#148 Open Source is WILD. The craziest things The Changelog has seen in 15 years.
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Because software runs the world and open source software has eaten software insofar as it's almost all open source, the stakes have never been higher. ♪

Thank you.

Welcome back to the Free Code Camp podcast. I'm Quincy Larson, teacher and founder of FreeCodeCamp.org. Each week we're bringing you insight from developers, founders, and ambitious people in tech. And this week we are talking with Adam Stachowiak and Jared Santo, co-hosts of the ChangeLog, the longest running software podcast in the world. Mwahaha.

They interview devs each week about open source projects, and they also have a weekly news episode that I always listen to. Five years ago, I interviewed them for their 10th anniversary episode, and now I'm back catching up on what they've been up to for the last five years. Adam, Jared, welcome to the show. Thank you. Five years, man. Happy to be here. Last time was in person. Yeah. It was. That was fun. Literally in person. And I said literally in person.

The correct way. That's right. We were literally in the same room. Unlike today, we're digitized. That was a good time though. It was a more logistical hassle than this, right? This was easy button. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we're, we're busy grownups with kids and stuff. And, uh, this is a practical way that we can come together and, uh, share it.

I think Jared day flighted into Houston last time. You drove down from Plano, right? Were you in Plano or Dallas? Yeah, Plano, Texas. Right by Dallas. Now I live in Austin now, so I don't know if that's... Oh, I didn't know you moved. Yeah. Yeah. That's what happened since five years. A lot of happens, right? Yeah. Well, first of all, everybody, after you listen to this, the short story, the 10 years of history, and I'll just recall to the best of my ability.

First, you all, like Adam started this podcast, got a lot of initial traction, started to kind of wane a little bit in motivation and was feeling listless.

Jared swoops in, gives him that renewed shot in the arm, and then together you form the perfect team to drive forward and expand and create all these additional podcasts. And yeah, I mean, you go to all these big conferences, you interview all these big developers in tech. I've learned so much from listening to your podcast over the many, many years, like basically since...

It's inception, I think. Forever ago? Yeah. At least probably around 2010 is when I started listening, 2011. Really? Yeah. I don't know. I probably listened to more than 100 episodes of The Changelog. So yeah, that is the brief history. How many years did you say? How many years? 2010. No, how many years did you say we've been doing this? 15 years. Okay. Okay.

Did you forget, Adam? I thought he said 10. This is our extravaganza. I was fact-checking Radio Live. The previous podcast. People should still go listen to that, but I don't want them to leave and go listen to that right now. Don't leave. Don't go anywhere. We're here now. That's ancient history. And as you can probably tell from listening to this podcast, it's largely extemporaneous and...

And we don't do any editing because I want to preserve the authenticity and capture the real Adam and the real Jared. Zero edits. No matter what I say, he's got to put it out there. It's got to go out. That's a lot of danger there, Quincy. Yeah, and also, this is the first time I think I've ever had three people on the podcast. Oh, really? So there's going to be a little bit more interruption than normal. But we're in for some exciting tales. That's not true, though. That's not true.

The last time we were on the show, it was the three of us. Yeah, I guess that's true. That was like an old version of Free Code Camp, though. This is the new Free Code Camp podcast, the way he does it, right? With the bass guitar and everything. Now more free.

Yeah, and we've got a video now. We're on YouTube and on RSS, so like Spotify and Apple Music. I'll stop being silly. I'll be kind of fact-checking him over here, giving him a hard time. Sorry. Just getting out of my shell. No, I like that. I'm standing. I got emotion now. Motion creates emotion, you know? There is one episode in the history of the Free Cooking Podcast that has had more than two guests. And it was that one. It was us. More than two people, and that was you. And now you're back. Wow. Honored. Honored to be back. Thanks, Quincy. Thanks, Quincy.

Yeah. So let's just dive right into it. So we talk about the history of the changelog and everything. Let's talk about what's changed because things are changing. Open source is changing. There are some serious undercurrents of unrest within open source. There's some corporate greed in open source. There's a lot of cloak and dagger drama. Maybe you can talk a little bit about that.

Goodness gracious. So back in the day, everything was more kumbaya. You know, you put your stuff out there. You were happy if anybody used it. And then turns out people do use it and they use it a lot. And when they use your software, they want improvements to your software. And at first, as open source developers, that feels good. And then you have to figure out how to use it.

And you're happy to help and you're just amazed that somebody finds value in this gift that you gave to the world. And so you want to polish it up, you know, like every issue, every feature request you consider and merge, you know, pull requests, all this kind of stuff. And then eventually what happens and we've seen it, a lot of our friends, a lot of our guests on the show over and over and over again, uh,

they start to get bogged down in the mire of managing this gift that they've given to the world and feeling guilty that it's not better or there's a bug or doesn't do that thing that somebody else needs it to do. And it turns out that's like a really good way as a capitalistic organization to make more money is to have somebody else work on software that you use for free. And that relationship gets really strenuous and tense over time.

And so we've grown up. The industry has matured. You said corporate greed has been here. It's not like it's new in 2024, but it's just gotten metastasized perhaps. And there's been a lot of fallout from that. There's been a lot of people who just burnt out and left. There's been projects that have changed hands into unscrupulous owners. There's been lots of stuff that's happened as a result of that tension.

And we haven't found a sustainable, good way of resolving that conflict yet. We're trying lots of things. There's sustainability efforts. There's donate buttons. There's different models you can apply. But that, I think, is somewhat defined open source over the last five years is this tension between, let's just call them the givers and the takers.

Yeah, that's an excellent way to frame it. So the givers, the takers, givers being devs who are often, you know, just doing this as a side thing. Like they started a side project that one day they needed to scratch their own niche. They needed to create some library that does some specific thing and they built it and other people started using it too. And then, you know, giant employers who have tons of resources at their disposal started using it too and not necessarily contributing back and thus becoming takers. And, and,

I think it's totally fine for a developer at a hackathon or somebody to just grab some open source library and start using it. That is totally kosher. That's totally cool. And that is just one Delph helping another. But when a giant Fortune 500 company starts using it and not contributing anything back to the ecosystem, technically they're within the license to not do that. Right.

it's not like super chill, right? Like, uh, and I want to point out that there are a lot of people who get paid by big corporations to go in and maintain open source code bases and help out maintainers. And even sometimes take over projects and continue to maintain them. But it doesn't always have this, uh,

you know, happy ending, right. Or even like a happy middle, happy second act. There's just like tension throughout between, as you said, the givers and the takers. Yeah. And because software runs the world and open source software has eaten software. And so far as it's almost all open source, the stakes have never been higher. And so we see things like that happen such as the XZ vulnerability and

where a state actor actually tricked a burnt-out dev into... Was that XZ? Am I on the right one? That's the right one, yeah. Yeah, okay. I'm tracking. So a highly motivated... There's been so many, so it's hard to know. Yeah, exactly. A highly motivated, very effective state actor, long conned, effectively. It was a long con, looking like a totally legitimate contributor, a package maintainer, and was able to take over the...

the release responsibilities of XZ and almost had it not been for the, what appears to be a coincident accident when somebody else noticed who is not trying to notice, but they just happened to notice that this package had changed, saved it from not affecting a whole lot of people to where this state actor, whatever state it was, we don't know would have had a backdoor into hundreds of thousands of machines around the world because of this.

And so the stakes are high now. Maybe they've always been high, but it just seems like it's more acute than just how high they really are. Yeah, and just to give some context, you say long con. This is like somebody who is being a productive open source contributor for maybe years who's gradually earning trust within the community of maintainers of that open source library. And then one day they kind of slip some malicious code in there.

And this is a package that a lot of people are using it without even realizing they use it because it's so foundational to like, like, uh, I mean, it's like way buried deep, several layers of abstraction away from what most developers are actually focusing on. And they just, you know, NPM install it or something like that. Right. And, uh,

And these systems being compromised, I mean, this could be hospitals. This could be military governments. This could be electricity companies. I mean, you hear about ransomware attacks and stuff like that. Just imagine the ability to deny service or to wreak havoc upon this. And also, I wanted to find state actor. That term, if you're not familiar with the term, it's like a security term. But basically, somebody who has the...

Blessing of a government like the Russian government is very notorious for subsidizing just cyber riffraff for lack of a better word. There are people that are paid to go out and try to penetrate systems and basically –

chaos, right? North Korea, like a huge portion of its budget comes from ransomware attacks and other things that they're able to do to essentially force law-abiding, like hard-working people and companies that are doing legit stuff like running hospitals and stuff like that to hand over a bunch of money to them. So this is a big deal. This is like potentially a very, very big deal. And I don't know if you've heard of it, but it's a big deal.

I don't think enough credit was given to the dev who discovered, I think, like, the package size or, like, the compilation time was, like, slightly longer. It's like they're running, like, the compilation. I think if I remember everything correctly, they're running this process, and they notice, huh, it's weird that that package takes a few milliseconds longer than usual. And so they got... That's kind of hinky, right? And then they start diving in, and that's when they discovered it. And they unraveled the whole thing. I thought it was a CPU cycle, like, running...

A little longer or... Something was slower than usual. Yeah. Yeah. So you're right on that detail. I'm not sure it was compile time or... It was latency of like... There was a lag or something. Milliseconds even. It was. Only developers would be so pedantic about it. Thankfully though, but that's how it works. And how many times do you have this issue where you don't dig deep? Like this guy dug into it and unraveled an epic con, right? And probably saved the world from millions if not billions of dollars of lost resources. I mean, it was...

Who knows the ramifications had this back door been inside of XZ. It may have stayed there for years. It also makes me wonder how many back doors are still in there, but you know, how many times do we come across something and we don't actually have the time or the curiosity to actually dig in. And he did that. And so it was actually an amazing story, but a, if kind of foreshadows more fear, because like I said, like if that one was found accidentally, uh,

How many are not found? It's a pretty big deal. Yeah. I mean, we had like solar winds, which is like a similar supply chain attack. Huge. Like, and when we talk about millions lost and productivity and stuff like that, people would have probably died. Like, there will probably be people who were denied medical care because like the...

People couldn't log into their systems and like the ER was taking like an extra 20 minutes per patient or something like that and somebody bled out. Right? Like these are – when power goes out, people die. There are people that are on oxygen or ventilators or other things like that. So literal human suffering beyond just near inconvenience of like some administrator in a cubicle. That's a –

That's the thing that there was this TV show. I really wish I could recall the name of it. If you're a listener and you know, it was in the 80s. It was this show where they examined things like elevators. This is New York City on a hustling, bustling, you know, New York Minute evening kind of thing. And here I am on the train. And what happens if the power goes out? Now we're all stuck here. Like it was essentially describing how we as human beings have built technology traps. So much so that...

they become critical to life. Like if you're stuck in an elevator and you literally can't get out for days, you might die in an elevator. Like who would ever think in their wildest minute, how'd you die? I was stuck in an elevator for two days. You know, like that's funny in this podcast, but very sad if that was a true thing. But we have built ourselves in our evolving society, technology traps. And it's kind of fascinating to think about

We create these things and then we rely upon the things that we create and they don't really rely. And they also rely upon us in the, in the sense of like, they will stop running if we don't maintain them. Even this is the, the conundrum of the open source developers. Like I created this thing. I had no idea how wildly successful it was going to be.

Maybe there's some free code camp analogies here. And now I'm just going to keep doing this thing for the rest of my life. Otherwise, although in Quincy's case, of course, he's built this system. And so that free code camp can outlive him. But a lot of these software systems, it's very difficult to find somebody to take over your project when you're ready to move on. It's such a hard problem because there's so much context that's required intention that's required skill, right?

To find somebody to actually hand off a project to is a very complicated task in and of itself. So you end up serving this thing that you created in the first place. And it's just – it's like you're – as I told Adam, as he says all the time, we create our own prison. Let's at least make it nice around here. So are we sad about this, Jerry? We're talking pretty down about this generally like this – like I did and you did and Quincy did. So are we –

We're kind of sad about the state of the world and the fact that we are in these. I think our heart goes out to the individuals who are affected. Right. And so because we're so close to those people as Internet people and as software people, we know a lot of them. So we think about it from that perspective a lot from their perspective. Of course, the immense amount of value that's been gifted to the world has been amazing to

for in the lives of millions of people, right? Like these systems that serve us can be better, faster, stronger, et cetera, because of those gifts, because we don't all have to go write our own X Z. I mean, if you think about a business that begins maybe a free code camp grad, uh,

certificate person, full stack, coming soon, full stack. What is it called, Quincy? Full stack. Certified full stack developer. Yeah, so a certified full stack developer goes through the grind of FreeCodeCamp, gets out on the other side, and now has the ability to

with their own hands and their own mind and skills they've acquired to create a business from scratch, right? And they go and they Rails new or they Django new, whatever the equivalent is over there in the Django world, or they Next.js new, whatever the equivalent is, pick your tech stack. And now they have a business in like a few days, right? A website, an app, an idea that's realized that

And they've written maybe like 3%, maybe 5% of the code that runs that system. Just standing on the shoulders of all these giants. There's the upside. That to me is still exciting. I'm happy about it. I think it's amazing how you can go do that for somebody and allow them, empower them to build their own future. That's what open source has done. But there's also the downside. So we talk about it all. Yeah. Yeah.

And you're going to have these people out there, like these nation states. Now, you listed off a couple different countries. I've got to imagine, now we live here in the United States. I've got to imagine there's some version of state actors on behalf of the United States. Oh, absolutely. For sure. We're not benign to this. Did we do the Iran nuclear plant hack? What was it? Stuxnet? Was that us? Stuxnet. I don't remember.

But basically, we figured out how to get – it may have been like a joint effort between several countries. But basically, we wanted to halt or slow down the Iran nuclear weapon enrichment program where they, like, you know, enrich uranium so they can create their own nuclear weapons and stuff. And the way we did it was we infected basically all the computers in the world with Stuxnet.

And it had code that would only run when it was on like this, the specific like computers that were in this otherwise air-gapped probably system within Iran and caused their reactors to melt down. So software, like how,

How do you get software onto the most secure computer systems in the world? You just get it on all the systems, and then somebody accidentally transfers it to one of those extremely secure systems. But yes, like, I mean, you could say, you know, we're the good guys. But yeah, we're engaging in things that, you know, you could argue are underhanded.

But we're doing it for the reasons of furthering our own national interests, right? Right. And I'm sure there are plenty of people in Russia who think... They're doing the exact same thing for Russia. Yeah, when they're ransom-wearing some hospital in Omaha or something like that, that they're helping their country. They're advancing their country's interests, right? So, yeah. What you're speaking to, though, is distribution, right? Yeah.

Because open source did not win originally. It had to win. It had to become so ubiquitous, popular, beloved. It brings all the right things together, not just freedom...

freedom to join the community, but freedom to use the code how you'd like, obviously with a permissive license. It brings in the rule of law. It brings in, in some cases, the allowances for trademark, or in all cases, allowances for trademark. There's a lot of things that open source did that wasn't just simply the software, but brought a lot of people together. But more importantly, what it offered in the end was this option to, as you said, Jared, to stand on the shoulders of giants and

But then the ultimate thing it did was distribution for software. So if most things or most Rails news or React news or whatever it might be, news, begins with some version of open source, well, then you've got a lot of dependencies, a dependency tree, transient dependencies, et cetera, that are in there that you're not reading the lines of code of. That is just coming along for the ride. And you may not know what you're actually getting involved in,

And then that's distribution. Like you had said, Quincy, for Stuxnet, this was a U.S. and Israel kind of thing. I just LLM'd this thing, so I got all the brain here. But that was a U.S.-Israel thing to stop the disruption of Iran's nuclear enrichment facilities, which, gosh, yeah.

All those words right there just speak political. I don't want to say them anymore. And this is a politics-free zone. We're not going to talk about geopolitics. We're talking about facts, okay, people? But I will say that, like, I mean...

I think the bottom line, the gist of what we're saying is this open source software does matter and it is a huge point of vulnerability. Like in the U S I looked it up a minute ago because you were mentioning people dying in elevators. 30 Americans die in an elevator every year due to elevator malfunction, you know, like dropping like that. Right.

Every year. That is like a horrific way to die. For sure. I mean, we can look at like Boeing and the planes that have been crashing. Right. And that's software engineering, right? Or a door flying off. Yeah. There was cabin pressure issues in a recent – I mean, a lot of that is not necessarily software. But like – It's engineering, yeah. Yeah. But like –

More and more it is. It's easy to think that some mission-critical thing that is relying on a whole bunch of open-source software because of budgetary considerations not invented here is a crazy, scary thing that...

Some CTOs and engineering managers will think like, oh, we need to build our own XYZ. We need to roll our own XYZ. But the flip side of not invented here syndrome, which causes people to expend great resources, reduplicating the work that's already been done in open source is just companies that are trying to save as much money as possible and therefore just grabbing stuff off the shelf and not really thinking, not looking at the nutritional labels, not really understanding what they're putting in their body there. Right.

Yeah, there's somewhere in the middle wherein lies most of us – where we should live is somewhere in that middle. And of course, because we have this propensity to find the extremes, we go back and forth between what I call dependency hell.

on the left, for instance. And on the far right, you have, I'm not speaking political left and right, just in this continuum left and right. And on the right, you have this not invented here syndrome, right? Where you're now having to code up every line of code in order to accomplish something. Because if I didn't invent it, then I don't trust it. And there's neither one of those places is a happy place. You have to find that balance. I think every business, every developer has their own appetite where they should be on the continuum. But

I think we've learned that the closer you get to either one of those extremes, you're not optimal. Yeah, 100%. So what are some other big changes that you've experienced in open source over the past five years? And, of course, you all have had the benefit of time. You were able to kind of observe during the very early years of

of open source. You actually had like the founders of GitHub on your show and stuff like that, right? And you were like in conversation as open source was going from something that was relatively inaccessible, like people had to use like Subversion or, you know, I don't even know the full history of

open source and we won't necessarily regale people with, you know, an academic treatment here, but like you saw kind of like the before time. And then over the past five years, things have started to really change. And just like anything in the world, you know, you have like a kind of a slow, uh, interregnum era. And then, and then, uh,

things start to speed up and you get this accelerating rate of change, right? And I feel like that is happening in open source, at least as an outsider. But you all are insiders. You all are actually interviewing these people and talking about it. And Jared is doing his weekly ChangeLog News segment where he basically just has the top stories on open source each week. What are some other big changes that you've experienced? I'm pausing to let Adam hop in first. I would just say...

I think open source, I think we should touch on how it grew a little bit just because it's kind of fascinating in my opinion. GitHub was born at the perfect time. It was the result of a need. I'm going to word sound with this for a second. Sorry. Too many political jokes here. OMG. My bad. And this is unedited. I forgot. You're off your game. I totally forgot about that. Yeah.

It came about in a time when the web was blossoming. There was so much happening around the web movement, and there was so much need. Rails was blossoming. Rails had been out for many years, but there was a lot of things just happening at the right time. And I really feel like GitHub really helped a lot, but then podcasts like ours and covering the direction of open source and just this inertia around open source was really moving fast, and people just had to keep up.

It was an interesting time, really. What has changed, I would say, in the last five years since we talked? What's changed, Jared? I'd say more licensing wars, more rug pulls. Yeah. I feel like, like you had said before, you opened it up quite well. A lot of...

A lot of turbulence against what the definition of open source truly is. And a lot of people who care deeply about holding that to its original hallmark versus allowing it to become blurred or a blurred line or mean something different.

And I think we'll keep fighting that fight, but it's just – that's been, I think, the main challenge. In keeping communities connected and not – there's not been many forks, a couple of forks, mostly as a result of the rug pull. Like Terraform, that was a rug pull. And then Tofu was the result, the forked result of the rug pull. Right. And when we say rug pull, we're speaking of a change in license. Yeah.

After a long period of time away from an open source license, which has been enacted by a handful of large organizations that have grown up around or alongside their open source projects, such as Hashi Corporate Terraform, such as Elastic with Elasticsearch, which by the way,

that this is a rug push because they've actually gone back to open source. So that's a unique one. They were one of the early rug pulls, but they're pushing it right back where it was. So that's what we mean by rug pull is a relicense changing the terms out from under your community. Yeah, so let's talk about the implications of that because for a lot of people, oh, okay, so some legalese in a markdown file changed. Who cares? What's the big deal? But that means so much.

And this is my own crude understanding of how it works. But let's say that Free Code Camp is a big fan of a project, and I have a few staff, and I'm like, hey, we love this project, but it's not quite what we need. We're going to make some changes and improvements, and we're going to contribute those back. And then you can share those changes with everybody else and the new features and stuff.

And then, so let's say we're using that, we're doing that, and like a whole bunch of other organizations are doing the same thing. They're taking this project and they're helping expand it, maintain it, maybe even paying people to work on it because they're so dependent on it. And then suddenly the license changes and they're no longer able to use all the work that they've done or they're no longer able to modify, like they're stuck on some old version that's no longer secure and no longer supported. And it just gets really messy for all the people along the way unless...

of course, those organizations turn around and start paying to license the latest versions. Right. Yeah. So basically, if you own a project, you can kind of like rug pull in the sense that you can change the terms of the argument or pray I do not change them again. Change them again. Yeah, exactly. The Darth Vader move, right? Yeah. And what can people do? They're so dependent on this thing that you've built that they have...

They have to look in the mirror and say, okay, are we just going to basically pay the ransom, essentially? Are we going to start paying for something that we thought was always going to be free? And that's why we even hitched our wagon to this train, right? Because when you're looking at... Well, the reason open source is winning, the reason everybody's going to open source...

One of the big reasons, there are many reasons, but one of them in my mind has always been like, okay, we can count on this not suddenly becoming like some exploding is like a line item on our expenses. Because it's open source. We can just continue to use it. It's dependability. We've made this decision. Now we can move on and make the thousands of other decisions we have to make as an organization. Dependability, right? Exactly. If they change the terms, then suddenly you have to go all the way back and unwind everything you've done.

it becomes this big ordeal. Right. It scares people. Like I would be really scared if we were heavily, you know, in the Kubernetes ecosystem, which I think we do use Kubernetes for a few things, but it's not like, you know, it's like a few people on our team use Kubernetes. It's not like,

Like we have entire departments that are dependent on this. But I can imagine if you're like a big tech company or something and you're using it, suddenly this is a huge deal for you. And it might represent hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars in licensing fees that are like an unexpected, sudden ongoing expense as a result of this. What's your concern with Kubernetes? Yeah.

What did you mean, the Terraform? Terraform. I apologize. No shade to Kubernetes. I'm like, geez, what happened? Did I miss this? Did I miss one? Did I not listen to news this week fast enough? No, no. I misspoke. I confused one DevOps tool for another. I'm not a DevOps, and I don't actually use these tools. They're interrelated, but yeah, different projects. Yeah, that's well said. Some of the mechanics of how this works, I think, are informative and perhaps interesting. So when you license a project...

you pick a license, you can actually apply multiple licenses to a project. And then in which case the users of that software get to pick which license they want to apply. But like Quincy said, like that's the terms and conditions of using that software. Right. And so when you pick an open source license, there's a set of licenses because there's a billion licenses out there. In fact, you can create a new one right now by writing down some terms and putting it on some software. Now you have created a brand new license and,

call it the Quincy Larson license. You can just invent one. The Winamp license. Yeah, exactly. But that will be proprietary. It exists. Quincy created it. It's his license. He applies it to his software. And the issue with that is anybody who wants to use Quincy's software now, they have to interpret and follow the terms of that license. And a lot of times this involves a lawyer or in some cases a court of law to determine if you're actually compliant.

There's a set of licenses which are deemed open source. There's an open source definition. You can go read about it. I think it's opensource.org. It's maintained by this group of people. I think it's a nonprofit called the Open Source Initiative, and they've come to agree on what open source means, and everybody pretty much agrees that

so far, of what open source means. And then they go and apply that definition to all these different licenses. And there's a set of blessed licenses, which are officially open source licenses. So when you pick an open source license, such as the MIT license, which is a very permissive open source license, it says pretty much do whatever you want with this.

There's no warranty. And then there's usually a clause in there about keeping this license in the copies of the – perpetuating the license itself, something like that. Yeah, and like Free Code Camp, we use BSD3. Which is very similar. So it's like MIT, which is basically the most permissive, but we also say you can't pretend you're Free Code Camp because you can imagine all these different shops propping up and pretending they're Free Code Camp and charging parents for coding education for their kids or something. Totally.

Yeah, so there's a set of licenses that a lot of them are very similar. It's nuanced differences. And when you apply that to a piece of code, such as the FreeCodeCamp platform, and you put that out there on GitHub or anywhere on the internet and say, this is open source, that license applies to that code.

Going backwards and forwards until it gets changed. And the moment that that license changes, if Quincy decides to go, wah, ha, ha, ha, and change it right into something proprietary, he can't actually go back in time and apply the proprietary license backwards because it was already previously open source licensed. Right.

And so you're pulling the rug from the future, but not from the present. This is why forks exist, right? Because at the day that HashiCorp decided Terraform was not open source anymore, well, Terraform was still open source that day. And so starting from that exact point in time, a fork of Terraform as it was the day it was still open source, not the future since then. That's a different piece of a different license that can then be taken and

And because it's an open source license, it can be modified and do all these things and it can be used commercially. And so that's why when somebody changes the license over time, they can't go back in time and change it previously. That's why forks exist. And that's why they can exist. If you can go back and change it historically, they'd be real messy, but that's kind of how that's the mechanics of how that license applies and why when a rug gets pulled, uh,

A bunch of people are like, well, we'll just take this rug over here, rename it. We can't use your trademarks, but we sure as heck can use your source code up until that day. And then from there they fork and they have different histories. Yeah.

rug pulls. And you said, bread rug push is where he like pull the rug. And you're like, wait a second. The backlash was too severe. Well, so elastic search was one of the early ones. Um, and one of the things that has changed as the public clouds have really entered the market. And so the biggest one being AWS, of course there's Azure GCP, Google cloud. Um,

And what AWS has done, which is completely inside the terms of the legalities of open source software, is they've taken open source projects such as Elasticsearch, which is an open source piece of software, and they've offered it as a hosted service without contributing back. And so you have this entity Elastic, which is an incorporated business entity, which is making money hosting Elasticsearch, which is an open source project, and...

Amazon AWS comes and starts to do the exact same thing. Now they're competing in the marketplace, except for elastic. The company is investing in the open source and Amazon is not. And so completely legal. But as you said earlier, Quincy, not chill. Is that the way you said it? It's not a chill thing to do, right?

And so herein lies that angst, that friction again of like we give this gift to the world. We're building a business around it. Now a competitor comes in and offers the exact same thing we offer, probably better because they're AWS. They're really good at this kind of stuff. And they don't have to spend all these resources on the software because we're working on the software. And so they're kind of freeloading. That's the perspective of Elastic. So they were one of the early – MongoDB was an MPEG one as well. They were one of the early re-licensors.

And back in 21, they relicensed to a proprietary license. Was it SSPL? They used a proprietary license. And Elasticsearch was no longer open source from there. Fast forward to recently, they relicensed again because things have changed. ALV2, baby. And now they are open source once again. So that's why I called it Rug Push because they're kind of putting the rug back where it was.

We just spoke to Shea Bannon. Is it out there yet, Adam? That episode will be out there. By the time this goes out, it'll be out there. Shea Bannon is the CTO of Elastic. And we just had him on the show talking about all the details of why they did it, why it was blah, blah, blah. So we're steeped in that particular instance. But it's the first time we've seen somebody go back after, I think in their case, it was three years.

of a proprietary license. Now they're back to open source. Awesome. And if that episode comes out before this episode does, I'm going to add that. I'm going to link to it in the show notes. Yeah, it's a good one. It's worth listening to. I think it shows the hacker's journey. It shows the challenge that they went through, things they couldn't really fully... I think they did share it publicly well, but articulated very well was the challenge. The main challenge, I'll paraphrase...

Not the whole conversation, but the gist of the crux of the issue was around trademark. And to defend trademark, they changed the open source license so that it was just undesirable to use their software anymore. They would have to have forked it, and I think that would force name changes and just cause some disruption. And so it was really around trademark and a misuse of the trademark and an unwillingness to change the misuse of this trademark.

And so as a protection mechanism, they change the license. From the outside, it's easy to see that as a rug pull. But now in retrospect, you still see it as a rug pull, but you understand more deeply why. This is why I think backstory is so important.

When you have any sort of villain out there. Because behind every villain is a backstory just waiting for you to somehow root for them a little bit. Or at least have some empathy for understanding why at least they're the villain. Or perceptually the villain to some people. And I think it was easy to see because this rug pull scenario had become more and more pervasive. At least it seemed like the beginning of it. I think manga was first with it really.

And then Elastic, both using the SSPL. And it was just easy to see it as a rug pull. But now in retrospect, I think after that conversation, I have not so much a change of opinion that it was a rug pull, but I at least have some empathy and some sympathy for why the choice was made. And I'm happy that a hacker was at the helm of

and was cheerful the moment that they could take their code, their company, and the code the company creates back to being open source. I think that's so cool. Awesome. Yeah, that sounds like a really cool tale from open source. It's worth listening to end to end. Don't let my paraphrase thwart you. Let that be a teaser.

Awesome. I'm stoked to listen to it. I don't like trailers. I like teasers, Jared, by the way. I will watch a teaser. This is a side note since I mentioned the word teaser. I don't like movie trailers. I don't watch movie trailers, but I will watch a teaser. The teaser is like the 30-second voiceover. It's a single scene, not even a full scene. It's just enough to be like, oh my gosh, that looks beautiful. That looks so amazing. I would watch that for sure.

Yeah. Trailers ruin movies, man. And so movie trailers, like certainly back in the 80s, like you go watch... If you want to watch some movie from the 1980s, just go watch the trailer. Oh, I know. They do the entire storyline. I actually just watched one for... They show you the ending and everything. I watched the Back to the Future 2 trailer while we were waiting for... My kids were making popcorn. I'm like, let's just watch the trailer real quick. And I'm like, it's literally...

a plot like a plot point for a plot point summary of the entire movie in like three minutes yeah like don't even go watch the movie unless you want to although maybe that's a hack you know nowadays i have less time to watch movies just go trailer only i mean it's a piece of art itself i think i would give you even one more there is a show on the internet called pitch meeting do you know this quincy

Pitch meeting. Oh, I do. I have heard this. Yeah. It's satire, though, isn't it? Ryan George is the fellow. He was from Screen Rant. Yeah, Screen Rant. It originated on the Screen Rant channel. Became so popular, they had to subshow that thing, Jared. For a while, it was a subshow. And they were like, no, no, no. You're a full-on first-class citizen. You're your own show. So now you have, gosh, I just lost my brain with what it was called. Pitch meeting. Pitch meeting. Pitch meeting.

Pitch meetings are amazing because – so Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice. Jared, are you going to go watch that? No. Okay. So I felt the same way. So you're going to watch that one? No. Okay. I really wanted to though. So go ahead and spoil it. They're going to have a third one obviously because you have to say Beetlejuice three times. I don't know, man. I think after this one – I don't think it's going to happen. I think it's not going to happen. I don't think it's going to happen. No. So if I don't think – if I've watched a movie, I'll watch pitch meetings because they're hilarious. Yes.

If I don't think I'll ever watch it, but I wanted to watch it, I'll watch the pitch meeting. If I don't care about the movie, I just won't watch it. But pitch meetings to me, it's pure comedy. It's all satire. It makes fun of the script writing process. The script writer pitches the idea of the movie to the producer. So it's script writer, producer. And...

The producer always just wants to make a bunch of money. All they care about is nostalgia, bringing back nostalgia, or whatever it can do to sell trinkets. Oh, we can make some things out of that kind of thing. And there's a lot of just really cool one-liners. But the pitch meeting for Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, if you don't care about watching that movie and you like the original Beetlejuice, go watch the pitch meeting. It's like the best spoiler ever. It's satisfying enough that you get the movie and what it could have delivered, and now you know exactly why you shouldn't have watched it if you did watch it. There you go. It's worth watching. Awesome.

Well, I'll take a look at that. Aside from these big changes in the way that organizations, especially large corporations, approach open source, what are some other big changes that you think might not just be like aberrations or like learning processes, but may actually be like permanent changes to how software gets made? Permanent changes to how software gets made. Well, it's more collaborative than ever. I think that...

We've really greased the skids on the collaboration process. I think that everybody now pretty much, unless they happen to be that one unicorn, like needs to be able to work in a team, work with a team. You know, we can do more together than alone. And the tools for that have gotten really good. Now they're still too hard. I was just ranting about this on ChangeLog News last week, like

I read my umpteenth Git guide the other day, and I linked to it because you can't have enough Git guides, right, Quincy? Yeah. I'm sure you guys have an entire – I'm sure you have a whole curriculum around Git. It's too hard. There's too much – this guide, which is really well written, and I linked up to it and I talked about it, was all about how to maintain a downstream fork of an upstream dependency.

And this would be a dependency that you may have some contributions to. It's not going to be a minor thing. It's going to be like a major dependency, like rails, for instance, you know, a framework. And I'm reading through it. I'm nodding my head. I'm in agreement with lots of things. And I'm like, this is a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with what I actually want to be doing, which is pushing my project forward. Right? Like this is just maintenance of a, of how to have atomic commits and how to rebase when to rebase, um,

You know, interactive versus this or that. Use the GUI. Like there was just all this stuff. And I'm like, someone needs to just fix this problem, don't they? Like where is the next iteration of collaboration tools? I'm pining for it. It's gotten a lot better. But I think it can still get a lot better from here. And we might be looking back on these days as like the bad old days of collaboration when we had to think about so much minutiae.

Maybe the LLMs will just do the minutia for us, but something needs to give here. We should be able to take your guys' Git curriculum and just throw it in the trash bin of history at some point, I think. I like to think that we should always be able to look back at any given moment and think those were the bad old days. Yeah.

significantly improved. And I definitely think it's gotten easier. Like GitHub has been pretty active about rolling out new tools. And if you don't like how GitHub is doing it, you can use GitLab or some other tool and just use that with your team. I do think Git is like a massive improvement upon the old stuff. But Git is...

Tricky enough that you and I are constantly having to pull up references, and some of the most popular articles on Free Code Camp are related to Git and common Git operations and trying to understand how Git works. So the actual, I guess, instruments of open source themselves are improving, but they're not improving fast enough, and there's still so much room for improvement. And maybe completely new paradigms of how version control and collaboration are approached. Yeah.

You almost need somebody who's not steeped in it to come in and be like, let's look at it at a 90 degree angle that nobody else is doing. And let's approach version control from this direction. And that just, like you said, is a new paradigm that fixes a whole lot of the stuff that we currently is status quo. And it's like, well, that's just how we do it.

Because that's how we do it. Maybe a Merkel trees are the problem. I don't know. Like you get down into the details that we've talked with people who are either trying to reinvent get or just improve gets tooling, like the editors and the integrations and stuff. And they think get will be the next get because of its solid foundation as a technology. Yeah.

I don't know how it's going to shake out. I just know there's tons of value to be brought and to be made by somebody who can come and get us to the next plateau of source code collaboration. And then, of course, the other thing that's really happened and is changing, like we're in the middle of it right now, is really a dev tools renaissance. I mean, the introduction of LLMs into our dev tools is still really early.

And I don't think they brought yet the value that, you know, the Twitter bros want you to believe they have with their demos. Yeah. But we're at the beginning stages of it. And as we figure this out and integrate it more, I think cursor is a good example. I think some of the stuff that is doing is very interesting, like into the editor, uh,

It's going to change massively over the next three or four years. I think how we're day-to-day writing code, once we figure out how to use these LLMs for what they're good at and to ignore the stuff they're not so good at. Yeah.

So, I mean, you kind of alluded to the hype around these tools. Yeah. But you use these tools a lot. I think most developers I know that are trying to stay with the state of the art have figured out ways to incorporate them into their workflows and started experimenting with what works best.

Finding things that don't work very well and just going back to old practices that do work, but experimenting. That's what we do as devs. We're constantly tweaking and trying to squeeze a little bit more performance out of our tool chain. We haven't really talked about the changelog as an organization, and I want to talk about that because it is a company. It's the source of sustenance for you all. You probably have some contractors working with you. Of course, you've got the Breakmaster Cylinder.

Creating these amazing beats. And there was an episode where you interviewed them. Awesome episode, by the way. Thank you. What are you all doing and how are you incorporating tools? And maybe we can talk about how the changelog works under the hood. Okay. Okay.

Take it apart, Adam. Isn't it pretty simple? It's pretty easy. We record conversations and then we ship them to the world. And we put them out there. Yeah. It kind of is that simple, but it's kind of not that simple. I think we've gotten to the place of simplicity over years of tiny and sometimes larger iterations to get to the version that works the best or the best for us.

And I think the organization operates from a – it stems from how Jared and I want to live our lives. We optimize for our families. We optimize for our personal time, our enjoyment of life, our ability to have hobbies, our ability to show up for our kids and our family. And I think if we were trying to build the most behemoth media company that just conquered all of podcasting, then we would operate differently.

So I think that might be why our answer is, or at least my version of the answer, is somewhat boring. I think we just really just care about software. We're software developers at our heart, and we show up every single day caring about this world. And we've been in the trenches so long that we have enough history to recall 2009 and what happened or 2010 and what happened. Like some people can't because they just weren't involved in software then.

And I think that we just show up, record shows with people, pay attention to where things are moving. We have a thriving Zulip community now, not a Slack community. I think really has become the unexpected heartbeat of what I think we should be around. Zulip has been really cool as a technology, but then also as a community to let us have. So I think we just really pay attention to the people we are, our truest fans, I suppose, the ones that show up and interact with us.

We show up and we deliver shows that appease them and delight them and bring them joy. They give us feedback about what they like. We work with cool people like Breakmaster Cylinder. We've got awesome people who work with us, amazing editors. Jason and Brian are amazing people to work with. I don't get to work with them personally because I'm not located with them, but I get to work with them by proxy through the ways we work together. But it's really awesome. I think we have a pretty well-greased, well-oiled machine that works pretty well.

And it doesn't really tax us dramatically unless we leave town like we're about to, Jared, which, hey, next week somehow we got to keep shipping shows and not being in our at-home seats. And, you know, that's always like – it's always a little pressure when we take off out of town. But I think – I will say I think our version is pretty boring on how we produce our stuff. But from the outside, I can imagine how it's pretty cool.

Why don't you share that, Jared? Is there more that we should share on how we actually do this stuff? Well, I'd be interested in what Quincy's interested in specifically. We can get into specifics of different aspects. Workflows. So you have this massive spotlight that you can shine on open source projects, right? And devs working in the open source space. What is your process for determining whom to interview and who to have on the show? And when you create new shows and you find new hosts? Because one thing that is notable about...

This is like an entire ecosystem of like, I think like six different podcasts, at least six. And you have a lot of legacy podcasts that are still like the RSS feeds are still live, even if people aren't contributing. Like Request for Commits is one I particularly enjoyed as an open source maintainer myself. So, you know, like what is the decision making process for deciding what to do with your show and with this community that you've built? Right. Yeah.

So you're going to get fuzzy answers on this kind of stuff because like how do you make decisions is really the question. Let's start with content. Well, we are a listener first. And so we think about what our listener would be interested in. And sometimes that comes directly from our requests. So we've fulfilled probably hundreds of listener requests over the years where we literally do a show because somebody asked us to.

Now, we're not going to do that on a show that we don't think is a good idea just because they asked us because there's lots of requests that just don't get fulfilled. We do read them all. And so that always feels good because, as I jokingly say, at least we know one person enjoyed this episode, right? It's the person who requested it. So we've always been listener first. And then we are also our own audience. And so –

if Adam is excited about a person or a technology or a topic, like that's good enough for me. And if I'm excited about it, that's good enough for him. And so our own personal interests draw us into areas like we've been doing way more shows on home lab stuff because Adam's gotten into home lab stuff and running servers in his house and, you know, prox mocks and plex and like all this stuff that,

my bag of tricks, but it's become his. And so cool. Let's talk about it. Super interesting. Just as an, as a, for instance, Silicon Valley, this is a, this is a touchy subject. Silicon Valley does show up every once in a while in our audio, the TV show. For some reason, Adam just can't get over this TV show and he has to bring it up all the time.

That's the whole story. Yeah. And for anybody who hasn't watched the classic, the modern classic, contemporary classic TV show, Mike Judge, creator of Office Space, creator of Idiocracy, which is a very controversial movie. See? You're just stacking the deck, man. Terry Crews as President Mountain Dew. Oh, yeah. I can't remember his full name, but Mountain Dew, he was paid to have that in his name.

Phenomenal movie. A lot of people would probably... Yeah. They didn't even distribute it. It was too controversial. It was too wild out there. But Mike Judge created Silicon Valley, and it's a great show. Very memeable show. It is a great show. Don't get you wound up. Don't get him wound up. You're fueling the flames here. The thing is that so many of the jokes there, and it was so well-executed...

even in its technicalities of the way the valley works. And it's just, it's so close to home for so many people that we talked to.

that Adam brings it up all the time. And I enjoyed the show. I watched the first season. I kind of fell off in season two, but Adam has probably seen all six seasons multiple times. Multiple, multiple. And so he gives these deep cut references that nobody understands and the show kind of grinds to a halt and then we throw a ding in there. We'll actually have a ding in our audio every time Silicon Valley comes up because it's awesome. My wife and I watch the whole series. It's not every show, but it's frequent. Frequent enough to have a ding. Yeah.

Let me give you a good question to ask us since we talked about these – since Jared mentioned listener requests. And let's see if – I think Jared and I might have the same response as the – to the answer. Okay. Or the same answer to this question. Ask us of the listener requests –

Of the listener-requested episodes, which were your favorite? So we did fulfill, and we have fulfilled, listener requests. So they will literally write in. We can go to change all the conflash requests, and you request any episode for any podcast. You plug in a few details, and boom, it's Dynamite. And it lands in the podcast inbox. It's pretty easy to triage, et cetera. And so from that, we'll select episodes. We'll actually reach out to people we don't know.

We'll produce a show that has some interest by us because we have to have some interest or at least be interested. But it really the idea for the episode and the person or the thought was born by an external, somebody who listened, a listener.

So the question, Quincy, you can ask us is of the listener requested episodes you've gone ahead and produced, which were your favorites or which was your absolute favorite? We have the same one. Well, Adam and Jared of the listener produced podcasts you all have produced, which ones were your favorite? That's a very good question.

I'm glad that Adam thought of it. I'm assuming since you thought of this question, Adam, you immediately have an answer teed up for it. I think you know. I think you know the one. Well, then tell me what it is. So I will just hint at what I think you should be thinking. And once I give you these details, you will concur. Okay. We were pleasantly surprised by the person.

They gave so much wisdom. We were unexpectedly happy with the show. We didn't plan to talk to them. This was given to, obviously, you know how listener requests work. So I understand the full circumference of that. And once we were done with that episode, we haven't talked to him since. So it's a one-time thing. We haven't talked to him. We've talked about having, I'll say the gender, him back on. Okay. And it was an excellent show. That's it. I'll just share that. And what year was it?

Okay. In the last couple years. It wasn't five years ago.

So this would be like a figure that is somewhat polarizing? Yeah, I mean, I don't know the answer to this. Let me tell you the answer then. Thank you. And when I tell you, you're going to be like, yes, I agree. I'm frantically scanning our list of episodes trying to find... I'm trying to guess who this might be. Yeah, okay. Who is this person? This mystery guest? I'll tell you the title of the show. Okay. Attack of the Canaries. Okay, Attack of the Canaries. Yes. Harun Mir from Thinkst.

Yes. Yes. That was a great episode. Best ever? Best ever request? I think it's probably my favorite requested episode. I love it. And that's a great episode. That goes back to probably two years ago. We haven't had it back.

Very interesting because the thing is deploys these canaries. They're basically honeypots. They sell hardware honeypots into organizations all around the world. They have a very cool business model and a perspective on business, which I really appreciate. So cool. And just they sweat the details of the software. It was a good episode. Yeah.

And a honeypot is where you have like intentionally kind of set a trap. Yeah, exactly. For someone where they're like, oh, I'm so clever. I discovered this vulnerability. But no, you just stumbled into the honeypot and now we know that you're here. Yeah, exactly. That's why the product is called Canary because the entire point is not to secure your network but to know when somebody is on your network. Yeah.

And so these things act like a Windows box or a Linux box or whatever. You can have it be a NAS. They have all these different profiles that you can set up in your network. Network-attached storage. Sorry, I like to define every acronym people say. Okay, thank you. And then when a hacker inevitably stumbles upon one, because when somebody hacks into a network, they're basically operating blind. They don't know all the machines on that network, so they start to just feel around, and they're going to...

run a network scan and see which devices have ports open. And they're going to maybe telnet into a port. And these canaries, as soon as you telnet into this port on a canary, which looks like an Nginx, which is a web server machine, it actually phones home and says, hey, someone's on your network. And so it's a really cool idea and a good execution on that idea. And we talked to Harun Mir from Thinkst all about that. And we never would have.

Had it not been for one of our listeners who knew about it. So that is a good example, Adam. I didn't know that was your favorite favorite, but I respect it. Respect it. Is it not your favorite favorite? I just wasn't going back that far in my head. I was thinking we had a really good conversation about building ergonomic keyboards. Oh, yeah. With Erez Zuckerman recently from ZSA, who builds those. Quincy, these are the keyboards that split in half. Yeah. And they're mechanical and they're ergonomic and they sell them and stuff. Yeah.

That was the one that was a listener request. It was in my mind as one recently that I enjoyed and I would not have sought out myself. But when you do all these shows, it's hard to keep track of your babies, you know?

That's true. I'll tell you one show that I listened to. I think it was like last summer. I was walking around New York City, and I was just like – I love walking, and it's a great excuse to listen to lengthy podcasts like this one and like yours. And I was just walking around New York City. I was staying there with the founder of –

he founded all thankful and, uh, like a whole bunch of different like developer bootcamps and stuff. Super chill dude. Uh, Daryl, he gave us like $150,000 that we've put toward developing our data science curriculum, which as I mentioned in the other interview, uh,

Five years ago. Where you all interviewed me. Yeah, I recall that. Yeah, so I was just saying, sorry for all the background information, but I was just walking through the streets and I had to get all the way, like, I love walking around New York City. It's such a walkable city. And I had to get completely across Manhattan, basically, from like north all the way to south. And I was like, great, I'm going to put on the changelog. Steve Yegge. That interview was so amazing. I learned so much from that.

He's a great storyteller. Not only is he a great storyteller, but he's like an engineer's engineer. And I love listening to kind of like the old guard who've been there and gone through tons of different revolutions in technology. And he's talking about LLMs. And after he talked about search technology, he's worked at like every big tech company. So that was just a phenomenal episode. And I think that's one of my favorite interviews in

In recent memory was that episode. That's a great one. I'm glad you appreciated that. Yeah, he was there at the beginning of a lot of things. He saw AWS as a demo running on an engineer's laptop. Before it was what it was. I think it was S3 in particular. But to be there when these things that are kind of the bedrock of modern software. When you look at AWS, it really is the compute for so many things.

And to be there when that started and to be able to tell stories from inside that, because you kind of, when something predates you, you go back to Linux, right? Linux kind of predates us. I mean, when did Linus first announce it? 93, maybe it was early nineties, 92. And so I was 12, I was 10 years old. And by the time I started playing with computers in the early two thousands, it was a well-established technology Linux, right?

And by the time I started working professionally, it was always there. It was just always there. And so you don't think about alternate histories where maybe that wasn't the thing that took off or how did it actually establish itself so well. And, you know, of course, there's the insider power struggles and all the other things that might be part of the story as well. Maybe not. That you don't think about when it preexists you. And I think for a lot of us, AWS preexists our software career. For me, it doesn't. But for many people, it does.

And it's just cool hearing from people who've, who are inside, you know, on the team that built that and imagined it and started having to argue why it's going to work and all this kind of stuff. So Steve was definitely Epic in that regard. Yeah. Awesome. So other listener request, what's the wildest listener request that you've actually acted on? Like where you're like, this is not a good idea, but then you looked into it and you're like, let's do this. This is not a good idea. Yeah.

I'm not, you're in a scroll. I think the premise actually for the Attack of the Canaries show was a little bit off center. Wasn't it? Wasn't it like how a South African is trying to change or there was some sort of like, I can't recall. It wasn't exactly on the money for what the show delivered. I mean, Canary was, the Canaries was in there and things was in there. And, but I think it was a little left of center in terms of the request, but we actually had to go read it.

I'm scrolling. You got me scrolling again. Crazy. So I'm going to be useless while I scroll here. Well, while you're scrolling, uh,

I do want to talk a little bit about where things are heading because I imagine you all are like me. You're not like – maybe you are super sentimental, but you all are focused on the future and where you can go from here. And it seems like technology is becoming more central. As you said, the famous Mark Hadrisen article, like software is eating the world and –

not only has software kind of eaten the world, but open source within software has kind of eaten software. You alluded to that earlier, to where it's almost like open source is one and it's over. And if you're building software that's not open source, it's probably for a much smaller customer base or it's much more bespoke or something like that. But pretty much every major tech company...

a huge amount of their stack is just open source tools, right? To the point that I think a lot of companies like Oracle that develop like proprietary databases and stuff, uh, you know, I don't know. I haven't followed closely whether they are also open sourcing stuff now, but it feels like,

the momentum is definitely on open source aside. And so you all were very wise and prescient to focus on open source, which ultimately went on to become like the biggest category of software. Uh, where do you see things going and what, sorry, this is like way too big of a question. I'll try to scope this down.

What are you excited about over the next five years, considering the past five years and the 10 years before that, which we covered in the previous episode, which we're not even going to talk about because it's a really lengthy interview. You should absolutely check out. But we've talked kind of about a little bit about the last five years. What's the next five years? What's your grand five-year plan? Hmm.

Gosh, man. Didn't we just talk about whether we'd be here in five years? Five years ago, Jared? Didn't we just talk about that? Yeah, we're getting old here, Quincy. I mean, I know you're not going to... Dude, I'm older than you are. I know we're not going to retire. You're not going to retire, but I'm wondering... How old were you? I'm 1980. Okay, so you got two years on me. That's not much. I'm 82. You and Adam are about the same, right? I'm the oldest here, then. 79. Oh, you are? Okay. I didn't know you were older than me. Oh, I'm the youngster on this crew. I like that. I have a big face.

Yeah, your shirt literally says Kaizen, which in Chinese characters, in Japanese, I realize it's, yeah, Kaishan in Chinese. There you go. Continuously improve. Yeah, like continuous improvement. Yeah. So there's a lot of different questions in there. Is this about where we think the industry is going or where we're going to be in five years or what do you think? Like...

what I want, what I'm excited about over the next five years in software or for, for the life of Adam and Jared's podcast. So there's a lot of stuff to be excited about, but how do you think that translates into the change log and the moves you all are going to make as an organization? Great question. That's a really good question. Go ahead, Adam. I think because we've been here for 15 years and I think every time we think five years ago, where will we be in five years? And we're still here. My guess is we'll still be a version of here. My hope is,

is that we're not so much more important for importance sake, but impactful because I think what we try to do is give the hacker generation, past, present, and future hacker generation a place to call home. Whether it's our Zolot, which is now super cool, which, what's the best way to send people to Zolot these days? Just,

Change.com slash community, right? Yeah, yeah. Okay, because it's been in this flux between Slack and Zulip. Zulip, for those who don't know, is an open source threaded team chat similar to Slack. Or it's like the cross between real-time chat and a forum. Go ahead. And it's open source. That's right. Cool team behind it. Lots of potential. I think for us, we just want to keep showing up for developers. I think as long as Jared and I are personally...

Yeah. Yeah. Comfortable.

There's not much surprise. Desensitized. Not desensitized per se, but disenchanted. Not disenchanted. Disenfranchised. No, not disenfranchised. There's probably a word to describe it. Less excited, maybe, just to dumb it down to some words. The colors are just a little less bright. You still see what's going on. I see it, but it doesn't vibe with you the way that it used to.

Right. It doesn't feel new anymore. It's just like, okay. A lot of these things are cyclical, which you don't realize when it's your first time through a cycle. And since all of us have been around for many years in the industry, we've seen the cycles repeat. And so it's easier to get excited when you don't realize that you're at the start of a new cycle.

Then it is when you realize that you're at the start of a new cycle and maybe one that's not going to last like this is going to come and go. It's not going to sustain or maybe this isn't going to sustain. But I've seen six of these. It's a new version of an old idea. It just becomes less and less exciting each time around the cycle. Right. And I think that's where I'm at. I think as long as we can weather that, you know, ups and downs of the excitement storm, if that's even a proper way to describe it. It's like some freaking crazy storms in this country.

Sorry about all y'all. But I think that if we can keep being excited about showing up and keep being excited about the community that's being born around software, whether it's the companies, the technologies, the people, that's what we come for really is the people. I think we can keep being excited individually and then corporately, he and I and the company itself.

around the people of open source and the people around software development. I think we'll keep being here and keep doing exactly what we're doing. Hopefully better because iteration, baby. And we're kaizen, always improving. I think we have been consistently making subtle, small, sometimes big improvements consistently over time for such a long time that we've been able to improve. And we've been able to get to different plateaus and different levels and whatnot.

I feel like it's a bit of a plateau, but I kind of almost want to bring up the maybe potentially our other favorite show. Can I steal a question here a little bit and not just go five years?

Maybe we can answer this question, but I want to come back to one topic. Let's do it. And I just want to point out one thing before you do, because hold that thought for just a second. I don't want to steal your show. That's why I asked. I always like to jump in with little wisdoms that I've acquired during my 43 years on this planet. A lot of times you can feel like you're in a plateau, but you're actually still slowly growing. People experience this all the time when they're learning to code. It feels like I was actually better before, and I've somehow gotten worse at coding.

That's just the way that the human brain works, and Adam would know this better than most non-neuroscientists and stuff because you have run an excellent show in the past, the Brain Science Show. Brain Science, yeah. But perception is wonky and weird. It can feel like you're plateauing or things have suddenly slowed down, and that can just change from day to day.

Yeah. Side of the bed you woke up on. Right. Like, I'm glad you said that because I think the most important thing you could do when you feel like you're plateauing and I do this to this is my own advice to myself that I give to other people as well, I suppose. But is that when you feel like you're in that moment, do do as best you can to zoom out. This is what I learned from Ariel, my co-host in that show.

Because what will often happen, if you can understand focal lengths with a camera, if you have a 200 millimeter lens, it's long, it's focused on a very long point away.

It doesn't have a lot of the field of view in it. But if you zoom out or you take a more wide lens approach to it, you can see a lot more of what's actually happening. So I think when you're in those moments, have a position of gratitude, be thankful for what you've been given, collect those things like your family and your health and the things that are high bar and high quality in your life, not just the seemingly ho-hum plateaued thing.

And really just take stock of what truly is happening in your life because you're often on the best moment of your life. Like these are the days basically. And you don't even know it. You, you were so kind of like, that's kind of why I used the word numb earlier. I kind of feel it that way. Sometimes you almost are numb to the greatness because I don't know, you just kind of, you're just you, you're kind of plateaued. You're kind of there. But my advice is to zoom out, get a wider perspective, um,

you know, have some grounding where you're actually at, what you've actually done and what's, what's actually happening in your life, who's there, all the good things. And then look at things for what they really are versus like, Oh man, like we're just great. And it's kind of, it's like whatever. Yeah. 100%. Like don't get numb to your own greatness and, uh, don't lose track of, you know, how far you've come and like,

How far you are moving, as long as you're moving in that direction. 100%. And I love kind of like your analogy of like focal length. You can change so much. Like I don't know anything about cameras, but I know that you can completely change the vibe of an image just by changing the focal length and things like that. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay, so you know the different lenses you have on there, right? You can just open your camera for that. I've never used any of them. Zero of the cameras. I've only got two lens. I got this, the SE. Oh, gosh. I can't use an example. You're scum.

I call it the banana phone because my kids didn't really believe that I would get a yellow phone, but I did. Well, on modern phones, you can hit a .5 option or a zoom option where it goes further in. It uses different lenses. So obviously, as you go further in, you have less field of view. But if you hit the...

0.5 or even the further one out, if you have a wider lens, you see a lot more of the availability of the image that you can truly see. So you see the full image. Imagine seeing only Florida. Jeez, this is not even edited. Imagine seeing only Austin, Texas. I use Florida like when I just mentioned storms. That's not cool. It's like tone deaf. Sorry about that. Imagine seeing only Austin, Texas, and then being able to zoom out and see all of Earth. That's the difference.

Being able to see all of Earth, you're like, gosh, I see how Europe's doing. I see how China's doing. I see how different countries are doing. I see the full picture versus only seeing one single city. Yeah. Awesome. Let me close the loop on a previous question. Weirdest listener request. I found one. I found one worthy of your call. And then I can also answer your question if you want me to about the future things or the exciting things.

Episode 428 goes back to January of 2021. The episode's called Open Source Civilization. Open Source Civilization. And the request was to have on Marcin Jakubowski. It's been three years. I can't remember how to say Marcin. A pioneer in the open source world with his organization Open Source Ecology. Okay.

The request says this.

We read that. We thought, well, that's kind of outside of our normal wheelhouse here. It is open. So there's your tie together. And we did an awesome episode with Marcin. Marcin. I think he's French. I'm now forgetting how to say his first name, which is embarrassing. Pardon the pronunciation. And I'm not going to attempt to pronounce it. But this gentleman who came on your show. Yes, this gentleman. And?

And fascinating what they're up to, what they were up to. That was so cool. It really was. I would love to like dip back into that pool again, man. Yeah, because they're building the machines that build the buildings and it's open source everything. And so there might even be a commune involved. It was very individualistic and like out there and somewhere in Kansas. Was it Kansas, Adam? I don't know. Three years ago now. I'm forgetting the details. Yeah.

But yeah, they're doing cool stuff. Definitely wouldn't have not have done that episode, but happy that we did.

Yeah. So closing that loop. I've definitely found like whenever you meet somebody who's like moved from like a major city center, like, you know, Austin or San Francisco or something up to like the middle of nowhere and they have like brought with them the funds that they built up living at the city and everything. And now they can do whatever they want. They've got like buy a bunch of farmland and just start building like these mad scientist things. Those always make for interesting stories because people are completely untethered to a lot of, it costs such a fraction to live in.

Right. Yeah.

That's cool. It's a farm in Missouri, Jared. It's Missouri. Okay. Not Kansas. I was close. Neighboring states. Yeah. Open source blueprints for civilization. So that's a big picture. That's a big vision. But also operating very much in the small as they're kind of homesteading and out there in the rurals doing everything cheap and with hand tools and stuff. I mean, it is crazy. Yeah.

Making their own tools. Yeah, making the machines that make the things. It's so loud. Yeah. Awesome. So that answers that question. And then your other question was exciting things. The future of the five years. Yeah. You know, I'll take a technical angle at this. A trend I'm seeing that I think is cool and I think will continue, speaking of, I guess, individualism.

It's just the ability and I guess the trend and desire to kind of own more of your stuff, own more of your online presence, own more of your social media, own more of your data.

And to really be more self-reliant, we're seeing a lot of activity around self-hosting. We mentioned home labs earlier. There's a huge home lab community. There's a huge self-hosting community that's growing. And I think we've all been bit by various forms of data silos that we trade across.

that we trade our data for free services. Equifax shout out to you all for doing such a bank of job of reaching millions of Americans, personal data, creepy advertising based on things that, you know, that based on information that big tech can glean about us from wherever we happen to be and then sell us something that we can't even explain how they would know that we want that thing or that we need that thing. So we think maybe they're actually listening to us talk like it's,

that they're targeted. Advertising is so good that we just conclude they have to be listening to us. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. People were convinced that Facebook was activating the microphone. Absolutely. And as we were talking about recently on the show...

for a long time I would explain people how, how tracking works and how target advertising works and how they're actually connecting. Not what you said, but you happen to be connected to this person who's either your spouse or your friend or your, your sibling. And they were searching for that thing. And then they sent that back to you. And like, I, for a long time I was like, and finally I just gave up. I'm like, yeah, maybe they are listening to us. I don't know. It's thinking good, man. Um,

Partly tongue-in-cheek, but maybe partly not at this point because they're getting really good at it. So we're seeing a trend back to self-hosting. Some people are leaving the cloud. So whether it's organizations for financial reasons or autonomy reasons or it's individuals and their house and their family wanting to run –

Maybe they want to run their own email. That's really, really hard these days. Maybe they want to host their own Mastodon server. Maybe it's their photos. Whatever it is, run your business off of a Raspberry Pi kind of stuff. I think that's a really cool trend. I think we'll see more stuff both in open source and in purchasable things to help people do that. And I just think it's an appetite that's increasing, and I don't think it's going to decrease anytime soon. Yeah, awesome.

And Adam, do you have anything to add to that in terms of like things that you're really excited about that you're planning to have a lot more episodes about in the future? I'm excited about people being excited about that. The self-hosting and the owning. I guess I feel a little jaded to use that word again on that front because I feel like there's hardware and there's software. And I feel like there's just... The cost can be extreme to own that and the cost to lose the data can be extreme as well. And so I think it's like...

It's a small silo of people type that can gravitate towards desiring to do that and then successfully doing it without losing their data long term. And like, man, if you lost your photos of like everybody – I mean, that would be absolutely shattering. Just stuff like that. Not that the cloud is any more better at it. But at least I don't have to worry about them losing my stuff generally. That even happens too. But wow.

That's kind of the argument from size equals security. I mean there's a lot of people who thought working in a large organization was job security versus a startup or a small business. And it's like reality hits and you realize like, no, it's not. There is no such thing as job security. And so all it's going to take is like Apple loses their photo backups for like 7 million people. And all of a sudden like that whole illusion will just be gone.

Well, hopefully that'll never happen. Yeah. I mean, I often think like it would in a lot of cases probably take an actual like, uh, EMP or some sort of nuclear bomb being detonated over like us East one or something like that to like actually cause a significant amount of the data. Cause it is backed up in a lot of regions like free code camp. We're like pretty sharded, uh, to, you know, Singapore and like all these other places. Um,

But yeah, that would be absolutely catastrophic. Let's say hypothetically this happens. Let's speculate as to what the next series of events would be. Oh, gosh. Should Apple suddenly lose all your baby photos? Class action lawsuits? I don't know what happens. Because they're gone, man. They're gone. You're not getting those photos back. Yeah. Now, if you had your own copy at your house because you happen to be a backer-upper, right? Yeah.

You're a self-hoster on your backer. Then all of a sudden you're good to go. You're the one. You're the person who's not falling into a state of depression. Because honestly, for most of us, yeah, you can rent your calendar. You can rent your email. Put your photos. That's the one, isn't it? Or your videos, in the case of your media. Those are your memory. That's your extended memory. So I will say that I do have... I do both. I actually leverage iCloud.

Like any potentially normal iPhone user. I mean, that's why you use an iPhone is you kind of buy the ecosystem. Yeah. But then I still also back up my own set. So...

It's not a perfect, always perfect one-to-one system, but it's better than if that did happen, I would probably still have a recoverable copy that I might need to spend days recovering in some way, shape, or form, but they're not gone forever. And I'm not having to search through the terms of service to see what my liabilities were with Apple. That's good. Yeah. I just do what a lot of tech people I've talked to do, which is have a single physical copy

they store somewhere in their house and maybe like a second one at their office. So that way, if your house burns down, you still got the office copy office burns down. You still have the house copy. Uh, they both burned down at the same time. You probably still have a cloud copy, you know, but like introducing, like I have destroyed a lot of data. Uh,

Accidentally through just my ineptitude as a programmer and a database administrator over the years. And I would not feel comfortable if that data was like not just dummy data from some project I'm working on that I didn't mean to destroy. If it was actually like consequential photos that I'm planning to pass down to my kids. Like my wife, you know, she grew up in China and she went to like college there and we met in grad school over there. And like she has like...

maybe like 10 photos throughout her entire childhood that were preserved through all the chaos and stuff going on over there. And,

It's heartbreaking, and I think of how many hundreds, thousands of photos I have of my kids. This nice timeline within the Apple photos that happen, all this stuff. That would be just totally catastrophic. So is that your main concern about a lot of this kind of back-to-basics, like DIY stuff as far as storing data and stuff like that, that a lot of people are going to screw up and they're going to accidentally have data loss? Yeah.

I mean, I don't care about that with like a home assistant. You know, like if your blinds can't open, I'm not upset about that. If you screw that up, like whatever, that's part of the fun. But if you screw up like your photos, that's a big deal to me. So I still keep my own ZFS copies of that. So I've got backups and stuff like that. But I'm not running my own drive because I'm scared that Apple will break my privacy in some way, shape or form.

So that I can run my own home lab version of what is iCloud or what photos is on the iPhone platform and tunnel through my firewall, et cetera, to my network. I'm just not, I'm not that into home lab. I'm into like, you know, movies and Plex and pie hole and other services like home assistant, for example, like I have automations on my house. Those are the things I'm trying to do. Uh,

Like those are, that's cool to me. That's cool stuff. Like simple home automations. Uh, I wish I, you know, I've gotten, I've kind of plateaued here because I have less time than I, than I can to go further than this, which it was just a really fun journey. Like had I not gone down this journey into the home lab world, I would not know.

I would have known as much as I do about Linux and the various flavors of Linux or why I like different flavors or anything whatsoever. I built the original – we can mention – I'll mention WordPress, and that's one of my things I want to mention. I hope that doesn't go too deep, but –

Way, way back in the day on a DigitalOcean droplet, we ran the changelog.com. Not changelog.com, but the changelog.com. The changelog. The changelog.com as a WordPress, I guess, application, a WordPress instance. And it was using, I think, Ubuntu 12.04 potentially. Yeah.

And I stood up that box thanks to DigitalOcean tutorials. They have awesome writers, everybody who's ever contributed to their docs. And those tutorials I owe a debt of gratitude because I learned a lot from that. But it only taught me enough to get the job done. It was only when I became really interested in home labbing and this sort of self-hosting things and learning more about this stuff.

and being more steeped in it that I truly learn, learn. Like I learned how to do it and then I walked away and that thing just ran for years. I think it would probably still be running to this day flawlessly. It might be infected because WordPress, but it would still be running as a server. Ubuntu would be going strong, you know. But I learned a lot about Linux and a lot about different things that I would never have gotten before.

The need to do that because I was never a system administrator. I'm not a back-end developer generally. I've never set up systems. I just have never worked on any of the platform type stuff I would ever had to before. And now I learn a lot more about that. So if it weren't for home labbing, I wouldn't have learned that. But I know enough to know how challenging it is and how on it you have to be consistently to make sure your systems run smoothly over time.

monitoring, all those things, you know? So, so to some extent, like this project of trying to automate your house service, kind of like your indie game, like I always joke about it because like, I feel like that's a big gateway that a lot of people have into learning all kinds of stuff about software development is, Oh, I need a core gameplay loop and now I need to add, you know, like some sprite graphics and now I need to add music and figure out how the chip tune works and I need to figure out, you know, like how to display certain things when certain events happen. Now I'm doing enemy AI and,

Like it's a project and just embarking on that simple project of like, you know, I want to like control my blinds or something like that. Suddenly you're like learning about microcontrollers and learning about like, you know, how signals are sent and interpreted and, um, Ubuntu, uh, you know, maybe you have like a, like just some tiny like raspberry pie running Ubuntu, Ubuntu 12 precise Pangolin. I had to look up the, uh, every release has a code name, but yeah. Um,

That is really cool. And I like that kind of project-oriented nature. And I like how you bring that into the show. And you have people talking about Home Lab and things like that. Yeah. I think that's a real cool way to run a show. It's just follow...

your own personal interest because you can trust that if you're interested in it, some other people are going to likely be interested in it. If at least one listener is interested in it and requesting it, then maybe a lot of other people. At the very least, you have one satisfied listener at the end of it, right? And it's not about Jared Rod being the most smartest people ever. It's a community. We've formed friendships because...

My true passion for Silicon Valley or my desire to only ever run ZFS as a file system to, you know, and that's my personal take or different things I personally enjoy. We formed channels in Zillow, channels in Slack when we had Slack going. And it's just kind of funny how producing this podcast isn't about standing at a podium speaking at people. It's creating a conversation that includes people.

It gives people a place to go to because like every, I would say really, this is a credit to Jared. Thanks to Jared and his constant hard work of compartmentalizing and providing these opportunities. He works really hard to automate when a show is published, different things that happen on social media. I think some of that has become more manual these days, but then even in Zulip, there's a new thread for every show. And so now people can jump into that thread and begin to have a conversation about

for weeks and weeks afterwards. Like, it happened a lot in Slack, but Slack was just different in the way it enabled conversations. And Zulip really, I think people talk more full-threaded, more full-featured, more full-fidelity, really. And, um...

What you see there is like you produce this podcast, you invite somebody on, you have this conversation. It's not to speak at the community. It's to open the conversation with the community. And that might turn into another show again six months or a year later, and it's a continued conversation. Those same listeners have been listening for the last three years, know the context of the two years ago show or the six months ago show or whatever, and they're on the ride again. And they even get the request on their episode. Like it's just –

It's not just Jared and me pontificating. It's a community involvement. I think that's probably the most joyous thing. So you've got kind of like a changelog cinematic universe going and recurring characters and recurring guests. Man, that is amazing. Tell us, Jared. You just stumbled upon something, Quincy, that you didn't realize you're stumbling upon, but you did. We own the domain. And Adam has been wanting to do something with his domain for years. Is it years now? CPU. CPU.

ChangeLog Podcast Universe. CPU.fm. It just never made sense, though. No. But, yeah, there's your cinematic universe right there. The ChangeLog Podcast Universe.

Well, I think after being on the show maybe three or four times, I'm a minor character in that universe. You are, man. You got your own little side quest going. That's right. Checking in with Quincy. Yeah, let's see what he's up to. Just changing the world over there. Walking around in there. Yeah. Very cool. Well, gentlemen, it's always an absolute pleasure to talk to you. It is fun. And we could talk all day. I do want to be mindful of the fact that Jared has a hard stop, and I also want to just

listeners to use the time that I would probably continue rambling and asking you know and you know questions following my own inquiry in my own interests like go and listen to some of those episodes I've linked at

at least three of them in the show notes, the ones that we've mentioned, the Steve Yeagy episode, and I think the honeypot, it was called... Attack of the Canaries. Attack of the Canaries. Yeah, I've linked that as well. And, of course, if you have time and you want to learn more about the history of the changelog, go and listen to the episode that we recorded live in Adam's studio in Houston. And I think you're going to learn a lot from...

from these people as time progresses, open source is not going anywhere. It's only growing. It, you know, has arguably won, but that doesn't mean that like,

It's not going to be changing heavily over the next decade or so. And I love listening to the changelog news every week and just getting kind of the straight dope from Jared, getting like just distilled, like the most interesting thing. And in this quirky soundbite rich manner that he delivers it, I love listening to long form interviews and just the amount of knowledge that is available in this giant archive of episodes. And I'm a change blogger.

log plus plus member for multiple years. And I encourage other people who are listening. If you get a lot out of the show, consider supporting Jared and Adam and the many people that work at the change log on different aspects of the show in the community. And I'm definitely going to join the Zulip community too. I had not even heard the name Zulip in many years, but we did look at that when we were considering, and I'm thrilled to hear that you've had such a fantastic, but yeah,

It's like real-time chat meets forum. It's kind of solid. It's got a lot of possibility, I'll say. Yeah. Well, everybody, I hope you've learned a lot. I hope you've gotten a lot of insight from these two folks. And until next week, happy coding. Thanks, Quincy.