From open source to acquired (Interview)

30:29It was just a nightmare trying to juggle all of these contracts. I had some great sponsors. That was working really well. But I felt like the popularity of Benthos at about the 2022 era was getting to the point where I couldn't cope anymore with just myself on it full-time. And then a few, we had quite a few contributors at the time that are like the core blobs, the real ones. And they were around a lot to help in like the support channels and stuff, but it wasn't going to be enough long-term. We were going to end up like getting to a point where we're all burned out. And I could kind of see that coming.

31:09So that was about the era where I kind of realized I need to stop being just a dumb, immature kid on the internet. and actually think about what's the actual sustainable model that would keep all of this going, that's not just me clumsily bobbing from one support contract to the next. I did make a good go of that, which we can go into if you want, but then ultimately it wasn't particularly successful. Contracting, you mean? No, so I started a product. So the problem that I had was that I wanted to stay bootstrapped. I was open to doing a VC round and like starting a megacorp or also joining another company and being acquired.

31:55I was open to both those things. But like I wanted to try and be a bootstrap company first because I like the idea of being able to do what I want. I like the idea of being able to not necessarily optimize for marketability. like my vibe on the internet seemed to work really well but i don't think anybody would have told me that uh from like a marketing standpoint um you know having like a sad blobfish just to give people a picture of that your avatar is like you making a double chin on purpose is that what that is yeah yeah it's there's there's a few variants of that on various social media like not serious yeah there you go there it is yeah so not serious business here and the mascot is a blobfish and you know we like the the docs were very facetious there's a lot of sarcasm in there which is good like my like even if you've got like a professional group of people that are working on your docs you know they acknowledge that but the problem is that if you it doesn't scale like if if you you imagine like microsoft saying like from now on all our documentation is going to be sarcastic because it's funny and we like it like can you imagine Everybody has to write in that same voice.

33:04Yeah, exactly. Everybody has to have the same tone. Like it just, it doesn't scale. So like, you know, I like, I like the idea of having a really small lean operation and keeping it, keeping it cool. So I wanted to try it. But again, it's just the procurement process, like actually getting these big, because a lot of our users are these big enterprises and they're the ones that I wanted to try and pursue because like money is great at solving problems. Well, that's the thing about like a cloud native product is like you have the customers with the money. That's the thing that I know about cloud native is like that's where the money is in the open source world.

33:44There's a lot of companies with massive budgets for these pipelines. But the problem is I'm just some kid in the UK who, you know, I don't want to spend all day every day. Like I don't have somebody full time doing these like procurement processes and like all these contracts and stuff so it was just it just doesn't scale like i would need to hire out if i was going to do it properly i would need to hire out real sales people real sales engineers real like all this and that i don't even know i still don't know who i would need to hire but like i made a good go of it it was kind of like a self-service i built a visual ui for benthos um called benthos studio and i had loads of interest so i had loads of people contacting me saying like we want to pay for this like let us do it um but then it immediately goes into like procurement and i'm like i'm gonna have to get lawyers like i can't it's the whole enterprise ready chasm that uh that is talked about there is that you know you go from how do you become sock to compliant how do you become you know enterprisey you can't be snarky or sarcastic in your docs you've got to have proper you know contracts you have to charge way more than necessary because they expect to pay a lot of money.

34:59You can't undercharge for your software because they expect to pay. What are you talking about? You want 50 bucks a month? No, I want to pay you 5 ,000 at a minimum per month. I must, I'm an enterprise. Could you try going downstream to like the, you know, if it fits on a credit card, you don't have to do any of that kind of stuff like petty cash. So that was what I was trying to do. I am also not good at marketing in that I'm very good at putting together marketing materials but i'm just not good at using them so like it just goes on my you just don't show anybody yeah exactly and i don't i don't like because the thing is like at that level as well it feels it feels like begging it feels like begging for sponsors except this time you also get access to this web app i made and it just feels like um it to me it just didn't feel like enough like it didn't feel like i was doing enough i wanted to have like these serious contracts where I can see these companies are really invested in what I've built so that I feel safe.

35:54Whereas if I have like a thousand people like on a, you know,$5 a month subscription, that's great. Uh, but that's not what I would have had. I would have had years and years of slowly growing the subscriber base. And it, it, it was potential. Like I had enough income that I I existed, and that was a success in my books because I had the lifestyle that I wanted. But the problem is then I had kids. So then I've got to justify, Daddy, Father, why don't you work at Google? And I've got to explain. Your kids ask you that kind of stuff? Not yet, but at some point I'm going to have to explain. The expectations of our children.

36:39yeah father why are we burning clang manuals to to heat the house why couldn't you have worked at google and you know that's hilarious it just got to the point where i can't really justify not doing anything at this point i have to like try and uh what year was that and it's 2022 my kid was born in 2022 towards the end of the year uh-huh it was august time august time i think Okay, August 2022. If you can give me 15 minutes, I'll go get the documentation and I'll give you a definitive answer. But it was about August time. Get the birth certificate. Let's confirm. I'm not sure I did that yet. Was I supposed to do that?

37:20Somebody was. Father, why don't I have a birth certificate? Why don't I officially exist, Father? Don't look at me. I don't work at Google. I've been too busy trying to work at Google. But yeah, it got to the point where it was like, I'm really enjoying the lifestyle of just spending like as much free time as I want not really having like serious obligations because I had like contracts and stuff but that was easy to keep going um it definitely wasn't like a full-time job but I was definitely working a full-time job in terms of Benfoss stuff and support on the on the channels and things it just it got to the point where it's like I'm this project is is going to reach a point where it's going to be too popular amongst enterprises for other companies to ignore that they're going to start building up like a benthos shop um and then i'm at the risk of well if their team is bigger than my team and their team's more productive than my team we're just going to lose all of our momentum like they're just going to basically maintain a fork um and i won't be able to control the direction of the project anymore or any of those things uh i won't get my my stomp stomp out of it so i figured well i'll just you know i'll call it now and it just so happened in in 2024 that it really got to the point where in the data engineering industry people were taking it seriously so there was like lots of companies suddenly discovering it and realizing oh hang on a minute we can get rid of Kafka Connect and desperately then clinging onto it the it got to the point where it was like okay well I'm freaking out now because if I if I if I'm still just me then um somebody else is gonna is gonna fill the void and also I still have to support the community on the various community spaces unless I'm just gonna ignore everyone I kind of have to support everyone to an extent and it's just gonna take up too much of my time I'm gonna be immobile and I won't be able to do anything so I was kind of getting a little bit freaking out um and then it just so happened that it got to the point where it was like okay there's enough um there's enough uh industry kind of interest in this that we can you know we can arrange something um and then red panda reached out and they had a great plan they can't do with a plan like premeditated so yeah i mean the whole thing is um it's a it's it makes sense it's like a bigger picture thing like if you're if you're the um if you're the kafka that a company is paying for, they can't just have Kafka.

39:49They have to have connectivity to all these other things that they're doing, and they have to have all these annoying chores that have to happen to the data as it's coming in. So you have to be competent in more than just Kafka. So not having some sort of ownership of that aspect of the deal is just a big risk, and it's a big cost, because if you end up using their tools, and they're using stuff that doesn't work particularly well and is annoying, then it costs a lot to support it. It's also costing them a lot to use it. Whereas if you have a tool in-house that does all those integrations, you have full ownership of how it's developed.

40:25You can add more stuff to it. You can be very clever about what you're adding because you're fully competent. You have ownership of the people who understand the engine. then these contracts suddenly become a lot easier because you can you have full competency of the entire end-to-end pipeline from wherever they're at now to wherever they want to be with your streaming tools so it it made a lot of sense as like a partnership and i mean i've been talking to alex for years like we we've known of each other um you know he was um i considered him a friend for years past. In fact, he got me a lot of attention at one point because they had their big, like Red Panda was big on Hacker News for a while.

41:09I mean, it's obviously reappeared lots and lots of times, but there was like a point where I think it was their launch actually. And they got some feedback from some of their users saying like, oh, hey, does this work with Benthos? And then he, if I remember right, he reached out to me about that time because we were sharing a lot of users so we did i think i was their first blog post so that as in their first um like partnership kind of the uh blog post and i put it on the benthos website as well and it was basically um i think i think we called it something like we're bringing simple back to streaming the the famous justin timberlake song jt you're the jt of big data but both of us like a mangled combination of me and Alex is this Justin Timberlakey fellow bringing simple back to stream processing.

42:01If you can imagine that. If you can get an AI rendering of that on the screen now, I think your audience would appreciate that. I think that's an easy button. We can do that. Thank you. What I'm confused about, though, is the state of Benthos. And was it a company? Was it an open source project? You had a team. you were getting sponsorships it seems i'm trying to like understand the context through your story and not interrupt but it sounds like not legitimate company at this point when you were acquired i still need to unpack what i was doing uh mentally basically i had a company what were you doing i had like an actual real company it really existed actually it was a uk company but it was basically my consulting company.

42:49So it owned all the assets. It was, you know, it was the, you know, I think we called it a few times the Benthos company but basically it was what I was using to operate as and, you know, I had lots of different sources. Like the thing is like people talking now still, this will never end about like how to monetize open source and I mean, the reality is if you want to live off just building your open source, you're not thinking about what is the way to monetize open source. You're just reaching for any possible thing because all of it coming together may end up being one day enough to actually survive.

43:26But the reality is you can't just do GitHub sponsors, for example. So that was a source of income. But that was just like sponsorships. For the most part, it was like kind of tips almost. I wasn't sharing any foot pics, so there wasn't really much of a drive to doing it. So we're talking like a few thousand bucks a month or a year. What are you talking about? I think it was so there was the point where GitHub was matching the donations. And that was also a point where lots of people were getting really excited about it. So I think at that point it was paying my mortgage at the time. And then that meant my actual income could just go to Pokemon cards.

44:07but the amount over the years, it's kind of steadied around there. I did have sponsors that were real sponsors, people who were actually like, hey, we actually want to help you. So shout out Derek from Snadia. They were just like, we want to help you as a maintainer of this open source that is good for the community that we're part of. and they gave me sponsorships that was enough to live off in combination with all these other sources. That actually allowed me to tone down a lot of my support agreements at the time because they were just unruly. It was just getting too complicated. I wanted to kind of like calm a lot of that stuff down because, again, that was like the majority of my job was just supporting people and trying to get through the procurement process for these future contracts.

44:59so you're spinning plates and none of them are actually paying you yet we did have i it was only me um but the the number of maintainers we had was quite vast so we were kind of like if i remember right i think that was about the point that we were kind of divvying up support contracts so it wasn't just me taking them i was also kind of um guiding them around but there was a lot of um there were a lot of like general consultants in the industry that were also kind of like part of that equation i'm sure if we all banded together we could have actually done something real and made an actual company but again it's like i didn't want to jump too deep into that in case it didn't work out and then i've got to tell everybody like oops support sucks um because i don't i don't like just being a support company and your product wasn't really taking off because of the procurement process that you described yeah and so it was it was easy for European companies, but the big ones are the U.S.

45:58companies. Right. So, ah, damn you, U.S. Fair enough. So Alex comes by. He's got a plan. You guys go way back, a couple of years at least, know each other well. It makes sense for Red Panda. It makes sense because Ben Thos is kind of struggling as a business at least to find that perfect equation of all the different strings you have to pull in order to make it work without taking on money and or employees at scale. What were those conversations like then? Is it like, here's a plan, sign on the dotted line, or your lawyers talk to my lawyers? It's a whole ordeal. I think technically I'm not allowed to talk about it.

46:49To talk about it. and emotionally i'm not ready to talk about it uh but yeah i mean it's it's it's like a it's a formal process like do it doing acquisitions it's it's a it's a formal process like it's it's a whole thing like it's lawyers and paperwork and stuff because obviously you need to need to prove various things and there's an exchange of um assets and control of various how long does that process take you well it's supposed to take a long time i think if you if you asked a normal like procurement lawyer then they would tell you uh six months i think i was told like is how long it takes to to like sort something like that out um but myself and alex are apparently very good at procuring and it was uh when it comes to that um and it happened very fast like i think i think in terms of like start to finish it was it it it gobsmacked my lawyers let's say how quickly we got it done because at the end of the day it was it just made a lot of sense um for them and it made a lot of sense for me so there's no point like dwelling on it we're not gonna like back and forth back and forth over legalese so at the end of the day however long that was 60 days maybe 30 days uh it's probably a couple months i'd say to to go from 60 days let's call it that no one's fact checking please don't fact check

48:25okay friends i'm here in the breaks with annie sexton over at fly and you know we use fly here at changelow we love fly it is such an awesome platform and we love building on it but for those who don't know much about Fly, what's special about building on Fly? Fly gives you a lot of flexibility, like a lot of flexibility on multiple fronts. And on top of that, you get, so I've talked a lot about the networking, and that's obviously one thing, but there's various data stores that we partner with that are really easy to use. Actually, one of my favorite partners is Tigress. I can't say enough good things about them when it comes to object storage.

49:05I've never in my life I thought I would have so many opinions about object storage, but I do now. Tigris is a partner of Fly, and it's S3 compatible object storage that basically seems like it's a CDN, but is not. It's basically object storage that's globally distributed without needing to actually set up a CDN at all. It's like automatically distributed around the world. And it's also incredibly easy to use and set up. Like creating a bucket is literally one command. So it's partners like that that I think are this sort of extra icing on top of Fly that really makes it sort of the platform that has everything that you need.

49:40So we use Tigris here at ChangeLog. Are they built on top of Fly? Is this one of those examples of being able to build on Fly? Yeah, so Tigris is built on top of Fly's infrastructure, and that's what allows it to be globally distributed. I do have a video on this, but basically the way it works is whenever, like, let's say a user uploads an asset to a particular bucket. Well, that gets uploaded directly to the region closest to the user. Whereas with a CDN, there's sort of like a centralized place where assets need to get copied to. And then eventually they get sort of trickled out to all of the different global locations.

50:14Whereas with Tigris, the moment you upload something, it's available in that region instantly. And then it's eventually cached in all the other regions as well as it's requested. In fact, with Tigris, you don't even have to select which regions things are stored in. You just get these regions for free. And then on top of that, it is so much easier to work with. I feel like the way they manage permissions, the way they handle bucket creation, making things public or private is just so much simpler than other solutions. And the good news is that you don't actually need to change your code if you're already using S3.

50:47It's S3 compatible. So like whatever SDK you're using is probably just fine. it, all you got to do is update the credentials. So it's super easy. Very cool. Thanks, Annie. So Fly has everything you need. Over 3 million applications, including ours here at Changelog, multiple applications have launched on Fly. Boosted by global anycast load balancing, zero configuration, private networking, hardware isolation, instant wire guard VPN connections, push button deployments that scale to thousands of instances. It's all there for you right now. To pull your app in five minutes, go to fly.io. Again, fly.io.

51:39What was your demeanor at the end? Were you over the moon? Were you going out for a steak dinner? Were you resolute? were you yeah i mean i was pretty i was pretty chill i think i had a kid so like i wanted to go and like do all this crazy stuff i want to go off the rails but like my wife's like we've got a kid ash well for example what do you mean off the rails for instance what were a few of your ideas that she turned down uh so you know las vegas for a month okay otherwise i don't really see the point um going there just for a couple days uh yeah i could have done a champers binge uh for for a few few weeks i think i could have managed i don't know what that is i don't know what that is no what is it let me break this down for you champers is the champagne okay i don't know if you if you call it champers in the u.s that might be a uk thing it might be a very specific thing in the uk as well champers is this slang or is this uh it would probably classify as slang i think okay i'm gonna start calling it champers jared champers i gotta crack out the champers.

52:45The champers binge. Now you don't have to, you don't have to explain any further. Now I know what it is. All right, lads, let's go crack out champers. Um, so, I mean, that's pretty much the same idea with different objects involved. Right. And then I just want to play video games. Um, but the thing is like day one, so day one, everything was, was sorted. I was like there at the company getting stuff done. Um, cause the thing is as well, like I had so many people wanting to have a support contract that as soon as you've got the people there to do the procurement, do the sales, do the sales engineering, do the support engineering, they're ready to go.

53:22Like they, they could, you can just untap all of that money. All of these people who were just like desperate for like some sort of. So that's an, that was actually an unlock for you. Oh yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. I mean, it's, it's, it's basically it, it doesn't frustrate me to know that there's like money on the table when you've got like support contracts, people saying like, Oh, please let us give you this money, please. Like, it doesn't really annoy me because I know that. It wouldn't annoy me either. Again, I would just compare it to like, I could just get a job at Google. Like, if I wanted to make a lot of money very, very fast, I could get like a stupid.

53:52You want your kid to be happy. Yeah, exactly. If I want my child to have a fulfilled life, then there's lots of things I could do. But I'm not going to. His father needs to work at Google. I've made my decision. I want to draw stupid blobfish pictures and post them online. That's my job. And he'll get over that in time. Does your kid call you Daddy Pig by any chance? not yet my my son calls me daddy pig really and it's not a it's not a to anything with my way tell him ash what daddy pig means do you know daddy pig well do they watch pepper pig that's right yeah there you go so that's why i'm daddy pig that's like our number one export it's a term of endearment anyways yeah daddy pig i don't know because daddy pig's kind of incompetent so but it's it's always a maybe maybe it is not there's an underlying I'm gonna have to be honest with you I don't want your kids I'm gonna get you oh this is like an intervention here don't let your kid call you daddy pig it's a term of endearment I know it is my ego's not shot here man I know my kid loves me let's go they can love you but not respect you oh you wanna stay on this show I'm about to hang up on you I mean And not if you work at Google, though.

55:04They have to respect you if you work at Google. If you work at Google and live in a van in the car park. There you go. That's ultimate respect. Thanks, Dad. thanks dad for this google pen i've interrupted the show continue please it's all right daddy pig I don't know because the goal wasn't just to like get get um like the the most amount of money in the shortest space of time and I kind of always had my my head on the idea that if at any point I felt like I wasn't actually enjoying what I'm doing then at that stage I would just stop because you know it's kind of silly at that point like I'm not I'm not going to make more money from running Ben Thos is like a almost like a I used to say like a hot dog stand on the street That was kind of like the mentality I had.

55:51I just want to be like small potatoes, a small operation, doing the thing that I enjoy. But if I didn't enjoy it, I was quite happy to just walk away. Like I think a lot of open source developers get stuck because they still want to work on this thing and they feel kind of like obligated to, but they don't enjoy it anymore. And at that point, it's like you're kind of trapped. But I kind of had my head on straight about that aspect of things. Like if I don't enjoy it, I'll just let go. So like joining Red Panda, and there's something we can tap into all these like customers and stuff. It's exciting.

56:18it's great um but it wasn't like before that i was like frustrated about oh i just want to tap that revenue um it was more just i wanted to find like if i could have found um you know 100 startups um that were willing to pay like a nominal amount um regularly to keep the project going and that if that were enough for me to start building the team out then i probably would have gone for it but i'm just not good at wrangling up the the startups there were lots of them but it's very difficult to get them to to pay a significant amount because you imagine like a significant amount would end up being more than they're probably paying for anything else that they're doing unless they're like spending a lot on aws so let's let's talk about the stepping away part because this was like the big ramifications of the sale was like benthos just went away effectively?

57:10Basically, the team immediately grew so we could actually start hiring people who were just contributors before. So we've got more people working on it. If you look at the contributor graph for the Connect repo, it's suddenly gone way up. The number of stuff that it has has gone way up. But there was stuff that I was already going to do that I knew was going to be annoying if it was under the guise of an acquisition. So I already wanted to split the repo out. It was one thing that we had as a plan. So there was like the Benthos repo was everything. So it's like the engine, which includes like a plugin engine and all of the stuff that makes Benthos what it is.

57:52And then there was also all the plugins. So you imagine like Kafka plugins, AWS plugins, Azure plugins, Rabinu Q1s, you know, Nats, all the various Q systems and technologies that we were integrating with. All of those were baked in the same repo. and it was getting to the point where we were regularly having to deal with the dependencies breaking because somebody would have a breaking change and then you end up with these horrible like dependency graphs where um stuff no longer compiles and i would have to then make a decision of like am i just going to make a breaking change where i remove one of these components or am i going to have to like beg these maintainers to like make fixes um and it was also just getting to the point where the binary was just so big that it was inevitable that most benthos users were probably going to want to have like a reduced version of it so what i was going to do um was have two separate reposts there would be like the benthos engine and then there would be like the community the like official suite of plugins and you get a binary so almost like the way that caddy does it it's like matt hall has the the sort of plugin system um and it is sort of dynamic you can choose what comes into your binary i kind of wanted the same thing um which would obviously mean they now have to exist sort of separately um but what we decided to do as part of the acquisition was kind of like fast track that um and what we ended up doing is having the benthos so there's still a benthos repo called benthos with the blobfish so people want the blobfish that's where you find your official benthos blobfish now um that's the engine um and still being worked on so it's still the core of the new product which is red panda connect and then what red panda connect is is that's all of the plugins and extra features that we've added on top um to the core engine and that's a mixture of it's apache v2 for almost all of it and that almost is is the annoying bit that people got a bit uh angry about yeah um and then there's a couple enterprise features in this there's a couple like plugins that are enterprise licensed.

59:54So it's not fully Apache V2. So the enterprise ones are the Snowflake connector. There's a Splunk one. There's a few AI connectors that we've added and a bunch of other like things that basically the idea is those are like the enterprise things that probably it's just going to be people who are paying money for those products anyway. Right. So kind of an open core thing now where the core is really large. Essentially, yeah. And the engine is kind of like its own thing. So it's still MIT. So of the Benthos users back when this acquisition happened, which I think was like May of 24, is that right?

1:00:28Yeah. Fact check, true. According to the blog posts are right. That's roughly true. So of the Benthos users that day, how many of those are satisfied with the Benthos core plus the Red Panda Connect Apache stuff? I think it's a mixed bag. So there's like different groups of users. So there are the users who are just, they're not like, they're not really helping to run the project. They're just noisy. Some of them aren't even users. People who comment on the Hacker News, but they haven't really actually used it all or anything like that. Right. And it's more of a philosophical thing, the concept of open source.

1:01:16They're not happy. and you know i understand the arguments is the licensing is confusing and you know there's these arguments there's a lot of fud uh which i fundamentally disagree with but you know there's a lot of um pole clenching because uh oh he's changed the trans licenses as a rug pull um but the putting them aside because i felt like that's there's there's points that are you know valid but Some of it was just about the surprise of all this stuff just happening in one day. But obviously, that's just the nature of an acquisition. You can't tell people, hey, we're about to do this deal. It's illegal.

1:01:55And you can't start making the changes that you intend to make until you're able to be public about it. So there was just stuff that's just logistics. It's just a fact of life that we had to do it as a surprise. None of the core engineers were surprised because they didn't know that there was an acquisition being made. but they they knew that that's what i was sort of heading towards and they knew the plan like the the splitting of the the repos stuff um so they were kind of like fine with it i think that they were a bit sad some of them are working with us now so like some of them actually got to become benthos engineers they're happy no because they have to work with me but the uh there's some some it's a bit disappointing because they work with um competitors uh so it's a bit of a sticky relationship now but obviously you know they kind of understood why things turn it like it's not as if like benthos was on hacker news and then a week later i'm like haha uh bags of money i'm selling it's like i made a good go of trying to um get things going without um without having to to reach for like vc funding or anything i just wasn't very good at it you can't fault me for that um but the uh i guess i didn't try that hard i could have tried harder but you know and then everybody else it's it's a it's just a mixed bag so some people don't care at all some people just carry on using it they they don't even care about the enterprise license they're just going to keep using it and not paying and they don't care because they didn't care before and then there's lots of people who will have their own custom build now and if anything they're probably happier because now they have full control over what's baked in and they can make sure that everything's FOSS and they only have the components that they're actually interested in.

1:03:38There's a fork. So Warpstream made a fork almost immediately. And they called that Bentos. Yes. And then Dave said it's been acquired by Confluent. So I'm not 100 % sure what the plan is. Still commits going into that repo. I did check on it. We've had Warpstream on the show. They're still doing stuff, something with it. They're still doing stuff on it. Yeah, I'm not sure, but it's still MIT licensed. Basically, they forked it before I did the split, which is a bit awkward. I was trying to convince them to fork the MIT engine after the split and then just take the plugins and separate them similar to how I'm doing from before the split, because that way people could have plugins from either ecosystem, and then all it is is just changing the import.

1:04:24They wouldn't even need to have forked the MIT engine because that could have just stayed MIT if they were concerned about licensing. but I understand their position like it's a competitor that owns the Bentos engines so I can understand why that's not an avenue for them but yeah I don't know I don't get a lot of hate because I think a lot of like it's easy to look at a Hacker News post and see people kind of like whinging and think that that's sort of like a personal attack on the developer but I mean the idea that I'm personally just going to work on this thing and you know live a live a more modest life than if i just had a software engineering job forever just because of moral obligations to people that i'm giving something away for free for like i think it's just it's not realistic so i don't read those comments that way and i understand that it's disappointing that an open source project that used to just be this completely independent indie project that didn't have any commercial success you know now it's been soiled yeah um But, you know, that's the way it is.

1:05:28You're an indie band and you sign with a big label and, you know, your original fans are calling you a sellout. That's just, this is classic. I got a few, he's a sellout, he's a sellout. And I'm like, I kind of can't argue against that. That is the terminology for a sellout, but I don't believe that's necessarily the exact case. I think that, so did it stay, the core engine stayed at MIT? Yeah. Right. So it wasn't like a rug pull. It was just an acquisition. Well, this is this is where a lot of these things get really complicated, because I think that the the arguments that you see online, whenever there's a license change, the complaint complaints that you see from people.

1:06:13I'm not going to say they're robots. I'm going to assume they're people online is it's just a fundamental misunderstanding of what the license is, because if I put code out, like if I put a recipe out for a. for a chicken nugget. It's a really good one. And I say, like, this is MIT licensed. What I'm saying is you can take this recipe forever. Like, you cannot delete this anymore. Nobody can. I can't say you can't use that recipe because I MIT licensed it. Anybody can do anything with it. What it doesn't say is as I slowly make changes to this recipe over time and I continue to work on it, that you're always going to be able to get it for free.

1:06:51Like, the version that's MIT licensed is always MIT licensed. It's the stuff after it that isn't MIT licensed if I do a license change. And I think that the fundamental, like, I think it's like a willing misunderstanding because I think people just like to get angry about this stuff. But the misunderstanding is this idea that by changing the license for stuff that you change on top of the code base, you've taken away the old code. And, you know, people will say things like, oh, well, code rots, doesn't it? So what's the point in, you know, whoop-de-doo, you've left an MIT licensed in the old version.

1:07:23But what good is that to me? Well, the good that it is to you is that somebody else can take ownership of it and continue working on it. Which is exactly what Bento is. That's Bento doing MIT. They've taken the MIT version and continue to work on it. But the idea that you've MIT licensed something, so now you have to work on it for free forever. Otherwise, it's a rug pull. It's obviously not right. That's obviously not how... Nobody would make open source if that was the contract they were intending. Like, social contract or real contract, it doesn't matter. like nobody would enter that contract willingly the idea that i'm gonna have to work on bentos forever um i'm gonna want to play video games at some point um my career on gaming is terrible right now because i don't have enough time for it i think that this is evidence of what steven o 'grady's take on eventually open source was on our show adam which is that nobody wants the older versions because what you say is 100 true and that version of bentos from april of 2024 for pre-fork and sale is 100 % free, just like you licensed it the day you pushed that code up publicly.

1:08:30But people don't really want that. They want current open source. They don't want past open source because then they have the maintainership burden of the in-between time in order to make sure that it continues to operate as they want it to or that it improves. And so his point with eventually open source, which is where things go open source over time, like you can have the five years from now version, that's open source or maybe it's nine months is that in practice people don't really want that. So it's kind of like saying it's not open source. You're speaking to like the BSL or the functional source license kind of things.

1:09:05Yeah, the eventually open source licenses which is a bit of an aside. I do think a rug pull though is in the eye of the rug owner and so that response is like entirely emotional and based on change of expectations and absolutely unavoidable in the case of a license change of something that's just going to happen. Whether or not it's justified or obviously you have, you're completely in your rights, both legally and I think morally to make the change. Where I draw issues with companies that come out with open source projects, raise large amounts of money based on that open source project, make large claims like this will continue to be open source.

1:09:49And then later on, much later on, after years and years of building goodwill, renege on that. That bothers me. I could see where some of your users might feel rug pulled, but you know what? That's just the way they're going to feel when something changes, right? It would be the same, like the same with just the acquisition in general. Like even if we kept everything exactly as it was, and I joined Red Panda, then they would be um you know they'll be upset because i mean even just from the like even if you ignore the code base for some people like just the goofy videos and like the updates and all that stuff was like a big deal to them and i mean i really enjoy doing that stuff um and you know obviously over time i was going to have less and less time for doing that anyway um which is already the case but the you know the idea of me then getting a real job is is disappointing because it's like this this goofball that you know we could just like come and hang out with um isn't as available anymore well we recently made a big change here at changelog ash i was telling you about it before the show just in december and it was outrage well i mean there are people that legitimately love the shows that we decided we're not going to produce those shows anymore and i don't i understand that feeling i've had my favorite shows disappear and you're just like you're sad you're like oh that's too bad and of course we've talked about rug pulls a lot on the show because there's been lots of instances of people feeling this way and we had the term turned back on us for you know closing down go time and ship it and i'm just like okay if that's the way you feel then fine but in which in what world did i agree to create this free thing for you in perpetuity for you to enjoy like i think a more appropriate response is i'm sad thanks for all the free pods you put out all the years, but that's just the way I would respond.

1:11:37They're completely going to respond the way that they feel. And on the internet, everybody just types that out and, you know, hits submit before they probably processed the recipient. And so I think your, your response to the responses, Ash, is relatively healthy. Don't say that. You're going to make me seem hinged.

1:12:00Okay. Well, please go off the, go off. Become unhinged. so i got a dartboard and every day i print off the face of a hater we dock some people and here's one of their addresses i'm gonna read it aloud

1:12:15but yeah i mean i kind of i had myself prepped for having to do like even even if i'd gone down the bootstrap route i knew that the tone of what i was doing was gonna have to change at some point i was gonna have to deal with people being not angry with me i didn't expect them to all be like lashing out but just kind of disappointed and you know trying to sort of navigate that because you don't really have any way around it it's entropy baby you know nothing lasts forever it's just the nature of nature that's how it works that's right the zoom out though i think is that you know it's encouraging that you could you know be in a place to have a skill to have the desire to build something of value, create that value, steep that value for multiple years, find unique ways to sustain, and then ultimately find the ultimate value, which is taking that to the enterprises that we're clawing to get not just access to the software because it was free and open source, but to do it in a way that supports an enterprise, which is through support.

1:13:18I mean, enterprises don't like to adopt something that they have to cowboy necessarily. I got told recently saying cowboy is a negative term. It's not a negative term. It's cowboys or cowboys, you know? Get over it. I think they're talking about the Dallas cowboys. That's a negative term. You cowboyed it for it. I mean, they have to cowboy without support. And so you've landed a place that you can keep doing that, which is great. And also, we actually have people being paid to work on the project for the first time. I'm not just asking contributors who've already sacrificed a lot of their free time to learn all this stuff and get into it.

1:14:02So once again, can you do something for free for the sake of this user and that kind of thing? I didn't mind having contributors sort of orbit. So like Mihai was like one of our top contributors and he enjoys working on the project just like I do. But I felt this constant shame that I couldn't do something better than just, hey, isn't it great that you're working on this project with me? Yo. Meanwhile, his kids are going, daddy, why don't you have a job at Google? Why doesn't Mentos give you money, daddy?

1:14:40and we're making you know we're adding features at the end of the day like if you're a Bentos user there's a whack load new stuff on it that you didn't have before and some of the stuff works a lot better than it used to because we actually care now so like you know if you're like an actual user then you know there's a lot there's a lot there that's obviously very very positive it's just that the immediate aftermath was difficult because we didn't have anything to show at that point. We were just telling people this is an acquisition. So there's like no benefits to show them at that stage other than like, hey, isn't it great that those show hold of value?

1:15:18And then, you know, we're telling them that all these things are changing. You know, we've like done a red pull on all these licenses. Get over it. You know, it's just difficult. But like it was fine. I did a live stream either the day of or the day after just to like talk people through like what was actually changing to the repo. And to be honest, like most people are either neutral. They don't really care. They just like as long as the software still exists, they don't really care about any of this stuff because they just use it for work because they're a normal person who has a job. Or, you know, there were people who were happy about, you know, the fact that there's a serious mission behind this now, this sustaining in theory, rather than just me doing it.

1:16:01like people used to complain about the burst factor before the acquisition which is perfectly valid um so there's like that now they no longer have to worry about so i mean i wasn't i wasn't just like i obviously understood that there was a bit of a backlash but i could to be honest i kind of enjoyed the hack news drama because like i don't get opportunities to be on hacker news much uh so it was nice to just be in there like oh it's ash here i'm the maintainer and this is this is my thoughts and i'm i know i'm gonna go straight to the top of the comments because i'm the person to be talked about it's like a free free attention like you get you get attention you don't have to do anything yeah i didn't have to post it what's an alternate universe i mean you didn't have to be acquired you could have had let me just paint maybe a potential alternate universe like rig panda could have just been a large as they were sponsor right they could have continued in perpetuity that way or done a larger swath and left you in that indie world a not quite similar to acquisition but they could have endowed you quite well as well as others could have but at some point something would change like you had said somebody would have made their own thing they would have a a larger team that was a benthos team and they were they would have outweighed you in capability and talent and rendered you to some degree obsolete then i could have just been the goofball like not having to do anything i did so i thought about there was there was um different like outcomes that I I planned for because the way that I would describe the whole process because it it was chaotic I was doing all kinds of like random stuff but the way that I would describe it is I was always I was on like uh like imagine I was on I was on a hike going to some like town and that's that's all I'm thinking about is I'm just enjoying this hike going going to this town um and eventually I'll get there that's my goal but all roads lead to Rome and everybody's looking at me like hey you're going to Rome you know you're probably not going to get there um it's very difficult to get to Rome but to me like I'm just going to this like next town or whatever but in my head I'm thinking well if I did get to Rome this is what I would do and this is how like when I'm walking on my little hike this is how I know that I'm prepped enough to get to Rome if it ever like got that far and it was kind of like that with this project where there were various like outcomes that were potential candidates for things that I would have done at this stage.

1:18:21So one would have been VC funding. That's the thing that everybody like shouts. Why are you doing this? And I consider that I talked to loads of VC partners, VC owners, various levels, various sizes, just to kind of get a bit of a sense of what their expectations are and what it looks like. Because I didn't know. I'm just like some guy in the UK. So I'm not particularly exposed to any of that stuff and that would have been one option is do a vc round and then try and aim for the stars the the problem there is um it's the same with a few of these like streaming tech uh projects where i'm just one piece of the overall puzzle and the actual streaming service is like the biggest piece you're going to spend more on kafka than you are on um kafka connect uh and likewise you know flink and all these other things are kind of like additions but your your main thing is the is the core streaming technology and the storage of that usually um so like i would have had to have had that competency baked into this new startup company and that's not really like that's not really in my mind like i'm thinking about the the product side of of benthos so like i i just thought it's a it's a possibility but there's like a big big gap there in in stuff and also i wasn't 100 sure if i'd want to if i'd enjoy it like being that kind of high up in the organization i've worked at startups but i've never been like cto or ceo so i wasn't 100 sure i'd enjoy that i think in hindsight i would have i would have been fine i would have i would have enjoyed it maybe not with young kids but i would have enjoyed it but yeah the other option is just band together people in the industry that could be like partners and get them to sponsor me.

1:20:08And there was prior art for that because Cinedia were sponsoring me. And like if I had 10 Cinedias all sponsoring me with similar kind of like setups, then that could have sustained me and I maybe could have like hired people as well. But the problem there is just because you got one doesn't mean you can just keep repeating that. I think Cinedia would definitely... Or that it's guaranteed to be there next year. It's really hard with yearly contracts renewing. Yeah, exactly. And when you've got 10 of them, like they're not necessarily going to see it as beneficial anymore. So they might not want to give you as much.

1:20:42And that's fair enough. Like, you know, it's free money with no obligation. So there's no way of like time to it. I cannot imagine hiring somebody under those conditions and knowing that my job now is to keep this impossible task of getting people to be kind enough to do these donations. I was really lucky with Snedia. It's nearly like amazing people that came in at like a really good time. And, you know, I'll be forever thankful for that. But I couldn't imagine like repeating that. I don't think it would have been realistic because it's just a it's just difficult thing to kind of arrange. It's really easy to get if you've got a really popular project.

1:21:23It is really easy to get somebody to give you like a sponsorship. So there were a couple of companies that gave me a sponsorship as part of their open source initiative kind of thing. But I would need those all the time. I'd need to have a constant feed of those happening. And it's just like the amount of effort invested into doing that. You might as well just have a support company that just sells support. And then it's way simpler. It's like trying to get sponsorships for giving free hot dogs away. when you could just sell the hot dogs. It seems a lot easier to just do that. It's difficult. But the other way was to just accept that life is fleeting and I can live off my current income.

1:22:13Why don't I just do this forever? And I think if I could just delete my family,

1:22:22then maybe that's the trajectory I would have had. You said that way too seriously. Yeah, he did say that. Seriously. You are a unique individual. That's for sure. Right. This felt more like you're making a deal. If some villain accidentally deleted them, like not me, but I would never do that. But, you know, if that were to happen, then maybe I would have just carried on. Because I did enjoy that lifestyle. Like just having, you know, your sponsors and humble life and all that stuff, then it would have been fine. But it's just difficult when you've got like a family and you've got to be an adult.

1:22:55You've got to answer those questions. Here's a question for you, though. Did Sanadia miss the boat, the opportunity to acquire? I can't really give any – I can't tell you any of that stuff. It is video. You can nod or make a face. Not really because I think basically at the end of the day, like sort of an acquisition, like two companies coming together, you have to have a really good plan for what you're going to do afterwards. and I know of founders that they you know they had a project they got acquired and then it just kind of fizzles a bit because you don't really you don't really have like a solid business plan like if your if your whole business doesn't hinge on that deal being a success then it might like I mean I've worked at companies that did all kinds of acquisitions and I've seen what it looks like to be acquired and then it turns out actually we don't really think you're all that like useful to us as like a business and we like what you're doing we're going to let you continue doing it and it's just it just feels like it's not it's not a great scenario for everybody involved um so i mean there were lots of companies that i could have i could have spoken to and could have could have had some sort of deal with um i can't give details as to i'm pretty sure i can't give details about who i talked to i would i would assume i can't uh even even just ethically but But if that had been one of the ones on the table, then it's a scenario where you have to weigh up lots and lots of different things.

1:24:27And part of it is how seriously do they have a plan behind the thing that they're buying? And what does that look like for the next few years? Because you're doing an acquisition to be working there for a few years. So it's a very difficult scenario. Just because you're super busy mates with another company doesn't mean it's suddenly going to make sense to just suddenly come together and sort of blindside. Like, imagine, like, turning up to a factory and just be like, hey, you owe me now and come up with a business plan for how we're going to work together. Like, you're kind of forcing them into a scenario there.

1:25:03Yeah, for sure. what I know about Synedia or at least Nats which is sort of sits above Nats it's Nats in the cloud basically I'm paraphrasing and botching my description of Synedia and Nats but from what I understand that Nats generally tries to render Kafka obsolete like it tries to be the better Kafka it's got a different way of doing things they've got Jetstream as well which has way more overlap than the original Nats right Right. And I just wonder if like, it's kind of funny that they were sponsoring you. I think that, you know, they would have had to have some ambition for doing so, not just simply generosity.

1:25:45Sure, Derek Hullson is a great person, you know, running Cenedian, founder and creator of Nats, all that good stuff. But there had to be some motivation behind it, not just simply altruistic motivation to do so. Well, yeah, I mean, at the time, I mean, we made a load of content together at the time. So, you know, I had a user base that overlaps massively with all of these companies. So it's not just Synedia and Red Panda. There's also, I mean, obviously, Warpstream and Confluent, all the various Kafka shops, but also AWS, Azure, like all these various like streaming technologies. There's a huge overlap with my users and those companies because they're using my product to integrate with all of theirs.

1:26:28so like there's there is a uh there is an incentive to um all kind of come together and have like a sort of shared marketing message um obviously if i did that with every company at the same time then it would kind of render them all obsolete to an extent i mean maybe it's not a zero-sum game and it would be good but um yeah there was there's definitely like an advantage to being like because you know them them sponsoring me i was like a super vocal proponent of synedia at the time i mean i still am to an extent uh obviously you know there's there's a bit of a conflict there now um but you know i'm indebted to synedia and i definitely felt that way at the time and you know we we made content together we did um all sorts of kind of shared um stuff but also like you know i was working on the the nats components within benthos at the time and obviously them being a sponsor of mine i put a bit more attention to that than maybe i otherwise would have so there is there is like a kind of indirect non-contractual um sort of thing going on there but i i genuinely think there's just really nice people and you know they saw like like it's very difficult to prove that that's what's going to happen like you're going to donate to somebody and then um that's that's how the relation is going to play out so they're kind of taking a risk with this this whole idea um and i just think it was you know that there was there's various things going on there is what I would say.

1:27:54Sure. What happens after that acquisition with your GitHub sponsors? You just go back to them and be like, it's just like, understandably everybody basically just like immediately turned off. Cause like, why would you like the, it's, I've got a company now and you know, I think that's fair enough. There were, yeah, there were, there were sponsors that were giving me quite a lot. And some of those lasted a few, a few months. But to be honest, my, my assumption was that they would all just disappear i've closed it now um because like i'd feel a bit uncomfortable with people sponsoring me now because i feel like i'm i'm monetizing the project so i don't really i don't really feel like it's it's a it i don't i don't feel like it's a reasonable thing for me to go out there begging for like i mean i know that's not what's happening if you've got a sponsor's page you're just kind of like asking for tips and for for most people it's nice because it's a bit of validation that somebody uses and appreciates thing whereas i was in a position where it was an actual like source of income so i feel a bit um conflicted about like leaving it there even if people just want to give me like a tip of the hat um i feel like you know keep keep that money and you know buy me a drink if you see me in person um but otherwise appreciate you but well where do you go from here what happens next i mean is this the end of your story yeah that's it i um yeah i'm just um i'm just gonna play video games no there's like there's tons of work i mean like as soon as i joined uh red panda there's like a mountain of stuff to to do to to get everybody um in action so like i've got i've got enough work to get on with uh as much as i want um i can i can chomp down on uh but i'm not really sure like long term because basically the idea is to make myself obsolete so like to to build a team that's big enough build enough competency and i mean that's not even just happening at red panda because as a consequence of this technology being kind of adopted and proven, I think is the business speak way of saying it, because lots of people are adopting it that maybe otherwise wouldn't without a big company behind it.

1:30:02There are other companies that are now gaining more competency around the technology. So there's much more redundancy there than there ever was before. so over time it's looking more and more and more like i could just step away and it doesn't matter the project will just keep on going whether there's like a fork war in five years time i don't know maybe maybe it does just fizzle out one day um my plan is to keep on working uh at red panda on it um the team isn't anywhere near as big as i would uh eventually want it to get to so there's a lot of work there to do um eventually i will stream again because i used to do loads of like community stuff but that's kind of fizzled out a little bit uh with the little kids but um eventually i'll get back on that but yeah i don't know i could get fired you could just be like it's true we're done with you too much of a goofball we're done with this we're sick of it and then i don't know but okay stay tuned well the future's unclear but probably positive unless the whole firing thing happened the future is terrifying and unknown and I'm here for it yeah that's true you could get fired unlikely though I'm sure you got a contract of sorts or some handcuffs to hold on to or hold on to you not really just a just a person I can't I can't force them to employ me I gotta imagine that as part of the acquisition there was some entanglement.

1:31:36Yeah, but they've acquired me, so the product is theirs. So if they decide that I'm not like... So there's no work contract. There's no guarantee beyond acquisition, basically. I can't get details. But basically, if I wasn't performing well enough, I'm sure they'd be able to... Yeah, I'm expendable. They can get rid of me. I mean, I'm trying to make myself as expendable as possible. That is almost literally my job. Let me go. Must play video games. I'm unloading my brain on lots and lots of people. Do not delete my family. Do not delete my family. Well, that's cool. You're living the dream, though.

1:32:12You realize this, right? I mean, you've got to be aware that you're living the dream to some degree. If somebody asked me like 10 years ago, you're just going to get to work on your open source project at a company. I'd be like, no, this is obviously not. not that's not really feasible um so yeah i mean it is the thing is like when you're when you do this stuff like there's lots lots of like success stories like um obviously he had um mitchell on uh recently it's like crazy success those are like the those are the crazy ones those are the ones that are really insanely successful but like um a lot of open source developers um you know they start with this like dream of you know one day i'll get to work on this open source forever but you know the reality is it's it is just it's a great job it's a fantastic job but it's not um it's not as idyllic as like I wouldn't I would be sad if I'd sacrificed seven years and hadn't enjoyed that time in its own right to get to this point I would have felt like it wasn't worth it I would have just gotten the job at Google but because I did enjoy those seven years I've enjoyed the journey thus far getting to this point um and i do really enjoy my job um that you know it's worth doing but i feel like it's it's a bit of a cautionary tale to people that like you you know just because you've got an open source project and you've got um like i would rather have a therapist make me really enjoy a normal job than like spend you know seven years gruelingly working on an open source project that you're kind of getting a bit burned out for to get paid to work on it because i feel like a lot of this is this is completely made up this complete conjecture so feel free to cut this from your show um but like from the from the sort of open source uh founders that i've i've met the like they're not the big ones they're not the ones with like the crazy huge success stories the ones that are working on projects where it's not necessarily a huge hit they're just managing to kind of like live off it um and it's much more of a grind it's much more of a like grueling process the main theme is they just want to be able to work on whatever they want and that's really important to them um to the point where a normal job like doesn't necessarily um sit well with them um right this is this is what they want to do so it's like there's almost like um uh and a whole nother level of motivation to continue working on this particular thing even though logic would dictate you should just get a job you should get Like, you know, they're not miserable people.

1:34:49They're not like, they're not sad or, you know, anything like that. Like they've still got a nice, they've got a nice lifestyle. They've got a nice career. But I feel like sometimes you'd have just been happier to just get a normal job and like learn to be okay with that. If there's like something going on there that you can't like work with people. I definitely had that to an extent. I had a deep need to pick my own work and build the thing that I wanted to build, not the thing that somebody else was planning or suggesting. But I'm over that now. I'm a well-rounded person now. Just video games.

1:35:28I'm just thinking about that really because I think I empathize a lot with that position because, Jared, I think you and I lamented on this to some degree in our most recent IRL. where we just thought, I'll paraphrase some of the conversation to my knowledge, at least was, you know, wouldn't it just be easier just to have a job, you know, because, Oh yeah. I've asked you that on the show before too. Because, you know, I'm, and I'm like, are you thinking about it? I'm like, this is his resignation. I mean, I think about it. I do think about it. I don't think that hard about it. Well, I think it's normal to fantasize about that.

1:36:06I think it's normal to fantasize about that up until the point of actually doing it almost because it is kind of the, I don't want to call it the easy button necessarily, but it's certainly a lot easier than the constant roller coaster of running or creating your own thing. Because when you run or create your own thing, you are fully in charge, especially in a scenario like we are in particular, which is indie media. We literally have yearly contracts that change, if not quarterly contracts that change. So it's super challenging for us to They build a business foundation beneath that. And it's only, we only get driven by previous year's data.

1:36:47So if the trajectory is up and to the right, we feel a lot easier pushing on the gas. But every year is a roll of the dice, basically. Like who's going to come back and love us the same, you know, that they did the previous year. Or who's coming up new that we really can support that will support this indie media business we're building. and I think it's it's super normal to fantasize about this what if I just got a real job and then I wouldn't have to worry about any of this stuff but then I think gosh I would have no or seemingly no agency over my day-to-day I can't command my own dreams I can't have these big ideas and then begin to execute on them incrementally over time and tackle big problems I think are worthy of solving versus what someone else tells me their dreams are something they think is worth uh being solved and i think that's where you know i empathize because the the easy button to some degree is just to go get a job and work on somebody else's dreams the hard button really is to work on your own but that is the most in my opinion the most rewarding yeah but it also means you're on the hook so things go when things go bad for sure oh there's no like there's no There's nowhere else to go.

1:37:59But at least I'm in control to some degree. On the daily, at least, to tackle my own dreams, to pursue my own dreams, to identify my own dreams versus somebody else's. I think it's a grass is always greener scenario for most people. It is. I think some people have like a, there's something going on there in their brain. They just have to. Here's the challenge. Obviously, those who have regular jobs would love to have a business, and those who have businesses would love to have a regular job every once in a while. But then there's also this challenge of like, the grass is greener, of course, is a cliche because we all look across the yard and see somebody else's grass, and we think it might be greener.

1:38:39But there's also this other thing that might happen is it might actually be greener over there, which is kind of what you're saying, Ash. She's like, and so you have to really, I mean, every once in a while you got to stop and analyze and be like, am I just assuming it's greener over there because I'm used to my grass? Or maybe I'm actually got the guy with the brown grass over here. And that's a hard thing to wrestle with. Or the grass is greener because there's affluent water being sprayed in his yard. Well, that's the thing. If you take care of your grass, man, it's going to be green. You don't have to do that in the UK.

1:39:11The grass is just always green. that's just a that's just for you guys um we love our clay we love our clay mounds in our gardens um yeah i was i was gonna say that like the the concerning thing for me is when when you kind of you see people who they're they're not happy with the current situation and they're kind of like pushing on regardless like that i don't want to tell i don't want to tell people just stop like somebody's got an open source project but they're burnt out and they don't enjoy doing it anymore but they feel like they have to. It's really difficult to just tell them, like, you should stop what you're doing and do something else.

1:39:50But I think that there's a lot of exploitation, not by design but just by accident, that happens. I mean, it's the same with, like, any other, like, any other company. I mean, it doesn't have to be open source. It could be somebody gruelingly working on their startup company and, you know, it's just not working out. and you know there's all these other scenarios but i think the difference is that when somebody's making open source and they're they're putting themselves out there you know they've got this project it gets a bit of attention and then they they feel like they're kind of obligated to keep working on it there's no one there protecting them from not seeing that you know you're you're being exploited basically like these these people are never gonna pay you for what you're doing they're never going to compensate you for it and they will just keep taking you know more and more and more if they can.

1:40:41Not all of your users. Some of them are like nice people and they just can't afford or you don't have like a good revenue stream or something for other reasons. But there's a lot of people out there doing a lot of work. I mean, I was one of them before Benthos. All my open source projects were, to some extent, I just worked on them for fun. But then eventually you get attention and then you kind of feel like, oh, I have to do this pull request. I have to fix this issue. I have to do this release. And you're never going to get compensated for it you're never actually going to get thanked for doing a lot of that work so if you don't enjoy it then you know ideally you need to be protected to some extent and i think open source is very risky because there's there's absolutely nothing between you and the people that are just going to keep taking taking taking and they don't know what they're doing like they don't know that they're doing that to you they just they're just using your thing they think they're doing you a favor by using your thing and and interacting with you but for a lot of these people that that you know they're giving you that their life they're giving you their time um and their energy and they don't necessarily have the they don't have anybody in the chain saying like oh well it's done now like you know this time's up this hasn't become like a massive success or you know we've done enough here we've solved the problem let's just walk away now and be happy with what we've made um because it's just you and the internet like there's no there's no filter there's no gap there's no um there's no one else there's no daddy right i want to be their daddy there's no daddy pig this is me being their global daddy pig stop what you do or just take a take a break like take a breather take a break step back stop working on it for a bit what we need is some sort of a resource that's like uh like healthy open source habits or something so that you can have a proper relationship with your project you know people won't read it Well, we get a mellifluous voice to read it to them.

1:42:32That's right. The one who cares would listen. Have Adam read it, and we'll just send it out into the airwaves. Healthy open source. They'll add a feature to GitHub where when you click the pull requests tab, it just asks you, are you actually enjoying this? And then if you click no, it just redirects you to Reddit. Where they know you won't enjoy anything. Okay, let's wrap this up. A quick thank you while we're thinking about thanking people or not thanking people, exploiting them for their work. But one thing you can do for an open source maintainer that you appreciate is thank them. I want to thank our listener, Hector, for requesting that we have Ash on the show.

1:43:11Did you know that, Ash, this was a request of a listener to hear more from you? So there you go, Hector. I hope you enjoyed this. You know, take it or leave it. It's all we have to offer. Thanks for dragging me out, Hector. and if you don't know that we take requests we absolutely do changelog.com slash request is where you can tell us what you would like to hear about on the show ash is there anything left unsaid i'm sure there is but anything worth saying that's left unsaid oh god please add out anything i said that's stupid no promises or at least add this disclaimer of like i'm very tired I'm a very tired person in general.

1:43:51So if I did say anything stupid, just keep that in mind, including lawyers. Lawyers don't listen to our show. If they do, it's for evidence. Don't tell them that. We also have transcripts. I'll be on again after getting sued. I'll get to tell you about the me getting sued story. Well, we appreciate you opening up and exposing yourself. I'm going to go have a cry. A nice private cry after this. Sorry, I had to do that. Last jab. No, Ash, it was good. Thank you for sharing the deeper details of the journey, really. I mean, it's... Thank you for having me on the show. It's cool that you've been able to make it.

1:44:33It's cool that you've done something so valuable that you could be acquired and you found the right path to be done that makes you happy ultimately and then adds value to so many people and the contributors that have been taken care of as part of this acquisition. That's cool. It's good stuff. and now your kids might respect you. That's right. I don't know what I'm going to get that far. You haven't met him. He's brutal. Google's renamed to Red Panda. Tell them that. There you go. Well, it's been a pleasure. So thank you for having me on. Thank you. Thank you, Ash.

1:45:07Well, the journey for an open source project is not always a straight line. Sometimes it might even be accidental. So I think in the case of Ash and Ben Thos and his demeanor and the way he approaches things is just with a little bit of a joy and a playful nature that I think we can all appreciate. And kudos to him for getting to where he's at with Ben Thos, the acquisition with Red Panda, having Alex as a good friend over the years and all the ways this just worked out for him and for the project. Now, we do have a bonus segment for this episode for our Plus Plus subscribers. By the way, if you're not a Plus Plus subscriber, it's better.

1:45:50Go to changelog.com slash Plus Plus. It is better. Get this show ad-free with bonus content and directly support us. And you can't beat that. $10 a month,$100 a year. Once again, changelog.com slash Plus Plus. And a big thank you to our friends and our new sponsors over at Augment Code. This is Developer AI for real work. Check them out. Learn more at AugmentCode.com. And of course to our friends and our partners over at Fly, Fly.io. That's the home of ChangeLaw.com. It could be your home too. Learn more at Fly.io. And to the Beat Freak in residence, Breakmaster Cylinder. Those beats are banging.

1:46:33That's it. This show's done. We'll see you on Friday.

1:47:32so Was that a Mentos joke? No, so it was like, it was nothing. The Freshmaker. Notice my label down here is Freshmaker because I'm like Mentos. Part of the theme, people think the theme was like deep sea. The theme was actually just all of this is throwaway. Like any, like the name, the logo, this is all just like stuff. Oh, it's like trash. Yeah. The theme was trash. It's the bargain bin of logos and marketing machines. So like the name, I just, I did Google search deep sea because I already knew I wanted like a stupid blobfish as the mascot logo. And then I just went on Wikipedia, clicked a blue link, clicked a blue link.

1:48:15This is how I do a lot of my names. Click a blue link. And then eventually you find a word that is like, it's a word. So it's something that people can say. It means like, it's the scientific term for like the scum at the bottom of the ocean.