Funding open source

I'm Nadia Ekbal, and you're listening to The Change Lock. Welcome back everyone. This is the Change Lock and I'm your host Adam Stikoviak. This is episode 193, and today we're joined by Nadia Ekbal to talk about a huge topic to us near and dear to our heart, funding open source.

We also talk about Nadia's current investigative journalism work, funded by the Ford Foundation. We talk about venture backed open source projects, what it means for an open source project to be in good shape, potential solutions to provide better support for open source, and we also thought deeply about how much the open source of the world might be worth. Our first sponsor of the show is Top-Tow, and longtime listeners of the show know that we love Top-Tow. Head to TLPTAL.com and check them out.

I'd love to give you a personal introduction, whether you're an engineer or designer looking for greater opportunities to freelance travel world, blog with the Top-Tow blog, get open source brands or you're a woman looking for more opportunities, they have an awesome scholarship program for women, giving back mentorship, giving back advice into career paths, really great things happening at Top-Tow. Or maybe you're a CTO or a team leader that's building a team, and you're looking for some of the best talent out there. I want to invite you to email me at Adam at changelaw.com. I'd love to help you connect with the right people at Top-Tow and see that next step.

Once again, go to TLPTAL.com and tell the truth, I'll send you, and now onto the show. All right, everyone, we're here today talking about funding open source with Nadia Ekbal, a former founder and also former venture capitalist. I'm here, Jared's here, and this, Jared, what is this topic? This topic is near and dear as close as you can get to our heart, right?

Absolutely. It's something that we always seem to bring up on the show because it's kind of ingrained in what we are and what our audience does, so we always touch on it as a side topic in our other conversations, but we have never addressed it so pointedly as to dedicate a show to it. Yeah. So I'm quite excited.

So Nadia introduced, I guess, say hello, at least, we don't want to keep the wings too long. Hi, everyone. And Nadia, you're not a developer, though, right? Is that right?

I did build the product for a company that I co-founded, but I would certainly not call myself a developer. Okay. And so the reason I say that is not to say, hey, you are not, but mostly because we're such a developer-centric audience, developer-centric show for many, many years, obviously as we kind of talked to you about before the actual call kicked off, but just to sort of say that this is a different kind of show for us where, as Jared mentioned, we've been dancing around this funding open source, open source maintainability, sustainability, whatever term or phrase you use to describe it. We're so long.

We love this topic because obviously we love open source, but usually we have developers on the show. But Jared, maybe you can share how you found the sort of one where you're sharing that with me in Slack. You're like, hey, is this a good topic for us? I'm like, absolutely.

What got you on that medium post of hers? I don't remember where I found it. Like, specifically probably Twitter, which is where, you know, links get flown. And it was something that if you were online last week or the, I guess, the second week in January 2016, running in our circles, you probably saw it because Nadia made quite a splash, I think, with this post.

It was called How I Stumbled upon the Internet's Biggest Blindspot. So if you can't tell, she's an excellent writer because the title's just begging for you to click on it, right? Everybody wants to know what the blind spot is, you know? So I apparently wanted to know as well and found quite an interesting post of Nadia's recent findings, struck him with us.

And yeah, we just said, well, we got to get her on and talk about this from a perspective that we don't normally get. Right. We're used to developer perspectives. Here we have a founder, a former VC and really, I think Nadia, correct if I'm wrong, but you're almost acting as a journalist in this context, you know, posting what you found.

So. Yeah, absolutely. But before we get to that, maybe we can find out where you're coming from. Yeah.

We like to get an hour of guests. So we know a little bit about you, which is that you're not a developer, which is not a very good way to find somebody. I can tell if it's been negative, it's just right. Exactly.

Right. Yeah. So if you could give, you know, kind of your origin story to where you are today. How'd you get here and where you come from?

Yeah. So I kind of wanted to detect by accident, I would say. I went to school out in Boston and I was working more on the impact investing and nonprofit side. I had foundations talking about better ways to, I guess, strategically invest their endowments.

And I moved out to San Francisco on a whim. I wish I had a better reason for this, but I just moved out here because the weather was really nice and I just went. And from Boston. Okay.

So understandable. And I came out here still in the nonprofit sector. I was at a strategy consulting firm and found a job out here purely so that I can move to San Francisco. And the nonprofit that they placed me with was this organization called Great Schools and Great Schools is an education nonprofit, but they also happen to be a website and they provide free school data on every K to 12 school in the country and you can go online and you can look up your school and find out information about it.

And I thought it was a really cool service and I thought it was cool that it was a nonprofit because you could have made it a for profit, I guess, but they saw the value of just saying, hey, here's a bunch of really great data and it'll empower parents, it'll empower teachers to just have it out there. And so while I was there, I was obviously more on the business and strategy side of things, but because it was a website, there was team of engineers, team of designers, et cetera, et cetera. I got to know that side of the business a little bit better and thought it was really interesting. And while I was there, I think, and just being so exposed to tech here, this was in 2010, got a little bit more interested in the data side of things like Great Schools started teaching myself to code because why not?

And I think this was like right before all the coding boot camps and everything exploded in, let's say, 2013. So I went out and bought these little books on how to learn Ruby on Rails and Ruby and whatever. And when I left the Great Schools, I ended up starting a company with my roommate at the time because, again, that's what you do when you're in San Francisco and kind of decided that tech was maybe more interesting direction for me to go in because it seemed faster paced, it seemed like the way to sort of implement your ideas in the world, whereas I felt more held back, I guess, with the nonprofit sector. And I built our product, again, with certainly not-commerce developer, which I think was kind of part of the point, was somebody who had been coding for, I don't know, maybe like a year and a half at this point, but was able to string something together that was usable for us and part of that obviously was because somebody else had gone out and created all the frameworks and libraries that I needed to make myself run.

And so we went through the traditional startup Sausage Factory experience. We raised money, we joined an accelerator, had this whole business that we were growing. And I think that being my first experience in startups, I also realized that there's this really great ecosystem for, if you have a good idea and you want to get it out there and you want to find support, there's a very well-developed industry of venture capital of angel investors. There's tons of institutional funding to help you get started.

There's accelerators. I mean, they still really went through 500 startups, it's like super influential and helpful for us. And it kind of got me wondering, well, what about other things that are really valuable but don't have venture backing and don't have that kind of institutional support? How do you help those things grow?

And what sources of funding are out there for them? This is something that was sort of like percolating in my mind. We ended up selling that company to another food brand because it was a food company by the way. And neither I nor my co-founder realized that we wanted to do this for the next fact of 10 years.

But I had sort of gotten stuck on this question again of how do you fund things that are really valuable and don't fit into that traditional venture model like great schools, the education on profit. That was that. And so I just started exploring after we had kind of wrapped things up with our company and started writing about it much like I'm doing now. And there was this one blog post that was called about a Facebook or nonprofit.

Not necessarily because I wanted to be an nonprofit, but just because I thought it was an interesting question. And one of the partners at the venture firm ended up joining collaborative fund right that post and thought it was interesting. We got to chatting. We got to know each other better and at some point he invited me to join collaborative fund.

And so I joined not to do venture capital, even though it was a seed stage venture capital firm. I had actually joined to do this alternate growth fund that we had talked about creating for companies that were profitable and needed extra capital to grow, but didn't necessarily want to have your traditional venture exit of like going public or big acquisition or whatever. And so I thought that was a really interesting project. I thought it might be a great way to kind of dig into these questions a little bit more.

And after I joined, realized that we just didn't have the resources to start a fund that was kind of out of the scope of what we were already doing, we already had a bunch of money raised for and had been deploying and whatever for a seed stage, which are like the earliest stage investments, but raising money for a growth fund is a completely different story. And there are four full-time people, including myself, I was out here in San Francisco, everyone else was in New York and there's obviously plenty to do around seed stage investing in San Francisco. And so it just sort of started to make sense that I got more involved on that side of things. And so at some point kind of became full-time seed stage investing and it was a really, really great experience.

I learned so much about venture capital, about how startups grow, about how good ideas get out there and become successful and how much venture capital helps contribute to that. So I think it was a really, really great experience for me overall. I'm really glad that I had it. But it kind of got to the point where I realized that this wasn't the thing that I, it wasn't ultimately answering these questions that had been in my head for so long.

So I ended up leaving in May of last year and took a little bit of time off to relax and then started diving back into this question, which I had covered in the post, it's just about what are these things exactly in my head that are not venture backable, because it's a very vague thing, right? It's like very popular to say, you know, venture is this like evil thing that everyone is relying on. We said on the show, it's like, ooh, it's bad. Right.

Everyone just likes to shit on a travel. But you know, there's plenty of things that are really great about venture too. And I think having been in that scene for a little bit was really helpful to give me an appreciation of all the things that it does right. And to try think about, all right, how can you take that framework and make it helpful for somebody else?

And yeah, I mean, it's kind of that process that I outlined in the post of starting with this very, very broad list of things that are not venture backable and tech at all. And that was a pretty broad list. It was, you know, stuff around like data and APIs, stuff around like independent product makers who were just kind of making games and fun little apps and things, stuff around like government tech and whatever. And so I had this very broad list and started interviewing founders, just treating it basically like my venture capital stuff of like going out and sourcing opportunities and talking to founders.

It was the same process. And after we're talking to them about specifically like why things aren't venture backable or interested in these types of things? Yeah. So whether, how they were being funded, how they're literally just paying their bills and where that was coming from.

And I found for some situations, like people were totally fine with the situation. They said, you know, like I'm consulting or, you know, I have like one or two hours make it's on a money and then we work on other stuff. And so if people were okay with it categorically, then I cross them up a list. But I really want to focus on things where people were saying, Oh my God, yes, this is a huge issue for me.

Can you please talk about it now? Went through that list narrative down got sort of like a couple of different groupings of areas that seemed categorically unfundable. And then I started going back to the funding side of things and talking to people I knew who either had a really great perspective on funding companies and projects and organizations, talking to angels, talking to VCs, talking to foundations and just asking them like, here's some opportunities I've seen, why would you or would you not fund stuff like this? And that was, that was definitely tough.

Plenty of funders were, and especially I think here in Silicon Valley, like you always want to see return on everything that you're doing. And I think that's true even philanthropy in San Francisco, where it's always like, what is my return on the thing I'm doing? It's never just like pure giving, which can be a good and a bad thing, I think. You mean in these meetings that they would take with you where you're asking questions?

There's like, there's no upside for them on it. So it's kind of like, why do this? Yeah, I think it was, yeah, I mean, four things where I was like, this just isn't going to be an investment. This is going to be a grant or something.

Then there's also kind of be like, well, why would I do that? Which I think is, I mean, having come from the nonprofit sector too, like I think there's absolutely plenty of grant making that gets very bloated and isn't really that effective. And you absolutely don't want to create a situation where somebody's like, always dependent on you for money and they haven't diversified their risk at all. That's something that even like foundations and nonprofits talk about all the time.

There's that radio station out there. What's that? It's a WIIFM. What's in it for me?

It's a joke. Sorry. That's what people think. They think like, if it's there's nothing in it for me, why should I, why should I care?

Which seem like you're overarching theme across, you know, both of the posts will dive deep into in this college. It seems like if, if people think what's in it for me and the answer is nothing, they're like, well, I don't care then. But I do that. Right.

Yeah. And I mean, I honestly spent, I would probably spend years being really angsty about that question and especially felt it over the summer. And I think I hit a point where, and this was kind of the point where I ended up focusing in on open source infrastructure was, I had a point where I was like, okay, you know what, like, I can't change human nature. That is a very big task.

So let me start with things that people can't argue against where like something is not theoretically this would be really awesome or this would make, this would make a better society if we did this, but it's more like, this is already happening. This is already out there. You're already using it, whether you know it or not. And it's not being well funded or supported.

And the only thing that I really found that was consistently categorically true on a list was open source infrastructure. And so that's, I think, changed the conversation a lot more because now it's more about here's a thing that's a system that we're relying independent upon that isn't well supported. What do we do about it? And it's still a collective action problem.

It's still a problem of every individual wants to receive support or wants to have this resource exist, but then is not individually motivated to overcome their own self interest. And I think like, there's still a ways to talk about solutions that can work with that and motivate people to work together, even when it's not always obvious or easy or desirable. So after these conversations with different funders, like you said, you kind of hit a wall or you've got depressed or distressed about it, you change your question slightly. So it was originally what is not venture backable in tech right now?

And then you add an addendum at the end, which was what's not venture backable in tech right now that tech absolutely cannot do without. And you had previously kind of come up with categories of types of not businesses, but endeavors that aren't backable. And sometimes it's because they're lifestyle businesses or because they're small products that kind of, like you said, are agency model or something like that. But other things you have data, knowledge, infrastructure, media, government type things, public services.

And what was the effect of switching the conversation, the question from what's not venture backable, but what they can't live without? Was that trying to convince them? Like you said, that they're already using this, they already need this and how that affect your results? Yeah, definitely.

I mean, I think that's why I think of this whole thing as a long game where like systematically we're not, I think, especially for Silicon Valley, we're just not really conditioned to think about things that the market can't solve or that aren't somehow venture backable businesses. And so it's, I mean, it's a very hard thing to overcome, it's a very hard mentality and culture to overcome. And I get it. And I think starting with stuff that we know we're already using, but it doesn't fit into that category can help open up a conversation for other things that might be more theoretically valuable and that also don't fit into your classic business model.

So for me, it's like, it's not about like throwing away all the other things and saying, well, these are obviously useless, but it's sort of like, okay, where can I come and like, where can we beat each other in the middle and agree that this is something that is being used and is useful, but doesn't have a business model in the classic, so it really sounds. We got to take our first break, but I do want to preface that break with the fact that I think it seems like you're hopeful, and maybe the reason why you're hopeful is because you've done some investigation into this human condition in terms of how you've investigated this path you've been on. So when we come back from the break, I think I'm going to dive a little deeper into the first level of open up, which is in the post we've been talking about, which we'll share a link to everyone listening to the show notes, so you can kind of either pause and read or read along how fast you can read, and what you said was venture capitalists showed me the weird and wonderful nature of the human condition, and to me, it seemed like you're hopeful there's a solution out there, and we're wondering, you know, what you learned from from that path you got. So let's take a break and we come back to talk about that.

Our friends will note our huge fans of the show and many of the developers that work at LaNODE listen to the show, they're huge fans that we're doing and they want to support what we're doing, and we will invite you to try out LaNODE, one of the most fastest efficient SSD cloud service on the market, use our code CHANGELOG20 to get $20 in credit, basically two free months, plans started just $10 a month, they have 8 data centers spread across the entire world, North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, they got hourly billing with monthly capital plans and add-on services, you get full-root access from more control, run VMs, run containers, or even your own private gift server, you can enjoy native SSD storage, or give it network, Intel E5 processors, again use the code CHANGELOG20 to get $20 credit with unlimited uses, tell your friends, it doesn't expire until the end of this year, so use it as many times you want, share it, to everyone you know, head to LaNODE.com slash CHANGELOG to get started. All right, we're back from the break here with Nadia, here with Jared, and we're talking about funding open source, and this is a big topic, Nadia got a couple of blog posts and a Q&A blog post and several to kind of support some of this journalistic investigation you've been doing, we thank you for all that effort, and we tee up this before the break with this question I guess is what you learned from, and maybe what you found to hope in when it came to what the venture capital would you kind of lived in for a while, that what it showed you about the weird and your own words, weird and wonderful nature of the human conditions, so what did you learn? I would say that most broadly, venture capital taught me to understand how to work with what is happening right now, rather than overly focusing on what might theoretically be great if it existed somewhere in the future, which is very, very hard for me to just personally to accept and move up against, but once you start looking at like, okay, what are the rules right now, what are the constraints that I have right now, and then how can I work with those things and talk about those things instead of just kind of like pushing something that doesn't exist right now, it just becomes a lot, solutions become a lot more obvious because you have constraints. I think one thing that is interesting if you just kind of look at the venture capital and start a ecosystem is that venture is not really just about finding a billion dollar company, the way that a lot of people talk about it, it's also about creating landscapes and creating new ecosystems and platforms, and I think that's why venture, and I guess I have more consumer focus here just because our fund was consumer focus, maybe a little bit different for enterprise, but within consumer stuff, the companies that are most interesting are those with really strong communities, really strong networks, people talk about network effects all the time, audience based apps where you have like millions of people using something and nobody really understands why, but that's fascinating to an investor, they're just like, why is everybody doing this?

Why is everybody using it? That makes it an attractive or interesting opportunity, even if the monetization in the long run is not always obvious, and I think that's probably part of why you see a lot of these audience based companies using advertising or whatever, because they don't really know how much that is. Right. The one that comes along for me is medium.

Like I hear a lot of people getting upset and that's kind of the medium that's kind of the medium that you use to amplify your message here, but that's the one that come up recently, I'm like, so what if it's, I mean, I guess, I guess not so what, but we're talking about why to not post there because there's no, there's no model. It's scary. Yeah. And I think it's hard.

I mean, there's certainly examples of things where people game overly dependent rely on a certain platform, even now, and that platform sucks and it's really hard to move off of it or it has problems or whatever. Or it just has its own best interest in mind and not necessarily the best interest of people who are creating the content. Totally. Yeah.

But then you look at, I think that is part of what accepting kind of like what is versus what should be where like no matter how much people talk right now about saying like, don't use medium because medium is like bad for us or whatever, you know, these are some of the issues we could have somewhere down the line, like people just never think that way, like in aggregate this is not how humans think and if medium offers something that is like short term really great for them, then they're going to use medium and that's why people use medium. And so there's this difference between like, what is ideological, ideologically like a great idea versus like, what is the thing that is going to get people actually adopting and using a product? So it's an interesting, I guess, difference that I got to understand better in venture. But then this idea of creating networks and platforms where I mean, I think I've said this before, but I think entries and harvests is like one of the best examples of this where they made a lot of investments and infrastructure.

So they did GitHub's first venture round, for example, where they understand the idea of like if you create a platform that everybody is using, then and exactly, and that just creates like so many effects that people can't even imagine. And that's like a really powerful thing. It's like, it's almost less about evaluation and more about like that creation of power. Yeah, absolutely.

I don't know if you guys saw there was this like Slack fund that was created by a bunch of venture capitalists recently, where the bunch of investors in Slack had come together and put together, I think, I want to say 80 million, but I'm not positive. So much it was to fund apps that are created using Slack. And it's not because, my guess is not because they think that they're going to find the next billion-dollar app on Slack, but by putting money towards that, they're incentivizing people to build on Slack, and the more people that go on Slack, the more people are dependent and willing on Slack, therefore they've created this like ecosystem, right? For better or worse, that's what happened.

So when I think about that and I apply to open source, it's kind of one of the most fascinating examples of really strong, tight-knit communities and like self-organized networks of people. And I think that because people don't understand it very well or haven't taken the time to understand it, open source is really hard to understand. I've learned this the hard way. There's just so much happening.

It's really hard to keep track of everything. Totally. That's what we're here. We try to keep up.

It's our model right here. It's really important. Yeah. But like, I mean, if you just look at it like that, it's like, you have like tons and tons of people using and self-organizing and making stuff.

And then other people build stuff on top of the stuff that they make. So it's kind of like this like huge decentralized platform that we use to build software on. And from that perspective, it's something that any institutional funder who's interested in supporting landscapes better and creating ecosystems better, they should be supporting that in some shape or form. I agree.

And the more we know about it, the more we realize it's like a house of cards and we're amazed that any of it works at all. On that note, I was going to say earlier, Nadia, it seems like you're writing your research as sort of painted this picture for us. And it's like this really awesome chair with really rickety legs. And that's those legs, not so much that open source is rickety, but that it's not stable.

And so that gives the ricketyness, I guess, of this chair. And we've got everything sitting on this chair of the stable, if that's the example, and the legs are not well supported. That's the picture I see that you've painted through your writing. Definitely.

You mentioned, I was going to say in your post, you titled it that you stumbled upon the biggest blind spot. And one of the things that you say there is when you started to realize that open source infrastructure, maybe we do well to define that as opposed to open source as a whole, because there's a lot of assets, but open source infrastructure is so necessary now and worldwide. And yet people think it's doing just fine, even yourself, so you thought to yourself, it's open source isn't open source doing just fine. And your, your, where'd your research go from there to like show you that there are, you know, that the chair is rickety and it's not a firm foundation.

Yeah. So I had kind of had a couple projects on my list, my original list that I just stumbled upon. And so I started talking to those people. Once I kind of made it known to a couple people that I was really interested in this topic, then they being the amazing super close knit network that it was versus people to start like sending me other projects, pointing me towards their friends who had projects they knew about.

So actually, like, so much of it was based on word of mouth and anecdotal, which was kind of awesome, how easy it was to just like put yourself out there and have tons of people that were so nice. And so I just wanted to talk and want to share that perspective. And I just tried to listen to people as much as possible. And I'm still trying, I think I'm trying to be very aware of the fact that like, I'm coming into this as, let's call it like researcher with a question, or kind of like a call to action mind, but there are people who have like decades of experience or just seen so much stuff.

And it's really cool because I love listening to people all along, just asking them about their experiences. I never, I try really hard not to assume anything about projects or what people need or whatever, and just try to like absorb as much information as possible. And then try to take a step back from that and say, okay, what are the patterns of what other people are saying? I think there's very little that I'm saying or proposing that is like entirely my opinion or my idea or whatever.

But I'd rather think of myself kind of like as an amalgamation of like all the other feelings that I've absorbed from other people. Or any specific feeling that you had a few quotes that you pulled out of what people have been telling you, you know, the source trenches, like what was a general feeling that you were receiving? A lot of frustration for sure. The, the ongoing sentiment that I think I've heard very often is I, and I understand why the professors, like I've created this thing that everybody is using, but I have absolutely no idea how to sustain it.

And I'm going crazy by myself. It's all right. Yeah. And it's just so odd because like in the startup world, you're like, I have this thing that millions of people are using.

And at that point, like, BC's will have hunted you down because it's like, that is their job. Like, they will know where you are. They will find you and try to invest in you. It's like you, if you're sitting on this thing that's so valuable, like people are just trying to throw money at you.

And so it just feels so odd to have somebody doing work that is really, really valuable and appreciated by lots of people, but they have no support at all whatsoever. And I think that's the biggest thing I've seen lacking is just like, there is no institutional support. There's no like quote unquote exit for this. It's kind of like, here you go.

Work on this for the rest of your life if you want, or try to find someone else to give it to. But it's volunteer time, you know, don't complain. And I think that's frustrating. Right.

I think it's not because there's lots of different projects fall into different categories of support as well. You know, you have language support, like Swift, which is open source and Apple of course is throwing NASA money behind that go. A good one from Google. Mozilla has rust.

So at the language level, you know, there are also a lot of, you know, I won't call them toy languages because that's demeaning. But smaller groups of people working on interesting languages that don't have that kind of support. But then we also have kind of a rise of venture backed open source products that, you know, Adam and I have been, Adam, we've had a lot of those late in the years, but short list rethink DB, zero DB, Metabased Docker. These are open source projects with business models, you know, different business models.

And so you see support coming to those specific projects. But then you have really like the grassroots homegrown, you know, the single person project Adam Daniel Stenberg of curl, you know, I always think of words like just a guy in his basement or in his office. And he writes a family. And we talk about infrastructure.

He takes a utility and, you know, in a library, a library, a very hurry for doing something really, really simple. He's touching, you know, URLs and, of course, it's way more than that now. But and that's like code that's running in almost every software system in the world now. So they have all these different circumstances.

But I think your overall finding is that there's a lot that's falling through the cracks. Is that fair to say? Yeah, definitely. The venture backed projects, you know, a lot of these are infrastructure is specifically like databases is a big one.

Docker, of course, is infrastructure. I guess from your perspective, what's that's those apart as they are venture backable versus some of the other projects that you found where people are, you know, don't have any support at all. Yeah, I think I would love to just have like some a big map of what all the projects, because I see it all in my head and sometimes have a hard time explaining it. But I think that it's it's been hard to find the right term to use besides open source infrastructure because it obviously is room for a lot of other projects that count as infrastructure, but aren't exactly the projects I'm talking about.

I think like stuff around like data infrastructure and DevOps seems to be like fairly well supported, at least as a category. And so Sam Gerson, staying who is currently at sidewalk labs, but he's been at a 16C and we've talked to us a little bit and he was saying that in his mind the stuff that like doesn't have a great business model are things that don't directly relate to downtime. So when let's say like a program language is like a system of knowledge or a system of information, but there's not the fear that like tomorrow language goes down for like five minutes or something. Right.

And so I think things where there is that fear are things that companies are willing to pay for. They're probably also easier to measure and kind of like meter out. So that's kind of like the mental separation for me. Like, I absolutely think that if you have a way to monetize something, then by all means monetize it because that's awesome.

Right. Don't make it hard. It has to be. But there's so many projects where they just don't have a great business model besides consulting, which is distracting and not always great for projects.

And it's those are the projects that I want to support. Another one that you mentioned your post, which is probably the biggest one is Red Hat. And you know, Red Hat's been a large business for years now. What makes that one different?

They seem to be an outlier. You don't hear about too many Red Hat's out there, but any insight on why they were successful or how that whole thing works. They're a funny one. I haven't met anybody who thinks that another Red Hat will exist or that it's a great model to be able to end these days.

I think as I understand it, I think there's some combination of they have some complex stuff around licensing that allows them to charge for things. They came into their space very early on and managed to capture that market and make people pay for it early on. I mean, I know Red Hat's well known, but what exactly is their model in plain sense? As far as I understand it, they charge for services and implementation and things like that.

Support consulting, things like that around this resource. Yeah. Around their Linux distribution. Yeah.

So as far as I can tell, it's the case of somebody coming in early and owning it. Right. Yeah. They also came at a time when a lot of businesses were very interested in Linux and not paying for licensing to Microsoft and whoever else on at the time, I'm sure.

And the upside of Linux as a platform, but there was just no way they were going to invest in Linux without some sort of fallback, you know, because nobody ever got fired for, you know, putting Windows XP on their on their desktops. But they needed support for it to even make like to get the check off to get Linux into their enterprise. And so the timing, I think, was really good. And Red Hat was kind of, I mean, my history is not great here either, but Red Hat was kind of one of the only companies out offering that, you know, that fallback of, okay, now you can, you know, you can do this because we have your back.

And nowadays there's just like that fear has kind of fallen more by the wayside. Yeah. Yes. I mean, there are a couple of companies that are organizations where sometimes their success is kind of legacy and you're not really sure why, like a Wikipedia like this, it would be as amazing and does exactly its job.

But they've, you know, it's like the first thing that comes up on search now and Craigslist has captured their own market. And within VC, there's like a whole category of companies, there are supposedly craigslist killers, which has spotted them like category startups are like trying to take down Craigslist and like can't. So yeah, it's, I would definitely call Red Hat another type of outlier like that. We can talk about what it means to be in good shape because I think that's kind of what we're dancing around here.

Some would say that funding doesn't isn't the solution to this problem. We have it open source and in your post, we've been talking about you said open source didn't seem like it had a problem. It seemed like it was thriving. But after you did some research, you found out that and in quotes, our tools were not in great shape.

What did you mean by great shape? What is what is great? I mean, you know, if there's funding that's good shape, what is what is good shape look like for open source infrastructure? Yeah.

And I think that money is a way to enable more time, but ultimately anything around solutions or even just talking about the problem comes down to a lack of time. So if you intend to be a project that is entirely volunteer run with a strong community of maintainers and that's super active, like you need people to donate their time to you, right? If you're a single maintainer who is running a project and you're really frustrated because you don't have better support, it might be about enabling that person to work full time on it. People that want more company contributions that where companies are using their project, that their employees don't give back, maybe because they're not allowed to, or there's just no culture of it.

Like that's about asking for more time. So that's kind of the lens I thought about through. And yeah, in terms of like, when I say that tools aren't in great shape, for me, it's about the whole thing being so decentralized and so relying on goodwill that there's no institutional oversight or stewardship or advocacy for it, that seems really dangerous to me. If it's everybody's job, it's nobody's job kind of thing.

Exactly. Yeah, and I can't think of like another issue that's so, so important that just runs on like a complete... Imagine if banking was like that. Yeah, it's crazy.

Yeah. And I think people are aware of changing things because it's how things have always been. Or because there's something really magical and pure in thinking about this is like a purely volunteer-driven... Right.

...and ever. So you think time is one of the metrics and what else is part of that besides time? I mean, I think time is like the most important part of it. What would you say to those who say, well, we got lots of time, okay, how am I still not in good shape?

I mean, to be fair, I think there are certainly some projects that are, especially ones that go, for example, where they have company sponsorship effectively or dedicated full-time employees working on a project. If they had the time to work on it, then that's awesome. There are plenty of projects and those that are really well supported and are doing great. I'm more concerned for the ones that didn't get so lucky.

I think I mentioned this post is that I kept hearing the luck coming up all the time. Everybody, people who were happy said they were lucky, people were unhappy to say they were like, oh, okay. Even people who had projects that were not elsewhere at all thought they were luckier than other projects. It seems like...

It's like a lottery. Yeah. It's literally like a lot. I won today.

Yeah. People summing up PR for me. Great. Yeah.

Right. I welcome this morning. Thank goodness somebody contributed something. Or I just happened to know somebody who got me a job working somewhere so I can do this full time or whatever.

That has been a scrabble in the show before. We've had several people on here say, I was lucky, I was able to get a job at joint, for example, to keep supporting NPM or Node. And that word was used on the show before, dude, as you can probably call. And then I say, you're living the dream.

You're living the dream. And they say, yes, I am. So we're all this quacky land thinking it's a lucky lottery. Yeah.

I think that I had one to make earlier of like we often talk about coding as art or open sources, art or volunteer based or whatever, which I think is a really beautiful thing at a conceptual level. And I think that practically speaking right now it's not so much, at least the infrastructure piece of it is not art so much as like, this is like a highway system or roads or any sort of like basic city infrastructure where the difference with art I think is that we can value it on a cultural level, but like if somebody stops painting, the world is not going to literally crash and burn. And if like a major highway is broken or blocked or something, like that suddenly changes like the entire economy. And so when I think about just like how to better support and kind of like steward this stuff, just having some someone to pay attention to kind of like the big picture to be able to think like five or ten steps ahead instead of everything happening on this like what happens tomorrow, what happens in the next kind of basis could be largely impactful to the entire system.

Let me submit another metric you said time is the main one I would agree with you. I think another metric that we think about as developers is the trajectory of a project or control and a lot of times those are trade offs because we see people starting off on an endeavor that they created on their own and it was they lacked time to work on it where they had complete control, complete ownership, complete decision making process in the trajectory of that specific piece of software. And then as they hit the lottery as Adam said, when luck was a lady for them, they thought it was, you know, corporate interests come in and as you become the infrastructure for all of these money generating, you know, businesses, they start off, if they do start offering you money, which we've seen that right, we've seen corporate sponsorship. And then you have now multiple interests involved and, you know, what claims does that company rightly have on your output if they're funding your work.

And so it gets to become a difficult and perhaps a kind of a thorny thing to walk through as I'm finding some projects will dwindle once a corporation comes in and gives, you know, you think the payday is here, I can work on this full time. And now you start to realize that, you know, there's strings attached. So lots of lots of lots of outs. I think we have a lot more to talk about.

We got to you up another break. On the other side, I want to talk more about that specific point, but let's talk about some ideas for solutions because you've definitely stumbled on a big problem and one that we talk about a lot. But honestly, the solutions are a lot harder to come across than, you know, just recognizing the problems without a conversation and we'll continue it after this break. Our friends at Opti are all about application monitoring for developers.

And today we have some good news for AngularJS listeners out there. Android Performance metrics should not be limited to server-side applications, so we're excited to say that our friends at Opti have opened up Opti for AngularJS and they're accepting beta sign-ups right now head to opbeat.com slash AngularJS to sign up for this beta. Here's what you'd expect. You'll see the performance of your application in your real time.

You'll be able to visualize the distribution of route render times so you can isolate edge cases. You'll also see a breakdown of your Ajax calls, template rendering, digest, and more, and you'll also be able to see the actual code that's slowing down your requests. There's also mobile friendly views for when you're on the go and all you've got to do is head to opbeat.com slash AngularJS to sign up for the beta. All right, we are back now yet, but before the break, I was mentioning the trade-off between funding and control.

This was something that you got a lot of because in your Q&A, one of the common responses is I'll just quote it, money will ruin open source. Open source works because there is no money in the system. People who contribute are motivated by other things like social reputation. How do you respond to that kind of a thought?

Yeah, I think the analogy that I put in my response to that is one that has been sticking my head, which is within the nonprofit sector. You have people who volunteer their time, and I'm sure we've all volunteered our time to some sort of social cause at least once in our lives. So for example, if you volunteer at a homeless shelter and you spend your afternoon and evening playing with the kids in the homeless shelter and you have a lot of fun and then you leave and because you have a day to have somewhere else and that was like your little contribution to the homeless shelter. But after you leave, someone else has to run the shelter, someone else has to actually facilitate everything that's happening there.

Something has to be responsible for even organizing those opportunities for you to volunteer in. And so I think right now when people say open source is just fine, open source isn't any money, whatever, they're really fixated on the, or they're kind of hoping that pure volunteerism is going to sustain a larger cause. And for me, that's the equivalent of saying like, yeah, if people keep coming in and playing with the kids every day, then they'll be fine. But you need some sort of centralized, a little bit of centralization to have somebody who's actually managing and administering all of that stuff.

No, I think that's definitely a good analog. And I think a lot of us are volunteers and so we see life through the lens of open source volunteer, you know, just kind of, especially now that it's become so easy to share. One thing I was thinking earlier when you mentioned GitHub being backed by Andrei Sarwits, interesting to get, right, which is the open source that GitHub's built upon, not invested in. Yeah, totally.

But the proprietary tool built on top of Git is, so there you have kind of a demonstration of that. But, you know, we're used to a lot of us are just kind of throwing stuff on GitHub, you know, maybe it's useful, maybe it's not, maybe I'm going to support it, maybe I'm not. And so we see everything through that lens, but then we also have people like you mentioned who are, they're in it for the long haul, you know, they're working on it tirelessly day and day out. And those kind of efforts tend to be the ones that bring value to more businesses, right?

Because they're sustained efforts and supporting those people is probably where you get the most global bang for a bucks. Yeah. There's like one, I don't want to go deep into a rabbit hole in this, but I guess I do push back a little bit on the assumption that the success model of open source is building a really large and active community of contributors. I think when that does happen, that's awesome.

There are plenty of really valuable projects that don't have that that have one or two maintainers or less than five. Well, something I've been thinking about during this conversation is that not open source, not all open source is the same. Exactly. Yeah.

I think the thing of Stemberg's out there that are totally fine, you know, doing curl, being a fun side project that gets him, you know, work and that work also gives back into the open source. There's other open source projects that are clearly infrastructure, even though his is also a term infrastructure that's not the same kind of type of project that requires lots of people or infrastructure or funding or, you know, all this different. I think that's a clear thing too, is that not open source, not all open source is the same. Yeah.

Yeah. And I've heard the same requirements would be successful. I've just heard way too many people saying if they come from like the start-up side, they'll be like, well, if the project didn't get funded, it wasn't valuable. Right.

And then from like the peer open source side, people saying, well, the project is having a hard time finding contributors that must not be that valuable. And that's like something I'm really concerned about people assuming because they're more than enough examples of where that's not true. I like the parallel that you drew earlier, which was if a software product, let's say, you know, like a product, let's say Twitter, for example, or just something like Twitter, something like that, it gets a lot of users. That's a good thing to track VCs.

But if an open source project gets a lot of users, so a lot of dependencies, I was speaking in Villapur speak, and if a lot of people were depending on this project, that doesn't attract VCs or doesn't attract what might come and support it. It might attract contributors, but it might not attract anything that can financially sustain it. Yeah. And even then, like it doesn't always attract contributors, which is kind of funny because it might just be, they made people's lives way easier and everyone's so happy to use it.

Or it's something that's like really complicated and that people can't just jump in on and use or contribute to. You had a term for that in your first business and trying to think about what that was, or maybe it can help me out there. There was a term for something like you were just coming and using it versus, you know, not supporting it. There was a term you used.

What else was that interesting? We would call that a leech. Where I come from. A leech.

He called the free rider problem. That was free rider. Yeah. Yeah.

That's right. Yeah. Which is like a really well established economic concept that exists in a lot of other places and totally applies here. I've been circulating or testing out my keystone species term of, so I actually studied environmental studies in school, environmental sciences.

And there's this concept of keystone species in conservation biology, where you have like a species that is very small in number, but like the entire ecosystem depends upon them. And so they get overlooked because it's people think like, oh, there aren't that many of this bird out there or whatever. But actually, if that bird were to disappear, then like all this other stuff collapses. And so I've been thinking about projects that need more attention, kind of like that, where you have something that like everybody's using it depending on, but there's only like one or two maintainers.

And if it's, I think actually someone point out there's the bus factor, I guess it's like a similar concept. Oh, yeah. Yeah. We're like, how many of you need to like hit by bus before the project goes under?

So yeah, similar concept. Well, that's the one thing about open source, which I think is beautiful in certain ways, because as a consultant, as a software contractor, which is my quote unquote day job, you know, people ask me that I'm a very small company, it's myself and perhaps a subcontractor. And they say, you know, what happens if if we hire you to write this software for us, what happens if you die or the relationship for some more? Well, I tend to make it like they'll say, they'll say it in nicer terms and I'll be like, let's just face it.

If I get my bus, are you guys true or not? That's what you want to know, right? And they're like, yeah. And I tell them how I write everything in open source tools and and languages and frameworks in very standard conventional ways so that it's easy to transition that to somebody else.

And one of the beauties of open source in terms of a business investment is exactly that. I was thinking earlier when you're talking about art versus infrastructure or highway system. Yeah. You know, the analog breaks down with software because it's all, you know, ones and zeros.

And if the person just stops working on that infrastructure, there's absolutely nothing stopping somebody else from just keep working on it. And so maybe that's an excuse to freeload for a while and have a nice fallback. I don't know. But it's definitely a benefit of a reason to invest in open source because it is as long as the licenses are permitted, it's transferable that way.

Yeah. It's actually super interesting. But I like that. I like that idea of these small species or these, you know, very limited animals that people don't think about as being necessary, but if they're not there, you know, everything falls apart.

And I think there's definitely individuals out there who are bringing immense amounts of value all around the world. And nobody knows about it. Yeah. Definitely.

So we all see the problem. It's interesting and a very nuanced thing. What are some solutions? It seems like in that case, just like knowing or like bringing those floating those things up to the top, like this needs help to a certain degree as it's part of a solution, although you still have people stepping up to help.

We've also seen efforts like foundations, we've seen corporate sponsorships to a certain degree. What are some solutions that are currently being tried? And then maybe we can all talk about if we have any other ideas that are worth trying. So I've kind of thought about solutions categorically depending on like who actually provides the capital because it's easier for me to think about like, is it actually possible for somebody to create the solution versus maybe nice in theory is some national philanthropist game and $3 billion in a sort of, so I think about like the people who fund open source, it's other developers or like individual contributions from people.

It's software companies in a lots of different ways, whether they hire people full time or they sponsor a campaign or whatever. And then you have VCs are play a role in the tech ecosystem that where I think there's more potential there than people realize. And then you have like public foundations and governments. So some of the different areas of funders, I guess, that I can think of.

So I think starting with like individual donations, I think that crowdfunding and tipping and bounties and things like that are great additions to a funny system, but not like the basis of success, right? Yeah, right. It would be like if we only had Kickstarter for startups and nobody would be like crazy. So like I kind of, I think that's like really great to like build support, get people involved but I don't see it as a way to like seriously sustain people.

The biggest areas where I find interesting right now are like, who is actually directly benefiting from this stuff and therefore might be more incentivized to give back or contribute. And those two areas are companies and VCs. And people have been experimenting with solutions and getting companies to fund projects in lots of different ways. I think part of the problem is that each like individual campaign or individual project needs help can feel like a very small piece.

And companies right now, like, I mean, depending on who you talk to, especially a large company, they might be like, yeah, we have lots of contribute, but we have no idea what budget this would come out of. Like we don't have a line item for giving to open source or whatever. And even on the contribution side, it's like, you know, sometimes they're on new policies for employees to be able to contribute on work hours or whatever. So I think there's like tons of stuff that can happen around working with companies.

I think like what I guess like the ecosystem needs, in my opinion, is some sort of central organization or institution that can kind of like be a place for people to go to when they run into that situation of, you know, lots of people are using this and I don't know what to do next. Right. There's value just having like something in people's minds of like, oh, I know where I can get support. I think it also makes it easier for companies and for VCs to understand, like, I can put my money into this thing and then like that thing understands the space better than I do and can help figure out like what's actually needed, because like, I don't know, VCs not going to put money into like a very specific project.

Right. And to be clear, like when I talk about VCs being involved, it's not an investment, but all VCs have management fees and management fees can they pay for people's salaries, but they also pay for things like marketing, travel, events, whatever. So it's not unusual. I think too.

Well, that's like a very, very tiny portion of a fund. It's not like I have a question that VCs might be interested in supporting the entire ecosystem. The way that they might support a platform or something else with like large network effects. The question is, you know, who should fund it, whether it's actual dollars or some sort of other system of value to give back, but then the other question is how, right?

So funny, I'll do is kind of easy than how is really the hard part trying to answer there. Yeah. I've been kind of just like going through projects that people have sent to me or that I've collected. I think they're like certain buckets of things that kind of like work together, like Ruby packaging tools is like, you know, an area of stuff.

There are some projects where it's like, there is one or two specific containers where like funding them full time is like a very straightforward thing to do. And there's other ones where obviously like the project is much more decentralized and there is no organization to fund. And there are also projects that do have their own foundations, organizations like Django does this or NTP does this, and those foundations need funding. So yeah, it's a little bit different for each project, but I think there's like, there's probably less than five ways that people can or need to be funded or supported.

I think actually like leveraging what's great about this research is that like people can come in and contribute can be a good thing and that like maybe there is no one maintainer to fund, but maybe you fund somebody to work on the project. And so I did want to mention Ruby together, which I don't know if you guys have seen, but I think it's like a really, really great example of a slightly more centralized place to like think long term around Ruby infrastructure. And they might not be the only people working on bundler Ruby gems or whatever, but you're funding people's work on those projects, which is like a slightly different way of thinking about it versus like, how do I donate money to bundler or whatever, right? And so I like that it's very output oriented, even though it is about taking in money, but the money is about funding time and output of Ruby together is actually like the time to work on these projects.

What do you think going back to the VC side, what do you think the likelihood, she said it's not out of the question, but you know, what do you think the likelihood of VC is actually being interested and actually falling through on whether it's a grant system or whatever it happens to be for open source infrastructure, that like a super long shot, because it seems like it would be. I'm optimistic. It's true. I'll just all admit it.

But I'm looking at from the corporate side. So like we have seen some corporate sponsorship, right? It's starting to happen. And I asked myself, well, why do they do that?

Because it has to be it's not, you know, there's no free lunches and it's very difficult to appeal to a corporation for altruistic reasons, right? And I think probably for venture capitalists, it's the same way they're capitalists looking for ROI, like you said, and in the corporation sense, there's a few angles. First of all, this is tooling that we use. And so by providing money for it to get better, our product gets better, our services better.

So that's, that to me is a pretty straightforward one. I see the value there as a business. Secondly, it's very difficult to attract high quality engineers these days because there's more software to be written than there are good people to write it. And so by supporting open source and being involved in open source, you're attracting engineers who like open source and work on open source.

And so you're kind of a good will factor there, I think, for corporation to support open source either directly or indirectly. And so they can see some, some benefit, you know, on the capitalist side for doing that is that it's, it's making their image better. From a VC, I just had a hard time finding where the hooks are. Yeah.

Well, at least you kind of hit it on the head. And the open source was worth at least 1.4, well, 143 million of Instagram's a billion dollar acquisition because they were able to get to exit half as fast or twice as fast. I guess not half as long as it was taken, normally without open source, one-tenth of the value, I guess, was the, some of the things we were saying there and, which is kind of the next topic, many ways of teeing up how much is open source worth, but it's being able to get to exit fashion. I think that's probably the biggest, if anything, attraction to VC is like, hey, if we can fund a company and they can be built an open source that we're helping thrive through, whether it's money, whether it's time, whether it's, you know, developer support or whatever we can come up with and we can get to exit faster or get to return faster, whatever that is, then that's, that's going to be lucrative.

Yeah. Yeah. I think there are two ways of looking at it. Like one is that companies are much closer to open source, therefore, they feel the pain more acutely and they're more like to fund.

Another way of looking at it is that there are two close to open source where they are like the direct beneficiary and no one company might be as motivated to act because they might worry about things like competition, which I've heard from some projects where companies say, well, for funding your project, then aren't we also funding our competitors' software and whatever. VCs have a unique role, I think, in that they're, they're one step above it. They're a little bit more neutral than any one individual company can be. They're really interested in the entire landscape.

And VCs are interested in, they're also interested in being the first to know about anything. They always want to know something that nobody else knows. There's this whole information is a metric that's implied, which is like super fascinating. Definitely the weird and wonderful stuff I was referring to.

And it's in their benefits to better understand something that can help them predict the future essentially, right? Whether or not VCs actually predict the future, but they want to feel like they know something. They know something. Yeah.

They know something else. Yeah. And I think like. It's totally.

Yeah. And it benefits like all of their portfolio companies. But even in thinking about, you know, like what are the next interesting things or the things that might be happening that we don't even realize is going to happen, you can like think about how like open source has changed so many and shape so many startup trends. I mean, just in making startups cheaper themselves, they that ended up spawning like the growth of all these micro VCs, like very small, fun VC firms.

And the rise of angel investors, because it was so much cheaper to put money into a startup. So because I'm sorry, therefore like, investing itself changed completely. Just the rise of consumer apps like Instagram, which could not have scaled the way they did or reached as many people as they did without having a source to back that up. I mean, just like the explosion of people learning how to code and all the business related stuff that came from that.

I love that. Apparently you drew there too with how this entire top we're talking about, which is essentially becoming open source becoming more and more prolific, how that's also spawned teaching kids to code or people getting into code earlier sooner or the world becoming a world coders, basically. Yeah. I love that.

It's awesome. Yeah. It's and there's so many like really, really tangible effects that if I think people understood the effects of a source better, maybe you can help stay ahead of those things a little bit. And it's so easy, of course, like look back and say, well, of course, I was like, help change all these things.

And sometimes you don't always know in the moment what's going on. So many intangible benefits, you know? Yeah. It's, I mean, when I was trying to just like even like measure the value of it financially, I was just like, bawgled by all the ways it could have gone.

So yeah, I think those value for VCs to be closer to that, especially now that open source is not a word that people still are confused when the word of a source or they pretend to know what it is or whatever. But at least it's not like, as unusual a term as it was, even like five years ago, among like non-developer people. I guess it's like force gun. It's a household name.

Yeah. That's how it's become a household name. Everybody knows up in source. Right.

At least in theory, they kind of get what it's about. So everyone in tech knows there's a whole lot of people have no idea. Okay. We're in a bubble here.

But let's pause there. Since we're opening up the whole unless not, you got a point that I want to cut you out. I do want to kind of swing us into our next point though or next topic. Is there anything you want to cover real quick?

Okay. So the next topic we're going to talk about after this break is we're going to try our best and now you've done it a day ago on on Medium. You posted a post called open source was worth at least $143 million of Instagram's $1 billion acquisition. So when I talk about what open source is worth, you've calculated it, you've done some math.

So hopefully you can school us as best you may be able to do that after the break, though. Here at the Change Wall, we have two emails we'd love you to subscribe to. The first is Change Wall Weekly and we've been shipping this email for several years now. We ship it every single Saturday morning.

It's everything that hits our open source radar. It's our editorialized take on what happened this week in open source and software development. Go to Change Wall dot com slash weekly to subscribe and our second email is Change Wall Nightly. Every single night, we ship this email out covering all the top new and top star repos on GitHub at 10 p.m.

Central Time. It's all the latest stuff on GitHub before blows up. It's often our own radar. We're often creating shows and finding new people, finding new projects, putting things on our own radar based on what we find in there.

So we'd love for you to subscribe to that head to Change Wall dot com slash nightly and now back to the show. All right. We're back from our break. We've kind of been talking about all sorts of stuff.

We've been talking about, you know, sustainability, open source. We talked about, you know, if it is venture backable, if it is worthy enough to fund, give time to it, whatever solution we can kind of piggyback off of, we kind of talked about who should fund it. We talked about some ideas on how they can fund it. And I guess if you're thinking about who and how, you might think about how much is it worth.

So now you're in this really great post a day ago, which is awesome. We calculated how much open source software infrastructure is actually worth to a company and use the now infamous Instagram as a lens, for example, for your example, and that spawned a blog post titled open source was worth at least one point or sorry, I keep saying one point. It's $143 million of Instagram's billion acquisition and the term Instagram has become sort of coined. Everybody knows it now.

And it's being used countless times to describe how many billions a company paid for in terms of acquisition for a company. Did you ever track down by any chances of sort of an open topic to this, but did you ever track down how much money Instagram had given back or invested into open source as part of this research of this article? Yeah, as far as I know, they are not regular contributors to any open source projects. They do list the projects, at least some of the projects that they use on their app and on their website.

So no evidence they've actually funded anything or to my knowledge, they do not say no, it's just nothing we've found yet. Nothing I've found yet. Yeah, and I do know from some specific projects they've used that those projects have confirmed that they've never given anything to them. Gotcha.

So how much is it worth then open source? Gosh, I wish I knew. How'd you come to this one specifically? The 143?

I think the easy way out on this one and I figured I would lowball it because then at least if that lowball is a big number, then we can all agree it's at least worth that much. Yeah, this question came up for me because as I was just talking to lots and lots of different people in the space, realizing that everything was sort of anecdotal, lots of stories of people on the ground feeling something, but not a lot of metrics or figures around the value of open source. There's just not a whole lot of data out there about it. And I wanted to start trying to calculate that myself.

I think that's actually very telling, but there is a lot of data which suggests that people haven't taken the interest in open source, so they should have at this point from, you know, kind of like the analyst perspective. And I've tried a couple of different ways of figuring out how to measure it. I've just been like super overwhelmed by even the methodology, which also says something about like how useful open source is. So I'd usually wanted to calculate like what is like the market size or the market value of open source.

And that was like way too big to imagine. That's why you posted on Instagram because it was just a loser to have one focus versus the overarching focus. Exactly. Yeah.

And I mean, because there are just like so many projects too that like how can you even count them all up and inventory them all properly. And so I tried taking with just focusing on Instagram and I picked Instagram because it's famous for this billion dollar acquisition and also because it had this like very short time exit. It was only two years. Most venture back companies take seven to 10 years to reach an exit.

So it's very short and part of that was because they got like a million users in the first three months and they were able to scale to that demand very, very quickly and keep growing and growing. So to create something extremely valuable in a short period of time. And one of the co-founders, my career has written a couple of times about like how valuable open source was to Instagram. So I tried a couple of different things.

My first thought had been to, because I knew they'd been so transparent about their stack, I was going to just like list out all the projects they used and then imagine if you had to pay for each of those things, then like what would that be worth it to them? But then I realized like way too many projects. Well, it's pricing and software is another, you know, like that would just take it forever. I was thinking about just thinking of it as like a time thing of like how long would it take to build all that stuff themselves.

But that's also pretty hard for me to imagine because I don't know every single thing that's needed from say like a DevOps angle or whatever. So I didn't do that. And yeah, I got, I really was just like stopped on it, which was frustrating because I was like, how can I not even do this for one company? But I got lucky because my partner is just like way better estimating than I am.

And I asked him for help because I was desperate and we were thinking about kind of like, all right, what about that time to exit idea of, okay, if you can say that open source cut their time to exit in half, money degrades over time becomes less valuable over time. So that billion dollars must be worth more within two years than it would have been in four years. And so I just got the present value of the billion dollars in a two year time frame versus a four year time frame. And the difference between the two was $143 million.

And you went like super conservative on that. I think open source probably cut down their time to exit by way more than that. You can even make the argument that like, it's probably like Instagram couldn't even exist if it was just hadn't been around. How many people did they have on their team overall?

I mean, I had two founders and what was their team size overall? I think it was 13. So they probably had to be three times that to build that kind of infrastructure on their own. And then all the cycles it would take to actually think through the problems that open source for them.

And from the business angle too, like having to think through monetization stuff, if they were even around longer, you'd have to hire people. Yeah, they're bringing it with a much higher forerunner. Yeah. Yeah.

Plus they were experiencing like extreme network effects, which you can't keep up with that. You know, you're not just slowing down your growth, you're actually, you know, destroying the effect. Exactly. Yeah.

You know, they had a hard time keeping up and when they weren't available, you know, people were moving on or what have you. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think like that entire category of companies we call audience based apps and venture.

I mean, they couldn't really exist without open source. So, and those are also the ones that get like kind of crazy valuation. So I could not even begin to estimate how much open source is actually worth. I've had other people quote, billions to me.

I haven't done the math out myself, but I figured that if you can say that it was worth at least $100 million to one company, then it is absolutely worth like, you know, $50 million to support or whatever it is. What's the percentage of that number to their billion? I didn't do the math. Maybe you have, as if that's a metric, you can say at least, you know, let's say it's 2%.

I'm just telling you just guess. Not 14%. Yeah. 14% was like way off.

Am I a basic math, try there. So that's 14%. If we said that every company out there that gives back to open source, they gave a conservative number 10%. And I said here in our notes, Jared, I did so funny to come back to actually be 10% because I didn't do the math.

But using a quote from, you know, you said a company using open source infrastructure can launch a scale today for one tenth of the cost. And so it seemed logical to me that if that's some sort of medium value, we can actually apply to it. Then if anyone is either using open source, any business, either using open source to build their business, they should tithe back 10% to the greater open source ecosystem. Yeah.

And that could be a good number that would at least be conservative to a degree. If you work up to them, maybe it's 2% at first, maybe it's 5% and it's 8% and it's ultimately the goal is 10% at least. If you gave back that amount to fund open source, that can help, maybe that can be the way. Yeah.

I mean, I agree. I think 10% is super conservative, which I think is good because why not start low? But like even if you said, all right, 10% is crazy high, like only 1%, like 1% of every company is still a ton of money. All right.

Well, we'll be totally right. We're going to get, we're going to start getting in the politics here about some sort of, if it isn't because you got to incentivize businesses to do the quote unquote right thing. Right. And you know, some businesses 10% like with their specific case, like that's like nothing.

I mean, it's a lot of money, absolute money, but to them, it's relatively small. Other companies can't, like 10%, that's their profit margin, right? So like that puts them out of business. So we're talking about operational or, you know, one or two percent, right?

Right. But if you could offset it somehow with some sort of tax break, when you, you know, when you give to open source, the government then gives us, you know, percentage of that as a tax break, or, you know, I guess it would be pre, pre-net anyways, yeah, you get it over my head. I just think about resolution. I got a little for like, I got a thought on this note here.

So if, you know, we're talking about this how, right, we got the, we got the who, we got the potentially how much. And now we got how can someone give back and since open source is already in the open, what if we had some sort of open community ran system that allowed people to apply, essentially and say, here's my project. It's on a known, you know, repo host, like GitLab, GitHub, whatever is recognizable, bit bucket. Here it is.

Here's the contributor metric. There's some sort of statistical analysis you can do from contributions. You know, there's all these different tools that they can show you like open issues and like velocity and all these different things. What if there was some sort of place we can submit that and say, Hey, could we get some money to support it?

And, you know, again, maybe it's just buying time versus money. That's somehow, you know, a basic on thought, on thought for solution. Yeah. That's where my brain is at right now.

Okay. Tell us more then. Yeah. I hear something of that sort come up from a lot of people in this space.

And to me, it speaks to the need to have, again, just like some thing a little bit more centralized, that's at least taking responsibility. They're not owning the space in a shape or form. But there is somebody who's dedicated there to think about like, not just code, but kind of like all the things you have to do to support the time to, to spend on code. And yeah, I think like the, the heart that would need to be discussed is a couple of things.

Like one is that obviously like every community is different, right? Like Ruby's needs are really different from Python's needs or whatever. Right. And so it's odd, I guess, to bring them all under one umbrella with, of all also respecting the individual needs and differences of each community.