Alright, morning. Let's roll. My name's Justin.
A fun fact, I get paid by the tweet. So if you follow me on twitter and say hello I'd love that,
or if you want to drop me a long form line you can reach me: hello at testdouble.com.
Open source, is good, right.
Companies working with competitors, other companies on common tools,
and then turning around and sharing that for free.
Startups, now they can stand on the shoulders of giants, and build great new
things with just adding a little code on top -- companies that couldn't exist otherwise.
And then never before in the history of the universe has an individual that's not
state-sponsored or company sponsored been able to just do a little work of their own
And then literally change how the world works.
But is open source good, really?
I mean, companies love consuming open source, but if you ever want to share an
upstream patch, much less open source a library, they suddenly are very stingy and
skeptical of this open source thing.
And then a lot of startups keep falling into the same trap of hoovering up all
this free stuff, without understanding how it works, and building maintainability
nightmares, right as they get successful, they can't add new features any more.
And most of the maintainers I know are pretty burnt out, right?
LIke, they don't like the fact that they're doing something for fun, in their
free time, companies are running on that stuff and then expecting customer support
you know, on nights and weekends.
So today, my goal is just to bring to light a handful of issues affecting
open source, and my only objective here is to encourage you to do the same thing.
Because maybe if we can start to build a broader awareness of some of the
systemic issues in open source, we can start to have ideas how to fix them
and then maybe someone will come along, start to create new creative solutions for
those things. And then we can, you know, start to live and realize the promise of
true, openness, whatever that means. And then we're done.
But again, today -- very little, minor, just looking at a handful of things.
Topics, such as dependencies.
Pulling back the curtain a bit, to show what it's like to be a maintainer
issues of trust, adoption, security
and then some deep thoughts about how we interact with each other as humans, as well
as where I think the future is heading.
I like to start off with term definition. The word "ideology" -- most of us think
of the word "ideology" as like a political subscription or affiliation, what you
believe. But I like this definition more:
They do not know it, but they are doing it.
Ideology as the negative space that's driving our actions without us even
realizing it. It's a quote from a dude named Karl Marx.
Open source fans are a bunch of hippies, so I figured I'd start with a Marx quote.
That comes from the book Capital, and Capital is an interesting book because it
as a work, it sits at the intersection between philosophy and economics.
I think it's an interesting subject to start with today because so does open
source, right? We share all this code altruistically, as if to earn karma from
people we don't know, and yet there's all these companies out there making
bucket loads of money off of open source, and every company that even doesn't
contribute open source needs it to get by.
So, thinking of capital and traditional economies, I want to look chart the
march of progress of economics. You know, in the beginning, everything was shitty,
Then as groups of people started to form
This opened the door to the development of human culture
The internet totally inverted that
This is progress
but where does it lead us?
Before you click one-click
Another example of unintended consequences
For like, at least a month