Open source

`5:38:47`

— And then they might walk away. I wish I had more insight into their mind state of the individual people that are running these projects, like if they're feeling sad or they need more money or they're like, it's just such a dark box. — It can be. — I mean of course there's some communication, but I just sadly see too often they just kind of walk away. — Right, and I think that's actually also part of the beauty of open source. — Is walking away. — You are not obligated to do this code forever. You're obligated to do this for as long as you wanna do it. That's basically your own obligation. — But there is a, I know, okay... So you might criticize some pushback. You did write a blog post on forever, until the end of the internet with ta-da list. There is a beautiful aspect and you found a good balance there. But I don't know, you're bringing so much joy to people with this thing you created. It's not an obligation, but there's a real beauty

`5:39:47`

to taking care of this thing you've created. There is and not forgetting. I think, what I think what the open source creator is not seeing enough and I mean there's like, how many lives you're making better. There's certain pieces of software that I just quietly use a lot. And like they bring my life joy and I wish I could communicate that well. There's ways to donate, but it's inefficient. It's usually hard to donate. — It is. There's some ways for some people that made it easier. GitHub donations is one way of doing it. I donate to a few people even though I don't love the paradigm. I also accept that we can have multiple paradigms. I accept that I can do open source for one set of motivations and other people can do open source for other motivations. We don't all have to do it the same way. But I do want to counter the misconception that open source is somehow high in a crisis unless we all start paying for open source. That model already exists. It's commercial software. It works very well and plenty of great companies

`5:40:49`

have been built off the back of it. And the expectations are very clear. I pay you this amount and I get this software. Open source, once you start mixing money into it, gets real muddy real fast. And a lot of it's just from those misaligned expectations. That if you feel like you're starving artists as an open source developer and you are owed X amount of money because your software is popular, you're delusional and you need to knock that off. Just get back on track where you realize that you're putting gifts into the world. And if you get something back in terms of monetary compensation, okay, that's a bonus. But if you need that money back in terms of monetary compensation, you just charge for software or go work for a software company that will employ you to do open source. There's tons of that. That is probably actually the primary mode that open source software is being developed in the world today. Commercial companies making open source that they need themselves and then contributing it back. — So I'm glad you sort of like drew some hard lines here.