OSS Book Review: Nadia Eghbal's Working in Public - The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software

Show Notes:

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Transcript:

Bekah: 00:07

Hello and welcome to season nine, episode two of the Virtual Coffee podcast. We're grateful to be sponsored by Level Up Financial Planning, who understands the importance of finding balance between having an awesome life today and being confident and excited about your future possibilities. If you want to take your financial confidence to the next level, check out levelupfinancialplanning.com and you can get that link in our show notes. I'm Bekah and this is a podcast that features the members of the Virtual Coffee community, where we're an intimate group of people at all stages of our tech journey. And we're here on this podcast, sharing our stories and what we've learned. And we're all here to share it with you. Here with me today is my co host, Dan.

Dan: 00:53

Yo, what up, Bek? How's it going?

Bekah: 00:56

Hey, it's going fantastic.

Dan: 00:58

I feel like I need a, I feel like I need a spookier, uh, welcome now that we're into, you know, Hacktoberfest season. Um,

Bekah: 01:05

Is Hacktoberfest spooky?

Dan: 01:07

maybe, maybe I should, well, it's just in the spirit of, you know, Halloween and stuff, right?

Bekah: 01:12

Hmm. Yes,

Dan: 01:13

I guess maybe not. Hacktoberfest is really based on Oktoberfest, which is less spooky and more drunken. So maybe,

Bekah: 01:20

beer, so

Dan: 01:21

yes, out of like, out of steins.

Bekah: 01:23

We failed. I don't have a stein. Do we need Virtual Coffee steins? Do we need a,

Dan: 01:28

we probably do. Yeah, no,

Bekah: 01:30

Virtual Coffee beer. We have Virtual Coffee coffee, now we need beer. So in, uh, during Hacktoberfest, should we shift? We're not, no longer Virtual Coffee, we're Virtual Beer?

Dan: 01:42

Uh, it's worth, it's worth

Bekah: 01:44

drink. Virtual Calming Drinks.

Dan: 01:49

Uh, Virtual Lederhosen. Um, anyway, so yes, today in today's episode, we are hanging out with, uh, Jessica and Brian, and we're talking about, uh, you know, in our open source season, we're talking about a book about open source. It's called Working in Public, the Making of Maintenance and Open Source Software by Nadia Egbal. And we read it as a, uh, as in our Virtual Coffee book club. Um, and it seemed really cool. And so they came to, uh, kind of talk about that and what we, what we learned and some insights from the book.

Bekah: 02:28

Yeah, it's like incredibly useful to read this book. Um, and you can still check out all of the links that we have in our discussions online. So I think that we do a pretty good overview in this episode of talking about the things that are covered, but there are many more in depth discussions on our discussion board, which you'll find posted in the links. Um, and it's worth I think that, you know, I have been doing open source contributions for the last couple of years and reading the book helped me to reframe my perspective and to consider the impact that I have as a contributor on open source and also realize as a maintainer, like, okay, so what are the things that I need to consider going forth? Um, so it's definitely worth a read, but this is a really great place to start and we appreciate everybody here who is willing to listen.

Dan: 03:18

Yeah, absolutely. Uh, I, um, as a confession, did not read the book before the podcast. Um, but I have it on my list now to read. And, uh, it was still, I found a really good discussion. Um, and it seems like some good insights there and some good talking points too for, for kind of group discussion. So I would suggest anybody. That is interesting. Open source either as a contributor or a maintainer to check it out as I am going to check it out.

Bekah: 03:45

100%. I will, I will even, uh, email somebody, not email, send somebody my copy with all of my notes. I'm like a big fan of writing in the book, so if you're interested in looking at all of my notes, let us know in the comments and I will send it to somebody. So you can check out all of the things that I wrote in the book. Um, but today we're going to go ahead and introduce ourselves with our names, where we're from, and what we do in our random check in question. And we very much hope that you do enjoy this episode. Today's question is, what is the last open source project you Contributed to, my name is Becca. I am developer experience lead at Opensource. I'm from a small town in Ohio, and the last open source project I contributed to was either Virtual Coffee. We launched a new monthly challenge yesterday for prep Eptember, uh, and I made a couple edits to the monthly challenge page or to one of the open source repositories, so it would be. Docs, Intro, Guestbook, all of those I am frequently making updates to. So, um, nothing major, just some minor text changes, but that's where I was last.

Dan: 05:10

Uh, okay. My name is Dan. I live in Cleveland. I do web stuff all over the place. And the last... Open source contribution was actually on the next JS, um, repo, but it was not code at all. Right. So my, my open source contribution was like contributing to issues, uh, and commenting on a pull request that one of the maintainers was making. Um, and, uh, yeah, I'm counting that. I'm we're, we're trying to virtual copy to, to push the fact that like open source contributions don't have to be just code or whatever, don't even have to be pull requests. So that, that was mine. And I was. I was, I was proud of it. I got some input in and stuff. And, uh, so yeah, um, Brian, why don't you go ahead?

Brian: 05:50

Hi, I'm Brian. I'm a senior Elixir dev, uh, currently living in Indiana. Uh, and my latest open source contribution to something that wasn't like my own personal project was actually also documentation, uh, in Elixir, the, the dominant web frameworks called Phoenix, and I updated some of their docs.

Dan: 06:10

Nice. All right, go ahead, Jessica.

Jessica: 06:13

Yeah. Hi. Uh, so the last open source project I contributed to was, uh, Josh's, uh, Josh Goldberg's, uh, create TypeScript app, uh, cause he posted, I believe a few weeks ago that he had opened some issues. And so I popped over to that repository and worked on one of the issues.

Bekah: 06:30

All right, this is awesome, um,

Dan: 06:32

wait, I'm sorry. Real quick, Jessica, can you do the, your name and, uh, you know, what you do and stuff too?

Jessica: 06:38

Oh, sure. Yes. Hi, I am Jessica Wilkins, and I work full time with FreecoCamp, um, mainly with the curriculum development team. Uh, so exciting stuff coming in the next few months.

Bekah: 06:51

woo, yeah, very excited, um, and one of my other contributions It's pretty recent. I think within the last month was to one of the free CodeCamp repositories and Jessica coached me through that. So shout out to Jessica for being awesome. Um, so today we're going to be doing something a little bit different. So rather than an interview style podcast, since we're focusing on open source this season, we are going to be talking about one of the book club books that we just finished reading, which is called Working in Public by Nadia Iqbal. Sorry if I, uh, did not pronounce that correctly. And the subtitle there is The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software. So, Jessica is going to give us a little summary of what the book is about.

Jessica: 07:38

Yeah, so I thought this was a great book there and it gave like great insights into kind of what maintainers have to deal with in terms of, Uh, building out open source projects and maintaining them. Uh, so the book kind of starts off with, um, just a little bit of history of open source. And I think a lot of developers, particularly those that entered within the, like, past five or even ten years, Um, have mainly been used to, like, Git and GitHub, but there was a whole other history before that. And so it, it was nice to see the book kind of open up with different open source, um, uh, you know, uh, services. Besides... Like GitHub and then also different source control besides Git. Um, and so that was really nice to kind of get that history. Um, and then we kind of dive into the different challenges that maintainers have to face. Um, and particularly there was a lot of interesting sections about maintainers that started off with like pet projects and then it kind of exploded and then the challenges that it faces and then. Uh, some maintainers walking away from those projects. Um, and then it also talks about the challenging aspects of how do you get paid with open source, uh, projects. And so I think it's a, a very good read that everybody should kind of look into. Uh, it's a nice, like behind the scenes look on like the challenges that maintainers have to go through.

Bekah: 08:55

Thanks, Jessica. I appreciate that. And I, let's start there with some of the challenges. I, we're probably not going to... Review this book linear linearly? Chronologically? I don't know, uh, from chapter one to the end what we're going to do is just probably skip around because that's where my brain is at this morning, but um that idea of challenges because I I think that that was one of the things that was Um, really kind of eye opening for me. So I've contributed to open source for the last couple of years at Virtual Coffee We always do a big hacktoberfest thing that's actually like one of the things that we talk about being like the birth of Virtual Coffee the Um, we've been doing it for a while, but that's what really kind of solidified the organization as something Hey, let's like learn and grow together and Do things. Um, and so I've always encouraged folks to get into open source. And one of the biggest challenges that I think the book talks about is not having repeat contributors and the amounts of energy that maintainers put into each of the contributors and how that, how it's impacted when you don't have the continuous contributions. And so, um, I'd like to kind of open up the contra the conversation there and see what your take is on, um, people who are, are jumping in and making contributions versus people who are continually contributing and how that impacts the project. And I'm going to send it over to Brian first for that one.

Brian: 10:24

Yeah, I've been kind of conflicted on this throughout reading the book. Uh, I was sort of gathering my thoughts on it this morning and I've kind of come down on the side of, I would. While reading the book, I was pretty hard on casual contributors, uh, in our discussions, uh, mostly because of having run open source projects in the past, small ones, where you do get these sort of drive by contributions, and as a maintainer of a small project at the time, you feel this pressure to like, oh, someone's interested in my project. That's awesome. Uh, I'll accept it no matter what. And I made mistakes doing it that way. Uh, looking back on it more, like I was really excited by those casual contributions at the time. Like, so I think it depends on the size of the project on a, on a small project. Those casual contributors are great. Like they're really motivating to keep you involved. And like, someone is actually looking at this thing. Someone's actually using it and someone actually cares, but for larger projects, which is what a lot of the book is focused on, they're talking, talking to. Maintainers of larger projects or maintainers of many, many projects. Uh, I do think that becomes a problem for them. Uh, one, uh, maintainer specifically talked about just dreading opening up their GitHub notifications because there's so many of them, it is just a never ending battle that you're, you're never going to get on top of. So yeah, it really depends on the size of the project and where it is and it's in its life cycle. That's to how helpful or how much of a hindrance those casual contributions can be.

Bekah: 11:59

Yeah, uh, thanks Brian. I, I definitely appreciate that. And I think that you, it might've been one of your responses. We have the whole book club discussion on our GitHub discussion. So we'll make sure that we post that in the show notes. Uh, it said like, like so many things, it depends, right. You know, whether or not this is useful and, you know, Jessica, I know that you do a lot of work. Um, probably with casual contributors in the Free Code Camp repositories. And these are a lot of folks who are getting their first contributions. And it kind of makes sense, I think, for folks getting their first contribution to just try and find whatever the, I don't know, low hanging fruit or there's probably a better term for it, to get started, to feel a little bit more comfortable before they can build those relationships. And so, um, you know, from your perspective as a maintainer, How do you think that the casual contributions impact your projects? And after reading the book, do you have any thoughts on how you'll approach your projects and casual contributions this year?

Jessica: 13:05

Yeah, yeah, as I was reading it, because the book talked a lot about, like, sometimes maintainers were a little bit resentful of, like, casual contributions, because they knew that they would make a couple of contributions and then they would just disappear, and, like, most people don't see that. I'm going to stick around long term and they're like, okay, I'm going to put all this effort into working with them for a short period and then they just bounce and then I'm stuck with all this extra work. Um, and so I, I can definitely see where a lot of maintainers are coming from, particularly from like larger projects there. Um, I, I still really enjoy helping new contributors on board to the project and learning how to work with Git and GitHub for the first time and getting those first few, uh, contributions in. And I, I think I just go into it knowing like. Most people, they're not going to be around, um, they have a very specific purpose, and the book kind of broke this up a little bit into like, most casual contributors, they go into it knowing they're, they're going into it for a specific reason, whether it's like Hacktoberfest or they're just learning for the first time and they want to play around with different open source projects, and then they move on for a variety of reasons, and the people that end up Staying a little bit longer. They were, they went into that project knowing that they were going to contribute a little bit more. Um, and that's been my personal, uh, you know, story there too, where certain projects that I've stuck around with, particularly with Free Kamp, is because I was using it a lot. And then I started contributing more and more and I went in with the intention of like, I'm going to stick around. And I think that's most people's mentality. And so I, I, I can kind of see where maintainers would. We get a little frustrated where they're just like, Oh, I'm putting all this work in. And then you're just going to bounce like a month later. Um, particularly with like Hacktoberfest, which is coming up, uh, where you get this like huge flurry. I know that, uh, with a few of our free CodeCamp repositories, we're going to get a huge flurry of contributors, uh, opening up issues, um, and requesting new features. And the book talks about this too, where people. will request new features, but then there's not ongoing support to maintain those new features. Um, and so there's, there's that kind of balance where it's like, okay, it'd be cool to have this new feature, but we've got to like maintain it, not just, you know, build it and then walk away from it. And so I liked how the book kind of dived into the ongoing maintenance and who's going to help, uh, especially loan contributors, um, and developers on these projects, like who's going to help them maintain as the project grows, um, Explanation right there.

Bekah: 15:32

Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a really good point. Who is going to maintain this thing? And I think that's one of the biggest considerations to think about when you are developing features for something, right? Like, people might ask for an amazing feature and like, yeah, that would rock, but... Who is going to maintain that? And so there's a lot of conversations I think that happen behind the scenes that you might not understand unless or until you maintain an open source repository. And I'm gonna toss it over to you, Dan, to, I know that like we do a lot of Virtual Coffee to try and help people, um, with, uh, first time contributions and kind of progress from there, do you want to talk about your perspective of kind of building that open source journey for our members?

Dan: 16:15

Yeah, it's, it's a complicated thing, right? And, and there's, you know, especially in regards, in regards to, you know, casual contributors and what, you know, uh, versus contributors that contribute over time. Um, it, I, I'm usually not trying to build, like in Virtual Coffee, right? In our, in our goals and everything like that. The idea of trying to get somebody that is going to contribute a lot is really nice. And like I tried, you know, that'd be great. And I like very much try to encourage people to do that, but I am like, I'm happy when people can, can contribute once and get through it. And that's like, that's cool with me too. Right. Um, our, our big thing, especially with Hacktoberfest is to, um, Break the seal, I guess, for people, right? It, it, like uh, is like to, to get them over the hump of that first, like the first or second one. Um, because it, it can be so, um, you know, I don't know, daunting, right? Uh, to, to try to contribute to open source. Even if you are, uh, an experienced developer, um, and know the code really well, like, you know, you could look at an issue and say, I know exactly how I'm gonna fix that. And still like, That there's, there's so many, there's so many like things that go into contributing open source. If you haven't done it before, um, it can make, it can, it can put up some, some internal walls, right? And so that's, that's our, that's our like goal with Virtual Coffee, especially, uh, with Hacktoberfest is, um, breaking down those. those barriers for people and, and helping people sort of hold their hands if they need it, you know, um, and reduce, reduce the barriers for getting your first steps into open source. Right. And so with that in mind, you know, we don't like, I don't get frustrated when people do make a contribution and then wander off, you know, uh, in general. Um, and I, I think if somebody wants to knock out some. small issue and then they do it and then they don't come back. Like that's fine because the issue is done for me. You know, um, the, but like that isn't to say that, uh, repeat contributors, people have been around for a while. People know the projects, uh, aren't like the things that they can do are going to be more valuable. Right. And so I'm not going to trust, probably, I'm not going to trust some like large change or, uh, uh, change that, you know, changes that need some more thought. You know, um, like sometimes we have issues that are very specific. Just do this one thing. Sometimes we have issues that are like, improve this thing, you know, somehow. Right. Like, you know, and, and those are the kinds of things that like, I'm going to be much more, um, happy with one of our contributors that have been around for a while and know the project know, um, with Virtual Coffee, like then there's. There's not just like the code that's involved, but also, you know, our community and our, you know, I don't know, our vibe, right? Uh, you know, so lots of the lots of the Virtual Coffee contributions end up being content, you know, and so that stuff needs to be in line. So, like, IU is one of our Um, and she is just complete, like a few, one, like very large re like reorganized all of our resources. Right. Cause our resources were getting, um, we had a good problem where we had too many, you know, they weren't organized very well and all that stuff. And so, um, that's not the kind of thing that I would have just like thrown up an issue on and just hit yes to whoever random person, you know, uh, wanted to do it. Um, so, so yeah. Um, and, and I forget. Yeah. Who mentioned this, but like with Hacktoberfest, you, if you participate in the, like, Hacktoberfest label and all that stuff, you will have a lot more random people. So that's, like, a little bit more of, that can be a problem in Hacktoberfest. Like, I don't mind so much that, uh, they contribute and then leave, you know? But the... There are a lot of people who are just trying to like, knock things out really quick, you know, and without a lot of thought, that kind of thing. Um, and so that can be a problem, you know, um, so like there's like one time contributors and there's casual, not trying very hard contributors, right? And those, those can be different too, you know? So, um, I don't know if that makes sense, but that's kind of my thoughts on the matter.

Bekah: 20:35

Yeah, for sure. I think that definitely makes sense and that goes into the idea of like maintaining the project and the challenges that come along with that too. The spam that you get is, that requires emotional energy or brain power at the very least. And that's something that she talks about in the book to, um, overcome and to think about like, okay, I have to deal with this. And that takes away time from doing the things that, that they want to be doing. Writing the code or, you know, creating the issues and that kind of thing. Um, Jessica, you mentioned the maintenance of open source software. So why don't we take the conversation in that direction? So what are some of the considerations for maintaining the software that they talk about in the book?

Jessica: 21:18

Yeah, I think that a lot of it centered around just having enough people to maintain some of those larger features. Particularly, there was this reoccurring theme where, like, individual, like, smaller projects, they were all pet projects. And they started off as these, like, small little pet projects that a solo developer or maybe a couple of developers worked on. And then it just kind of exploded. And, um, it was interesting to see how it just grew exponentially. And then... All of a sudden they're like, Oh my gosh, how the heck do we maintain this thing? Cause this was just my small little pet project. Like they never thought it was going to grow past just a few people using it. And now tens of thousands of people are using this. And so they just get overwhelmed with like. Okay, who's going to stick around and help me maintain this thing? Or, you know, I have a full time job and I have to kind of maintain this thing and, and so, uh, that the book kind of kept continuing to talk about those, uh, issues there on just basically like time because, you know, one of the themes was like, you know, money and financial aspects because a lot of people are working on, uh, open source projects even through their company, uh, won't allocate a lot of like Dedicated time and I was in that situation where at my last company we had a few open source projects and there would be seasons where we would like go full force on these open source projects and add all these different features and then we get into maintenance mode and it would just kind of sit there for a little bit and even though we were paid to like You know, work on those projects, like, when it got to, like, maintenance mode, um, it just sometimes just sat there for a while and, like, uh, new features that we were supposed to implement kind of just went by the wayside because we were working on client projects. And so it's just like, it seems like a complicated issue that we're still trying to figure out. I think the book does a good job of kind of seeing it from, like, different, uh, different angles there. Yeah.

Bekah: 23:11

Yeah, absolutely. Uh, there's so many different challenges that you don't think of. And there are some stories about maintainers that are like, I'm, I'm done. I'm not maintaining this anymore. Like people would get mad at them. Right. And that's, I talked to an open source maintainer last week or the week before, and they were reading me some of the mass messages that they get from users of the software. And these people are using it for free. And they were. So mean! I don't understand why someone would be mean like that and I do understand why some people were like, hey, I'm doing this for free. I don't care how many users I have. I'm done. Like, see you later. You figure it out. And that, you know, that's one of the big things that we have to be able to address because we don't want to get to the point where like, huge projects, suddenly nobody Like, peace out, uh, I don't want to do this anymore, right? Or like what just happened with Terraform, um, HashiCorp changed the license on it. I, we're going to talk about licenses later in the season. Um, but there are like different things that can impact that. And I think that if we're not looking into how do we support maintainers, that we're going to see more of this stuff happen down the line, especially as maintainers, like. Age out. I don't really know what the right term for that is there, but like, hey, I don't want to do this anymore. I'm retiring or whatever, and there's nobody there to take the reins on that thing. Um, Brian, do you have any thoughts on the section or, well, it's not really a section. She talks about maintainers throughout the book and the, how to support them or the challenges that they face that you'd like to share.

Brian: 24:49

This is one of those cases where like, I think it's, I've been doing this professionally for 16 years now. So I have some experience in the pre Git and pre GitHub world. And there's a quote near the end of the book that really jumped out to me. It was like, public does not imply participatory. And GitHub makes that really hard. You can turn off a lot of features in GitHub, but you can't turn off all of them. You cannot turn off, uh, accepting pull requests on your repo. Uh, so you, you, there's many people who would like be happy to put their code out there for others to use it, but they are not looking to participate in a community with their project. And the, the book brings up the, the big example of that is the creator of Closure, um, Rich Hinke, I believe is his name. I may have got that wrong. But the creator of Clojure is like, he's very much like, this is my project. Um, there's a tight group of other people who are allowed to contribute to it. And he's not accepting anything from anybody else. He's not even going to look at it. And GitHub makes that really hard. Whereas before it was kind of just the default. There were tools like SourceForge and other things that were mostly just an exercise in pain. There's a reason GitHub won, uh, but just the idea that it's really hard to opt out and to protect your time. Because the, as a maintainer of a larger project, the, the bottleneck is going to be your time and how you allocate that. And is it going to be, uh, participating in the community? Is it going to be onboarding more maintainers so that you're increasing the amount of maintainer time that's available? Uh, or is it just going to be. This is my project. Other people may choose to use it, uh, but I'm, I'm not looking for outside contributions.

Bekah: 26:47

Yeah, and I, I wonder if, um. The green squares is part of the problem here. I know at OpenSauce we always talk about like, it's more, contributions are more than the green squares, right? Um, because people are always trying to, you know, fill, fill that GitHub chart with, hey look, I have made different contributions to things. Because those are the contributions that like literally count, right? Having commits and PRs to things. Whereas, um, Those other aspects of maintaining a project, maintaining the community, answering questions, writing issues, updating documentation, like all of those things are incredibly valuable and they take up tons of maintainer time, but they're not rewarded. In the same way. And so maybe like reconsidering what counts as a contribution could help to take some pressure off of that. But, uh, I think Brian, that's a really good point to bring up that not everybody wants to make this a community project and it would be great to have some safeguards in place for folks who, who don't want to, they just want to share their code and make that available online.

Jessica: 27:57

Yes, absolutely. But, uh, but I thought one kind of touched that reminded me of like another aspect, which I guess we'll get into the financial aspect later but like has some of these like developers like like Evan you with view like he's one of the. Main, you know, like that's one of like the major libraries that the JavaScript community uses and like, he's still like trying to get ongoing support and whatnot for his project, especially like financially with the conversations around like Patreon and stuff, which is just crazy because it's like so many people use Vue and like he still has like a Patreon account and is like raising funds that way. And I'm just like, why, how did we get here? So the, the, the, I think the financial aspects. The basics of all of this are, like, complex, to say the least, where you have, like, people that have run literally, like, I think in the book they said there was one guy that had, like, 1, 100 or supposedly, like, 1, 100 packages in libraries that, uh, he was maintaining, and he was still trying to figure out ways to, like, get funding for that, which is, like, insane to me, so it's just, yeah, it's crazy.

Bekah: 29:11

I think that's such a huge challenge. I mean, I've heard nearly every maintainer talk about that, right? There's an expectation that people can use your work for free, right? Um, and... There's not that much that can, that that's being done about that. So I don't know, maybe we can talk a little bit more about that now. Cause I think that, that this is a key part, like, um, both to, uh, sustaining open source, but also to preventing burnout in maintainers, because I think most of us know that if you're just volunteering for free over and over and over, um, that it can. It can be really tough. And the one analogy that's used in the book, and what chapter is this? Chapter five is the one of the Christmas lights. Let me see if I can find that really quickly. Um,

Jessica: 30:02

Yeah, I actually like that one where she talks about how, like, uh, basically she's talking about, like, how our neighbors, like, want to put up their Christmas lights because they want to do it. It's not like they're... And then, but she says, like, you would never in the real life walk up to somebody's door and be like, I want to see these Christmas lights and decorations. Like, no one would do, no sane person would do that. Uh, but then online, we seem to, like, feel more comfortable. demanding things and for free and and so I did really like that analogy where it's like people put up their Christmas lights for them. It makes them happy and they have their own set of decorations, um, but you would never just walk up to someone's door and be like, hey I want to see this reindeer in this corner of your lawn and I want to see these lights and all this other stuff. But in software, it seems to be just okay to demand certain features and, and not really want to kind of like contribute or pay for that. And so I, I did really like that, that analogy that she used towards the end of the book there.

Bekah: 31:06

yeah, there's the other analogy, um, free as in beer. Brian, do you want to talk about that? Because I know that you did comment on it.

Brian: 31:13

Yeah, so there's, there's a distinction between free as in beer versus free as in speech. And I've never liked the, like, the term free as in beer. Um, but I did like, um, let me see if I can find my notes on it real quick. The, the concept of free as in puppy. I, I thought that was a much better, uh, analogy for maintainership. Like, you're given this thing and you have to, it's awesome at first. Uh, everybody wants to come see it. Everybody wants to help you out. But then, you know, the puppy grows up and it still needs lots of attention, but the rest of the community is not quite as interested in helping you out with, with your dog anymore. There's, there's more puppies somewhere else now. Uh, so I thought that was a, a much better analogy for maintainership than free as in beer has been over time.

Bekah: 32:01

Yeah, and those are, those are both like, that's part of the challenge, right, of, of maintainership and trying to support maintainers. Um, what are some of the ways that she talks about in the book about how we can support maintainers? Yeah.

Jessica: 32:15

Yeah, I think that she, she offers a few different like suggestions there in terms of like, um, I think she also commented about how GitHub, because I think we've, you know, talked about how GitHub is by far the market leader. I mean, there's others like Bitbucket and GitLab, but GitHub by far is still like the market leader in this, um, but she talked about possibly getting You know, if there was more support from GitHub and how there was like, supposed to be a list of features that maintainers were asking for, um, that would help them, uh, in helping maintain these, uh, you know, uh, different open source repositories and kind of like, The, the push and pull from, from GitHub and how GitHub even acknowledged like, Hey, yeah, we, we could do a little bit better in that area and kind of help you guys out. Um, and so she did talk a little bit about that. Um, and then also just like maintaining like the community size and, and like we talked to her a little bit earlier about how like some contributors or some open source maintainers will be very selective, um, and sometimes a little bit. Um, and we did talk about that in the, or they talked about that in the book, um, as well, but maybe that is one of the solutions of just like onboarding a little bit slower without being too gatekeepy and like, what is, you know, like what, what's the line there? Um, and that maybe if we onboard a little bit slower and, and you, you know, people start off with. Maybe some smaller contributions and slowly but surely are entered into more responsibility or, um, or maybe there's certain things that they, like, can't contribute to just yet, um, and just finding different ways to kind of, a lot of this has been centered around, like, I guess, techniques and kind of slowing up that, uh, instead of just having like everybody just contribute right away, um, which might work, but there's that delicate line where it's like, you know, some people kind of take it too far and are a little bit too gatekeepy and it, it rubs people the wrong way where they're just like, I had a poor experience. Um, and so she does talk a little bit about that in the middle of the book there.

Bekah: 34:25

Yeah, Brian, do you have anything to add to that?

Brian: 34:29

Um, just thoughts around the financial aspect. Really, there's, uh, there's a dividing line where If you're an individual maintainer and you're taking contributions, they say through Patreon or GitHub subscriptions, there's some threshold that needs to be crossed before that is even valuable to you at all. And it's not just coffee money or something like that. And getting a project large enough to actually be able to support you is pretty rare. Like. Evan Yu, the creator of Yu, even his, um, I haven't looked at the numbers recently. Like he's not making a ton of money, um, through, through Patreon for the project. Did you contrast that against accepting corporate contributions? And that gets into a whole like tax situation where corporations are not going to want to support these individual contributors because basically you're in a contracting arrangement then. And a lot of these people don't want to, don't know how to. Set up an LLC or something like that, where, you know, the company will feel more comfortable giving them money or setting up a foundation. The company will feel more comfortable setting up the money. They don't want the, the overhead and bureaucracy of doing that sort of thing when they're just trying to maintain some open source project. So there's this tugging, there's this tension, really, depending on what your project is doing. You're more likely to be able to make some sort of living off it through corporate contributions than individual. Uh, But there's more overhead and getting set up to be able to do that.

Dan: 36:14

Point, you know, it's, it's always something to think about. And like, that's true, even if somehow you had no corporate contributions and all just individual contributor, uh, you know. financial contributors. Uh, it's just like you're in America. Anyway, you'll have to pay taxes if you're getting over some amount of money, you know? Um, and you know, like that idea and I, it made me want to, we don't really have time for me to just sit here and Google things right now, but it made me wonder if there's like, what, what kind of support there is out there for like legal support for open source, you know, maintainers. Um, maybe there's. You know, because like I have set up an LLC a couple times and it's, I don't know, overall, it's not too hard, but it's still like something to think about. And then you have to do taxes and all that. stuff. Right. And it is like, Brian, you're totally right. It's like, it can be complicated for sure. I think if you are planning on doing it for your, like, to try to get to a point where you can make a living off of it, it's. It's just going to be worth it and part of, you know, the deal. But like, even if you're making a couple, like a thousand dollars a month or something, which is not a living amount of money, but it is like that, I think it's probably in America going to be over the threshold where the IRS is going to expect you to give them some of that, unfortunately. Um, and, and So yeah, Brian, like, like that's a totally great point. It's like the legal aspect of like, uh, of accepting contributions and how that works, um, I think would be a great. Place for some, you know, some resources or somebody to like dive into that. And maybe it already exists. I haven't. Like I said, I, that made me want to Google it. So I'm going to do that after we're done here. But, um, I think like raising that, like raising that thought is, is really good. And I hadn't really, um, I hadn't really considered that, like how much, cause mostly because I am independent. So I already have my LLC. Like everything I do is just through my LLC already. And it's like, I did a long time ago, so I don't think about it anymore. But yeah, if you haven't been down that road, totally like. Another thing that is totally, um, can seem scary and like you don't know what to do, don't know where to go, don't want to talk to you, all that stuff. So, I'm glad you brought that point up because I think it's a really good one.

Bekah: 38:15

So as we kind of close out this conversation, um, I, the last question, one of the last questions I asked in the book club was how did you feel after finishing this? Were you optimistic, unsure, still pondering? And I know at least for me, like this is a lot of really great information about open source projects because I'm kind of limited to the ones that I've maintained, which have all been smaller projects. Uh, in my experience talking to maintainers, which I've talked to maintainers of, you know, like mid size projects, but it was really enlightening to see and to really explore. I actually, the, there were a couple of questions where I'm like Virtual Coffee in a lot of ways is we, we've always based what we do on. We are inspired by the open source ecosystem and this is how we're trying to run our community as well. And so much of it just like clicked for me. I'm like, oh yes, I feel that pain point. Or like, oh, I'm not the only one that feels that, right? And so there was like a, I felt like a sense of belonging a little bit more, I think after reading this, but also of understanding some of the underlying issues that a lot of. Folks are feeling. So I don't know that how I feel after reading, I guess I would feel, uh, steel pondering. That's not really a feeling. But that's what I'm doing. That is the action that I continue to have is thinking through these things and, and searching for answers. 'cause I think the book poses a lot of really gr great questions and there's still a ton of room to provide answers for this, so I would love to hear what you all have to say. Um, About, about that.

Jessica: 39:48

Yeah, I guess I will. We'll jump in. Yeah, I think that like, I think we're moving in a healthier direction, but we still have a lot of things to figure out. And like, one of the interesting aspects of the book we're talking about when people like walked away from their open source projects, or they just I just didn't want to maintain it anymore, like, it brought up the, uh, controversy with the left pad, where it was only like 16 lines of code, and the guy's like, look, I'm done, like, I don't want to do this anymore, and like, so many other projects, like, depended on that, where it just, like, broke the internet, and, um, and so, Those, I think we are going to still have more of those aspects because especially with like npm and how it's all structured where there's like packages on packages of packages where there might be some small little another left pad where somebody is just like you know what I'm done I'm going to walk away and then how many other packages, is that going to affect? I do think that's going to continue to happen and I don't know if we have a solution for that. Um, and as if like in that left hand case, like basically someone else just jumped in and like recreated like their own version, but it's like, can we keep doing that? What if it's like something more complex? And the book kind of talks a little bit about that. So I think overall we're moving a little bit more and healthier. I think we should still have more like conversations within the software community in general about what we could do with open source, particularly with maintainers. And if we continue with this conversation and keep asking these types of questions, then we can hopefully get some some answers down the road there.

Dan: 41:23

That's awesome. the, left pad thing is very interesting. Um, I'd encourage you if you don't know what that means to go read the, uh, read the story. It's, it's very, very fascinating. Um, Brian, any, uh, final thoughts on that?

Brian: 41:34

At the, I guess I'm still in the pondering camp of the, the stuff that I hadn't considered coming into the book is sort of the social relationships around the ecosystem, especially like parasocial relationships with social media, where like, I'm very familiar with parasocial relationships outside of the tech community and social media, but I hadn't actually considered it. Being part of this ecosystem as well. And stepping back, like I, I work in Elixir. There's a couple very well known people that, you know, are extremely important in the community and I would definitely qualify, I would consider my relationship. With them, that's parasocial, but I had never thought of it through that lens. So there's an interesting way, uh, to think about it going forward.

Dan: 42:22

Really quick, define parasocial for people who are not me that might not know what it means.

Brian: 42:28

Sure. So parasocial relationships are basically one sided relationships through social media, where, for example, you follow someone on Twitter and you feel, you know, a lot about them. You feel that they're your friend, but, uh, you are never going to have an actual interaction with them. Or if you do, it'll be a very brief interaction.

Dan: 42:49

Got it. So it's kind of like, is it the origin of that word kind of based on parasite? Is that what that is?

Brian: 42:56

I am not sure. I have thought the same thing though.

Dan: 42:59

Yeah. Okay. Um, no, like that's a, it's, it's a really good point. And like, that is a good word. And we all, I think in this day and age are very familiar with that sort of relationship and have, you know, I'd certainly do, you know, um, a lot of people both in code and, and that stuff. And the idea of, um, An open source project having a, a social media, you know, presence, um, is always kind of interesting to you. That's a whole nother thing to manage if you're a maintainer, you know, I don't think, uh, I don't think I would suggest that for everybody or anything like that. But, um, it definitely can be a way to get the word out and also maybe spread some awareness about, um, you know, financial things or things like that. Um, okay. Well, everybody, I think we're going to wrap up. I thank you both for coming today. Um, I really appreciate it. We're going to be doing these every week for September and October. Um, so, you know, stay tuned and, um, Yeah. I think that's all we got. So Thanks. Jessica and Brian, and we will see you guys next time. Bye, everybody.

Jessica: 43:59

Yeah.

Brian: 44:00

Thanks.

Dan: 44:03

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Virtual Coffee Podcast. This episode was produced by Dan Ott and Bekah Hawrot Weigel, and edited by Ashley Mulder. If you have questions or comments, you can hit us up on Twitter @VirtualCoffeeIO or email us at podcast@virtualcoffee.io. You can find the show notes, sign up for the newsletter, buy some VC merch, and check out all of our other resources on our website, virtualcoffee.io. If you're interested in sponsoring virtual Coffee, you can find out more information on our website at virtualcoffee.io/sponsorship. Please subscribe to our podcast and be sure to leave us a review. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week.

The Virtual Coffee Podcast is produced by Dan Ott and Bekah Hawrot Weigel and edited by Dan Ott.