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2017-04-08
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  1. “I mean, that's a natural evolution. If you're saying that this is a wave of the future, or even is here, then why shouldn't it then take on the forms and functions of every other previous successful organization and company before it and ditch the ones that didn't work? Exactly. Okay, you guys. Well, thank you for joining the A6 and Z podcast. That was a lot of fun. Thank you.”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “The interface is always. I was blown away when we talked to Jan Larnhart from the hoodie project, and he said, it's a JavaScript library that has probably about as many contributors as users. They've done a very good job of building a great community that way. But it's sort of for building online, offline applications on top of CouchDB and things like that. Great community. But he was saying that in their community, they actually have a team of people that work on the marketing and actually talk to analysts on behalf of the project.”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Coming back to sort of like the holistic look at open source, I'm really interested in seeing how org structures for open source projects themselves is going to evolve, where it has been so lopsided to developers and code, but only really weighed, I think, like have sustainable projects and sustainable organizations is to bring in other types of skills to support all the things.”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Just personally, I've been mainly interested in the distributed web and a lot of the new stuff going on and the kind of peer-to-peer distributed web. And it's everything from IPFS to just to Tor to like blockchain is kind of in there. IPFS is an interplanetary file system. It's basically a way to, in a distributed fashion, store files and serve them out and eventually potentially even kind of replace HTTP as a transport for web-like applications. And then peer-to-peer in general is just everything from BitTorrent to, yeah. But there are some new web standards that really help bring a lot of this along, like WebRT.”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Yeah, that is all very true, but it is very complicated to implement, especially as we get better at managing open source projects without institutional infrastructure, people become more resistant to it. Because it always adds something, right? It's always another thing to think about or to deal with. And I think that people really like to live in a world where they don't have to worry about a lot of those concerns.”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Working for a foundation now, I've come to respect some of the institutional infrastructure that you can get behind things. And I think that as we start to think of open source projects as infrastructure, you need some kind of institutional support for that. But it runs a little bit counter to this trend of everything getting smaller and more broken up and more distributed.”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Yeah, I think it's actually going to be one of the most interesting battles in open source moving forward. What is the role of companies going to be in open source moving forward? Because briefly summarized the history of open source, there was a time where companies were like, oh, we don't really want to use it because we don't think it's reliable. Then tons of startups got built using open source because big established companies didn't want to use it. They were like startups said we'll use it. You know, made tons of money. Now those startups are huge companies themselves.”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Yeah, I mean, this actually goes to your idea, Nadia, about there's no my and open source. It plays out very differently when the My is an enterprise. Totally, yeah. And it goes back to your guys' ideas about what happens about the good motives of the Google, Facebook's Twitters who then open source their internal tools.”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I do my work. And that's what I think the GitHub generation is much more interested in, like workflow collaboration process side of open source and the legal side of it. It's just almost less relevant.”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “The MIT license. So the MIT is a liberal license similar to the BSD license. And now I think the most popular license. Because it's a better license. And the Apache 2 license is a better license. But there's a lot of stuff going on with Apache as an identity and a lot of identity politics around open source. And so I think really why people have been taking MIT is it's a way to say, I just don't want to have that argument.”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “And to be fair, in a nod to the older generations, they don't see all that partially because there were previous generations that were fighting for all this stuff, to say, oh, now you can just copy paste this license and you're good. But there was a lot of work that had to be done to even”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “The GitHub generation, as you dub it, open source is the default. There's nothing to push against. So it really is just about being a regular person going about your day than about being an open source.”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “A lot of it is historical. The open source branding kind of helped open source win. And then when open source won, I think that a lot of the free software people went, well, that's not necessarily our values. We're going to glob onto this other identity. But then now the people that kind of stayed on the open source side of that also had a bunch of identity and a bunch of values associated with it. And their assumption is that everyone who comes to work on open source needs to acclimate to these values. And with this whole GitHub generation, these people are not grabbing those values before they contribute. They're contributing for a whole host of other reasons and we shouldn't expect them to share all of these exact values.”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Oh, I said I hate the term open source, which is admittedly was a little bit inflammatory to say that. I felt very tension coming in as an outsider and talking to some people who strongly believe this one thing is definitely a core value of open source. Then you turn and talk to other people and they're like, no, this exact opposite thing is also a core term open source. And it started to feel like the term open source is just sort of meaningless.”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “And sometimes they'll even try to retain some level of control, even without investment, which is even worse. But there are counterexamples. I mean, Google just gave Kubernetes over to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. And that's like, you know, an up-and-coming project that's getting lots of contributors and lots of new adoption. And that was just because for it to be a de facto standard, it needs to be in a neutral body, right? So there's some recognition. That is evolution.”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Like sometimes, we're really excited to announce that this is now open source, meaning we don't want to take care of it anymore, so go live over there. We'll give it to the community, except they haven't actually identified anyone in the community who wants to take care of it.”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “But I'm a little bit more critical of those projects in that they are open source technology. And while that's enough for Carl Fogel, it's not quite enough for me. Like I would like to see them under either open governance or just having contributors that don't work for that one company, right? Or having, like, I would like to know that the sustainability of this project is not dependent on how much money that they want to put into it. Because I've seen it just happen too many times where this ends up being more useful than that company has use for it and it becomes harder and harder for them to justify the continued investment that it takes for this growing community and growing number of use cases. I mean, like, you know, there are projects like Go at Google where they can continue to flow money into it because they're using it so much internally. But at some point, if they continue to be popular in the community, it is going to be bigger than just Google. And how are they?”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “So far, they've been contributing a ton of things. They've been open sourcing their thing because I think they recognize selfishly and unselfishly that for a lot of the most successful things, you need to create ecosystems around them. And that's a really important piece. I mean, even open sourcing TensorFlow.”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “I think so too. Micro Yeah. I mean, think about it as having all these easily accessible little Legos, and you can just kind of turn them into one building and you break them apart and you build something else with it or whatever. If the world can function that smoothly, then that would be great. That's an ideal to aspire to. You still need people to think about like. Why are we building it this way, or what does the actual system look like? And that role is actually kind of being filled lately by companies like Google or Facebook that have the resources to make big strides the way that academic institutions used to. That can also lead to a bleak future if we take it to its fullest extent.”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Yeah, yeah I'm a little bit biased, but also when I look at newer frameworks for a lot of this stuff, especially like React, they're actually assemble out of many tiny components now. So even our bigger projects are broken into tiny components just because they're easier to manage, to be honest.”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “It varies, but like you can take a few examples, React is like a very big JavaScript framework right now from Facebook. It's actually assembled out of many tiny components, but it's really easy to, for me at least, to poke in there and say, like, okay, what are the ideas in here that are going to last way beyond when anybody's using this framework? Like, they have this notion of DOM diffing and applying the differences to the DOM instead of just applying all the updates or replacing entire sections of the DOM. And like, that's really powerful. And there's already a dozen libraries to do that in different contexts. Once we move on to a new use case after that one use case, it's very hard for these frameworks to add things that help them into that use case. So what we end up doing is we break apart all the good ideas in the smaller components that are more reusable. So you're saying that's almost the inevitable.”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “That's the work we do. I tend to take the long view when I see larger projects like that or in general what you would call like a framework where you're usually what it usually is is there's a new use case. And in order to really fulfill that use case, somebody wants to take responsibility for the entire problem, not a piece of it. So they build a very large stack, a very large project to go after that. Once after like a few years though, you start to recognize what are the good ideas in that stack and what are the bad ones.”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Me, this is like one of the big questions around sustainability is not just how do we support the projects that already exist, but where all the new things going to come from that are really, really big when you don't have any sort of, honestly, like any sort of incentive for it, which I think government and academic institutions have traditionally done for software and they aren't necessarily participating in right now.”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Does this then leave the domain of the really big visionary projects to come out of academia, like the way Spark came out of AMP Lab, Apache Spark, where you have an entire new set of companies being built? I mean, they now have had like multiple conferences since they keep growing and growing.”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Like the decentralization of anything creator related these days, right? We used to have like 10 internet memes that were really funny. And now there could be a meme that got three million views or whatever and like no one even knows it exists. Smaller projects might be really wildly popular, but it just solved like one small piece or have their own size audience that's big enough for them but doesn't have to be like this the same sort of cult of personality we used to have.”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “So I think that one of the things that GitHub solved was they made it very low cost to have a lot of smaller projects. And so what you're seeing is that basically large projects, large applications are assembled out of a many, many tiny components. When you have these tiny components, they're scoped very well, right? Like they do this one or two things. They're not going to grow exponentially out of control. Whereas in older open source, when you were building a database, when you were building an operating system, there are a million potential directions that you can go in. There's a million ideas of what the scope of this should be by everybody else. And because it's so hard to set up the infrastructure for an open source project and get it going, there was a lot of incentive to try and get every feature ever into these projects. But that goes away and it actually becomes a lot easier to manage projects when they're much smaller scope.”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “But where does a vision come from? I'm not saying there has to be a cult of personality necessarily, but it's kind of amazing when there's sort of a driving person, a driving force that sort of motivates people into a new worldview, like whether it's Vitalik for Ethereum or Mike Kern in the early days of Bitcoin, Gavin at Bitcoin, whoever it is, Linus Torvalds for Linux, you know, like we can just keep going.”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Something's just dovetails with software itself and the process of making it is so much more accessible in the last five years than it ever has been before. Now you can see this happening even in like startups where we used to have this archetypal like I don't know college hacker or whatever who became the founder and now we are groaning about having these like more MBA types or whatever that are coming in. Part of it is just because it's becoming a lot easier to start a company and part of why it's easier to start a company is because we have open source software like Yeah, you don't have to actually write as much code yourself to get something up and running. You can just use other people's tools. And those tools are the open source tools.”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “The people that he was describing were technically oriented people, whether they were programmers or not, who, you know, in their own time wanted to go and mess around with something. And, you know, because they wanted to get recognition because they wanted Technical Towns, whatever. That was their motivation and that was kind of where they were coming from. Whereas today, open source runs every business, every technology, everybody is involved in it in some capacity if they're developing software. They contribute to and move around the open source software community as a contributor as part of their work, as part of their social life, as part of like any kind of side project that they do. And it's really usually not about recognition and about ego. I mean, all the people that are highly recognizable in modern open source communities would trade it for three more people to help them merge patches. I think some of this is really inverted.”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “So the continual bizarre is a very, very old Ericus Raymond essay on like basically describing open source, especially early open source. And at one point he does get into the incentives that people have. And the incentives he describes in that text are just no longer true. Like that's not why people get involved in open source. And what are the, what were the...”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “You can't have Funny thing is I remember when we were talking to Carl, he has this view of as long as it has an open source license, it doesn't matter how dysfunctional the project is because we as a community always have this ability to fork it, right? And didn't agree with him on this because just the practical reality of forking a project is such a huge overhaul. And you don't necessarily have the right people to do it at any particular time. And what you actually want are the healthy communities that have healthy practices. You want to be able to reform them and to keep them going.”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “You can take down your version that you put up, but you can't actually take it down from the public domain once it's out and it's been licensed a certain way, it's out there like anyone else can take it and modify it and make it their own. And that's terrifying to some people because it's like, wait, that's my project. You can't have my project. And it's like, well, because it's not your project because it's open source. And that's where the tension lies today.”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “There was like a very critical bug that was found in OpenSSL, and the question was, well, why did nobody find this before? And the answer was because there are like two, there's one paid person and there's like 10 volunteers that are working on this. Like, of course, they missed a bug. Sorry. And that led to this bigger thing from Linux Foundation and other organizations that were saying, like, how do we actually support these types of projects that they have the resources they need to protect all of the world's information right now today with so many different dependencies, the question of whether you have this possessive mai or associative my is important because if you want to take down your piece of code”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Yeah, yeah. And because they don't have this long onboarding process where they have to acclimate to the culture and this giant toolchain, they don't think about these kinds of ideals the way that everybody who's involved in open source in the 90s did, right? It was just one of the things that you went through in the onboarding process sort of informally, you acclimated to the culture.”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Yeah, we had Carl on the podcast, and he just had this idea of open source from the initial morals, not from, you know, what the law actually says, because all the legal stuff is just a hack in the law so that we can get to this place where we're all working on this thing together.”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “I even thought about that as a shift in the might. And I have to credit Carl Fogel, who was one of the original authors of Subversion for coming up with that and helping me think through that. But right now, like as more and more people are creating and contributing to open source and don't have the same attachment to, let's say, the legal battles of the 90s or the early 2000s, because everyone releases their stuff as open source, whatever, it's not a big deal. And they don't think about the fact that it's not your project. Once you make it open source, it is actually out there in the public for anybody to copy and use.”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Is no mind open source refers to the legal position of what open source is and just kind of speaks to the tension that we're feeling today from a new generation of people. So historically you think about open source as being like the code is the institution that we must protect and protect its freedom at all costs. I do not own the code because the code legally is out there in public domain. It's like out there for anybody to use, to copy, to modify. That's the definition of open source. And so instead of having a possessive my where you say like this is my bike you have an associate of my which is this is my friend and the code”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Yeah, I mean, it's cool. I mean, like, if you think about Git's only been around for 10 years-ish, it's not unusual to think that when you have new tools in the system, then the culture of how you work is going to change. We believe that for everything else, why would we not believe that for open source? And I think we're just in this sort of like transition period from open source practices that worked in like the 90s or early 2000s or whatever pre-git life and have to recognize that some things are just not the same anymore”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Yeah, yeah. The CTC, the governance body around Node. We actually discuss things, but I like that. So in Startup Land, everybody likes to talk about ask for forgiveness rather than permission. But the standard in all open source is you're constantly asking for permission and we guard this commit so strongly. And a lot of that comes down to the history of the toolchain, right? Like with CVS and with subversion, you could make pretty bad mistakes that were very hard to recover from that really took an expert in the tool. But Git isn't like that. Git is very forgiving. You really can't mess it up too much. And so what we've been pushing on is sort of liberalizing that commit access. Like once you get one thing in that is valuable, like we will onboard you as a committer very quickly.”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “I love that because I think that also reinforces this idea of these communities as sort of new organisms, the new nature of companies. Because I'm really fascinated by decentralized companies and decentralized organizations. And open source is one of the vectors to get there. But it's also interesting because going back to the human side, I remember Jim telling me a story about Linux Foundation where in the early days, one of the biggest lessons they learned was sometimes you just have to pick up the phone. And talk to a person directly, just human to human Like forget even kind of battling it out, like, you know, in code. Yeah,”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “To me, actually, it mirrors how we think about workplaces or interactions with people in general. Humans are just humans, no matter what they're doing. But yeah, I mean, if you think about like evolving manager strategies now in workplaces where it's like wanting to default to trust of the people that you manage and not say, I need to micromanage every single little thing you do, but I want to trust that you are on your own skill to handle this. And if anything is wrong, then I can like stop it. But otherwise, I want to just empower you to do what you're doing. I think it's actually like very in line with broader. Evolution of like how we think about human behavior and how we manage.”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “No, I think that the reason why it's not very sloppy is because we dramatically increased the number of committers. So like there are 90 people that can review this. Nothing is going to make it in unless it's pretty nice. But the reality is a fix to a test, a small adjustment here, a bug fix there. These are not issues that need to get decided upon by formal body. They're clearly valuable as nobody's going to object to them. Let's just let them get in. And then, you know, when things are controversial, when people can't agree, that's when we escalated and we have a consensus-seeking process. So it's actually a majority vote, but we try to reach a consensus if we can.”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “Do you think that governance body do you think that your model of inverting that is what makes people hold to a higher bar so they're not sloppy? Like do you think people are more sloppy when they know they have to go through a gatekeeper?”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “So, one of the things that I've been a big fan of is inverting this whole notion. Usually you'll have like a small group of people, whether they're committers or a smaller body of the committers that are making a lot of decisions, right? And usually you put this in terms of like their gatekeepers. They have to make sure that every commit lands, right? They have to get agreement about that. That just doesn't scale. Like there are too many contributions that need to land for that to be the case. So what we do in Node and what we've actually encouraged other projects to do is invert that so that the default mode is for something to land and you may make corrections to it. You may need to get them to change things. But everything's going to land. And things only escalate into these people to make a formal decision if there is a conflict around it. That's interesting.”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “Even just beyond how do you get new contributors in, or how do you up level contributions or keep people around? It's also like, how do you deal with issues as they arise? How do you talk to each other?”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Code by itself does not make an open source project. You have to have all these other types of skill sets. And that's like one of the biggest issues that I've seen where people don't really understand the value of a healthy community.”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “Yeah, yeah. Not everybody makes that transition. That's not why we have a website project, is just to get people into core. It's more about healthy open source projects value all of the skill sets that they're trying to encourage. So if we want a nice website, if we want nice documentation, if we want good tests, we actually have to have the same kind of path for those sorts of contributors, right? Like they need to eventually own that work, become committers to it. You know, we have people in the formal governance body around core that mostly have worked on tests and they know the test system very well. And the same with documentation, right? Like these are core values, so they need to have the same basically growth path as anybody else does, even if they're on, you know, deeply technical stuff.”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “The reality is that some projects are complicated enough that you have to, but hopefully you can get around it or find. Inventive ways. I mean, one of the things that we've noticed in the node project is we've broken up things that you can get involved in. So if you just have the skills to work on a website, you can actually work on the Node.js website. And we see people transition from that into core because there was kind of a cultural barrier to entry that they're now passed, that they're comfortable can do the project. So, you know, there is no formal operating process for the website. It's easy enough to contribute to. But then when they get over to Node Core, like, yes, there is because it's just a little bit more difficult.”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Yeah, I think just making it clear, like really, really easy for people to join, like first off, not scaring them away is really important. A lot of those in documentation. So it's not just here's how you do it, like steps one, two, and three, but even just human language around, hey, like so glad you're on this page. Really excited for you to contribute. Like if somebody is not sure if they want to contribute and they read that, then they'll immediately feel more welcome. And then when someone shows a little of interest trying to like encourage and nudge them along, I think is really important. So it really is more of like an active investment to what people are doing.”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “And there's a balance between, I mean, yeah, there are projects that maybe almost overinvest into building really, really healthy contributor communities, but then someone's also got to use them or also just kind of becomes this really nice experiment in like what it looks like to have a healthy community.”

    2017-04-08 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Changing Culture of Open Source · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source