I'm going to go to these other guys that give me the same thing.

33:43The big change is that because it got actually harder on CentOS and Red Hat once the Equihire thing happened and they were paying the CentOS maintainers because customers would come in and say, well, you're making both of these things, so why should I pay you for one and not the other? Or why should I pay you for the one when this other one's free? And that conflation of having Red Hat sponsorship, it helped the project not fail and collapse, but it also made it harder to have those conversations, to draw that line between the product and the project. And so now the new rebuilds, like I heard one guy inside Red Hat described it as these changes are Red Hat getting out of the rebuild business.

34:22Like we decided that's not where we want to spend our time. Here's the way that building an operating system works in our pipeline holistically to make a better product. and it's still really close to RHEL and you can still use it for whatever you want to, but it's not going to be trying to match RHEL identically anymore. It's getting six months ahead of RHEL on features and fixes. But like you said, a lot of those people that are going to different alternatives now, they're in that latter group, the five-plus year usage where they just want the same thing. They don't want anything to change ever, and they don't want to think about being able to contribute being a benefit.

34:56It's mostly what I wanted to cover. I know we can probably go deeper. Wherever you want. And I got more I can say, but I don't know how much more we want to go. How much more do you want to spend on this, Jared? Five minutes? I want to hear about the future, man. Yeah. Juicy. Juicy future stuff. Well, real quick before that, how does Meta get their support when their CentOS stream doesn't do what he needs to do? Like, what do they do? They're self-supporting. They're active in the projects. They're contributing. They identify a feature that they want or something that's broken that they want to fix, a bug.

35:25and they're contributing that into CentOS Stream. They're active contributors there. They're contributing to upstream projects. I know they're heavily involved in SystemD. They participate there. A lot of times you'll find talks from them at conferences like Scale where they're talking about the internals of SystemD because they employ a lot of SystemD developers. They have kernel developers, ButterFS developers, all kinds of stuff. So they have a lot of that expertise in-house. Gotcha. So they don't really need to leverage that support any more than just interacting with those communities already.

35:55All right. So the future stuff. Juicy future. Juicy. So the major version right now of RHEL is 9. Everyone knows that. Same for all these RHEL likes and CentOS Stream, which is still RHEL like. It's all major version 9. Everyone can count and knows that the next number after that is 10. Is it 10? Yes. Was it 8, 9? So there's a – I'm making this joke. Go ahead. It's lost to you because there was actually a time before I got hired where there's some weird marketing thing around it where they were telling engineers that they couldn't say that the next version was 8. and I don't know where it originated or why.

36:26Oh, wow. But then some real marketing folks showed up at the, I think it was the Fedora Flock Conference, with stickers with the rocket ship and the number 8 on it. And after all the messaging to the engineers was like, don't say the number 8, just say whatever the next version is. And so the engineers were all mad. They're like, oh, these guys showed up with the number 8 on a sticker and they told us we can't say it? That's so stupid. Like, why do we even have this problem? Okay, I missed that joke. Big company, inner things, whatever. The next version is 10. Juicy stuff, go. So, we're on a, REL's on a three-year major version cycle now, six-month minor version cycle.

36:58Be a little more reliable. It used to be kind of hit or miss, and one of the feedback we got from customers was, you know, bringing it back to Ubuntu. They have their schedule where they're like, yeah, we're publishing this month. You can count on it. And a lot of people, a lot of customers really value that. So, eventually, version 8 was when they adopted that in 2019. So, three-year cycles, you can see that REL 9 came out in 2021, sorry, 2022. so 2025 is when REL10 is going to come out and it's going to be we can't officially say dates but there's an event in 2025 in the spring that Red Hat puts on that might make sense for there to be product announcements at anyone can figure that out just by looking at public websites it's not that hard not that that would be the exact day but probably pretty close is a good time frame to expect it.

37:44CentOS Stream 10 has already branched off from Fedora it's getting that initial productization to become to stabilization to become RHEL eventually. It's in a state now where you can get it and install it today, but we haven't announced it as, you know, ready is a weird word. I think we usually use launched or released, but there's going to be a launch announcement or release announcement for CentOS Stream 10 pretty soon because it's getting to the point now it's not that high pace of, you know, stabilization. It is, okay, well, everything, we basically have all the features we want. We might make a few more changes before it gets released as RHEL 10, But it's basically stabilized, and this is what you can expect RHEL 10.0 to be whenever it comes out next year.

38:27So we're going to have that announcement pretty soon, probably next month or the month after, where we announce SendoStream10 is here. You can use it now. It's pretty good. We like it. Also, Eppleton, the thing that I work on directly, we're going to announce that about the same time. Usually, when we've announced them separately, we usually have the feedback that, well, why would you announce? If we announce one, immediately the question is, well, I want the other one to use them together. I want those extra packages, and I want the base operating system. They're useless without each other, in a lot of people's opinions.

38:54So we're going to do kind of a joint announcement probably the same day or the same week where we say, yep, Apple 10 is here. We've got all these extra things you can add. The community has been building them for the last few months, and we've had the infrastructure online. But we're doing like a flag day. Like, here it is. It's as ready as it will be. It's a thing. Like, do we say it's ready at 2 ,000 packages? Do we say it's ready at 3 ,000? We're going to keep adding stuff, and even after we announce it, it doesn't stop growing. So we've got those things coming up. And timeline-wise, you can look at it as that's about six months before the RHEL 10 launch.

39:30Yeah, so spring of 2025 is when RHEL 10 is going to be coming out. And then we're about a little bit more than six months before that right now. We're getting all this stuff buttoned up to say, yeah, Sinto Extreme 10 is here. You can use it. It's a major version, stable operating system. It doesn't have minor versions, but it's going to be maintained for five and a half years. It's very rel-like. You can add all of these Apple packages we've been working on and use it right now, and it'll be good to go. I love it. That's the good stuff coming up. What exactly is extra in the extra? Okay. That is just the mentality of it, of it's only packages that you can't get in the base operating system.

40:06So I kind of mentioned that there's like 60-something thousand packages in Fedora, and only about 10 % of those go into CentOS and then eventually go into RHEL. Everything else in Fedora that isn't that 10 % is eligible to go into EPPL. So like I can say I maintain like the CADDI web server. I maintain that package in Fedora and I also maintain it in EPPL branches. Up to date, I haven't seen anyone say like we need to put CADDI into RHEL. We have customers asking for CADDI. Maybe that changes in the future. But for now, I maintain it in Fedora and I put it in the Apple branches for each release, Apple 7, Apple 8, Apple 9, and Apple 10 now, put it in there so people can use it on that RHEL release or that CentOS release or any of the other RHEL-like things that are out there.

40:48They use it there, but it's not a RHEL package. It's not maintained by Red Hat. You can't file a support case for it. So that's what the extra in the name is for. It's only additional things. If, for example, Caddy, if Red Hat decided to add that into RHEL and into the product, it would then become ineligible for Apple and we'd retire from there and you'd get it, Instead of getting it from the community repo, you get it from the main repos. Gotcha. Does that help clear that up? That was a good summary, I think. I think that's what I wanted to cover for a while. I think it's been challenging to, from the outside, as a non-Red Hat Enterprise Linux user, I'm not that person.

41:22But I care about Enterprise Linux because I have friends who care about Enterprise Linux. Using it at work or at home? All over the place, you know? Friends at Facebook, even, that rely upon CentOS, of course. And it's just kind of crazy that how the world is fractured. And then the parts we can't, that I won't really go into, but like that other side on the rebuild side is also offering support and financially backed services. So why not just buy Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the first place? It's like, we've talked about that in the side conversations, Jared. I mean, I'm not going to argue with that point, but.

41:57I know you won't, but like, what do you think about that, Jared? Like, we've talked about that. It seems strange to go through all this and have these rebuilds that is either bug-compatible or there's words that leverage the RHEL brand to be RHEL-like that says it's free and open source. They're trading on the RHEL brand. But then they're offering support or other financially-backed services. That's basically what Redhead's doing to RHEL in the first place. The rabbit hole goes deep. It is. Carl, thank you for sharing that story. I'm always happy to talk about it. Going deep with us. We appreciate it.

42:37Thanks, Carl. Appreciate it. Thanks, Carl. Thanks for having me on.

42:58What's up, friends? I'm here in the breaks with Kyle Carberry, co-founder and CTO over at Coder.com. Coder is an open source cloud development environment, a CDE. You can host this in your cloud or on premise. So, Kyle, walk me through the process. A CDE lets developers put their development environment in the cloud. Walk me through the process. They get an invite from their platform team to join their Coder instance. They got to sign in, set up their keys, set up their code editor. How's it work? Step one for them, we try to make it remarkably easy for the dev. We never gate any features ever for the developer.

43:36They'll click that link that their platform team sends out. They'll sign in with OIDC or Google, and they'll really just press one button to create a development environment. Now that might provision like a Kubernetes pod or an AWS VM. You know, we'll show the user what's provisioned, but they don't really have to care. From that point, you'll see a couple buttons appear to open the editors that you're used to, like VS Code Desktop or VS Code through the web. Or you can install our CLI. Through our CLI, you really just log into Coder and we take care of everything for you. When you SSH into a workspace, you don't have to worry about keys.

44:08It really just kind of like beautifully, magically works in the background for you and connects you to your workspace. We actually connect peer-to-peer as well. If the Coder server goes down for a second because of an upgrade, you don't have to worry about disconnects. And we always get you the lowest latency possible. One of our core values is we'll never be slower than SSH, period, full stop. And so we connect you peer to peer directly to the workspace. So it feels just as native as it possibly could. Very cool. Thank you, Kyle. Well, friends, it might be time to consider a cloud development environment, a CDE.

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47:33Max Howell, creator of Homebrew, creator of Tea Protocol. Did I cover all the gamut or is there more? Oh, there's more, but those are the things that people care about. There you go. I do like to hit on what people care about. Now, I think the last time you and I crossed paths was some sort of announcement around T, I think. Maybe that was TXCL or something. There's more to it. It's been a while, but I remember you put something out. I covered it on Change Dog News, and I wrote something about it like, I feel like they're trying to boil the ocean. I don't know what I said. Oh, yeah, yeah. And that affected your game plans by some way, right?

48:11Yeah, yeah. It was an important little pointer. for me. I appreciate that. Okay. That's all I remember. Yeah. I was trying to do too much. That was, uh, what was T-Clee, which we'd now call PackageX. Okay. And, uh, well, I was very much aware of the fact that homebrew is enormous. And here I was trying to do like homebrew 2.0, something I said I'd never do. And, you know, I think, uh, Ryan Dahl with Dino is seeing the same kind of problems right I've had something that's a huge success how do you make something that is as big even as that's like you've got this enormous momentum behind the previous thing so I was very much aware of that when I was building out TKlee and so I put too much into it thinking well that's the only way I'm gonna get people to like come on board with it right right and you point out quite sagely I think it made me realize that yeah it was doing too many things and that was just confusing.

49:13So we whittled it down to just what it is now which is like an executor for packages so you don't think about installing them you just run them and that's enormously powerful actually I think over the next few years people are going to start seeing that. It's so good for scripting for example you can write a package x shebang in your script and then add all the packages you want and then you've got a portable script you can just pass around that you don't have to worry about if people have things installed or not it like opens up the entire open source ecosystem to it okay so i got a few things planned to use that but we realized along the way this is all part of t protocol right that um even though we thought initially we would be putting like functionality for the protocol into t clee actually no that doesn't make sense it's diffusing the messaging once again i think i was a little too influenced by our investors and that's why we went down that path but we course corrected so now we're completely focused on just the protocol which you know that was the original vision that i had to build something that could help uh people who create open source to actually you know uh get some of that value that they create back to themselves rather than just creating value for people who build on top of it right the people beneath the people beneath the people, right?

50:36Like the dependency of the dependency and letting that value chain trickle down or trickle up, whatever direction you're looking at it from. So how does that work then? Yeah. So we built it. We've been running the testnet since February and we got 1.7 million people who've signed up to use this testnet, which are pretty great numbers by any standards, but especially in the Web3 space, like you don't get that kind of users. I think it's a testament to people understanding that what we're doing is important, but also that we've cracked it, that we understand how to take the value of open source and actually expose it.

51:13So until now, we all understand the value of open source. Everyone builds everything on top of it. But very little of that value ends up going back to the people who maintain it. That's my story. Homebrew was a passion project that became my full-time job for free. and I had to keep taking new jobs, quitting them after I'd saved up some money working on it. And that's why I founded T-Protocol. I was once again in that position, wanting to work on open source full time. So our system, it changes the economics of open source. That was one of my conclusions before founding T-Protocol, that the system of economics that we use in this world, it doesn't fit cleanly onto how open source works.

51:56Open source is really weird. There's no real thing that's like it. elsewhere in the world. So it was necessary to build something new that used economics in a new fashion. So that's what we built. We have an on-chain Oracle called Chai that computes the impact of all the open source projects, all 10.5 million of them, using package manager data and dependency data to calculate that. The higher your impacts, the higher your rewards. Every 24 hours, we just give you free T token. And then we have, like with the 1.7 million people who signed up, only a third of them are developers. Two-thirds of them are people that maybe didn't even know about open source before.

52:34Once they heard the story of how everything they've used on the internet for the last 30 years is built on top of this open source, they understood that there's a huge amount of untapped value there that they want to participate in. So they're the input for the monetary parts that allow the open source to be remunerated. And I've had loads of tokenomics experts looking at it over the last three years. You have to calculate the sell and the buy pressure correctly in order to make it so the token price stabilizes it, something which then makes it so the open source maintainers can sell their token and use it to fund the developers.

53:12Right. Because if they received a bunch of token for their package getting popular and they went to go sell it and they were just dumping on the market and the demand wasn't there, then the price would crash and you'd have your typical, you know, peaks and valleys of the crypto sphere. So you're trying to like stabilize the coin basically? Or what's the tokenomics? You're trying to stabilize the value of the token? Yeah, exactly. It's very important that we do that, otherwise it will be a project that just goes whoop and down, as you were saying. Right. And, you know, then it hasn't succeeded at all.

53:47And, you know, that was a difficult problem to solve. We have lots of mechanisms in there that will be there for the launch. We're having to launch later this year or early next year. Gotcha. So it's not live yet. No, but the test now is, so people can sign up. We have 17 ,000 open source projects that have onboarded 2T protocol during the testnet. So, you know, we've got good traction. I'm hoping when mainnet goes live the proof will be in the pudding, you know. People will see that this is something that actually could fix these fundamental issues with how open source is funded. And it's really a no-brainer if you're an open source project with any clout.

54:26Onboarding is free. It's very low effort to do so. Too low effort, as you probably saw some of the negative press we had over the last year or so. Yeah, there's been some spammers spamming. Yeah. We incentivize people to try and break T-Rank or Chai. And they found a way to do it by creating more than 200 ,000 packages on NPM. We're glad they found a way to break it because that meant we could fix it. That's what the test set is for. but yeah, don't feel good about it but when you're building new things there's always unanticipated consequences to that a lot of people think I should have seen this coming I kind of agree with them I should have seen it coming but when you're building stuff, you only have so much time yeah, sometimes you learn as you go I remember that happening I don't remember what my comment was at the time but once I saw it I was like, yeah this seems like a natural progression So you live and learn, right?

55:24Live and learn. And it was still early, so that's good. Yeah. And it won't happen again. We've closed the gap. Cool. What exactly is T? Well, the main purpose of T, at least what I wanted to accomplish when I came up with the idea, was to use cryptocurrency to fix what we call the Nebraska problem after that famous XKCD comic. You know, the power of blocks representing all of open source as it gets stacked on top of each other. And those little projects near the bottom that are, you know, fragile because the people who maintain them don't have the time or the incentive to do so. And yet it's holding up so much critical infrastructure.

56:04So, yeah, it's a cryptocurrency project that uses a unique tokenomics model in order to give open source developers token rewards on a 24-hour basis. and a lot of the other pieces of it are designed to attract the interests of typical crypto investors or just like normal developers who want to show real support for their open source projects. A key differentiator between us and most ways of supporting open source is that there is no donations in our system. You can buy a token and then stake it against projects so both you and the project is gaining from this. There's no gift. It's more like an investment.

56:51So what would, so say there's a piece of software that's signed up for the T protocol. And so I can use T to execute it, right? Am I then required to also buy into the, like to give back value? Or is it still I can just use that without doing it if I want to? Like does it lock you in? So, nothing's different. Going into it, I knew that this wouldn't work if we changed anything about how open source already works. You can't charge for open source. You can't make it so you have to buy token and stake it, even if you can get that token back before you can use things. So, it works based on calculating the impact of open source projects, and then you are creating a yield on top of those projects that then goes to the project maintainers.

57:43They didn't distribute the token however they see fit. But yeah, as a user, nothing's different. And as a maintainer, nothing's different. I didn't want to change the incentives in open source either. It's still incentivized in exactly the same way. It's just now you're getting token for doing that rather than before where all you get is reputation or kudos, satisfaction perhaps. Now, inside of the T protocol, can I place specific bets or buy into specific packages? You can stake against specific packages. So let's say I know my buddy Adam is about to release a new NPM package, a JavaScript thing.

58:25It's going to take the world by storm. I could stake his package when it first comes out. And as that package gains in usage, I would benefit from that? Is that how it works? Not exactly currently. This is an idea we're playing with. You should be rewarded for seeing up and coming open source, right? That's fun. Right. Plus, I can do it on my own packages, right? It's good for the package because they get more stake yields initially that way. But currently, if something isn't very staked by many people, the yield you get is higher. So there is an incentive to go and find open source that isn't yet popular but you think will become popular getting there early because your yield is also dependent on the impact of that project the t-rank of that project so initially the t-rank of any new project is going to be close to zero you don't get any rewards for less than 25 it's necessary to have a cutoff because otherwise people would just create fake open source packages right stick them in the system and try to gain rewards that way.

59:30The T rank only grows as you become something other projects use, the dependency tree. So you do have to convince other projects you're worthy. And that's exactly how open source already works, right? You release something new, it takes time for the community to trust that your package is worthy and use it. So we don't fix the initial uptake problem, but But that's the case as it is right now. Gotcha. What is the idea of staking? I understand it in crypto as normal, but if I bought in and I staked against a project, what does that do for it? You get a yield. Describe that to me. Like 4%, 5%. Like a percentage back.

1:00:16Why would I do that? Because you want to have a yield of 4 % or 5%. What does the project maintainer get? They also get a slightly increased yield because they're encouraging people to stake. Now, the T we gain from people staking because it locks the token up, prevents people from suddenly selling it. There's an unstake period. This is common with crypto projects to prevent rapid fluctuations in token price. Yeah. Interesting. When I buy in initially, who am I buying the token from? So we're going to launch with several major exchanges, still haven't announced them. So most likely you will buy from them.

1:00:58But there will be other ways the token is distributed initially. Gotcha. Do you all keep a large percentage of the token as creators of the token? There is distribution of some of the token to the investors of my company, the founders like myself, and some advisors as well. But it's a small percentage. We're doing what was considered a fair launch where more than 50 % of the token goes to the community. Right. And it makes sense because you're investing in it, making it. There's obviously economic incentives across the board for it. If I knew then what I know now, I wouldn't have done it with VC.

1:01:46I would have just launched the token myself, taken none myself, and then made it so 100 % just goes to open source. But, you know, too late. It's fine. Can't do it? Can't change? Not if I don't want to be sued personally. Gotcha. Okay. But it's a very small percentage relatively. Yeah. One of the things we're doing is we're launching the token from a completely separate company in Switzerland. It's a non-profit and the long-term goals for that company are to have it be governed and run by the open source community as well. But none of my investors or any of the other people that are related to the company they invested in have any say in how that company runs.

1:02:29It's very important to me that this is an open source project for the open source community that's governed by the open source community. In the long run. How do you go about onboarding then? So you said you mentioned there was how many? Like a lot of projects onboarded? 17 ,000. 17 ,000. So that's a lot of, it's a decent amount of projects. What does it take to onboard? What's the incentive? Obviously, the incentive is to be able to have, what is it called? T? Is it called T or Chai? T token. Okay. T token. Chai is the technology, the oracle that runs. Sorry, I'm uninitiated here. So a lot of my questions are from the uninitiated standpoint here.

1:03:06Okay, so you have the T token and me as an open source maintainer developer, I go and put my open source T enabled, I onboard. What is that like? Yeah, so the way the system works is it's project-based. So we declare that a project will receive X amount of T token rewards every 24 hours. in order to have that token go to that project's wallet, it's a project wallet, one of the maintainers of the project needs to commit a file, the T constitution, as we call it, to the GitHub repo or any Git repo. We're not GitHub specific. Once our system sees that file, then the rewards start coming in. Is it challenging to determine ownership at that standpoint?

1:03:54Because you've got multiple maintainers, core maintainers, trademark holders, Especially with the WordPress world, you've got a lot of things happening in this ownership state of open source. There's a lot of luck that can happen. How do you determine who is the true owner, I guess, of the token when it comes in, if it does become valuable enough to cash in, so to speak? The token goes to the project wallet, and then whoever commits that T constitution can declare any number of people that are considered core contributors to the project. They all have control over that wallet. Now, we haven't made any deliberate decisions on what should happen next.

1:04:34Every project's different, right? Most projects really are just one person, so it's very simple for them. It gets a lot more complicated when you have large projects like Python or Node or whatever. WordPress. Loads of people and WordPress, exactly. Yeah. So we're waiting to see what they're going to do about it. But it's on the blockchain. It's an EVM compatible blockchain using Coinbase's base, which is just a layer two on top of Ethereum. And you can write smart contracts to distribute the token. So that's what I'm hoping I'll see is the open source community stepping up, writing smart contracts to fairly distribute the token.

1:05:11One easy way to do it is here's a list of people, split it equally. A much harder way to do it would be based on pull requests or code contribution. Lines of code. Just kidding, just kidding, just kidding. I wouldn't say, yeah, I've already thought this through. I was kidding around. Life code is not going to be a great metric for sure. It just incentivizes people to make PRs that are longer and longer for no reason. Do you anticipate challenges there that you will get mud on your face from, regardless if, I guess, maybe egg in your face is probably the better term? Yeah, almost certainly. Because you don't have, you know, you're kind of leaving it to them to decide and it might cause drama?

1:05:47Oh, on that front, I don't think we'll get egg on our face. But who knows? Mud in your eye, egg in your face. Yeah. One thing I've certainly learned during this project is there's going to be people that really just don't like it. Don't like what you're doing. And they're going to be angry no matter what you do. When you're doing things that are genuinely new, you've got to cross your fingers that you're doing it right. And see what the community thinks in the end. Sometimes it's easy to squash that to some degree with the why. Why? Why did you do this? It's one thing to have a capitalistic intent, either personally because you're creating a company around this with venture capital and incentives, and then to enable open source developers to get paid.

1:06:33So there's lots of reasons why I'm sure, but what is your personal reason why? Why did you do this? So yeah, we're going to be quite transparent, as transparent as possible. We're going to be open sourcing most of the, probably all of it by the end of the year actually, even the website, who cares? But my personal reason for doing this is because three years ago I was in between full-time work, trying to work on open source once again, and I looked to see if anyone had come up with something that could pay me to work on it full-time for, you know, this time. This time. I've tried things in the past, like Patreon, spent half my time marketing myself rather than writing code when I was trying to get that Patreon working.

1:07:12And there wasn't anything new. Everything treats open source like all it is is charity. All you can expect is a cup of coffee and five bucks. So I decided that maybe it had to be me who fixed this problem. And I went down the rabbit hole finding new ideas, trying to find new ideas about it. It was a moment of inspiration one evening. I've had some weed. And I realized that crypto smart contracts and that package manager data, that dependency information, I could use that. I could do something with that. Maybe that would be the solution. So we're going to see. We're going to see. When are we going to see?

1:07:48When? When. Yeah, so hopefully by the end of the year, maybe early next year. And how long will it take? Everything's built. Everything's ready. Well, why aren't we hitting go? It turns out crypto's got a lot of legal red tape, as you might expect. Yeah. I think I appreciate people trying new stuff. I think there's a large number of developers who are just so anti-crypto that it's going to be a stumbling block or something you'll have to overcome. Now, if it starts to work and work well, and it's on Ethereum, you said, so that's proof of stake, right? So it's not just proof of work like Bitcoin, which a lot of people have a problem with energy draw.

1:08:28So it doesn't have that particular problem. Maybe you can overcome some of the anti-crypto stance of the developer community at large. Is that fair to say? I think so. I've been always more on the fence because I think there's potentially cool and interesting new things you can do that you couldn't do before. And I'm waiting to see them, kind of where I've been, you know. And so maybe this is one where we say, here's a cool use of crypto that actually does what it's supposed to do and brings value and all that. I hope it works out. Yeah, as he was describing the dependency graph, it reminded me of the way I suppose Google or a search engine attributes weight to or importance to a website, which is backlinks.

1:09:08It's the same kind of idea where you sort of define some sort of perceived value based on being in the dependency graph of a project. And I imagine that totally makes sense. And it's not based on whether I think your thing is cool, whether I think your thing is worth funding. It's a matter of, yeah, it's like, is it literally being used? How deep is its importance? then you can't scrutinize back to the Nebraska XKCD drawing and cartoon because you can see the weight. You can see the graph there that says it truly is important. And going back to what you said with Patreon or even GetUpSponsors, you spend most of your time marketing and promoting the fact that you could be paid, not doing the things that should get you paid, which provides the value.

1:09:59And so it seems like if you can get past this, I don't know how to describe it, I guess, the idea of crypto. Anti-crypto sentiment. Yeah, the anti-crypto sentiment. If it couldn't play out well, because it seems like it should. Because you can't argue with the graph. You can't argue with the importance that gets placed on it or the weight, the perceived weight and value that comes from that as a result. And the developer can keep doing what they're doing. Not remapping around this new idea of how to get paid. They can just keep doing what they're doing. The dependency graph predicts their future.

1:10:32He can stick against it if he wants to, which increases my yield, increases his yield. Seems like it has the right kind of ideas. What's the reception so far? Like you're in the percolation stage. What's the sentiment? Well, you're totally right that a lot of developers are very anti-crypto. And so that's been a battle from the start. Hacker News hate me even more than usual. But inside the crypto sphere, it's very popular, like 1.7 million signups is pretty unheard of. And what it turns out to be the case, to my surprise, I spoke to over 300 open source devs over the last three years, just, you know, for market research reasons.

1:11:18A lot of them don't care if it's crypto or not. They like crypto in the respect that they like technology. Open source devs aren't as anti-crypto as the others, the rest of the devs, you know. And yeah, I think we have a reasonable chance of showing that crypto is just a technology. We're not a scam. There's nothing scammy about what's going on with us at all. They'll see that once we've gone live and no one's, you know, rucking the token or anything like that. Right. And, you know, it's all open. That's one of the beautiful things about Web3. All those smart contracts are transparent and readable.

1:11:53You can see what's going on. Right. So I'm hoping a few success stories after the launch, people will start to reconsider. I have an idea for you. Or at least, let me see if I understand this right. And this is where my idea comes from. What if, let's play out a scenario. What if the developer world rejects this because they're anti-crypto? what if t because you can still determine the dependency graph with or without onboarding right you can still determine the graph because it's in get so long as it's open source and available you can determine that graph and its importance what if it becomes a speculation engine so the people who do care about speculating can leverage it as crypto whether developers or not and now it's sort of like maybe this adjacent, this adjacent proxy to value.

1:12:46And not me saying this, but I'm going to say it. Who cares if the developers are anti or for crypto and who cares if they truly adopt this or not? It can be a way to speculate the value of the lone developer in Nebraska's thing and create value whether they take it or not. Because you can now have a betting world basically against all of open source. And there's a way to make money from, or make money slash create value or speculate value and take away that value if you want. It seems like a pretty genius idea, to be honest. I might have to give you an advisory token allocation. But yeah, like...

1:13:27You got a wallet? I can't tell if he's being serious or not. There's certainly stuff we could do if the main idea doesn't work out, but my passion won't be in it. Plan B. How about plan B? Yeah. That's plan B. Yeah. Because, I mean, it's possible you'll be rejected. That would suck, right? Because you spent years, three years doing this. That would suck, right? It would suck, but not everything always works out. You know, you come to accept that when you're building things. Yeah. I think it would be a real shame if the only reason it doesn't work out is crypto skepticism. Yeah, I hope it's because it doesn't.

1:14:05I mean, I hope it works out, A. But B, if it fails, I hope it's because the idea fails, not because it's haters. I just did a bad job. I don't know, though. I think with my idea, if it truly is a good idea, I think you could do both. It doesn't have to be just because you're rejected, plan B is X. I think it could be both based on what I hear. Now, this is 20 minutes of podcasting, which I haven't dug into the white paper or the details and stuff like that. But I can't see, based on what I've heard so far, why it couldn't be both. Because it's already doing that. It already can be speculated against.

1:14:40If I have a project and Jared wants to stick against it, he can. So that's all you're doing. It's about perception and mechanics and marketing, really, a story, than it is simply what it can or can't do. Yeah. I'll certainly go away and think about it. I don't think it's likely we would launch with both. Partly because, you know, we're locked in at this point. You could do both, though. It's still possible to do just because you don't market it that way doesn't mean I can't use it that way. That's my point. Well, they would have to do a dependency graph against all projects everywhere, right? True.

1:15:12Versus the ones that are registered. You're currently tracking... We do do the dependency graph against all projects everywhere. Already. Yeah. Gotcha. And then you give a pathway to this thing that's one, software's eating the world, open source is eating software kind of thing. Now anybody who ever wants to speculate against open source can. Not saying they would, I have no idea about that, but it's an interesting... Something to chew on at least. Something to chew on for sure. Yeah, there's certainly lots of things we can do with the data, like the Chai database, on-chain, Oracle. It's got all the dependency data and it's got the rankings.

1:15:51We're exploring the idea of building out SBOMs based on that, which give you actual impact for your stack and threat identification essentially, allowing companies to donate or stake based on the S-Bomb we're generating. Yeah, totally cool. The idea of building out some sort of like polymarket-esque thing as well. Mm-hmm. But as you say, other people can do that, right? The data is on the chain. You can build against it. Yeah. It's one of the things we're looking forward to actually, is seeing what the OverSource community just do on top of these primitives that we've built for them. Interesting.

1:16:28So is this limited to libraries then? Almost, you know, because like I was saying... Because it wouldn't solve Homebrew's problem. Not itself, no, interestingly. Homebrew isn't even actually in the system because it's not packaged by anything. Right. Pretty popular project, though. Kind of embarrassing for me, but it's a limitation of the current model. Yeah. Like once Chai is open sourced, which spoiler alert, I'm doing that during my keynote in an hour. Nice. We're hoping that people will come forward with suggestions for how to fill in these gaps and help us to build it out. Yeah, that would be cool because right now it would be limited by the dependency graph.

1:17:15So you need to have dependencies. Yeah. So you can't be a command line tool or an application or these other open source projects to use this particular. Well, sometimes you can be a command line tool, because some of the command line tools are dependencies of other command line tools. Sure. But it wouldn't track your actual usage, right? Well, we don't really track usage either, of course. But you would want to, right? Like, if Homebrew gets more used, I know it's not in there, but if you imaginarily covered it, it would be based on usage, right? Well, we have a new idea that we've been developing over the last few months that we'll fix this, that we'll be announcing next year.

1:17:52So it's a different way. You want to spoiler alert us? Fair not, fair not. But it's rather lovely. I'm very excited about it. And it does solve some of these issues for a different use. It tries to tap into the fundamental utility of open source. So phase one, we're releasing this essentially a remuneration platform for open source maintainers. Phase two is exposing the real value of what open source represents. Wow. And yeah, it should be pretty exciting. And you said it's trackable on Coinbase, is that right? Because of the way it's protocol? He didn't name a specific one. No. You said something.

1:18:35We use Base, which is Coinbase's blockchain. Okay. So certainly it's going to be on Coinbase, but he hasn't said where you can buy this token. To be disclosed, where we will be selling. Is there a way that you could leverage this to secure the open source supply chain, as it said? I don't really like the term supply chain, but that's the accepted term of open source supply chain. Is there a way to leverage what you're doing with T, not just to incentivize to maybe gain value, but maybe leverage that in a way that can ensure security for open source packages or reward those who are more secure or just anything that just bolsters the security of open source?

1:19:19Yeah, so going into this, that was definitely one of the things I wanted to achieve. And we have ideas for how that can play out with what we built already. We're kind of securing it to some extent because we're securing the maintainer's ability to actually work on these things. But we have plans later. So one of them is inside the thing I was just talking about that we're going to be announcing early next year, which do have tangible extra security benefits to the open source ecosystem. So, yeah. So it's in our best interest to find a way to make this play out. Me and yours? Like, generally. We, as in the community.

1:20:00Because if they have these kind of plans and there's altruistic ways to get there, we just have to... Well, I certainly want to know what he's going to disclose in early next year. I'll tell you after the podcast. Well, Max, best of luck. T.XYZ, is that right? Yeah, T.XYZ. T the drink, T-E-A. T-E-A. Not T-E-E or just the letter T. T, yeah. With hindsight, the name wasn't great. A lot of hindsight. Well, hopefully some foresight. I'm excited to see what happens when you launch. So launch. Yeah, well, thank you. Get to it. I'm looking forward to it. End of year? It's very soon. Hopefully. Very soon.

1:20:36All right. famous s words good luck with your keynote as well yeah all right max all right thanks

1:20:48what's up friends i'm here with a new friend of ours over at assembly ai founder and ceo dylan fox assembly ai is where you can turn voice data into insights chapters transcripts summaries and so much more with their leading speech AI models. So Dylan, give me a glimpse into what you're doing with speech AI models at Assembly AI. So at Assembly, we're building industry leading speech AI models for various tasks like speech to text, streaming speech to text, speech understanding to help developers easily convert voice data, whether it's live or pre-recorded into super accurate text, and then to help developers extract a ton of information and metadata around voice data or even around the text that they just were able to convert from that audio data.

1:21:35So these are things like picking out entities or PII that was spoken in voice files or summarizing voice and audio data down into custom summaries. It's things like being able to detect how many speakers spoke and who said what and what the names of different speakers were. So we bundle all those things into a super simple API with really great docs that developers can just sign up to for free to start, use the API, build into their apps, and then build these really cool AI apps and products and workflows and automations on top of voice data with. I dig it. Okay. Can you take me a little deeper into the opportunity for developers?

1:22:14Because it seems like there's a lot of voice data out there and there's a lot of trapped value in that voice data. There's so much voice data being created on the internet now. Podcasts, videos, phone calls, voice messages, audio books, virtual meetings. It's crazy. And you can now transform and understand all of this voice and audio data in ways that were not even possible a year, 18 months ago. So what we're seeing with the help of these new AI models that we're creating at Assembly, developers and organizations are just racing to build all these new applications, workflows, automations that leverage the voice data they have either within their organization or within their product to build really cool new products and services and workflows that are just like taking off at the market.

1:23:01So at Assembly, we're building the industry leading models for all those different apps and workflows, whether it's speech to text or speaker diarization or speech understanding capabilities to summarize voice data or extract entities from voice data or mask PII from phone calls for various types of automations that might be built. And we're exposing that through a super simple, super scalable API that's just constantly being updated and constantly getting better. And so we're seeing a crazy amount of developers and companies just build really cool apps and services on top of our API every day.

1:23:34It's really only just getting started, especially with the model updates that we have planned over the second half of the year that are coming out. They're really excited to launch to the developers on our API. Okay. Constantly updated speech AI models at your fingertips. Well, at your API fingertips, that is. A good next step is to go to their playground. You can test out their models for free right there in the browser. Or you can get started with a$50 credit at assemblyai.com slash practical AI. Again, that's assemblyai.com slash practical AI.

1:24:11tell us about this uh what do you guys want to hear about the state of open source funding sustainability pledging oss pledge.com this is your new thing funds well open source funds what's the state so we got a couple things so the state of funding there's a couple ways we could take this and since we're going to cap this to 20 minutes i'm going to say the words fair source. Okay. And I'm just going to put that there. And maybe we'll come back to that later. Okay. So don't, don't, don't bite on that. I know, I know that maybe something we could have a little more vigorous conversation about. Let's do it.

1:24:46But yeah, man, no, the past, past year launched two initiatives, fair source and open source pledge, both kind of coming out of this place of trying to balance the user freedom that we enjoy in open source with the pragmatic practical realities. So you're not idealist either. Correct. We're not idealists either. Correct. Okay. Yeah. Balancing freedom and sustainability is how we think about it. Developer sustainability. So Pledge in particular is really exciting. We launched this on October 8th. What day is it today? It's like the 28th or something, right? So not quite three weeks, about three weeks ago, three weeks tomorrow, we put up three billboards in San Francisco.

1:25:26We rented three of the most expensive billboards in the world to tell a story about the change that we need in the industry to pay the maintainers. And this is the pledge. So the pledge is a group of companies that are working together to change the status quo in open source sustainability. Companies that join make a commitment. So there's two parts to joining. Number one is you go pay maintainers. Number two is you blog about it. Okay. So the pay maintainers, we have a barrier to entry. We have an entrance fee, if you will. So we use this dollars per developer number so that companies of very different sizes can kind of, you know, we can compare across.

1:26:10$2 ,000 per developer on staff to open source maintainers, meaning no strings attached payments to your dependencies, essentially. Okay. Could be foundations. could be GitHub sponsors, Open Collective, whatever. So Pledge itself is not actually touching any money. What we're doing is bringing kind of the social validation layer to it and saying, we've already got GitHub sponsors. We already got Open Collective. Thanks, Dev. Platforms that'll help you do this. We already got all the foundations. So number one, go pay maintainers. So a company has 100 developers. They would pay$200 ,000 per year to maintainers.

1:26:49And then number two is blog about it. Blog about it means you tell us who you paid and how much. That's your annual report. And that does two things. Number one, it drives awareness because now we've got blogs on everybody's blog out in the world talking about the open source pledge. So building kind of that social validation piece. But then it's also the accountability so that people in the community can, you know, we're looking for receipts. Who did you actually pay what, right? So it gives the community a way to go and look and say, you know, all right, Sentry says they're paying$750 ,000 to open source.

1:27:24Who'd they actually pay, right? Look for those receipts. Yes, that's the pledge. So two inputs, one being money and the other being the blog post, annual blog post. And what do they get out of it? What do they get? JSON. JSON. Always JSON. Yes, man. JSON. All right. That's how you pay maintainers, JSON. Yeah, tell me more about that. Tell them, Jess. This must be some pretty good JSON. That's it. Yeah. I'm always down for a good JSON schema. Yeah, so what do you get out of it? Essentially, it's a lightweight certification. You get a member badge that says Open Source Pledge Member. So then you can go out.

1:27:59A lot of who we're going for at the beginning is developer tools companies. You want to sell to developers. You want to demonstrate your goodwill in the open source community. You get that badge. It says Open Source Pledge Member. and then, you know, as we build this thing out, that starts to mean something, right? So I, when I'm making my decisions about what tooling I'm going to use, if I see that open source pledge member badge in the footer, I know that this company is actually paying maintainers in a real way. So that's the number one thing you get is that kind of cred. Yeah, I mean, it's really about the branding, the marketing, you know, and companies who want to tell, you know, who want to tell a good story about open source saying, all right, you know, you want to talk game?

1:28:37Like, this is how you do it. This is how you actually support open source. Okay. You buy it? I don't know. I mean, I think. I'm on the fence still yet. What's that? You're on the fence? I'm on the fence still yet. I think that, I guess, like, if you get the company, like, if you actually, if it becomes a thing. Yeah. Right? So it's kind of a, it's not really a thing yet. You're trying to make it a thing. If it becomes a thing, then I get a thing. But in the meantime, if nobody cares about it, then I don't care about it. Just thinking as a guy who's running a company. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, well, if I don't currently care about supporting my dependencies because of all the reasons why I should, instead I'm going to do it because the pledge exists and I want to look good.

1:29:16I don't know if I'm sold right now because it's brand new, right? And you've got a handful of companies doing it. So we launched. So it was brand new on August 28th. So what? That's two months ago exactly, right? Pretty new. So it was brand new on August 28th. Sure. The two companies that were the first to join were Sentry, my employer, and you want to guess who the other one was? It was a, I was surprised too. I was paying attention. I think it was like, I don't know, tell me, but I was surprised. It was Astral. Do you know Astral? Astro.build? Astro.build is also coming along. Astral, A-S-T-R-A-L.

1:29:54Oh, yeah. The other ones that are doing like Python tooling and Rust. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah. And they are venture backed by Excel. Correct. Okay. Just like Century is. Okay. So actually Excel. So Excel partners are kind of like. So, I mean, it's networking, man. This is all the social, like this is social networking. This is like herd mentality. I mean, what company is not an AI company today? Sure. Three years ago, you know, we weren't talking about it at all, right? Like for better, for worse, humans are herd animals. Companies are herd animals. And that's kind of what we're trying to work with here.

1:30:28You know, when you're, when you talk about sustaining open source, I see there's three levers that we can pull. Number one is commercialization. So you build a company around your project. Open source itself is not a business model, but you know, over the past decades, we've come up with business models. So commercialization is one way to sustain open source, to subsidize an open source project. On the other end is taxation. So Sovereign Tech Fund is doing this. They're spending German taxpayers' money on critical digital infrastructure. Yeah. Okay, so both those are fine. That's good. What we're going after with Pledge is this middle lever, which I think of as validation, social validation, right?

1:31:05Again, you want to be seen. Another way I think of it is it's not an exactly perfect analogy, but open source is kind of like a restaurant. Okay. Here's what I mean by that. Please, yes. Tell us more. I'm excited. What? What's on the menu? What's on the menu? Okay. Open source is kind of like a restaurant. Again, it's not perfect, but bear with me. I go into a grocery store and I pay for my food first and then I take it home and I eat it. Okay. I go into a soup kitchen and somebody else pays for it. It's a charity and I get to eat. Okay. I go into a restaurant and, you know, we go in together.

1:31:44It's social, first of all. We go in, we sit down, we have a nice meal and it's at the end of the meal when the food's in our bellies that we settle up and we pay the tab, right? So it's like a restaurant in that you're paying for this thing that you already ate. You know, you already consumed it. So year after year, our companies are consuming open source. We're feasting at the open source table. Okay. And what we're doing with pledge is saying, all right, now it's time to settle up, to pay for the open source that we've consumed year over year. And I get there because of the social aspect, right?

1:32:14Yeah, I understand. That's the part you're trying to drill down on. See, I saw it differently then. Okay. Not the analogy. I don't disagree with the analogy necessarily, but... All right, what are you seeing? I saw what you were doing with the open source pledge or OSS pledge, to be more clear, was an extension from what we did a while back with maintainer month and maintainer week. It was maintainer week and then maintainer month. And it was OSS fund. It's the same idea that you started with Sentry, which was for every developer, whatever your number is, is your number. But you said$2 ,000 per developer was the good algorithm to use.

1:32:45Yeah, that's our minimum. And so I saw open source pledge, this OSS pledge, to be an extension of that, but more with an awareness piece to it. Because it was hard. it was like you were pushing this uphill battle to say, yeah, companies should have an OSS fund. Yeah. Yeah. Which is a great thing to say, but then it was like, well, how do we do it? Yeah. Whereas this, yeah, the FOSS fund. Yeah. Thank you for clarifying. Yeah. I saw it as like an extension of that, but potentially better marketable, you know, and potentially with this social component that is not so much a force multiplier, but more like a, you should, because this is where people who are doing this and believe in this model are collecting.

1:33:22Whereas the other way, it was more like soapbox. Yeah. Whereas here, you're sort of like, what was it? Hands Across America, like back in the 80s. Remember that? It's more like that, you know? Hand in hand across America feeding, I think it was The Hunger, something like that. No, you're right. I mean, so Foss Funders, I mean, it still exists, but Foss Funders isn't, this is in some ways, you know. A version of that. Foss Funders V2. So Dwayne O 'Brien is leading Foss Funders. Love Dwayne, love Foss Funders. Open source pledge is, yeah, it's kind of a V2 where we're saying, let's get an actual dollar amount.

1:33:57Because the thing with FossFunder is like, I built a FossFunder.com website. I recruited companies to put a logo on it. You know, it links out to a blog post. Some of those same mechanics were there. What was missing was there was no threshold. There was no consistency across that. It's like one company gives$10 ,000, another company gives$100 ,000. And like, how are you thinking, you know, it's got to mean something. You know, it's like when I see that a company's on open source pledge, like when you see it, here's what I want to say. When you see that a company's on open source pledge or when your listeners see that a company's on open source pledge, they should think, oh, this company's putting their money where their source is.

1:34:31This is your meme. All right. Speaking of memes and credit, when you said that, we picked up on it. Yeah. We used that somewhere. You said that? I've said it a few times over the years, but I said it on Change Dog News and you picked it up. Yeah. That's on my copywriting there, Adam. Put your money where your source is. Yeah. Send us the bill for the copywriting, Jared. Yeah, I will. No, we like that one. Put your money where your source is. Now you've vellied up to the buffet. You've had your meal. Yeah. Put your money where your source is. Yeah. I mean, that's the main message. It's like, when you see that open source pledge member badge, you should know, wow, this company, they put their money where their source is.

1:35:08Those are going for it. But yeah, man, early days. So two months ago, we launched with two. That was a soft launch. We put these billboards up. I don't how much time we have to get in all the billboards and everything, but we put these billboards up on October 8th. So that's the three weeks ago. Yeah. By the time we put the billboards up, we had 25 companies on board. So we went from two to 25. And I'll tell you, when we add those two, I was like, what are we going to have on October 8th? Because we signed a contract for billboards and we're going one way or another. And I don't know if it's just us and Astral, then it's just us and Astral.

1:35:38But we had, yeah, 25 companies join us for that launch. So we feel really good about that. We had seven, well, six open source foundations that gave us endorsements, you know, because the pledge is companies. But, you know, on the other side of the equation, it's all the foundations and the maintainers. And so we got endorsements from OSI and five other open source foundations, PHP and Django and whatnot. Yeah. So I feel like we had a lot of good momentum for launch, but yeah, man, it's all about what happens next, right? It's like Next three, six months. I'm a salesman now, you guys. I'm like, this is what I signed up for.

1:36:13Now I got to go door to door and be like, hey, who wants to join? This is your baby. Well, it's David Kramer's baby, let's be honest. But you're carrying the torch. Exactly. Fair enough. Fair enough. That's your job. That's my role these days. All right. Well, I mean. Keep an eye on it. Keep an eye on it. Yeah. I'm excited to see what happens. Two to 25 is definitely a move. Yeah. That's a move. If you went two to four, I'd be like, two to 25 is legit. 24 is. No, if you went from two to four. I was like two to 24. I'm like, what's all the one? I mean, that's okay. I put out the Twitter poll and I was like, where are we going to be at launch?

1:36:48And everybody had me at five to launch. Okay. So I feel pretty good about 25. Yeah, fair. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. But it's what happens next, right? Is it on the honor system? Well, so there's no, there's no vetting and verification, right? The blog is there. The blog is there, and we do go look at the blog when you get onboarded. We look at your blog, and we go back and forth. This is what we're looking for. Who's we? So there's four of us on the core team. Okay. Two of us from Sentry. Two organic community members that showed up to participate. Vlad and Ethan are not employed by Sentry, and myself and Michael are at Sentry.

1:37:24So that's the we. Okay. And, you know, we'll grow that kind of formality of it over time as we grow. So, but yeah, we launched with 25. We got, so we do vet. Here's what I want to say on that. Going back to what I was saying earlier, GitHub sponsors. Thanks, Dev. Open Collective. These platforms that do this. Our goal is to build that up so that they help with the receipts. So thanks, Dev's helped me out a ton. Okay, so I'm doing, I'm going to, you know, past years you guys and I have talked about Century's own funding program. So this is kind of the extension of that where we say, all right, now can we get other companies to join us with this?

1:38:00So Sentry's own funding program for this year is going to launch in a couple weeks. We'll land that in a couple weeks. Had to push it back because I was distracted by the pledge. Thanks, Dev, is my main vendor for that. And they're helping us out with, all right, what kind of reporting do we want for the pledge? And how can these vendors help us with those receipts so that it's not just an honor system? There's a little more meat to it. So really trying to incentivize that ecosystem. Well, whoever would put out a blog post saying you funded open source and you didn't fund open source, I made a face by the way it was not a good face well there is this happened no I'm just saying like that if they did if it did happen right if you would go through the motion of saying I pledge I blog and that blog was non-factual yeah I mean it's pretty bad big time you know yeah yeah yeah so yeah receipts and so I joked about the JSON earlier and you never close a loop yeah what's the JSON deal you just laughed what's the JSON there is close a loop of the JSON for all about it so there is Well, so what we have people do, and I don't know if we'll do this forever, but the way the system is set up, we're going to geek out for a second here.

1:39:09To join the pledge, a company publishes a JSON file. They publish their blog post, but then they publish a JSON file because this is an annual thing, right? It's an annual thing. So every year you've got to pay. Every year you've got to publish a blog post. So I built a system where they publish a JSON file that says, here's the number of developers we have. Here's the amount of money we spent. And here's the link to our blog post about it. And then they can update that year over year. And then we pull that in with a GitHub action or whatever on our side. Yeah, so that's where the JSON comes in.

1:39:39Anyway. So they give a JSON. They don't get a JSON. That's just more given. Yeah. But they become part of, I mean, you're going to report that or, I mean, somehow that thing. You should pull it together to a master JSON file. They do get a JSON, though, because when they go through the flow, they generate the JSON file for them. Who does? We have it. We built that out. Vlad, one of the folks working on it built that out on the website. So if you are at a company that wants to join the pledge, then you go to opensourcepledge.com. Dot com. You'll see a join button there. opensourcepledge.com slash join.

1:40:15We'll walk you through the steps, including, yeah, we'll build that JSON for you. We'll give you a gift of a JSON file. They gift you a JSON, but what do I do with that? Then you put that on your domain to validate that it's legit with your company. See, more work for me. That's more work. We'll streamline it. Early days. Early days. Yeah. Cool. Well, good stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Keep an eye on us. So let's wave a magic wand. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Put it here down right now. All right. How much time you got? Three minutes? Yes. Three minutes. Three minutes. Okay. He's got less than three minutes to wave this magic wand.

1:40:46It is pick your number of years from now. Yeah. One, two, five, whatever. What's the goal? What do you want to like, what would be best case scenario? Yeah. You know, so when I go to San Francisco, I like to read embarrassingly basic, cringy business books on the plane. So I was there two weeks ago. I was reading Crossing the Chasm. I want everyone on the plane to know that I'm reading Crossing the Chasm. Yeah, exactly. Work OS. Yes, exactly. Crossing the Chasm. That's it, right. Innovators Dilemma. Sorry, Crossing the Enterprise Chasm is really the long-term. That's kind of the playbook that I'm seeing for this.

1:41:22For this to be successful, the intent is really to have as much of the industry as we can participate. So we're looking at this whole thing with the innovators and the early adopters and the early majority and the late majority. You know, wave the wand. If it's five years from now and we're across the chasm and we've got a thousand companies on board and some of those companies have 5 ,000 developers on board, we're doing great. If it's a year from now, we've got, I mean, 100 companies, maybe 200 companies, you know and there's some of those centuries 135 developers if we have a develop a company that has 500 developers on board a year from now i'm feeling really good about it you know you're currently the biggest one yeah absolutely yeah yeah so you need some big fish you want a lot of fish but you want some big fish yeah so we're going broad and then we'll grow it up you know because it's about it's about i want to say peer pressure but it's about that you know validation that we're doing this together century 135 developers like microsoft's not joining tomorrow You know what I mean?

1:42:23It's like we've got to make the environment a little different before we can get there. Build it over time. All right. Thanks, Chad. Opensourcepledge.com. That's it. Go there now. Yeah. And look for that badge. Get your JSON on. That's it. All right. Thanks, Chad. Thanks, guys.

1:42:40Okay. To the many people we saw in the hallway at All Things Open. Well, hey. It's good to see you. We met a lot of people who were there on the coupon code we gave out, the free one in most cases, and in some cases, the discounted version. And that's so cool. Lots and lots of listeners of the changelog at this conference. And that's even cooler. So this anthology episode covered lots of stuff. the state of enterprise Linux, RHEL, CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, Alma, Rocky. The list is long. We cover T.XYZ, this new protocol that may give value back, may give rewards back to open source maintainers. That's cool.

1:43:31And of course, opensourcepledge.com and Chad's work and David Kramer's hard work on this from Century to support open source maintainers to find ways to find models for organizations and teams to adhere to so they can give back, so they can do the right thing and to support their open source that they're using. And that's cool too. Lots of cool stuff. Okay, on Friday, a fun Friends episode from the Hallway Trank again at All Things Open. in different people, different conversations, maybe a little more fun. I don't know. You tell me. But a massive thank you to our friends at Century who happen to be also a sponsor of this episode.

1:44:14Just happenstance. We love Century. We use Century. Century's awesome. And our friends over at Coder, Coder.com, 8sleep, 8sleep.com slash changelog. My gosh, get one of these. Sleep on it. It would change your sleep life. Trust me. And of course, our friends at Assembly A.I. Check them out. Assembly A.I. dot com. And those beats, they're banging, banging, banging. Thank you, Brake Master Cylinder, for those banging beats. The beat freak in residence always bringing the beats. So good. Okay, that's it. This show is done. What are you still doing here? It's time to go. We'll see you on Friday, okay?

1:44:53We'll see you on Friday.

1:45:11Thank you.

1:45:32Thank you.