Open Source Maintenance Fee Update with Rob Mensching

0:01Speaker 1:How'd you like to listen to dot net rocks with no ads? Easy? Become a patron for just five dollars a month. You get access to a private RSS feed where all the shows have no ads. Twenty dollars a month, we'll get you that and a special dot net Rocks patron mug. Sign up now at Patreon dot dot NetRocks dot com. Hey, welcome back to dot net Rocks episode twenty ten. I'm Carl Franklin, that Chard Campbell, and we're talking to Rob Menschin today. But we'll be talking to him in just a minute. But first, how are you, Richard?

0:47Speaker 2:I'm great, dude. I've been you know, home for a few weeks and that's always fun.

0:51Speaker 1:Yeah, always fun. Well, let's start it off right because you know, we got to get through this intro stuff. It's going to be weird today.

0:59Speaker 2:I point out there's only to be sixteen more of these, right, eventually we reach time.

1:04Speaker 1:We do these sort of weekly mini geek outs and Rob feel free to join in anytime. All right, this being episode twenty ten, let's talk about what happened that year. Yeah, first of all, there was a terrible earthquake in Haiti seven point zero bigin devastated Haiti, killing an estimated get this, almost three hundred thousand people. It's crazy, and leaving more than one point five million homeless. Just absolutely devastating.

1:33Speaker 2:Because there was there was a seven earthquake in christ Church that same year that killed.

1:40Speaker 1:I think two people.

1:41Speaker 2:Yeah, like construction matters, although Church will go through a lot.

1:45Speaker 1:Chile also had an earthquake. Yeah.

1:47Speaker 2:Yeah, it's funny because as we're recording this in June, there's just been a whole string of earthquakes around the Pacific rim that's right, and in Venezuela.

1:54Speaker 1:Yeah, so Venezuela was just yesterday.

1:56Speaker 2:Yeah, it's crazy.

1:57Speaker 1:Yeah. The deep Waters an oil spill which gave dawn dishwasher detergent a new identity.

2:05Speaker 2:I'm pretty sure that happened back in the Mesonvaldis.

2:08Speaker 1:But okay, oh yeah, you're right, that's right. Yeah, the little duck on the down bottle. That was excellent Valdis.

2:16Speaker 3:Yeah.

2:16Speaker 1:But anyway, so this was an explosion of an offshore drilling rig.

2:20Speaker 2:VP killed a bunch of people, yeah.

2:22Speaker 1:Eleven workers. Gulf of Mexico caused the largest marine oil spill in US history. Millions of barrels because it was.

2:30Speaker 2:Running deep underwater, right, and it took a long time to get down there and lock it down. It was hard to do.

2:35Speaker 1:Yeah, in New Orleans, they weren't selling so many shrimp. Let's just say that.

2:40Speaker 2:Oh, well they're still finding that.

2:42Speaker 4:Well.

2:42Speaker 2:Yeah, fifteen sixteen years later.

2:45Speaker 1:The Wiki leaks Document Leaks Julian Massage, of course, published hundreds of thousands of classified US military reports and then scooted to Russia.

2:56Speaker 2:Yeah, ultimately ended up in England and stayed in the Ecuadorian a consulate for a decade. Like that's tough, but yeah. Yeah.

3:06Speaker 1:The Arab spring began in twenty ten. In December, Mohammed Bozazi, Yeah, self immolated after harassment by local authorities and that started it.

3:15Speaker 2:Yeah, that was the beginning of a tremendous change.

3:19Speaker 1:European debt crisis intensifies Greece. Remember that Greece basically went broke.

3:26Speaker 2:This is when the challenge of the EU infrastructure really took a hold, where Greek euros aren't the same as German euros, right, and that's the reality they had to contend with all byproducts of the subprime crisis.

3:40Speaker 1:North Korea's military aggression. They were blamed for sinking the South Korean naval ship Chionin, killing forty six sailors. And yeah, that wasn't good. Another natural disaster in Iceland, the volcanic eruption.

3:55Speaker 2:Yeah, you're going to say that name. Go ahead, say that name, Carl. I'll say it's got three j's in it. It must be easy.

4:02Speaker 1:I falcol something like that, something like that. I actually have a bottle of the ash from that's amazing. Yeah. I bought it at the Rekuvik airport and I brought it home and I thought my kids would appreciate it, and they just left it here. That what the hell, dad, whatever? Whatever, Okay, I like it. It's on my minicle. Polish presidential plane crashed. Ninety five others, including the president died when they are aircraft crashed near Smolensk, Russia.

4:39Speaker 2:Slensk.

4:39Speaker 1:Yeah, Smolensk, Iran's nuclear program ambitions intensified. New sanctions were imposed. We don't know how that's going to end. Nice. The US Affordable Care Act takes effect in March, became the largest overhaul of the uslthcare system in decades and dominated American politics for years afterwards, including this day. They're still fighting over it still. Yeah, and the FIFA World Cup in South Africa.

5:12Speaker 2:Don't forget about the Winter Olympics in Vancouver. Oh yeah, okay, yeah, and that was and that was the silver Light Olympics. Our friend Scott Stanfield had the contract to do silver Light for NBC.

5:23Speaker 1:Yeah, that's right. Scott basically had a streaming video platform on silver Light and sold it to Major League Baseball eventually.

5:31Speaker 2:Eventually by that time he was doing it for NBC and we were we were watching it, and I realized we were talking about it as he was working on it. He had no plans to come to the games, and like, what are you doing? Yeah, get on a plane, get up here. And we ended up going to a lot of currently.

5:44Speaker 1:Yeah, so, oh, should I tell that story about Scott Stanfield We had after he sold to Major League Baseball. We were at an MVP summit. I think we were at Daniel's restaurant. Michelle was there and you were there, and Kelly was with me and we had to Kelly and I had to leave early. So we offered to you know, chip in and pay for stuff, right, And he says he's drunk. He goes, you're not paying and I said, come on, let's just you know, we can pay our way. He goes, look, I'm really really rich and I'm really really drunk, so fuck off or something like that. Yeah, good on, Scott, just honorable mentions. He attempted Times Square car bombing, record flooding in Pakistan, the UK election resulting in the Conservative Liberal Democrat coalition government in the end of the N one influenza pandemic. So it was a disastrous year for global events except for those, you know, sporting events. A right, Yeah they did, okay, Richard, tell us about space tech, the spacey stuff.

7:01Speaker 2:There are three shuttle flights, all early in the year. February Endeavor brings No. Three in the couple up to the Space station, and April Discovery brings the Leonardo cargo carrier, and in May Atlantis brings a Russian research module, the Mini Research Module. And that's it for shuttles that year, amazingly, and this is almost it right. Next year will bee a last of the shuttle flights. Much more activity though. In May, the Japanese Space program launches Akatsuki, which is their Venus climate orbiter to Venus later that year, in December, it's supposed to do a twelve minute burn to go into orbit around Venus, and something goes wrong. The problem is that because it's trying to go into orbit around Venus, as the burn that starts, they can see the burn starts, and then the spacecraft she goes behind Venus relative to the Earth, so they have no communication with it, and then too long goes by, and when they finally get a hold of it, it's in safe mode and tumbling, and they managed to get it, communicating with it again and get it recover realized it only ran that burn only went for three minutes, so it's not in orbit,

8:10Speaker 2:it's going to miss, it's going to fly by. It takes them a few weeks to figure out that the main engines badly damaged, that there was actually a kind of an explosion on board. Really, what had happened was there was a leak in the fuel system and too much oxtars that went to the engine and burned the engine up. This is the same thing that likely happened to Mars Observer and resulted in a total loss of Mars Observer a number of years before. So they got lucky here here's the crazy part. They still have a spacecraft and they're still trying to figure out what to do with it. So they managed to figure out a new orbit so that five years later, in twenty fifteen, they'll get close enough to Venus to attempt to go into orbit again, but they don't have the main engine. Also, the vehicle was only supposed to survive for four years, so they designed a hibernate mode for it that it didn't have, upload it, shut it down for three and a half years, and then work out all the equations for using the maneuvering thrusters to actually put it into orbit.

9:04Speaker 2:Realize they're carrying too much fuel, so they turn it on and dump the excess oxidizer, not going to need to lower its weight enough, and in twenty fifteen managed to get it into an odd elliptical orbit around Venus so it can actually do its science and it'll operate up there till twenty twenty four. Very cool, very cool. Indeed, another amazing Japanese satellite mission, the Hyabusa, that was the one that actually touched down on Iakawa asteroid. You've seen the video of the spray of rock. Because it's like most asteroids. We've now realized their rubber piles. So this little arm touched down to grab some parts and actually jammed it because there was so much debris. But they managed to get it closed up. They got it into its container, and in twenty ten it done the rendezvous in two thousand and five. In twenty ten it actually returns part in debris from an asteroid to Earth successfully, first time we ever.

9:59Speaker 1:Ha that wow.

10:00Speaker 2:Also in June, SpaceX launches the very first Falcon nine with a Dragon qualification unit on board, just a test flight, and that will lead to the later flight in December, the second flight, what they call the Cotts demo flight. Once this is doing resupply to the International Space Station. All this one doesn't actually do resupply. It does go into orbit proof as it can, does carry a few microsatellites. Also a wheel of cheese because it needed some kind of payload, so they put an entire wheel of libourriere cheese and then brought it back. It was the first time that a private company put something into orbit and returned it successfully.

10:35Speaker 1:I wonder if that improved the flavor.

10:37Speaker 2:I don't know. It certainly photed around a little it's a great question. Also in October, Chinese launch the Change two, which goes into orbit around the Moon later that same month. It'll hang out there for a year or so. In twenty eleven, it will leave orbit of the Moon and actually go to lagrange point two, which will make the only third nation besides NASA and NISSA ever go there. And then we'll fly on from there to intercept an asteroid called it Tutatus in twenty twelve. Wow, that was an amazing mission. And again the Chinese are quite accomplishment space even by twenty ten. On the computing side, we'll lead in February with the Windows Phone seven announcement running a modified version of Civilite, and it will ship in the US in November.

11:22Speaker 1:It's almost like a eulogy, isn't it.

11:24Speaker 2:I mean, you know, you know, the funny thing is when you like to have that phone now, with the way phones are at the moment, like I kind of miss them.

11:32Speaker 1:I do too.

11:33Speaker 2:Also, and in March we have the Mixed twenty ten, which is when we get NBC two point zero and a bunch of other cool announcements. March is also when Apple announces a thing they call the iPad a really big iPhone and freak everybody out, which then is followed in March by an open letter published by Steve Jobs called thoughts on Flash. Right now, what did Steve say in his Thoughts on Flash? Well, he he didn't say was the truth, which is Flash was murdering the battery of his iPad, Yeah, because that was his Flash was never made for mobile devices, right, it was for PCs and so but it was.

12:11Speaker 1:Bigger than that. It was about the security of plugins, or the lack of security of plugins.

12:16Speaker 2:Oh, you're absolutely right. Yeah, that the real issue here. And the thing I whenever I talk about this is I do fairly often doing the history talks. We all in you know, the two thousands. Every Christmas going to family, we're replacing people's address bars because over the course of the year, inevitably they downloaded something that swapped out their address bar with some kind of spyware, right, And so you were always fixing that because that was the nature of plugins at the time. And so Steve wasn't wrong.

12:43Speaker 2:Plugins are a huge risk and he was going to eliminate and he said, Safari's never going to run plugins like this, is it?

12:49Speaker 1:And that was kind of a death knell for for silver Light, but also just the lack of plugins is the death knell for silver Light. You know, if you don't silver used to plug in technology and if you don't have that, you know it's well.

13:03Speaker 2:The problem, of course is that in April is also the launch of Visual Studio twenty ten. I helped run that event.

13:10Speaker 1:Yeah, me too.

13:10Speaker 2:And this is framework four. Oh, this is the WPF version of Studio. This is the release of f sharp, this is j Query and open source library bundling the box, you know, with its regular license still attached to it. And of course silver Light four the first version of support chrome and out of browser and was pitched in April as this is the way that enterprises do cross platform development.

13:35Speaker 1:Internally, I believe my band played at the launch party, yeah in Las Vegas at the Mirage when we were there.

13:43Speaker 2:Yeah, we also have Windows Azure shipped with sql Azure, php support for Phpjava dot Net with webrolls and approles. If you remember, most of us didn't understand it. We were trying to do shows about it and noverybody was confused. And then we fast forward to the fall till October with the Larry last PDC on the campus in Redmond, Rained the whole time. It's only about a thousand people there because there's not a lot of space and exactly no silver light sessions, which is an amazing transformation from April six months later Microsoft Premier Conference. No civilight sessions. Now, I subsequentely discovered just by asking around, like why a there are no civil light sessions because there was no silver light team left. They'd essentially been dismantled. A bunch of them had gone over to win Phone seven, and a bunch of them had gone to the new version of Windows that was going to react to the iPad, and so they didn't submit any sessions. And famously, again we're talking about our history. Mary Joe Foley asked Bob Mugli at that point, the president of Server and Tools he owns Azure and oll of DEVNIV, why there was

14:50Speaker 2:no mention of silver light, and Bob looks vaguely confused and says, well, our strategy has shifted. What Bob doesn't know is that there's been no public announcements about the impact of thoughts on flash, on silverlight and so forth, because for the most at that point when the iPad came out, there was a real lockdown in talking about how Microsoft was going to respond to the iPad. There was a lot more fear about the iPad then when it was still a mythological product than the way we feel about tablets today. And so you know, I've subsequently interviewed Bob Mugley about this and he said, point blankly, I didn't know. I was the first person to talk about it. And to MJ's credit, all she said was what Bob said, our strategy has shifted. Yeah, it was everybody else who said silverlight is dead and Microsoft really said nothing, and that upset a lot of people. Like there's lots of folks that are still not over that.

15:40Speaker 2:Like that's that was a tough day and a tough situation to be in October, when our friend Phil Hack leads the project that becomes the first version of New Get. All these things in the same year, and then in November the Xbox Connect not the same thing at all, and I'll mention too other products. Then we wrap this up. Instagram ships this year, Kevin Seistrom and Micah Krieger, and also Facebook Messenger.

16:07Speaker 1:I have some things to add because twenty ten marked the beginning of the streaming era in audio, streaming subscriptions became commercially viable. Spotify established the business model that most competitors would follow. Pandora familiarized millions of listeners with streaming. Smartphones made streaming convenient enough for mainstream adoption, and the music industry began shifting away from ownership towards access. And this also kind of is a death noell for musicians and recording artists.

16:39Speaker 2:It's the final straw.

16:40Speaker 1:It was the Yeah, it was the beginning of the end for the for the music business as far as artists being compensated for their work goes were. You know, record sales continued, you know, digital downloads continued, but really people stopped buying CDs and map and it was all about the MP three and your stream and all of that kind of stuff. Download still dominated revenue, but streaming was started on his way, on its way. So twenty ten marks the the end of the music business as we.

17:16Speaker 2:Know it, well, at least the beginning of the end anyway, the beginning of the end. Right, So there you go. Okay, so I guess we should get onto better no framework awesome, So our friend Simon Kropi, Simon, you're us. He's the guy who said, you guys should get Rob Menching back for you know, a one year update on open source monetization, and we said sure, so that's why he's here. But he also says, hey, have you seen geo convert And I said, no, what's g convert? Geoconvert maps between gjson, topo, json flat, g O buff kml, kmz, gpx, wkt, wkb CSV, and gopark mousc entirely in your browser. So all of the formats for geographical data.

18:13Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, yeah, all in the browser. So you basically choose a map file, upload.

18:18Speaker 2:It, boom convert, and then you can dump it back out in whatever other format I want it. Yeah, that's magic, of course it is. It's awesome.

18:26Speaker 1:Yeah, Richard, who's talking to us today?

18:29Speaker 2:Gret A comments off a show nineteen forty eight, that's one where we talked about this open source maintenance fee with some Rob guy. And there's a lot of comments on the show, honestly, and Rob responded to most of them. Thank you, Rob. That was very kind of you because people are clearly excited and interested, and I think this recap's a really good idea, but here's one we didn't get a response to, and I thought we might take it on a little bit. Chris blithe and get asking this about a year ago. I just listened to the show.

18:54Speaker 2:The one thing I don't understand and we'd love to hear Robs feel on it. What would be stopping a big organization just automatically building your open source repo on their build server and pushing their art effects to their internal feed and therefore you get all the project management stuff and security updates, but just not ready to go binary. Let's be honest, setting up an automate build is pretty low in terms of effort and would be you know, fit in the short term bracket or is there some secret way for maintainers to stop that from happening. I don't think there's any way to stop that from happening, and I think that's the way most organizations actually do things by design.

19:26Speaker 4:No, I don't know that many organizations do that, but it absolutely is by design that they can't.

19:33Speaker 1:Yeah.

19:33Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I've seen both things where your build process actually goes and fetches the bit from the open source repository and continues on. I've also seen versions where they maintain a local repository and decide when to push new versions in and everybody builds off of that. But I don't think that takes anything away from the open source maintainer or the project.

19:53Speaker 3:No.

19:53Speaker 4:His point is, I bet you can do this under two hours, right, and take care of it. And that two hours is two hours per year is the cost. We're talking costs the maintenance feedback then, and that's that's two hours per year. And depending on the project and what you have to do and what you have to keep up on, it might be two hours, it might be more than that, but it's absolutely more mind to share that you have absorbed into the company, right, and we'll talk about it. But most people don't think that way about the open source projects, which is why the open source maintenance fee is working.

20:32Speaker 2:Yeah, so's.

20:38Speaker 4:Talk about because it's it's but he's right, he's absolutely right. You could absolutely do all that. That's by design. That's fantastic because the idea is then hey, you're in the code, you're helping, you're being in there. There's more people then that are working at that level. Fantastic, You're maintaining the source code. There you go. Good job, but it's not very common.

20:56Speaker 2:Awesome, So Chris, thank you so much for comment in a copy of music co buy. It is on its way to you. And if you like a copy of music cob buy, I write a comment on the website at dot NetRocks dot com or on the facebooks. We publish every show there and if you comment there and never read on the show, we'll send you a copy of music Coby.

21:08Speaker 1:And if you don't want to do that, you can just go get it yourself. Music too, code by dot net. It's twenty two tracks of twenty five minutes long of music that is scientifically designed to keep you in a state of flow for focus, relaxing, and particularly coding. So that voice you heard before was Rob Mentioning. He is the CEO and co founder of fire Giant, a company that provides commercial support and tools for the Wicks tool set. He's also the creator and maintainer of Wicks, the most powerful set of tools for building Windows installation packages. Wicks holds the unique distinction of being the first open source project released by Microsoft, and Rob has been deeply involved in open source for over twenty five years. He's passionate about making open source sustainable and his proposal of the open source maintenance Fee. I guess it's not a proposal now, but it's the thing. The open source maintenance Fee is all about creating a better path forward for projects and their maintainers. Welcome back, Rob, and I guess you gave away the end. It seems to be working.

22:12Speaker 4:Yeah, but there's a lot of things still to talk about. Sure, and it's working for us. I don't know, there's a lot to talk about. There's a lot of details to it. I think we should say it.

22:23Speaker 2:Started the beginning.

22:23Speaker 3:Then.

22:24Speaker 2:I don't know that everybody listened to the last show, although they should.

22:27Speaker 4:How far back do you want to go? Do you want the motivation or what it is?

22:32Speaker 1:The elevator pitch, and.

22:33Speaker 4:We'll do the elevator pitch. There was a time back in two thousand and twenty four that we were starting to see a escalation of pressure on open source maintainers that turned into for me, the catalyst was the exe utls attack, where we now believe state actors pressured a single maintainer into giving access to one of them so they could insert a very very subtle build system flaw or not flaw attack into Linux, which then snuck its way into almost everywhere until some engineer at Microsoft happened to notice things were running a little slow and went, hey, this seems.

23:19Speaker 2:Like a problem, and lil So was like half a second, I don't.

23:25Speaker 4:Know how you find it if he was doing very sensitive performance testing. So that's like the only was it. Yes, that thing could have been in. You would have a backdoor into all Linux, including those on the clouds. And where that goes is crazy. That happens, That's very exciting. That's like the things that you know Jason Bourne novels are done about or whatever. I was more interested in the people because at that point me, like many of my friends, were very frustrated. And if you listen to that episode, which I did, I went back and listen to it, you can hear the frustration, I think in my voice a bit. And I was just like that incident kind of said enough is enough, We're going to solve this problem. I'm at least going to take a shot at it. So over the next well not quite a year, six months for the summer for sure, into the fall, and then early twenty twenty five came up with this idea called the open source maintenance fee that says, there's an open source project, which means that all the source code is available under the licenses that we know very well from the OSI that specify how you can

24:29Speaker 4:share and access that source code, and they are generally very liberal, definitely on the part that you can see the source code. Then what if we added this very common concept, a ula to the binaries the things that get built from that source code from the project maintainers. And the maintainers could say, hey, I'm going to put a ULA on this because I spend a lot of time building these projects, keeping them up to date, keeping the issue tracker free from spam, maybe answering questions, answering questions all over the place, keeping doctations like this long list of things that all maintainers do. So how about we have a small fee that we charge people compensation for all of those tasks that a maintainers do. And this idea was at that time for me very scary when we were talking about a year ago, and now I'm just like, yeah, this is this makes so much sense.

25:22Speaker 4:We should just do this. And so that's why I'm really glad to be talking to you guys again about the idea of the source code is open source. The binaries that come from it are protected, not protected, are licensed under a separate eula, and that separation creates a space where we can have maintainers become sustainable, that they can actually find a place where hey, because there's companies paying for the maintenance fees, they can actually work on the project and stay involved in projects that might be wearing them down after all these interactions with people that have assumed that all of their interactions with them are free, right.

26:02Speaker 2:Yeah, And this is back to Chris's comment at the top of the show here where hey, if just so avoid the binary, do I have no obligation? And it's like always never about that in the first place.

26:12Speaker 4:Really, yeah, And if you enter at the source code level, you're entering in a different place. Sure, right, If you're in there and you're starting to working there, you're generally look at the code and now you're becoming part of the community that you're actually moving forward this project. What the space that I found were the people on top that were just using the binaries straight out and then expecting, like my favorite example is there's this bug that's been over for ten years. How have you not fixed this bug in ten years?

26:40Speaker 2:Right? Yeah, I'm going to uninstall this free product.

26:43Speaker 4:Okay exactly. And then they're like and then maybe you maybe as a maintainer, you're like, look, oh, man, I love my project. You're right, it's been ten years. I'll go back and look at that. They spend the time they fix it, and then they're in there, and then the person saying, well, how long until you get the build out? Like where's the build Why isn't that available right now? And it's like, well, I have to just go through all the work and all those sorts of things. Yeah, it's that whole space.

27:06Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it's and it's it is a bund It sure feels like a bunch of ungrateful wretches, you know, when they're at that level the angry issues of whis are not a built version of this. Why I don't want source code like that drives me crazy too.

27:21Speaker 4:Yeah. And it's when you become a successful project. We talked to us a little bit last time, that you end up with a lot of people in your project. Yeah, very successful projects like you know, the wig tool sets getting millions like we're up to the almost twenty million downloads of our various parts, the primary entry points. There's like twenty million downloads almost. That's a lot of people that have been used in that product.

27:43Speaker 1:Right.

27:44Speaker 4:It's cut product project, It's complex, it has lots of parts moving around in it, and you can get people that I think, it's just free and it really just keeps coming back to that same place of the attitudes as opposed to being part of a community and working on it and helping and participating. People just show up and ask their question and want an answer and download EBITs.

28:07Speaker 1:You could buy an answer. Well, so would you like to buy an answer?

28:11Speaker 4:Well, you know, and this is the other thing that there are. There are business models that people will then tell you, well, if you want to do open source, then you should, you know, create a company, go create a service company around it, where maybe you offer support, or you offer other additional features on top of it, or maybe you do consulting and you go customize it, work it with other people things like that.

28:33Speaker 1:For you get on a short list of people who you can, you know, take their suggestions and make customizations for right.

28:41Speaker 4:However you want to do that, The challenge all those are You're now putting together a business, right and there's a lot of maintainers that are like, my project is only so big and I don't necessarily want to put together a whole business behind it. So is there a space for me? The challenge was can we find something in there that meets those maintainers that are starting to get burned out on their project that they don't have to go and say I'm going to quit my job and create a whole business around this. And that was one of the key characteristics that I want to make sure that we can meet in that space.

29:13Speaker 1:So how does the open source maintenancee work exactly right now?

29:18Speaker 4:The easiest way to put it together that has worked out really well is we kind of co opt to Gethub sponsors, And turns out GitHub has been a really good partner through all of this. And like I said, the idea was to not have to create an entire company. So with GitHub sponsors, you can set up your fuduciary connection with GitHub and your bank account through Stripe. That's a very easy thing to do as an individual. And then you say, I'm going to offer the I'm going to build the binaries for my project put a yula on them, and we actually have a ula that you can copy and paste out of the open source maintenance fee if you want to just use that one and put it up there. And then you say, you said for your gid HOB sponsors to say here's the fee that you pay and GETTHUB. Then we'll connect the payment from the companies straight into your bank account, so you don't have to do as a maintainer, you don't have to do anything, but you know, a day's worth of work.

30:19Speaker 4:Generally you have to wait a little bit on the bank stuff, but a day's worth of work to connect all that things together. So it literally allows maintainers to stand all of this up without standing up a whole lot of infrastructure by building on top of GitHub sponsors.

30:32Speaker 1:It's great. And this is this is something that I kind of suggested back in twenty twenty two when we were at NBC talking about making open source work for everyone with David Whitney episode eighteen eighteen, and you know, we were just talking about that whole problem of open source maintainers need to get paid somehow, and I think I suggested that we did it through maybe I suggested new Get. I think it was new Get that I suggested, you.

30:58Speaker 4:Know, I think you said you said get up. Someone else said nugot. I think I think it was Dave Whitney maybe someone that has recommended nugat.

31:06Speaker 1:But we were talking about this, this whole idea.

31:09Speaker 4:Yes, this idea yeah. And the trick though, was in the past sponsors and all these conversations have been around it would be nice if you pay. It should be nice if you could put a donation, a tip jar, something like that. The important facet that has worked out really well in the open source maintenance fee is the EULA, the fact that it's not optional, it's not a donation, it's not charity, and that actually activates everything that you need to inside the companies, because if it's a charity or a donation, the story usually goes, I'm an employee, I think we should you know, we use this project.

31:48Speaker 4:Let's go sponsor it. You will hit eventually a procurement team that goes, do we have to spend money on this? The answer is no, and the procurement team says great, no answer. So now, but with a EULA, then the ULA says, here are the terms legal goes yep, those are the terms. Procurement goes great, how do we pay it? And you say great, go to GitHub sponsors and pay it there. Now, when we launched this we talked to last year. It was still brand new. I think I'd only talked to you guys. They had only been out a week and it was like May yeah, yeah, and I was. It was early enough that I was afraid to say what was going to happen. I had a whole lot of hopes, I had a lot of ideas was good, but I also know but I was also confident that there was going to be bugs right, There are things that I needed to work out. And so the tool set being my project means I could put it in a real project with real users and absorb all of the growing pains just the initial launch, right because I treated it just like a product, Pull the bugs in, resolve them. So like the fact got built up from every single question that people asked. One of

32:56Speaker 4:the trickier ones was get hub sponsors when it launched, And this is my mistake. I didn't catch this detail when we put it out there to pay by invoice, which is what all major companies want to do. They all want to pay by invoice, require you to pay five thousand dollars up front, so you had to in your invoice, you had to invoice five thousand dollars, and I think there was also a three year commitment to doing that if you went through invoicing. And when you think about if you're a small company and you're paying ten bucks per month, one hundred and twenty bucks per year five thousand dollars up front for five years, was like, I, how many years do we have to go before we finally pay off this chunk of change that we put in to get hubbed? So I never really like I talked him a little bit. I never quite understood their system.

33:45Speaker 4:It was something about trying to get charitable donations to be recurring from bigger companies and have them have bigger pools of money in there to spread abrout a bunch of their projects. So it was very charity donation kind of oriented, which of course doesn't work for what we want. I wanted to use it here, and so they were awesome and they created a whole extra invoicing system for the open source maintenance fee. Wow, so you can now just pay only your invoice.

34:11Speaker 1:Isn't the whole idea that you want to make using an open source tool free for anyone who just wants to kick the tires and run it. And then if you start making money with your software project that we're an integral part of, that's when the feed kicks in. Is that in the yula?

34:29Speaker 4:Yeah? Yeah, so actually that was one of the bugs that we had to fix as well. The first bug was getting it so that people companies could pay by invoice and get hub was great. It took a little bit, but we got that they had to make coding changes on their side for that to happen, so it was great there. I bring this up because I really appreciate what GitHub did to make that happen. Kidding, your issue that you're bringing up is also interesting because your original yula said that if you make money, you must pay this maintenance fee, and it got us into an interesting situation where there might be a someone that was just getting started in their business and maybe they were making like their first sale for five dollars or something like that, and now they're like, great, and I use a whole bunch of open source to build it. How Like I now have to pay a fee. I'm going to go negative for trying to do this, and that was never the intention.

35:25Speaker 1:We got to set the bar to real money first, yeah, right right right, So, and then the challenge is that so we did I in so we released open source maintenance fee one point one v one point one.

35:37Speaker 4:Like I said, it's a product. So it got versioned and move the minimum bar up to you have to make more than ten thousand dollars per year. It's still really low. But the idea, hopefully was that one of the important parts is if an open source project takes a maintenance fee, they pay the maintenance fee for their projects down the line. Because the one of the important factors is you only pay the maintenance fee for the projects that you use directly. You don't pay this like, oh, every single project that I depend on in the project, they depend on and so and.

36:09Speaker 1:So and so, right, the whole tree.

36:11Speaker 4:Only the ones that you chose, right, you picked them, therefore you pay the maintenance fee to them.

36:16Speaker 3:Right.

36:16Speaker 4:But then when those maintenance those projects make a maintenance fee, they then will pay their projects down the line. So it hopefully works its way down the system. I haven't seen a whole lot of projects adopted yet to know how well it works down the same.

36:28Speaker 1:Trickle down economics. I think they call that in the eighties.

36:31Speaker 4:It is it is in the dot net ecosystem, which is the one that I know really well. The dependency trees don't tend to be very deep.

36:40Speaker 1:Yeah.

36:41Speaker 4:The one case that I can make is like x unit is probably one of the most popular ones. That is, like the Wix tool set uses x unit for some of our testing systems. So we, you know, as part of fire Giant, we pay x unit a fee, and that's we just choose to They don't have a maintenance fee, but we choose to say, hey, we're going to pretend every dependency that we have we're making money on this project. Therefore we are going to pay all of our dependencies.

37:08Speaker 4:And next unit is our I think it's the only dependency that isn't a Microsoft dependency in wex, So we pay that there.

37:16Speaker 2:All right, Well, don't we take a quick break for these very important messages. Yeah, and we're back. It's dot net rocks. I'merchard Campbelllet's call Franklin. Hey here at toppling with Rob mentioned about the open source maintenance fee, and uh, Okay, so you rev to one point one, you obviously learn some things, but otherwise, how is it going if you got some folks signed up?

37:38Speaker 4:Yeah, so it has completely changed my outlook on contributing to my project completely.

37:44Speaker 2:Wow.

37:44Speaker 4:We went from no sponsors because we didn't take sponsors before this, so we have a nice clean start to now about a year later, and today I think we're at like three hundred and eight wow wow sponsors, which is I went digging could be the most, if not one of the most sponsored projects on GitHub.

38:07Speaker 1:Wow.

38:08Speaker 4:Like it's there, aren't I compare. I've compared us to VTE, which is the kind of turned into the default build system of JavaScript. I don't know how better else to describe it, but it's a massive project JavaScript typescript all that being a huge space, lots of people depending on it, created by even you who also created view guys brilliant. I'm impressed by everything he does. And he had, like their project had like sixty two sixty five people sponsoring it.

38:36Speaker 1:Wow.

38:37Speaker 4:So it is working exactly like we wanted.

38:42Speaker 2:You've plugged into this business mechanism that I think you grappled it with a lot of other people didn't that when you create this construct of it is an obligation for a business using the binary to pay, They pay.

38:54Speaker 4:And they don't complaint the business is the only thing they complain about is how we use getub sponsors to do this because finding the invoice thing that we talked about, how yes, it's it's purely a how do we pay? Not why or do we have to? It's purely a what is the mechanism by which we put the money into the right place? Because we just want to solve this problem and streamlining that is probably the biggest problem to tackle. When I first announced this idea, everybody said, how are you going to enforce this? Even Carl brought it up, like how are you going to force people to do this? And I was like, well, our primary focus is education first. Because's brand new, all those sorts of challenges.

39:39Speaker 1:It's kind of like a Grateful Dead show. You know, you can tape it, go ahead, We're not going to cool.

39:45Speaker 4:I didn't know that about Grateful Dead, but yeah it.

39:48Speaker 1:So they're all dead now, so grate Yeah.

39:52Speaker 4:So on that front, it worked perfectly in that it got it for it. We did get the feedback that there was no notification that the EULA had changed. And when we talked about before, I said, we have this perfect mechanism in nugat packages, which Wix happens to be all shipp through nugat packages that you can say requires license acceptance. It's a bit in the nugit manifest and if you install through visual Studio, it will prompt up a little box to say, hey, accept the ULA. But most of which stuff is a dot net tool and a MS bill desicate. Neither of those routes that you use showed you, including dot net tool installed does not tell you that there is a license that you must accept.

40:34Speaker 4:So you're like silently accepting the license as the dot net tool installs it or.

40:38Speaker 2:Something that's not sexy.

40:40Speaker 3:Yeah.

40:40Speaker 4:Well I couldn't get the dot net team to care. They're like, oh, this is this is not our problem, and actually there's an issue. It's it's in the newgit repo. I got bounced out of the dot net one in the NuGet when it's been like I don't know thirteen years or something, me complaining about open source project for Noshue for a long time, but like they're not interested in tackling this in fact, the discussion is mostly about maybe we should remove this. So the feedback was coming in, Hey, we didn't realize this was happening. I only saw this because I read this one page in the documentation which notified to me that, yeah, people don't read the new releases.

41:13Speaker 4:They just pick up the new one and go. So a lot of people didn't even realize it's happening. So we implemented in Wix seven, which just released back in this April, so a year after wik six, when we introduced open source maintenance fee. This concept of what I call ed uforcement. It is a property you add an MS build to say accept the EULA, or you can add it to the command line tool, to the Wix's command line tool say accept the EULA, and then you specify the version. So in the latest version you say accept EULA Wix seven, and so that means that you now have acknowledged that there's ULA, and if you don't pass that switch, then the tool fails errors and says, hey, you need to accept the open source license fee. Go to this link and you can read all about it, and we have the information and it basically tells you, hey, you need to if you're doing all this, you need to pay the fee. And after you've done that, then here's the command line switch you add. So Carl will say, well, then they can just go ahead and add the command line so which once they learn how which is true.

42:15Speaker 2:But generally speaking, businesses are not criminal, no, and they don't want to be criminal. They don't want to be they don't want to be criminals. They want to follow the rules. Make the rules clear and easy to follow, and they will follow them exactly.

42:26Speaker 4:And so we have finally put together these pieces that have fit into a yula, which is a natural concept for them, unnatural and open source, but it makes sense as soon as they evaluate it, come back with a payment process that they have to go through gethub sponsors, which is a little bit unusual, but it's get hubbed and trusted and therefore they just have to kind of work their way through. And so smoothing that procurement process is the last thing that I'm kind of continuing to iterate on trying to find easy an easier ways through because I kid you not, the emails that we get, we're almost up to like one or two a day of people asking how do we do GitHub sponsors, How do we pay you through get hobs sponsors. Can we have another mechanism. We're not really used to doing it this way, and so if we can figure out how to smooth that out one more time, then it just fits very naturally. And all the companies are like, uh, okay, we just just do it done.

43:25Speaker 1:And and they pay annually, so.

43:28Speaker 4:You could pay annually, you could pay monthly. Getthub supports both of them through the invoice whatever.

43:34Speaker 2:But getthub Sponsors does all that.

43:35Speaker 4:Get houb Sponsors does all that. Like I it is. It has worked so well by just fitting into these parts, and the pushback has been minimal, like I was prepared for so much more sure, but people, but people have been like, there's been a couple like you should not pay, you should not charge for open source that goes against them luntro of it yah, which of course is demonstrably false. That's not at all true anywhere in the history of anything. This is exactly where you do pay it. I've had I've only had developers say that they're not sure that the wording in the yula is quite right right, and I'm like, that's possible. I had a lawyer write it.

44:18Speaker 4:If you have a lawyer that says that there's a problem here, I would love to work with them. But my understanding from legals that I had, these are all the correct words. They quibble over what does user mean? And it's defined in particular way legally. And it's very funny because I had the same comments to my lawyer when I read it, like does it really mean this? He's like, well, if you change it the way you're suggesting, then that messes all these days up. I'm like, I'm not doing law Okay, I trust you've got this right.

44:44Speaker 4:The professionals do the professional thing exactly exactly. So last year I was very uncertain how it would go, and now it's a completely viable model that a maintainers that are like my project has gotten to the point where I'm spending more time on this than I feel like I'm being conversated for because it's just making social value for the system. I think this is this is an absolutely a viable option for them to consider it.

45:14Speaker 1:Last year I looked at it and I kicked the tires and I was like, well, you know, maybe I'll wait a year. So this just while you were talking I went and looked at my new get published packages, and my most popular project is Blazer Sliders. So this is you know, you get panels that have sliders between them and that kind of stuff, vertical, horizontal, you can nest them and everything. It's really cool. And I've got twenty four thousand downloads, so and it's it's a main It's not hard to maintain. But every time there's a new version of dot net and I have to you know, upgrade it and test it, make sure that it all works.

45:49Speaker 1:I've got clients that use it. Yep. So I'm thinking I might this might be a good time to pull the trigger on that. Yep. Sure.

45:55Speaker 4:And it's exactly that spot that you're like, oh, well, yeah, you know what, I have enough, there's of value me continue to stay on top of the dot net releases that come out, the security releases that come out. You just have to be aware of them, all those things. And now you're like, yeah, you know what, I'm going to do that and then I'm going to go get another couple, you know, extra picks for my guitar or whatever you're doing. You're like, you know, like pickups, pickups, all right, all of those things become viable or you know, you you donate it, or you you know, I don't know, take your wife, your daughter, your son, your whatever out to dinner that you haven't seen him, like all those things.

46:31Speaker 1:Well, I'm a I'm a big fan of pricing things according to the value of the customer to the customer, right, and so if a customer is using Blazer sliders in a in a project that they're making millions of dollars a year on, you know, it's kind of it makes sense to.

46:46Speaker 4:It makes sense some of that down and that's why it's worked. It's it's been everybody's been like, okay, it makes sense. The numbers small. If anything, the number is too small. I have to deal with procurement. My hope is that while I try to work on pre procurement at the same time, if more projects start picking it up, then it just becomes part of procurement, which is what happened with open source. The lawyers were like, you can't touch OPO source, and then they got comfortable with the licenses and then it became a process. This is how you accept OPO source.

47:17Speaker 2:I means it's obviously working for Wicks, but if you got some other folks that are being successful with it.

47:22Speaker 4:So it's still early. It's early, and I have honestly shied most people away from trying to pick it up because I didn't think I had all the bugs worked out right, and I didn't want them to go through pain that I didn't know how to help them resolve, because there was a potential that you know, you get a lot of lashback, and as a maintainer, especially in money, I was very worried that it could get really, really nasty. Yeah, and so just finding the right way to say things and word things was a big part of it, and I feel like we're very much there to that end.

48:01Speaker 4:Simon Kropp, who is notorious.

48:04Speaker 2:Notorious, awesome on this show certainly.

48:06Speaker 4:And huge in the dot net ecosystem, was the first second person I talked to the open Source Maintenance Fee about. I didn't know Simon before that. I just cold called him and said, hey, can I talk I want to show this thing to you. And he was the one very early had fantastic questions, helped me frame and make sure I had answered a lot of questions early, but he at that time was noncommittal. I'd say he's like, well, we'll see how it goes. But he's starting to bring his projects on now that's cool, and his projects are bigger than mine, like as pure numbers go libraries and these like that. There, it's much bigger. He's already opened the issue in Verify, which is one of his big testing systems, and he's doing it the right way because the docutation said, if you're going to introduce the open source maintenance fee, put an announcement out, explain what you're doing and why, and leave a lead time of three to six months, because if you don't, people will complain that you didn't tell them right, yeah, that you run exactly well, it just too fast. If you do, then they don't complain or they don't have anything to complain

49:13Speaker 4:about in the end. So it's just things we learned.

49:15Speaker 1:Simon is a brilliant, brilliant guy. He's helped me on a couple of my open source projects too, and it seems like every other better Know framework is because of him.

49:24Speaker 4:Yes, I'm betting, and we'll see if it works, but I'm betting that the open source maintenance Fee, depending on how it goes, could make you know, Simon like retired. Yeah, that's actually my thinking is that given his projects, he's so prolific, he could through this have so many people that he could finish and then just work on his projects. And I keep thinking, how is that not the best thing for people using these projects? Simon available to work on all things full time, on.

49:54Speaker 2:Verify, on you know exactly so many, so many things, all.

49:58Speaker 4:Of them and all of them. Then he wouldn't have to pick which ones he's doing. He'd just be able to do them all because the dude's a madman. So that's I'm excited to see how it goes for him.

50:09Speaker 2:Well, people will vote for their feet, right, he can go focus on the ones that are getting the most sponsorship.

50:13Speaker 4:That that too, or spin up new projects and help and things like that. It's it's all in my opinion, it's all good. And I contrast it with like going back to VT Evan and they started a company, and they recently got acquired by cloud Flare, which of all companies, is probably one of the better ones because they are generally very much about continuing to keep things in the open. But I keep wondering if Evan had put the open source maintenance fee on vat and view. Yeah, that thing gets I forget. It was like twenty million down in a month. Yeah, double digit millions, you.

50:51Speaker 1:Know, Richard, when I'm thinking about Polly, Yeah, totally Polly Appenaxtonnes Polly, Yeah, you know, and it gets millions and millions downloads.

51:00Speaker 4:Exactly that that whole space. You're like, do that, and then what are we doing. We're funding a person to work on a project that they've been successful at, they figured it out, they like what they're doing, presumably they've been working on it so hard and for so long. Now we're just funding them to continue to do more of that. I in a way that.

51:20Speaker 2:You know, no EXI I'd love to see Simon Cropp do even more, like goodness knows what he's holding back on.

51:25Speaker 4:Yes, So so I am. I have gone from very frustrated and very afraid and concerned about what was happening to now I'm on the other side where I'm like, you don't have to adopt the open source maintenance fee. If you don't want money or do you want to deal, then that's fine. I'm not saying do that, but if you have any questions, it has been working really well. Oh Jason Everything was I think one of the first ones. And I know Kazoo adopted on a bunch of his smaller projects, but Jason Everything might have been the first project that was bigger. Greg Daniels, I don't I don't really know him. He just kind of picked it up out of nowhere that I didn't really understand. It just surprised me, and I learned a few things in his release of more things to put into the fack and and people's reactions, like the timeframe.

52:12Speaker 1:Guess how many downloads of Polly have gone through new get two point eight billion?

52:17Speaker 4:Now that that's tricky. Downloads are tricky because if they are, aren't they referenced by the dot net framework somewhere like internally?

52:25Speaker 1:Well, so the transit of ones wouldn't count. No dot net framework forked the stop Polly that they're using for themselves. Okay, it's not that Polly is included.

52:35Speaker 4:Okay, Okay, then then i'mification all right, cool. Then no, then then that's pretty much probably all straight up direct references to Polly.

52:45Speaker 1:Yeah, there's still people at aptnx that are maintaining it, so, I mean, you know, the money would obviously trickle to them.

52:51Speaker 4:Look like if fire Giant. I was getting a point where like, I can't do this. I can't fund Wix with the security vulnerabilies that we're hitting and things like that. We the whole lot of dev time into it in twenty twenty four, and it was brutal. With the open source maintenance fee, it's much more like, yeah, let's pick up one of the features and do those, and we've been able to do that. We did a long standing feature that we'd wanted to do forever, per user, per machine switching inside bundles. I mean it was complicated, a whole lot of problems. Yeah, we knocked it out in Wick seven and it was like, it feels better. The whole thing feels better. Answering questions, Yeah, no problem with suit as I get to it, I mean, boom boom, boom boom, knock them all out, keep going. Yeah, the attitude and everything just feels so much better that. All right, these large companies, these companies of all sizes are paying a maintenance fee for me to keep this project going that I want to see successful, and now I don't feel taken advantage of at all.

53:46Speaker 1:So we didn't really talk about what's you set Obviously set the maintenance fee for your project, but what's the range that you would advise people to do.

53:56Speaker 4:So there are two models pre presented on the open source maintenance fee dot org has two models that it proposes. One is if is a ten dollars fee if you're if you're just a library or something like that, you want it simple, just do ten dollars straight up. If you're at all bigger complicated anything, I would recommend in all cases you have ten dollars for a twenty person up to a twenty person company, forty dollars for up to one hundred person company, and then the sixty dollars for after the one hundred person company. And that kind of ranges that we found.

54:30Speaker 1:Is this per year or per month, per month, okay.

54:33Speaker 4:Per month?

54:34Speaker 1:Wow?

54:34Speaker 4:And then and like I said, nobody's really complaining about the present.

54:37Speaker 1:Now, nobody would complain about that.

54:39Speaker 4:No, We've had a couple devs complain about it, but they're not business people. Like that's the tricky thing. Also not tricky. There's a small cases of most of the people that give me feedback and the maintenance fee have been developers. And then I just have to make sure I coordinate with who they are where they come in at because as a developer I am guilty of this as well.

55:00Speaker 1:Well.

55:00Speaker 4:I don't always think businesslike yeah right, and and they're like, no, nobody would ever do that. You're like, well, you know, if it's just two hours, I'll just stand to see I system and run it myself. And you're like, absolutely, you could do that, but does your boss want you doing that? Is that really the best time for you to be using you know, is it worth all that a headache? No, you know, let's just pay the fee because it's not that much and the whole balance ends up working out. So yeah, I I am, like I said, I'm quite tickled that it all worked out. I was telling my wife I was going on the show today this morning, and she was kind of talking about and she said, oh, yeah, and now someone could go and work in the open source field, and I'm like, the open source field, that's not a thing. But I was like, you know, there's actually a space here that if you create a project's big enough, then yeah, you can work in the open source field.

55:48Speaker 1:It's true.

55:49Speaker 2:Yeah, it's true.

55:50Speaker 1:Well this is great, and I hope we have inspired some people who have big repositories that a lot of people are using to take a look at it.

55:58Speaker 4:And you never know, and I hope people that work at companies start going, you know what, we should make sure that all of our projects are covered. Why don't we just pay a maintenance fee as if they didn't, But they do, right, That's what we do at fire Giant. We basically say every dependency that we can sponsor, we go and sponsor the mat our fee right like they took a fee.

56:17Speaker 1:Just do it, absolutely, just do it, do it well. This is this is a great solution, Rob. Thank you for the update, and it's been great talking to you. Thank you for having me and congrats on the progress. Man.

56:27Speaker 2:It's going well.

56:28Speaker 4:Yep, and hopefully you have other people coming. Oh yeah yeah, I use the opens sours means fee. It's no big deal. That's what I want. Big deal, just the way we do it, good way it works, just the thing you do. Give me the time.

56:38Speaker 1:Right, Well, thanks again, Rob, and we will talk to you, dear listener next.

56:41Speaker 5:Time on dot net rocks.

57:04Speaker 6:Dot net Rocks is brought to you by Franklin's Net and produced by Pop Studios. A full service audio, video and post production facility located physically in New London, Connecticut, and of course in the cloud online at PWOP dot com.

57:20Speaker 3:Visit our website at d O T N E T R O c k S dot com for RSS feeds, downloads, mobile apps, comments, and access to the full archives going back to show number one, recorded in September two thousand and two.

57:34Speaker 6:And make sure you check out our sponsors. They keep us in business. Now go write some code.

57:40Speaker 1:See you next time.

57:41Speaker 4:You got jam Vans

57:50Speaker 6:And