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Node.js Foundation

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2017-04-08
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2017-04-08
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  1. “I would say that in modern open source, in the whole GitHub generation, they are the same thing. If you're going to continue to sustain your project, you're going to be needing to get people out of this giant pool of contributors. And many of them need to be feel invited. And you're competing with a lot of other projects that are nice and inviting.”

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

  2. “Contributors helping or in the community? Because I mean, is niceness a quality of a healthy community? Because don't you want sort of a creative friction and collaboration? How do you sort of navigate that?”

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

  3. “All of these, there's like a positive way and a negative way to look at it. So, like, the negative thing that I always hear is that GitHub is just a bunch of people dicking around with their own thing and they don't care about contributing to projects that are established, right? Which is actually not true. There's a lot that a person gets out of contributing to a project that's popular. And there's a lot of draw for that. The issue is that competition for people's attention is really high. And so unless you're a nice place to come and contribute, people don't care. A lot of established contributors that are used to just people showing up because they're a popular project, they're not getting any people because they're actually not a very nice place to contribute.”

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

  4. “And it's just more like natural cross pollination, I think, that happens between GitHub projects than there was before because you can just be on this one platform and very easily move between different projects and kind of glance around. I just think in general the more you can take inspiration from other places and easily link to them and point to them and have exposure to them, the more likely you're going to learn and iterate on your own.”

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

  5. “How Yeah, one of the things that's been like really undervalued is the degree to which in older open source, part of the barrier to entry that people went through before they were ever identifiable to any contributor was an acclamation to the culture and an acclamation to the tool chain and all this stuff. And one of the things that GitHub has done is completely removed all of that cultural acclamation. Like there is one tool chain that you use to contribute to any project. And then when you show up, you don't have all of this cultural knowledge. You haven't bought into any of these ideals about open source necessarily. You're just there to contribute. And we actually need to work with that.”

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

  6. “Actually, reminds me of some of the intergenerational problems in getting through the open source communities. I mean, when I think about the early days of like how, I mean, Jim Zemlin has described to me like, you know, the existence of the foundation, the evolution of the foundation. It kind of blew my mind that you have Linus Turwalds. And then you have like this entire foundation of people. So it's not just a cult of personality. And then you have the sort of old world of open source and new world of open source, which is probably not a good way of describing it. But Michael, you're actually the person who brought that to my awareness when we did an op-ed years ago on how GitHub makes everyone essentially an open source.”

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

  7. “It's an opportunity, and it does have value. And the real problem is that you don't have enough people that are maintaining it. And one of the reasons they don't have enough people maintaining it is because you're not leveling up any of these people that come by.”

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

  8. “Like these assholes just keep showing up and giving us code. Don't they understand that I'm too busy to look at their code? It's crazy, right? But that is a lot of the dialogue around it. Whereas thinking of them as casual contributors and people that like show up and have value to add. And really what you need to figure out is how do you capture that value? How do you encourage it? How do you level people up? How do you retain a drug?”

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

  9. “One thing that I found interesting is because the dialogue tends to be set by popular projects and those developers and their problems tend to dominate the story about this. You have these words and vocabulary like drive-by contributions, right? Oh, right.”

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

  10. “I mean, it strikes me that you can use the analogy of an organism to describe the community like a human body or any other organism, and that you can have this ecosystem of all these different parts and players. And then if you're healthy, you're functioning well. And if you're popular, you're like working really hard. But it doesn't necessarily mean that you're in good shape. And that has all kinds of implications. Right. That's super interesting.”

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

  11. “Popular can refer to like lots of people are using the project, and Healthy might mean is the community behind it or the governance or how many people are maintaining it, I guess the back end part of the project is that in a good state. So you can have projects like OpenSSL might be a project that was really, really popular. Lots of people use it.”

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

  12. “It has just been around like trying to put vocabulary to what is going on. So, about how you can have someone people using this project, tons of people using the project, and not that many people maintaining it. Need vocabulary to actually explain those two different things, right? Because right now I think a lot of people talk about projects as big or small and big doesn't really explain what it means for a project to be big. So I've tried using terms like popular versus healthy.”

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

  13. “Project. What's the significance of that? So if a project goes into a state of disrepair, that doesn't mean that people stop using it. In fact, I mean, like Heartbleed is like the best example of this where you have, I mean, basically nobody working on OpenSSL or maybe like a couple people that aren't even paid full-time to work on it. And, you know, the majority of the internet, depending on it.”

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

  14. “I think that there is a somewhat laissez-faire reaction that's like, well, if people don't work on it, then people don't care about it, and then it'll just go away. And what Nadia has found and actually demonstrated with real data is that there really is no connection between the number of users and the number of people actually maintaining a project. Let's pause on that for a minute.”

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

  15. “Everything is great while it works, and when it doesn't, then suddenly it doesn't. And there are a lot of people who use open source products who then are trying to ask, hey, like, can we get this typo feature in or like this isn't really working? And if you don't hear feedback because nobody's maintaining it, then you have a problem. It would be as though there's like a bunch of volunteers working on Facebook or something. And it's like, well, I really hope Facebook works because.”

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

  16. “So, this ties so much into your research and thinking about sustaining open source communities. First of all, why does it even matter? Because honestly, as a consumer, as a user, I don't care as long as I have a product. So why do I care if there's three people working on it or 400?”

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

  17. “We started thinking about contributing to the project differently. I mean, so for instance, that 90, that's just a core itself. If you look at the website and localizations and everything else, we actually have like over 400 people that have committed rights. So this”

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

  18. “The Node Foundation is an independent foundation. The Linux Foundation is essentially hired to run it to administrate it. And so it is a Linux Foundation collaborative project. But Joan had brought Node and created this foundation around it. We brought kind of a governance model and a lot of the contributors and we were able to merge all that together. And so, I mean, at the point that we had this disagreement, we were down to maybe a high of seven committers today about a year and a half later, we have 90 committers. Wow, that's amazing. So the reason for”

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

  19. “Just consuming it. Contributors had dropped down to, depending on how you're counting, maybe three people were actually working on it from a high of something like seven. So it was never really that high. And the community around JS, the people that have built modules on top of it, we'd actually done a lot of experiments in how do you grow sustainable contributors over time in this new GitHub kind of ecosystem. So we had some really good reference material and some strong opinions about how to do this. Also, some of the people that have been contributing to Node for a long time were unhappy with the way that Joyant was running it at that time, had some disagreements. And so we took those disagreements and said, okay, we're going to fork the project under a different kind of contribution model where we get people more involved. Because it wasn't a technical disagreement, later Jiant put Node into a foundation. They needed kind of an open governance plan. We were able to merge the project together.”

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

  20. “This was the IOJS fork of Node. The main difference was that there wasn't a technical disagreement. A lot of these other forks, like Ethereum and whatnot, there's a technical disagreement that essentially is not really reconcilable a lot of the time. For us, we were actually kind of hitting a lot of the problems that actually Nadia's research calls out where the sustainability of the project was in question. We had tons of users. I mean, the users of Node.js are still doubling every year, but the number of people working on it had gone down.”

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

  21. “I'm glad you brought up that the human part of it because I feel like there's a tendency when we talk about open source and code to sort of mechanize it. And to me, like the arc of this podcast is about the human aspect of open source. Because essentially you're working on code and then you have human beings personalities clashing and coming together while working on this through these various open source communities. So go back to just even the nature of the fork you led. And by the way, you just told me today that you merged it back in now. Like what was the story behind that?”

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

  22. “So, I mean, the way I first discovered what open source even was was someone learning to code maybe like four years ago. And I remember having this moment at a Rails Bridge workshop where you get your Rails app up and running for the first time and typing in three words and all of a sudden all these magical things happened behind the scene that I didn't know about. And I was like, where did all this come from? How did I create this app by not really typing that much? It was pure magic to me. And that was the part where I was like, huh, I wonder who is actually building all this stuff in the back end to like allow me to have that experience.”

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

  23. “In an industry where people aren't in a job for like a year to three years, the relationships, the personal relationships that they have tend to stretch decades. And so community is kind of important to everybody. But in the open source world, it's just a lot more defined. The community is like literally the only thing holding these people together, even at the time that they're doing the work. They don't all work for the same company. Right.”

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

  24. “Wow. So I think I got involved because when I was really young, how I got involved in computers was through the hacker scene. And one of the things that really kept me there was that there were like people to talk to. There was a community angle to it. And so when I started to work in the actual industry, I was kind of searching for that continued community. And that ended up being the open source community.”

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