There will be bleeps (Friends)

39:28It looks like you are now running essentially like, you know, in the same way that other influencers might have an influencer economy or whatever. And there's various routes of making that money and paying those bills and getting that open source work. Right. But there's not a single easily treaded path that is not without compromises. and it makes me very cross to see a bunch of particularly younger main terrorists being told like no this is the way if you follow this you will both be rich and you can work on whatever source you ever want whenever you want right that's just a lie that's just right yeah well hold on just let me just say this for those who are putting them through the pain of watching us on video.

40:10The fringe benefit of doing the video version of this is for the last 10 minutes, you can watch Justin sit there and chomp at the bit for his opportunity. Because we've said so many things that I'm sure he wants to address so much so that at one point he was literally holding his mouth shut because he has so many things to say right now. This guy talks for three hours uninterrupted and he hasn't had a chance to say anything for the last 10 minutes. So Justin, just turning the floor over to you, my friend, which of these many points would you like to address first gotta admit to anyone watching the video i did get distracted at one point because my pen ran out of ink and i had to write down because he literally left at one point he literally left and then came back yeah i uh so that so that was distraction number two distraction number one was i uh uh saw somebody texted me that uh the vision pro with m5 was announced oh so well there's a five alarm fire right there yeah if i don't yeah that just to tell you my priority is as one as one of the five remaining daily driver vision pro users who i use the mac virtual display every day like we've discussed several times on the show even so i will not be buying it uh because because it's just basically i'm using it as a monitor but uh and i'd much rather just talk about that now but to to try to honor what mike just said when we say open source is not a career is kind of running a consultancy uh it's helping co-found help start whatever like a consulting company speaking at conferences doing some amount of open source you know none of i was very fortunate in life in that none of my open source was super successful it seems like a huge pain in the ass when it when that happens for for the most part in terms of the burden of issues and pull requests and yada yada but i was visible enough that people would come up to me.

42:05Younger folks, less experienced people, people trying to succeed in this industry. And they would, whether it was about speaking or whether it was about blogging or whether it was about doing open source, a lot of the activities that people saw me do, they'd look at that and they'd confuse the means with the ends. So they'd say, Hey, how do I break into open source? And I'm like that's a real weird goal because like i do open source because i'm trying to get something done that makes me money like working out for a client and like we got a you know the first real project i did was like i was a java client and like we had a whole lot of javascript and no way to run tests against it in ci and i was like that won't do and so like we started unit testing our javascript with jasmine like locally well how do you get that running in ci i was like oh i had to figure out a you know this is back in 2010 or whatever like run a a pseudo html and javascript like fake environment in a java runtime and and then make a maven plugin that we could incorporate into the build like and i did that on my own time on a weekend or you know late at night or something and then i just plugged it into the client code the next day right now here you go a gift free of charge because it makes my life easier at work and we're going to ship your code better right And almost every one of my open source projects was that it was, I have a job that pays me money, that that job would be massively improved in terms of the outcomes or my life at that job by writing some open source.

43:38So I'm going to solve my problem and I'm going to make it open because that's that's easier than getting approval to make it closed internally. Right. Like if I if I have some like, you know, asinine idea for how I can make things a little bit better. forgiveness is way better than permission. Maybe it won't work. Like why, why would I fight for like budget and time to go on some, you know, escapade to like, Hey, I can vaguely improve things in a way that you don't understand when I could just go on my own GitHub, publish something publicly and then go and consume that at work. And if it turns out that it's useful, then work is happy to like, let me spend some hours building it because then I've got a virtuous, you know, I've got at least one person depending on it and that's the person paying me.

44:20So then I can keep working on it a little bit and make it a little bit better respond to issues and feedback and that's typically how i've done open source right like that's one way to do it and in the in a very very small sense that at least has like incentives aligned where it's like i make this thing better because it's built for purpose for somebody who needs it and that's not that's not breaking into open source that's not saying like okay so what i want to do is i want to work on this open source project and i've seen this play out lots of times whether it's through the sponsorship deal or you know what um ruby together and later ruby central did was they actually paid hourly for people to work on bundler and ruby gems code bases and when you're like talking about like a high 150 an hour or whatever it is hourly rate to work on an open source tool then a lot of questions arise like what do you work on uh who chooses the priority of that work like it's a You know, if you're talking about 150 bucks an hour or zero dollars an hour with most of the people contributing, making zero dollars an hour, like suddenly there's a perverse incentive there to be like, all right, well, either, you know, what if there's nothing else to do?

45:30Like what if bundler is a solved problem and basically does everything it needs? Like now you've got a perverse incentive to create make work to justify more hours to get more money. and and if the goal at the end of the ends is i want to get make make a you know replacement level tech career doing open source activities i think like the places that leaves you in terms of the amount of complexity and machinations in terms of like how that funding gets to you and the amount of singing and dancing and and and and glad handing and arm twisting that you need to do to like you know extract those dollars from people who might not necessarily see a direct value or benefit or ROI for giving you that money, it leads to places like this that are as goddamn confusing as the situation that we're in now.

46:20And that's, that's, you know, I guess maybe a, a, a twisted knife version of, of the picture that Mike's painting is like, this is just all about at the end of the day, it's like incentives were not aligned because people wanted to get paid. And this is where this leads you. And yes, it's really sad that a lot of people do open source for free but like a lot of people have hobbies for free and if they choose to keep doing them it's kind of their their task i don't know what to tell you and that's the thing like for me genuinely open source for free as a hobby is a beautiful thing like and we should think very carefully before we decide to kill that by either paying everyone, which won't happen, or by making people who aren't being paid feel like they are being exploited, right?

47:09Like I, again, it really f***s me off no end when you have people often with minimal involvement in open source themselves going around telling open source maintainers big companies are exploiting your labor. And I said, well, if only there was a way to get a big company to pay me to write software for them. Oh wait, we have lots of that. But the reason why lots of people, including me, enjoy open source software and have continued to work on it for a very long time is it's like I don't have an engineering manager or product manager or technical project manager being like, please sign your TPS reports.

47:44When will this be done? Is this a yellow T-shirt or a green T-shirt sized project? right like being able to just opt out from all of that bureaucracy is you know that bureaucracy is important and necessary sometimes but it's also nice to not have to do that right and when you don't have to do that you can operate in a different way and work in a different way and that's fine and again we go back to the open source maintainers owe you nothing where it's like if someone doesn't like it like i mean there's legitimately issues on homebrew that people file and it's like this is a legit issue but you're being a head about it so i'm just going to close your issue and when they're like oh but then i'm like well tough tough luck i can do what i want right but if i'm a paid employee and if that person is a paid customer right in some companies you can do that right sure right but that's not terribly advisable and i think this goes back to what we were saying about perverse incentives and like who gets paid and who doesn't get paid it's like well open source maintainers owe you nothing sure people who are being paid to do something owe someone something right right it might and again in homebrew's case we specifically do we have like all open tooling and open documentation and blah blah blah and we pay maintainers that hit a certain threshold three hundred dollars a month we call it a stipend there are people for whom i'm sure the average you know american child delivering newspapers if that's still a thing that happens like is making significantly better hourly wage than some of these open source maintainers are but it's fine because that's just a token amount for appreciation for them right and we're not like but even then we have had it's not we've not done anything publicly or whatever because we try and in homebrew do a reasonable job at keeping some of our drama behind closed doors but even in that case for a very small amount of money we had a person with a very well-paid day job who was doing the wrong thing essentially because they wanted to hit a threshold to get an extra 300 bucks a month right and that made us reconsider how we do this stuff but to go way back to something that justin said right at the beginning right like about you know he did open source to solve his own problems right went back when i got involved first with open source in the heady days of the linux desktop back in like 2007 when i did my first google summer of code and met a lot of these kde people and i was like a linux guy like the thing that people used to say all the time then that I never hear anyone saying now is open source is about scratching your own itch right and what people meant by that back then was like open source is primarily about solving your own problems and then releasing it in a way that other people can benefit from you doing that right and that's why I did it and it's why I do it because when I work on homebrew and I make homebrew a little bit better it's usually because something in homebrew annoys me and I use homebrew therefore I make it better and that's completely the opposite from the attitude Justin was saying of like how do i break it into open source it's like well whenever anyone's asked me that i'm like well find a tool that you use find something annoying with that tool and then go fix it right and they're like oh but you know i don't know javascript yet or i don't know this or i haven't contributed to that code base or i can't find a mentor or whatever and like again as we're being a bit more spicy on this podcast it's like well congratulations you lose you're never going to be a successful open source maintainer right like i've never seen someone who's been an open good open source maintainer who has been taught into being so right or encouraged or given enough money that they kind of finally get over a line or whatever right that helps people contribute and it's great and we shouldn't discount that as being a thing that we do for some people sometimes but like most of the time most of those people it's intrinsic internal motivation that gets them to do this stuff right and it's that doesn't come from i want money i want clout i want my resume or CV to look better.

51:32It has to come from like, I just want to do it because it's interesting and fun for me. Right. I think this goes beyond open source software because the pattern is very generic. It's like, I love doing X. So I do it for fun. I would love to do X more. If I could only make money doing X, I could do it more. And then X becomes not fun anymore. If that's successful, like basically that's the pattern. So it's not just software, but creation of all kinds. Anytime you can parlay your hobby or your passion into a job. Your passion is now your job and your job's a job and jobs aren't fun. Even if you can, you can add to that, Jared, cause then you can, you can take all your friends you have good relationships with.

52:13And I tried this one. It was a lot of fun. And then you hire your friends and then your friends aren't your friends either. That's right. And you live in a basement in Ohio and you're like, Oh my God, what have I done with my life i've destroyed my hobby and my friends but i got money in exchange you know we're just training it all in for money yeah that's the unsolvable problem i think right there and i you know for years and years we've been looking for more paths to funding more ways because there's so many different kinds of open source and there's ones that have an easy time making money because they are right there staring you in the face like they're like end user applications and then there's So the dependency, the dependency, the dependency, who only has a GitHub account and is not on any social networks and is never going to make a dollar on their GitHub sponsors because nobody even knows that they're transitively installing, you know, XZ, for instance, just naming one that was exploited.

53:07And so maybe I just thought there was different models. We need to just explore all these different models. And I remember going back years to Nadia Ekbal's lemonade stand repo, which she published back when she was doing her open source funding, writing. And she documented like, here's all the different ways, bounty programs, open core, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, pick one that helps you. And we've explored on this show over the course of, you know, a decade now, different people doing these different models. And with more or less success. at the end of the day the happiest people that we've ever talked about talked to about their work are the ones that are like yeah i do this for fun i'm not going to monetize and it's like that's that ends up being the healthiest relationship to your open source code is i do this for fun i'm not trying to monetize it because every one of these models we can go through them all and they all produce at some point the perverse incentives that have happened in the Ruby community.

54:06To me, it's not even monetization versus not. It's like direct monetization versus indirect monetization, right? And I can't remember what it was. I'm sure it's some much wizened old philosopher or whatever who said this. I'm going to paraphrase it and butcher it horribly. But basically, the idea of the best things in life are achieved indirectly, right? So let's not be overly crude. I'll try and be relatively diplomatic. but basically you know for example if your goal is romantic companionship right there's ways of getting elements of that very quickly in exchange for money right but most people would say that actually that's probably not the most fulfilling long-term option and the most fulfilling long-term option you know i've been with my now wife for 23 years like we have a perfect marriage and relationship i'm very very happy that takes a lot of time and effort right and again i i have almost like a pending blog post brewing about just being patient feels like it pays a lot of dividends on this stuff like i was at github for 10 years i've been with my wife for 23 my best friend who comes around to my house we're currently watching alien earth is very good we've been friends right now you're watching it well i mean not right now because i'm on a podcast okay well you said your best friend coming over and you're currently watching alien earth i'm like dang this guy can multitask i'll do my best to multitask but yeah i mean we've been friends for like 30 years right and most and homebrew for 16 years like most of the good things in my life are things that i have done for more than 10 years right and there has been ups and downs in those times and there's been times where if you were to look at some tiny microcosm of like the first you know months or weeks or whatever or a particular segment you'd be like oh well this isn't worth that i'm gonna to bail i'm going to quit i'm going to move on right but again like all of these things are things that i've got and i've have made me very very happy and i'm delighted with not because i wanted to make as much money as possible or have as much whatever as possible human relationship interaction whatever but just because like i enjoy the process going along and i still enjoy the process going along and that tends to get you to a very good place if every day you enjoy your life and you keep doing that and keep enjoying your life and at the same time you know stuff like money you're like okay well i need to pay the bills i need to make sure that i make enough money to provide for me and my family and whatever but you're also really excited about what you're doing then that tends to work pretty well and if you go and chase like maximum financial return for anything right on the short-term basis like okay you might make a bunch of money like often you don't but you're probably going to be miserable in the longer term and you're going to be like why am i doing this and i need to quit and whatever right and that's i mean almost that's the definition of sustainability right like when when we're not talking about open source sustainability when we talk about anything being sustainable the idea is how do we get people to be able to do this for a long period of time and without being a you know a cheese ball like open source sustainability comes from within like the reason why i have been able to do it for a long time and not burn out and literally in that 16 year window i don't think i've gone a month without working on homebrew i've maybe not even gone three weeks without working on homebrew and the reason why is because i enjoyed it then and i enjoy it now and i know what i'm willing to do and what i'm going to quit and i built a group of maintainers where i'm very protective over them because i know that's the same for them right and to me just almost looking at yourself in the mirror and be like am i enjoying this is this good like and if it is great do more of that and if it's not then just stop right and that terrifies a lot of people because it's like oh well open source will collapse and we have all these maintainers who walk away and it's like well actually no because someone will step up and do what needs to be done if what you're doing is really important and that's that's maybe the hardest part of it all it's like maybe that open source project you've spent a huge amount of time and energy into maybe it's not that important maybe it is replaceable and maybe your role is replaceable and that sucks to look in the mirror and think that but maybe that's true maybe you need to do that look if you're watching this video you're gonna be probably noticing that like we're three white men you know the the collective noun for white middle-aged men is podcast i get it but it's true and one thing that a piece of context right about like that 2015 to 2021 era especially in the u.s and politically is like this conversation about like you know just being tut tutted by older guys who were already successful in their careers oh just do it as a hobby just do open source in your free time or something when that comes into contact with this motivation that like open sources and ends, not a means it's a way to get, because highly visible people are doing it.

59:09People rightly assume, you know, for whatever reason you're doing it, if I were to do that at the same stage or at the same level of impact or in the same high profile project, then I too would be highly visible. And therefore I could parlay that into, you know, more marketability, right. As a, as an employee, I'd be, I'd be hired in at the staff level or the principal level, or I'd have better employment prospects. And so there's a, you know, even though I started doing open source to scratch my own itch to Mike's point, and that's still the reason I'm ever motivated to do it, it created a virtuous cycle, not just for my employer to be able to benefit from my hobby work, but for me to be able to parlay those projects into new relationships and credibility because your GitHub profile kind of redounds to like at least some kind of proof that this guy can write working software.

1:00:01And this is what it solves. Right. And mixed in with all of that is like, well, what if you don't have the free time or if you've got family responsibilities or there's some other, you know, systemic reason why you aren't able to just work for free and make this time possible? it's creating an avenue for more privileged people who do have that luxury of time to pursue that hobby and then and then even though it's just a hobby it's not like i definitely made more more money out of my like programming habit than out of my japanese language acquisition habit you know like in terms of a hobby so so like that's not that's not lost on me here it's just kind of a fact of life and I don't know how to solve it because when you try to solve this through the lens of, and that's why we got like when the conclusion, and I heard this a lot in the late 2010s was, and that's why we have to pay people to write open source.

1:00:59I was like, that's And there's just so many, like, you know, the number of circles and loops necessary to kind of connect these dots together in a way that's actually going to get the outcome that you want. is so convoluted that this is probably just going to make things worse. I can't say we're in a much better place in all of these experiments where people are, and again, to Mike's point, where people are being directly compensated for their open source efforts, especially in an ad hoc or a semi-directed pseudo-employment manner, like through contracting and through kind of an amalgamation of funds and sponsors and donors.

1:01:41like i don't know what to do i just want i just want to put it out there so we don't get emails about privilege i'll be honest that's why i said those things i think it's a good point and i think it's well made and i'm glad you made that i think for me my take is like should we try and improve the diversity of open source etc like yeah we should i do like hopefully all of us would agree with that to some degree but i also think not everyone having the free time again it's one of those things where if sometimes i think the people pushing a certain narrative haven't done the five whys on like the reason why they're often doing that is because they themselves come from a position of like you need to do open source to have a really great career right and i'm like well no i've i've worked with plenty of like staff plus engineers at github who are phenomenal engineers who've literally never done a single open source commit ever right and i would not tell those people that they should or shouldn't right like considering the number of open source related emails i've had that have fascinating things to say about the size or presence of my and whatever may relate to that and various interactions with my mother etc like like i don't encourage anyone who like doesn't have a current interest in open source to sign up to receive those types of emails right and i don't think we're going to solve that problem anytime soon but i think that's the thing it's like do we see open source as like an essential on-ramp that we have to use to like get people to be successful in the software industry and if you start from that like prior then it's like yeah of course you're going to start thinking like we have to improve diversity and pay people to encourage people in because otherwise you're just gonna you know really up the software industry by not like solving that but i don't think that is a problem i think and ironically i think that is a problem that is exacerbated by people saying we have to pay and we need to put more money in rather than it being solved by that right because no one has to write open source right like that's i think that's the fundamental thing if i can say anything to any person listen to this it's like literally if you have a job where you write open source even even if you're a paid employee or contractor or whatever like i'm sure you can find something else where you don't have to do that right like everyone writing open source in some degree has some element of choice maybe not short term maybe this month's mortgage payment relies on you you know writing open source and whatever right but like long term in the career and also something justin you said you pointed this out on your podcast a lot about how there was this golden age of you know the three of us again are probably similar sort of age there was this golden age of programming like the early 2000s where you know if you came out and you're interested in open source like chances are that was going to help you into a reasonable tech job and you could probably make a decent amount of money and then now we're seeing you know like things are completely horrific for a lot of juniors trying to get into the industry and i think that's the thing it's like i don't like that i don't think anyone in this school likes that but you can't we can't just magically go backwards and undo that and fix that and i think often the people i hear advocating this type of stuff around open source just have wishful thinking of like no if we can go back we'll do it right this time and we'll like reinvent it and whatever and so well that's not how it's been and i loved your point jared about how this is just universal for hobbies right like we could probably have had exactly the same conversation we had right now about like music or whatever right like and money and whatever like i remember when i was at github and there was i can't remember the name of the band it was some like top 10 indie rock band and one like github conference like github had paid for this band to come play and the band came out was that when cold was that when cold war kids played at uh that's the name of the band that's the name of the band but like having been there in the room and i think there was a silicon valley episode that was loosely based on this like they came out and started ever hold on i gotta interrupt you like if you don't know this like most silicon valley episodes were based on interviews with chris wanstrith and people i re-watched it all recently with my wife and it's aged well but anyway so like they came on stage they started playing and like 75 of the people immediately left the room because they were like i don't want to be here right and i'm going to confess something to the you know the two of you here hopefully no one else hears this but you know like i used to be an aspiring musician i have anyone on video can see my mostly now unplayed guitars behind me right and i immediately thought to myself what a bunch of sellouts right like i i would hope to myself that i would never be at a level where i would take any amount of money to go play to a room of nerds myself included like who don't want you to be here and would just immediately leave the room as soon as you start playing right like right and and again like you could say we can have the same conversation money and music right like was that bad that they had that money or took that money or whatever right like i'm not a musician i'm sure lots of musicians are very angry at me for based on what i've said and i'm being a massive hypocrite but like yeah it's i'm sure there's another podcast i'm an identical conversation about this and i think like we're not special in software open source and this is not the first industry to have this problem nor will it be the last no i think that's a great point and i think that i've said this before that people by and large people don't make music in order to make money they make money so that they can make music, right?

1:07:15And I think that there are people who've done both and they're called rich and famous rock stars or whatever. And of course, people idolize those because wouldn't it be the dream to be able to be rich and famous and make music? Like that's, yeah, that's a lot of people's dream, which is why it's really hard to do. And we draw that across to open source and we have had some people who've made livings, who've made really good livings, publishing open source code and creating a following and becoming whatever you have to be in order to get that done. You can go to the top of GitHub sponsors and see a few of those people there.

1:07:49It's an entirely different skill set, just like being a rich and famous rock star requires more than being able to play the guitar because lots of people can play the guitar, but there's more to it than just that. One of those major factors, in fact, is timing and luck and has nothing to do with who you are, your skill set. Another major factor is what you look like, unfortunately, but that's the case. and so open source as career might follow the exact same trajectory as music as career it's like yeah a few lucky very privileged people find a way to make that work and they live a great life and the rest of us it's like you got to decide if you want to do it or not at the end of the day open source is a gift to the world it's you giving back a lot of the motivations for doing it is people saying, well, I got so much for free that I felt like I should just give back.

1:08:41And so that's what I do. And so that's a gift and a gift comes from a place of privilege. You have excess and so you give it. And one of the beautiful things about the digital economy is that we can give it to everybody. Whereas if I was going to go out and buy a new Vision Pro M5, I could just give it to Justin. I couldn't give it to the entire world. it's an amazing thing to be able to do your work once and gift it to the entire world and sometimes it just has to stay that you got my address right for that i figured you already have it on order so i'm probably just no no no not yet you you need the phone you got to scan your face i buy you the new one so you send me your your original maybe you got it i got justin searles original vision pro there's a thing here right because we're kind of conflating programming and making a living programming and open source as like a hobby activity or whatever.

1:09:37And just like music, there's a difference between being able to play music as a skill. Being able to program a computer is a skill. Right. And being a songwriter who puts love and craft and passion and creativity and something of themselves into the music that they create is a passion, a craft, you know, it's an individual pursuit. and yes if you do that you are lucky to get paid and if it does all work out and the stars align then that's a miracle and good for you like but at the same time getting paid as a musician with that skill to go play gigs like there's a guy who you know sings at the lobby bar at a hotel next to my house every tuesday and he's mostly playing you know wonder wall and and you know the country road and yeah and like he's not there for his health but like there's a transaction happening and I don't begrudge him at all right it's like that's you know there there's ambience and there's music and so like hell you know the Cold War kids made me laugh Mike because across the street there's a new hotel that opened I live in Orlando and it's just all resorts and stuff and pools and whatnot the new hotel opened earlier this year or late last year and they had the Goo Goo Dolls play and I was like hell yeah I'm gonna go over for a free Goo Goo Dolls concert and free food and drinks and uh yeah right and it was great I don't begrudge them at all because that was like that was them applying their skill for for for money in that in in that sense you know i mean the songs were written all 20 years ago and everyone's really old and they look suspiciously good and that made me wonder about how they're maintaining that but like when we're not when a programmer is applying that skill to make money at the at the end of the day somebody whoever's paying that money is going to be looking for some kind of value out of it.

1:11:25And if you're, whether you're working for somebody and they're, you know, why do we have planning sessions? Why do we have product owners? Why do we have requirements handed to us? It's because the things that we're typically being asked to build as programmers are at the behest of somebody else who wants to see that software built or continue to operate or to be refined or whatever, in order for them to extract some kind of value out of it. And just like with the singer songwriter who can like eventually get to the point where they get to open new hotels and, and get paid to sing their own songs.

1:11:58Like every now and then you get really, really lucky. Like you, I worked on Ruby and rails for years and years and years. And now there's a Ruby and rails team at a company like Shopify and they hired me and I get to continue doing the stuff. I talked with Aaron Patterson's a good friend with me of mine. And yes, that's part of my bias and my allegiances as I talk to like that crowd of people more than the maintainer side of people who are involved in this particular dispute and fully own that. But like, oh, I'll talk to him about his job. And it's confusing sometimes. I'm like, well, he has work stresses here and there and stuff.

1:12:33But like at the end of the day, he makes good money doing doing that for Shopify. Shopify gets a lot of benefit out of that. but like if he were to quit he would basically be doing the same thing every day for free you know like so that is the stars completely aligning and you know what like I know half a dozen people for whom that is true out of how many thousands of people that I've interacted with and so it's just an unrealistic thing and now this is back to Mike and our original kind of hot fix premise it's an unrealistic thing to just plan on your career being that it's way too high of a bar it's way too skinny of a bottleneck to hope that you're gonna like with any level of confidence squeeze through because so few people do and not for lack of trying well it's like all the youth right now they all want to be youtubers or or tiktokers and it's like that's the it's the new version of i want to be a rock star it's like Like, you know how many rock stars there are?

1:13:35There's like seven of them. Yeah, but the influence of your economy, I think that's, it's similar. And I think - It's been democratized to a certain degree, yeah. Yeah, and we're, I guess, as again, like, you know, three white men in our 40s, like we're probably like, if we had like some Gen Z guest on, yes, it's Gen Z because I'm British. And then I'm sure they would have a very different perspective here. But again, I sort of wonder whether some of this comes from like the concept of like the side hustle right where like the side hustle is often the like i have a hobby and i am going to on top of my job i am going to monetize my hobby and hopefully i can get to a point like you said earlier jared like where my hobby can become my job because i fully monetize it and i can pay the bills and whatever right and i think again music is an obvious example right where there are people for whom music is their career right and they i i know some of them for whom they then go home and they are not interested in playing or producing music in their spare time at all anymore like it's i would just do it for money there's people for whom they are not interested ever making any money from their career ever right in which if we wanted to have a horrific open source metaphor you know some like i was going to say man or woman it's probably like a dude with long hair playing their guitar around a fire while their friends some of them might want to listen probably most of them don't you know someone could go up to them you're being exploited for your labor like you should be paid the same as taylor swift for this right like and it's like well actually no one wants to pay that person because they're not very good and they don't want that job right that person is doing it entirely as a hobby and then there's the people where there's like a blend between the two maybe it's their hobby and it's their job right and i think that's the thing it's like career hobby both right and all of those are acceptable options but it feels like this stuff often gets conflated and even someone like aaron parrson right good example right he's written a absolute boatload of open source code of the years it would be interesting if you went back and somehow did accounting of like okay well what's that that's almost take the amount of money you've been paid to write open source and then the amount of hours you have spent doing open source and hobby related things say any work on a public repo on github in your entire history as a programmer and let's figure out like what your hourly rate is and my my guess would be like it's obviously getting better each year that he is employed by shopify but my guess would be it's actually a lot worse than you think it is because he again like musicians right like musicians are not getting paid to play their scales right people are just sitting when i used to actually be a half decent musician a lot of it was just sitting and spending two hours playing the same riff again and again and again and again slightly faster slightly faster slightly faster slightly faster and like you know no one's going to pay you to do that really boring stuff right and it's i don't think open source is dissimilar and like what i worry about is again i'm from an era of which it wasn't clear that open source was going to win right when i was at university there was still all the kind of like linux and like i can't remember the name of the company that basically there was this big lawsuit and you know steve ballmer linux is a cancer all this type of stuff right and it looked it was like a battle between proprietary software and open source software and some reason the only reason we're even having this conversation is because open source software so clearly and unambiguously won and i maybe i'm being paranoid here but i worry for a world in which we say okay any big company that uses any open source software in any capacity is extractive and unless you are paying all those maintainers a bay area like living wage then you're an evil company like what happens if we actually go all in that viewpoint like do we make those companies be like well you know what i'm actually not going to touch open source anymore i'm just going to pay a team internally to build this stuff right and for a lot of people like me like that would be a very sad thing right and it would that would be the end in some ways of a lot of the non-hobbyists like open source right and right i just think where does the money come from to pay every single open source container with 10 stars on github like a living bay area salary right particularly if as justin said we say to them hey we just give you that money unconditionally you don't need to have a product manager or whatever you just build whatever you think is best however you think is best right like that's right i mean it seems ridiculous to me maybe that's just me but like i think that's the logical conclusion we get of the like peak we should pay everyone because otherwise it's unethical argument here right right yeah to that point we just did a show recently with faras abuka dj about npm security in light of the just the onslaught of NPM hacks, which have been going on and continue.

1:18:19I think after he published that, there's even some newer ones. And one of the things, and he runs, you know, he owns and operates a socket security company. And so he's very much in the InfoSec world and talking with, you know, CTOs and CEOs of larger corporations. And they're saying things like, well, this is not because of open source sustainability, but it's because of open source security and this, you can't trust a network thing. They're starting to have those conversations, especially because of the, uh, you know, first time to say it on the episode, I'm glad we're over an hour in because of the new enthusiasm around AI code gen tools.

1:18:58They're saying things like, you know, do we need NPM? Should we have, should we use, this is not, should we contribute? This is, should we even use Ruby gems? Why don't we just write everything in house? and like that is starting to percolate amongst leadership in you know silicon valley companies and you add to that an open source tax so to speak of whatever whatever it would be mike when you talk about every maintainer has to get this much money therefore every user has to pay in according to their dependencies or whatever however you'd actually work out the impossible logistics of all that it would just be one more reason why people will start to opt out of the economy altogether together and say, yeah, because I look at a world, I don't know if we're going to get there guys, where my co-gen tools can reproduce for me instead of a vendoring a gem.

1:19:49Why don't you just reproduce a gem? And now I don't think we're going to be there myself anytime real soon, especially with gems such as a large, you know, rails, for instance, which is not a gem. It's a meta gem of many gems, but the smaller ones, it's like, why would I even have, why would I care about open source i can just generate everything jared it's funny you mentioned this because it's not just your fever dream but it's like increasingly a thing that i am also hearing in fact world i i'm living it but i i okay my brother uh jeremy he works for cars.com he's elixir and elixir programmer okay and you he gave a talk at elixir conf last month which the i don't know if it was the title, but basically the thrust is zero dependency software.

1:20:36Instead of pulling in these dependencies, and it's not from a security perspective, although when you're talking about open source tax, most people aren't thinking about how this stuff gets funded. They're thinking in terms of yes, maybe the security concerns that I don't trust the software necessarily, especially if you're in a regulated industry and you've got to go and have lawyers go and check licenses and verify all that stuff there there's that tax for sure but more so like i now you know i am running code that i don't control or understand and it's going to have its own update schedule and i have to keep all of these dependencies up to date and of course of course the npm community is famous for like really really tiny modules and that's lots and lots of things that you have to keep up to date and so that upgrade burden is really high and right now you you you take cloud code you take codec cli you point it at a readme and you say all right go clone this repo and i just want this section from the readme i just need this kind of a couple of features right here just go clean room implement that for me if you don't mind and like it'll do it and you can just vendor that in to your point you vendor that into your project and so like i'm working on this posse party rails app and and since going with agents i'm trying to think now i started working with agents in april you know started with you know the github copilot stuff moved on to cursor moved on to cloud code now i'm in the heart of drugs and uh i think that i may have added zero new gems like zero new dependencies definitely zero jobs like oauth stuff you're you're talking to apis i mean this is almost all integration work yes i would be you know this would be for me to as a starting point, it'd be all gems.

1:22:20I'd be like, I get the, the blue sky gem. I get the Instagram gem, right. I owe off gem. And then I just like tie those things together. Cause it's just posting, you know, across different social networks. I won't say just to belittle it, but my point is like, I would expect that to be mostly third-party code. And 10 years ago, that's how I would have done it too. But I, you know, it's not just because of AI enabling this. It's like, I learned the hard way that if you're writing code, that's basically glue code of like eight other different things. Like it's kind of like you're on one train and trying to jump onto another moving train, you know, like in real time is to try to keep everything in line and you're just holding the stuff together.

1:22:56And so, no, I've got, I've, I've written, in fact, this week I'm rewriting my LinkedIn integration that, you know, it's not just a whole bunch of HTTP requests to post stuff. You got to like, wait for it to download. So you need another whole series of, you know, self and queuing tasks to go check to see if the download's done. And then my wife, Becky is like, well, if it doesn't support stories, I'm not going to use it. So I'm adding story support, which I think is supported by as far as I know. No, definitely no Ruby gems, but I don't know if any dependencies are doing this much. And so the nice thing is that when you own the code, you can build on top of it.

1:23:32And when it's inside the code base and it's part of the context of whatever your agent's doing, there's a lot to be said for as the cost of code, and this is how we tie back to this conversation, as the cost of code basically craters to zero asymptotically here. like the writing of the code is not the part that is necessarily making is worth money anymore. So if I'm a maintainer and I want to get paid to write open source code like that, the market dynamics for that are also flatlining right now. And so what we could be experiencing this conflict being a flashpoint and you know, where did, where did it all start?

1:24:07According to Ruby central, it started with them cutting budgets, right? And why were they cutting budgets because sponsorship's declining. Why is sponsorship declining? Apart from the macro stuff and apart from the conference stuff that Ruby Central also runs, I think a part of it is a general sense that we've already hit peak open source, right? In the sense of people's unpaid labor is the way that we're going to get all of this stuff built, not in the sense that things are going to be necessarily open or built on open protocols and platforms, if anything, that's probably going in the opposite direction but the the value of an individual programmer going and hacking out a particular issue or a pr is going to go down if like now you can just at codex something or at claude something and and mike you've been working with this too like using copilot agent and finding it you tell me how you found it yeah so i mean it's funny because a lot there's a lot of copilot related stuff i was one of the first people to test an internal beta of that it's alpha technically um and the reason why lots of people inside github would like me to test things is because i seem to be allergic to telling people that things were good when i thought they were a heap of even when it was strategically and politically advisable for me to say like this person's pet project is wonderful and so yeah my feedback on copilot pretty early on was like wow this is surprisingly not a piece of like when you describe i mean you have to remember like when Copilot came out before ChatGPT and stuff, right?

1:25:34Or at least it was being alpha'd before that. So this sounded like ridiculous, right? That we would like use AI, whatever. And I was like, wow, this is a better auto-completion for Ruby than I've ever seen using any ID or indexing or whatever, right? And it immediately made me more productive. So fast forward to the kind of Copilot coding agent stuff. Again, I saw the kind of memes on hack and use of like Microsoft employees being encouraged or forced to use this publicly and it just being an absolute disaster. and i was like lol i'm gonna try this out and again like maybe because umbrew has borderline fascistic issue templates that demand everything of you and essentially like force you into mike mcquade's opinionated way of how you file a bug right but if you follow that template properly it's actually really great context for an lm particularly when it has all the comments of us discussing it right and i i basically just i think a couple months ago assigned every bug in the homebrew package manager to copilot agents and then you know it took a couple of weeks some of them got their 99 their first time some of them got 50 in the way and i finished off a lot of the stuff but like essentially in two weeks those were all fixed right and you can go and look at the public record and see how well that went or didn't go whatever but like anyone who says like this stuff is not productivity boost is like in any circumstance is massively kidding themselves and the awkward reality of it again back to the conversation is i would say is copilot agent great does it avoid hand-holding no definitely not is it better than the standards drive by a homebrew contributor jury's out right it's certainly comparable and i i definitely think at this point like the first iteration of pr i would struggle to tell the difference to between co-pilot and a first-time contributor right a homebrew maintainer and indeed myself who's worked on homebrew longer than anyone else will do a much better job but even then like i find myself leaning on it because sometimes it's like there's 10 ways of fixing this co-pilot go pick one right and whatever mess you make i will clean that up and get out of the line but it's that like empty page problem and yeah i i think this i'm probably not quite as uh not like pro ai but like i i don't maybe buy stuff quite as heavily as justin says about like the cost going to zero but i definitely think it's impacting stuff pretty heavily and i think we're in some ways seeing like a reversion in the tech industry of like back to what skills are valuable who's valuable whatever right and back perhaps to being like maybe tech is just a slightly less fun place to work right like going way back for me like back in 2009 i got a job on like the third application or whatever to a company called kdab who i knew about them because they employed more than anyone else of kde maintainers in the kde ecosystem and i was like a big linux on the desktop guy and being contributing to kde i was like woohoo i'm gonna go work for this company and i can get paid to write open source right i discovered pretty quickly on my first like 100 open source project that it's like ah actually getting paid to work on open source as a consultancy looks like very tedious boring work right and i can probably say specifically now considering it's been that long ago so k office which was like kd's like open office alternative essentially like a corporate sponsor was like we want k office to be good here's a spreadsheet with 5 000 regressions compared to microsoft word in k office go for these particular import documents go through and just fix these line by line one by one right incredibly tedious work no volunteer wanted to spend their spare time doing it so a company paid people to do it right and again this kind of comes back to a lot of the stuff in the early conversation all the fun enjoyable parts of open source i don't think you're ever going to struggle to find people to do those at least not until you tell them all they're being horribly exploited by capitalism by doing so but like there's gonna always be a bunch of really boring work in open source maybe it's supply chain security stuff maybe it's whatever that's the stuff we need to get the money towards and fund the stuff that people don't want to do and i think that's gonna be there and again it's one of those things where the jury's out with all the supply chain security stuff whether the costs of that balloon beyond what people are willing to pay right like if we have a team internally or we have LLMs that mean that we don't have to pay this tax, then maybe that's what we do now.

1:30:10I've seen some people on the internet be critical of like in way back to Ruby Central, that organization we're talking about at the beginning of this conversation, it kind of incited this back and forth. That Chan, the new executive director is not technical and not from technical communities, but rather is like more there for her nonprofit experience. you know i i remember when uh ruby central was just ben and evan and then they added marty like in 2012 or whatever and it was just the three of them as as the chair people i guess uh and all rubyists all programmers and that felt right and back then in that era that we kind of keep hearkening back to the writing of the code the building of the tool that like you know the brilliant API and the just the the blood sweat and tears to get it over the finish line at a high enough level of quality whether it's a CLI or whatever it is a library and then to publish it that was like where all the action was that was the work that was the thing that required brilliance and that's what the market was you know rewarding so handsomely in terms of great tech salaries if it's the case that it is now no longer you know an incredibly rare thing to have capacity for writing replacement level decent code that means everything else now is more valuable and so to mike's point if i'm run if i'm operating a service and you know jared was scared he said he said he bleeped it out no i'm kidding i believe the whole i must have bleeped the whole sentence out because i don't remember i want a more bleep uh uh more bleeps for a minute i want to be mike i was lying earlier i do want to be oh gosh he's got you down he he does but like if i if i'm running a service and i'm going to be scared you know bleepless to have uh a root level security event occur at the place that i'm downloading all of my gems which could then be root kidding my computer for all of i know for i don't know what it was 12 days like i'm actually really glad that the executive director has a like the hat on now to finally like shore up the governance make sure that like their regulatory and their finances and their tax situation is all buttoned up.

1:32:30And probably I think at the end of the day, we'll probably end up being much more transparent than they've been in the past, which was just the result of negligence, I'm sure, and not malevolence up to this point. Like those are actually the skills that are more valuable because you can't just easily replace them. It requires good judgment and diligence and like experience and oversight. so like you know part of this is a story of just an organization maturing but i think part of it is also like a reflection of like the change in what's what's valuable and important right now and as you look at open source or your conversation with frost which i thought was excellent you know frost is a real smart guy this is where the new locus of of of control goes when when the writing of the code is no longer the most important thing i'm out of things to say so i'll just say a cliche the times they are a-changing, are they not?

1:33:21That was a musical cliche on Mike's behalf. You like that one, Mike? Bob Dylan, right? Yeah, I love it. I don't know that Bob Dylan song, sorry. You don't know Bob Dylan? Come on. Unless it's like Northern European power metal, I'm pretty lacking right now. Yeah, I don't know if they got Dylan in Scotland. They still have newspaper boys and children. Do you have Milkmen still up there, Mike? We until recently had our milk delivered to our house by Jesus. That's amazing. That's so idyllic. Living the dream over here. Well, you knew so much about American culture. I figure Bob Dylan would be right in your wheelhouse, but you know, that only extends so far, I guess.

1:34:02Yeah. I only do the parts of American culture, I guess, to echo this conversation that I'm paid in order to. You're forced to. Forced to learn in order to maintain and sustain employment. Right. And that hasn't yet gone as far as Bob Dylan. Well, I'll send you a$10 donation and a Bob Dylan album. You can just get to work on that. The moment when the Americans should make some sort of sports metaphor, and I nod along as if I understand what baseball's fourth strike, third innings catch, MLB championship Fridays means. Well, this is a nerdier podcast. The joke I was going to make was going to say, no wonder you like alien earth so much because it takes place in a world where America doesn't exist anymore.

1:34:43You can finally relax. It's just five corporations. Each get a continent. Just like how it should be, right? All right, Justin, this is as much your podcast as it is mine. If it were mine, I would say thanks and end it. But do you have more things you want to talk about? Well, since this is going to show up on my feed as a hot fix, we try to end every single interview with some sort of pithy one-liner that represents what is the fix to the problem statement. And it's the guest who I guess in this case is Mike being double hosted by us.

1:35:18It's, Hey, I'm just trying to, can I believe that? I'm trying to beat the bleep filter. You can't, you gotta keep it in. That stays in Mike. Mike, it's your job now to like help us land the plane and find a title for this thing, at least on my feed. Like what is, so if the problem statement is, you know, open source is not a career. like what's the fix like how do what what do you tell people instead like like like how should they how should they what's the takeaway for them in terms of like where should their attention be or you tell me well i guess in some ways i would divide the statement in two right so from the open source side of things do open source if you want to do open source right if you don't want to do it anymore don't do it anymore this is when like when this podcast gets published and like 99 % of open source maintenance quit and we have a world crisis and i'm like oh well uh but like genuinely like and we i very strongly encourage people in homebrew to be like hey the day you're not using homebrew anymore thanks for all your work stop using it move on get on with your life there's been people kicked out of homebrew who are doing a good job but clearly homebrew has been very bad for their mental health so we kicked them out of homebrew right like ultimately this stuff needs to be fun and it needs to be something that you enjoy and if you care about sustainability and burnout and open source you want that stuff to be better like go you know if you're an source maintainer go get some therapy right you probably have some you need to deal with like chances are and then the career side of things it's like again same deal like right if you work in tech chances are you have a career which is nice right it's harder right now than it used to be i'm lucky enough to have a lot of friends with careers outside of tech you know people who are personal trainers who are opening up the gym at like five o 'clock in the morning working like a 60 hour week with a split shift right like that's hard those people do not get paid a lot of money they work really hard and they make a really big difference in people's lives right if you're in a situation where you're getting paid good money to sit in your ass in your home office nine to five monday to friday like you know again maybe it's about figuring out a way to be happy with that or your life and if you don't like that then quit go do something else but like same deal right find a career that has some happy medium point between paying your bills getting what you need out of life and that you can actually enjoy and not hate right and do that right just in both camps do what makes you happy right because that's at the end of the day that's probably what is going to give you a better life and also give those around you a better life and even give like other people that work with you at your work where you're open source or whatever if you're miserable doing what you're doing like you're probably not very nice to work with so let's just all be happy kids that's going to make some people cross i think uh all right so i started with don't do open source if you don't want to which is a little bit long for a podcast title Then I said, do open source for you.

1:38:28And then I just flipped your problem statement. I said, open source is a hobby. Yeah, that works. Works for you. All right. Unhappy maintainers should quit. If you don't like it, quit. Yeah, pretty much. All right. Well, on that note, I'll pretend I'm going to hit my button that plays my music now. And then I'll have my call out and I'll say, hey, Jared, thanks a lot for we're playing at Jared's house right now because we're in his Riverside account instead of Mike's Riverside account or my squad. account just really we're we're all broken but we're glad that you're listening hello hi but it makes us happy especially listening this if you're still listening at this point nobody's paying me i've got no sponsors that's why i get to skip the bleeps that's right our sponsors pay us extra to bleep things out you know so i'm gonna make lots of money off this episode yes i hope it was sufficiently brand safe for you that's a new business model pay per bleep Here's some good news for us.

1:39:28This morning, as I prepare to shift this episode, that's October 17th, 2025, Ruby creator, Mats, posted on rubylang.org about rubygems.org saying, quote, Ruby Gems and Bundler are essential official clients for rubygems.org and the Ruby ecosystem. Bundled with the Ruby language for many years and functioning as part of the standard library, despite this crucial role, Ruby Gems and Bundler have historically been developed outside the Ruby organization on GitHub, unlike other major components of the Ruby ecosystem. To provide the community with long-term stability and continuity, the Ruby core team, led by Mats, has decided to assume stewardship of these projects from Ruby Central, end quote.

1:40:10He goes on from there, lots of details, link in the show notes. Thanks again to our partners at Fly.io and to our sponsors of this episode, coderabit.ai and agency.org, That's A-G-N-T-C-Y dot org. And thanks also to the best beat freak in the biz, Breakmaster Cylinder. Next week on the pod, news on Monday, Ellie Huxtable talking Atuin Desktop on Wednesday, and Kaizen 21 with Gerhard Lazu on Friday. Have yourself a great weekend. Give someone a compliment if you find the opportunity. And let's talk again real soon.

1:41:05there's some words i decided in advance i wasn't going to say so you should be glad for those i appreciate it that's sign of a good friend mike appreciate that all right well we'll just hit the button on both sides i'm not going to end it i'm going to let justin's be the end i'm going to hit the music when he said he's going to hit his music so the show's over at this point justin got the outro well all right okay okay i'm going to keep this stuff in so am i then all right well maybe i should just sing your music if you're going to ruin your show i'm going to ruin mine yeah that that's mutually mutually assured content uh change log plus plus it's better