RubyConf 2014 - The Social Coding Contract by Justin Searls

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