FLOSS Weekly 746, Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

Doc Searls (00:00):
This is Floss Weekly. I'm Doc Searls. This week Jonathan Bennett and I talked with Claude Warren Jr. About open source culture, how it maybe started in a way with coffee shops in 1680 or something or other. All kinds of really interesting stuff about gee culture, what's right, what's wrong, how to manage it, really deep stuff, good stuff. And that is coming up Next.

Leo Laporte (00:27):
Podcasts you love from people you trust. [00:00:30] This tweet,

Doc Searls (00:35):
This is Floss Weekly episode 746, recorded Wednesday, August 23rd, 2023. Don't hesitate and cultrate, this episode of Floss Weekly is brought to you by Bit Warden. Get to the open source password manager that can help you stay safe online. Get started with a free teams or enterprise plan trial or [00:01:00] get started for free across all devices as an individual user at bit warden.com/twit and buy FastMail, reclaim your privacy, boost productivity and make email yours with fast mail. Try it now free for 30 days at fastmail.com/twit.

Leo Laporte (01:22):
Listeners of this program get an ad free version if they're members of Club twit. $7 a month gives you ad free versions [00:01:30] of all of our shows plus membership in the club. Twit Discord, a great clubhouse for twit listeners. And finally, the twit plus feed with shows like Stacey's Book Club, the Untitled Linux Show, the GIZ Fizz and more. Go to twit tv slash club twit and thanks for your support.

Doc Searls (01:49):
Hello again, everybody, everywhere. I am Doc. This is Floss Weekly and we're starting more than a week after the last one by about 25 minutes because we've had technical difficulties, [00:02:00] which in the broadcasting business you have a lot. So we had ours this morning and they were very, very funny. Am I correct, Jonathan? For those of you watching, his hair is messed up because he had to rip off his headphones because he was laughing so hard. I couldn't

Jonathan Bennett (02:15):
Breathe, man. I was going to die of laughter.

Doc Searls (02:19):
It's great because our technical producer, Ant Pruitt, who was in the back room when he spoke, his voice was like the demon on the other side of the [00:02:30] port of Callis at an old castle or Satan coming out of the girl in The Exorcist. It was amazing.

Jonathan Bennett (02:39):
I've heard some vocals on Screamo metal that could take lessons from him this morning. It was great,

Doc Searls (02:45):
Special,

Jonathan Bennett (02:47):
Amazing.

Doc Searls (02:49):
And so we do actually need his voice in order to operate the show or we'd like to have it. And his voice right now is on an I R C back channel because we can't use his actual voice. [00:03:00] Anyhow, we'll get going on this. We're going to run along. So Jonathan, we actually have become somewhat familiar with our guests because we've been chatting for the last half hour almost. Yes. So what's your thinking so far before we get rolling?

Jonathan Bennett (03:16):
So we're talking with Claude Warren Jr. And he is an open source guy going to fit in really well with the crew here. Of course, he did a talk back a while ago called the Cathedral, the Bazaar [00:03:30] and the Coffee House, which I found really interesting. And it's essentially just talking about some of the modern problems that we see with open source and debatable the nature of the problems and whose fault it is. But putting all that aside, he just has some ideas about how we can manage the risk of having all of these different players in open source projects and some really interesting stuff there. And I think we're going to talk about that. There's some things in the news that really [00:04:00] fits along and hopefully we're going to be able to make some connections between things like HashiCorp and the B S L, the business source license and the cathedral, the bazaar and the coffee house. It should be fun.

Doc Searls (04:13):
So our guest is Claude Wire Jr. Like Jonathan just said, and he very kindly provided a bio in our Zoom chat before we started. And of course with all our technical difficul, we had to kill the Zoom so it went away. [00:04:30] What I can say and I know is that Claude Warren Sr is in Wikipedia and so is Claude's mom, and I think at least one of his siblings is in Wikipedia as well, a kind of a famous family. We can talk about that maybe if he's up for it. In addition to that though, he is in the Netherlands now, moved there from Ireland, but he's an American guy who in Denver and Claude correct me on this, I only remember it was a champion critter eater [00:05:00] contest winner somewhere.

Claude Warren, Jr. (05:02):
Critter Crunch.

Doc Searls (05:03):
Critter Crunch. What was that?

Claude Warren, Jr. (05:06):
That's also in Wikipedia, if you look it up, it's a robotics competition. It's a tabletop combat robots competition started about a decade before the ones you see on tv. And in fact, they referenced the Crater Crunch rules as an inspiration, but the Denver area Mad Scientist Club [00:05:30] would run this critter crunch at a local convention every year. They still do. And basically you build a 20 pound or a two pound, depending on which division you want to be in, critter has to fit in a one foot cube start of the competition. You can deploy beyond that. The object is to immobilize your opponent or push 'em off the table. So I won that the very first year, which was not saying much [00:06:00] because nobody knew what they were doing. And I mean we had one guy who go and he hit the wrong button and backed off the table. So yeah,

Jonathan Bennett (06:13):
It's not the first

Claude Warren, Jr. (06:13):
Year. It's a

Jonathan Bennett (06:14):
Lot of fun. That's not the first year of those things always goes right. Nobody knows what they're doing. And by the second or third year you kind of have a clue. And then a few years goes by and somebody comes with a brilliant idea. There's a competition. I think they hold it in Japan that is, it's similar, but rather than [00:06:30] combat, it is navigating a maze. And the first year that they did it would take 30 minutes for these robots to find their way out of the maze and now they have a robot that can do it. A large complicated maze can do it in like, oh, I want to say 30 seconds. And because they've figured out all of these different tricks, you can go, rather than taking a corner, you got to take a corner rather than go and do a 90 degree curve and go, you can do it on 40 fives. And that keeps the speed [00:07:00] way up. And then somebody discovered, hey, you know that thing that they do with hypercar where you have the fan that keeps everything sucked down at the tabletop? Why don't we put that in our little robots? So the way these things mature and get more and more impressive is just phenomenal.

Doc Searls (07:18):
Go ahead. I mean once a chili cooking contest with chili I took from Wendy's and then enhanced a little bit [00:07:30] and the plaque was a handmade thing by stoners that said winner of the chili contest, 1948. It was actually 1984, but they were stoned and there it was. But go ahead Todd. Sorry.

Claude Warren, Jr. (07:44):
I was going to say one of my goals for the Critter Crunch is to work out an autonomous division. The problem that I'm trying to solve currently is how do you find the edge of the table and make that easy [00:08:00] to do so that people can assemble something that's reasonably cheap and come in and compete? Is that these are all people who do this in the garage aren't any really big teams. So it's a lot of fun to get kids involved and just have a blast with it.

Doc Searls (08:15):
Our house in Santa Barbara has open stairs. There's space in the stairs, so if a Roomba encounters that and doesn't know what the edge is, it falls one story to the stairs below. This has happened a number of times. So Roombas aren't especially good at this either. [00:08:30] Okay.

Claude Warren, Jr. (08:32):
We won't use their technology though.

Doc Searls (08:34):
Well, this is Roombas as it like 10 years ago. If

Jonathan Bennett (08:37):
You make it open source, you might find that Roomba picks up yours. Yeah,

Claude Warren, Jr. (08:40):
That's true. There you go. That's true.

Doc Searls (08:42):
There you go. So I'm curious, so did you grow up in Denver? I know you were in Santa Barbara, weren't you at some point and now then somehow you're went to Dublin or somewhere and now you're in Dublin. There must be reasons.

Claude Warren, Jr. (09:00):
[00:09:00] My father, who is the Claude Warren that's in Wikipedia was a professor of anthropology. And so I was born in Southern California and LA when he was in getting his PhD. And then we moved to Idaho because that's where he got his first teaching job and then to Santa Barbara where he taught for a couple of years and then he went to Las Vegas and so he moved to Las Vegas and he was there [00:09:30] for the rest of his career. And so I basically grew up in Las Vegas and then later I moved to Florida, I moved to Denver, I moved to South Carolina, North Carolina, back to Vegas, back to Denver, and finally said, okay, that's it. We're going to Ireland. So my wife and I moved to Ireland and we were in Ireland for 12 years. And then about two months [00:10:00] ago we moved here to the Netherlands mostly because you can't find any housing in Ireland. So that was a problem.

Doc Searls (10:08):
You see you a smaller country.

Claude Warren, Jr. (10:11):
Well strangely enough, it was much easier to find housing here than it was in Ireland. So go figure.

Jonathan Bennett (10:20):
So what was the on-ramp for you for finding computer software and open source? A lot of us have this discovery moment where, oh, [00:10:30] I could program a computer and make it do all the things I want it to do, and then you have another one, open source makes this a whole lot easier and I can share stuff. What did that part of your story look like?

Claude Warren, Jr. (10:44):
Let's see, I don't even remember when I started programming. We can talk about punch cards and paper tape and all those things that old people talk about. You don't want to go last because then you have to talk about ones and Ls instead or Ls and zeros. Anyway, [00:11:00] when I lived in Denver the first time in eighties, I came across net, the bulletin board system and was really interested in that and wrote some software to do mail handling for net and I released some of it. It was all shareware or a lot of it was shareware at all of it. Tried to start a company with that. That didn't work out very well. But [00:11:30] after that I think I kind of got more interested in writing software that anybody could use, but there wasn't a whole lot of, wasn't very many places you could put that out. And a lot of it was just shareware, so you would compile it and send it out and not have the code out there.

(11:53):
I came to Ireland, I got a job at the Digital Enterprise [00:12:00] Research Institute, which is now called Insight at the university there, and I was working on a project to do cancer research and so there are massive databases of information that cancer researchers would like to be able to query. So we built an engine that could query that and ingest research data as well. But in the process of doing that, I got involved with Apache Jenna [00:12:30] and began to contribute back to Apache Gena, got committer rights and sort of worked my way up. I'm a foundation member now and I'm running the, I'm one of the co-chairs for community over Code eu, which is a community over code is the formerly called ApacheCon. That's the new name for ApacheCon. And we're bringing back the European version, so that'll be next year, [00:13:00] June 3rd through fifth and broad US lava is our plan. So to nail everything down, but it looks like that's where we'll be. Very cool. And then moved on from that, just did a lot of open source, ran a bunch of stuff up on GitHub and contributed to various Apache projects and things like that.

Jonathan Bennett (13:22):
Yeah, very good. Now one of the things that you're kind of known for when I've found you on the internet, [00:13:30] it seems like first off, you share a name with the famous director or something. So that threw me for just a moment, but once I found the open source version of you, if we will, one of the things that you're famous for is a talk, the cathedral, the bazaar in the coffee house, which obviously it takes a page from Eric Raymond's work, one of those founding documents of open source. Would you take it a different direction? You want to give us the quick version of that talk, the 30,000 foot view? Give us the Lightning Talk version.

Claude Warren, Jr. (14:00):
[00:14:00] It's interesting you say that because I originally gave this talk as a lightning talk in ApacheCon last year, and I don't have those notes anymore and it's changed since then. But basically I started that talk, I talked about how my parents were well-known and my mother's an historian, and that's a good segue because I want to talk about 1688, which tends to get a good laugh in a tech environment because who talks [00:14:30] about 1688. But in 1688, Edward Lloyd founded a coffee house in London on Tower Street and they talked about shipping in his coffee house. He had lots of people who were interested in shipping and they would come in and discuss problems, all the risks and whatnot from the shipping, your ships might sink, you might lose your cargo at sea, you worry about pirates, it's the golden age of piracy, all these things.

(14:57):
And those people [00:15:00] said, we've got a problem that if you invest in a ship, if you buy the ship, invest in all the cargo and the ship disappears, you've lost everything. So they developed the strategy of buying shares effectively in the cargo or in the ships. And so this eventually evolved into Lloyd's of London, which is that the insurance company, that's where they get their start. And I looked at that and I thought we could apply the same sort of [00:15:30] risk reduction strategy to the risk that we have in open source and in open source. The risks that you generally see are you have the project in Nebraska that's run by one guy that's supporting everything and he gets burned out and everything collapses. That's a risk. You've got risks, the log four J type risks where you get security issues that have to be fixed and you have to be aware of that.

(15:56):
How have the legal requirements that are coming out of the EU and potentially out [00:16:00] of the EU s. So there's some risk involved with using open source and producing open source. And my thought was if companies stopped looking at open source as being a way to save money, it's not free, it is free software, but that's not the reason to use it. If they started thinking about it, about funding it as insurance against catastrophic failure, then perhaps we [00:16:30] would see a lot of these risks diminished. If you're able to pay the guy in Nebraska to continue to develop and maintain his software, he's more likely to do so. And so the idea behind it is that the Cathedral and the Bazaar talk about ways, strategies for developing software with top down or the broad based approach that I suppose most of your audience knows. And [00:17:00] the idea is to bring in this new concept of the Coffee House.

(17:04):
And in the Coffee house is a place where companies and people interested parties can go virtually go and discuss open source projects and think about what are the problems that are affecting a given open source project. Is there only one person developing it? And if we're dependent on that and there's one person developing it, how can we help to [00:17:30] keep it afloat? I mean, we can add people to the development team, we can hire people within the company, within our company to go out and work on the open source project and do that without really you do that without really trying to guide where the project's going and just support the project in its natural environment. Then you have reduced the risk for your company. So you can start thinking about the pay that you do to [00:18:00] pay developers to go out and do that.

(18:02):
That's a part of an insurance policy for risk reduction. You can work with other what are called open source program offices where you support open source projects that your company's dependent on. And if multiple open source project offices get together, then they can start to evaluate all of the things that they're dependent on and there will be a lot of shared dependencies and so they can [00:18:30] work and not have to do the research on every dependency. They can share the load and as long as you can trust your co open source program office, then the project, then you can cut the amount of work that you have to pay for and have to do. So we can share the work and share the benefit in an open source way just in terms of providing support for the projects we're dependent on.

Doc Searls (19:00):
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(21:30):
[00:21:30] I love the case for open source as insurance a risk reduction. I'm wondering how much adoption you've seen of that conceptually or actually in the way companies are rationalizing that rationalizing their open source strategy.

Claude Warren, Jr. (21:50):
Yeah, it's interesting. I gave the talk basically a year ago to start and then I gave it again, I redid it, [00:22:00] made it longer, put lots more

(22:03):
Information in and did it in Berlin at a FO backstage and had a lot of people ask me about it and talk about it, but I haven't, can't say that I've actually gone out and looked to see who's doing what in the space. I know that there are a lot of OPOs open source program office. I work at [00:22:30] Ivan and I work in the open source program office there. They pay me to work on Cassandra because they're dependent on Cassandra and they want to make sure it's got a vibrant community and all of that good stuff. And I know that there are other open source program offices in various other companies and that I know that some of those are working together to do things. There's another concept called intersource. I don't know if you've heard of intersource, but it's the idea [00:23:00] that you can effectively do open source within a firewall.

(23:05):
So if you have a number of banks in a country that have to implement the same protocol to talk to some national thing, then they could work together to create that implementation and that will would be, but they weren't going to release that outside of their cadre of banks. Then that would be an inner source project or could be an inner source project. And so one of the ideas is to have [00:23:30] multiple obos working together on inner source projects where they're doing these evaluations. And I think we're going of that we're going to see more evaluations because of the legal requirements that are coming in. And I think that as soon as that hits and people begin to realize what the cost of that's going to be, then teaming together to solve these common problems is just going to be a natural solution. [00:24:00] And so I think it's coming. I don't think it's here yet. I think some early adopters are starting to look at it, but it's on its way up. Get on the bandwagon now.

Jonathan Bennett (24:15):
So I'm curious what your take is. There's some approaches out there that we've covered here before. We've talked to people about it before that seem to sort of be attempting to do what you described as this coffee house model, which I love the analogy. I think it's great. But [00:24:30] there are groups like Tide Lift and there's another one that the name escapes me at the moment. Are they essentially trying to accomplish the same thing as what you're suggesting

Claude Warren, Jr. (24:42):
Now? I only know Tide Lift from their research papers where they talk about various

(24:52):
Components or how open source is being used and things like that. And I think that they are doing effectively [00:25:00] the research that I'm saying everybody's going to have to do because if you look at the European code, that's law that's coming in. If you have a product that you sell that has any open source stuff in it, you're responsible for making sure that that open source is good code and there aren't any problems in it. And if it fails, you're on the hook as somebody who's selling the product or selling a support contract for a product. [00:25:30] So those companies are going to want to be sure that the research has been done on the specific projects that they're dependent on. And I think that that's what's going to drive this. And I think Tide Lift is just, they're a good example of what can be done and how the research perhaps should be done.

Jonathan Bennett (25:55):
I don't

Claude Warren, Jr. (25:55):
See them as competing.

Jonathan Bennett (25:57):
Well, tide Lift has, at least the last time we talked to 'em, tide Lift has [00:26:00] this project, and I think it's their bread and butter where companies can pay them a monthly fee. Tide Lift will come in and do sort of an audit of all of the open source code that they use and then Tide Lift will take that monthly charge and distribute it out to those projects. And the idea being that this rising tide of open source should lift all boats and it's a way to try to do that. Now the problem Tide Lift has is at least when we talked to 'em, they were very JavaScript oriented. So all of the things [00:26:30] on N P M they were supporting. But then you have that forgotten project in Nebraska, which I'm pretty sure is actually a reference to the network time protocol, N T P.

(26:42):
They didn't have a way to do that. They didn't have a way to support the actual UNIX programs that are really kind of the foundation, the bedrock of this. But I love that tide lift and there's one other company doing it and I can't remember their name, but I love the fact that they're trying, and then we've got Patreon and buy me a coffee [00:27:00] in all kinds of different places. We're open to GitHub even has a way to support developers directly. So it kind of feels like we're trying to stumble in as sort of an open source world now we're trying to stumble into some good ways to do this, to support, because we know a lot of us, a lot us have this idea. We understand that if this project stops getting updated, we're all in trouble. And it's just really finding that good model. Everybody wants it to happen, [00:27:30] but trying to figure the exact model out to make supporting these people work is a challenge.

Claude Warren, Jr. (27:36):
I'm not sure there's one model, but lemme back up. First off, the single project in Nebraska is, I got the reference from an XKCD comic panel. I don't know what they were referencing, but that's the one that I have in my mind. Is there beautiful diagram there? But I think there are multiple models to fund the developers [00:28:00] and it's not just funding the developers. There's a lot of things that you can do to support an open source project and depending on who you are, whether you're an individual or a corporation and where you are, so what do your local laws say you can and cannot do? There are going to be a number of solutions and as an individual Patreon going in and contributing to your favorite open source project, going in and [00:28:30] working on documentation if nothing else is always welcome. That kind of thing is great.

(28:36):
Donating to one of the foundations, the Linux Foundation, the Apache Foundation, something like that where you're helping to support lots of projects as a way to do that as a corporation. Again, supporting the foundations. You may not be able to pay directly to people that might be not kosher in your locale. [00:29:00] So you have to kind of look at what the restrictions are and find a way to support the projects. And so I think you're going to see a lot of different models depending on where you are in the world and how big you are.

Jonathan Bennett (29:14):
I appreciate your take on that because oftentimes when you have kind of a top down, this is the right model and everybody should use it, you end up well, it doesn't work for everybody. And if you really try to push that, it ends up breaking a lot of things. [00:29:30] So it's very much in the open source ethos to say, well, there's a lot of different options. Pick the one that works for you rather than trying to come up with one central solution. There's a few of these solutions though that I think probably most of us agree on are not great options. So are you familiar with the business source license and companies like HashiCorp in the news recently?

Claude Warren, Jr. (29:57):
I am. In fact, a while back [00:30:00] there was ACA went to a business source license and because some friends of mine had projects that were dependent on that, they decided they wanted a fork it and start a new project. So Apache Peco was born of that and I'm the champion for Apache Peco, but I have no idea how the code works. I'm just there to make sure that they can get through the Apache process and learn how all that gets [00:30:30] done at Apache to produce good quality code.

Jonathan Bennett (30:35):
So I am,

(30:40):
How should I put this? I'm understanding of the problem that some businesses face that they have an open source project and their funding model is, Hey, we sell support for this and you can pay us and we'll host it for you. And then somebody like Amazon comes along and undercuts their price and hosts the same open source project. I'm [00:31:00] sympathetic to that problem. I have an issue with taking people's code that was contributed under an open source license. And of course there has to be a contributor agreement for this even to be possible. But taking code that was made under an open source license and re-licensing it with the entire project going to a new license, that seems like a low blow to me.

Claude Warren, Jr. (31:24):
I would agree. I would agree. And I actually, I would agree with both points. I think [00:31:30] that changing the license midstream is a really bad move and that I'm not sure I would actually have to go look, but I think that most companies that have done that have chased away their customers, A lot of their customers.

Jonathan Bennett (31:46):
Well, they've inspired forks that most people jumped on is really what's happened.

Claude Warren, Jr. (31:51):
That's basically what happens. So now instead of having five protocols, we make a new protocol to [00:32:00] combine 'em all time. We have six. Yeah. So I think I can see the problem from the developer side where you have to make a living somehow. And I can also see the issue with the large companies coming in and saying, oh, we're going to just run this for free, which is great if you're somebody who's just coming in and trying to run the project and you're going to get [00:32:30] some support from the guy who's already helping you with other stuff. But I think that a w s and companies that do that large scale hosting, they need to think about what are they doing? What are they running when they do this? They need to support that open source environment because they're dependent on it.

Jonathan Bennett (32:58):
Yeah, [00:33:00] there's a danger there. I suppose that Amazon is going to kill their own golden goose by killing the open source projects that they're actually hosting.

Claude Warren, Jr. (33:09):
I think it's going to be very interesting again, when the European law comes in because in its current form, they're responsible for everything they're running on their network, right? So all of a sudden they have this fiduciary responsibility that says, you've got to make sure that [00:33:30] this is good stuff or you are exposed to potentially large, very large lawsuits. So I think we may see a change or we'll just, we'll see the large hosting companies take a page from the pharmaceutical companies where they just spin off some company and then let it die because they've got some legal problems with it. [00:34:00] So we'll see where that goes.

Doc Searls (34:06):
Well, I want to either continue diving into this because it's really interesting or go to the cultural relativism topic. There are others queued up on for the conversation here. But first I have to let everybody know that this episode of Floss Weekly is brought to you by FastMail. Make email work for you with FastMail, customize your workflow colors, custom swipes, night mode and more. [00:34:30] FastMail now has quick settings. From the quick settings menu. You can easily choose a new theme, switch between light mode and dark mode and change your text size without leaving the FastMail screen. You're looking at quick settings will also offer options related to the FastMail screen you're viewing. You can generate a new mast email address, show or hide your reading pane. Switch between folders and labels and more. Choose to auto save contacts or choose to show public [00:35:00] images of senders from external services like gravita.

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(36:10):
Plus keep track of all the important details in your life easily with fast mail's. Powerful sidebar works with password managers like Bid Warden and one Password to make it easy for you to create unique passwords for every account and safely store them on your device. It is great on your desktop [00:36:30] and mobile, especially when you download the FastMail app to get the most out of your email. And it's easy to download your old data and import it to your new FastMail inbox. FastMail is moving email forward with new internet standards and open source innovations that power many email services other than their own. Don't get left behind by substandard email providers, reclaim your privacy and boost productivity with FastMail. Try it now [00:37:00] free for 30 days at fastmail.com/twit. FastMail that com slash twit. So Claude, another thing you're known for and you talked about at the Inner Source Summit last November was the impact of cultural relativism on inner source communities. You mentioned inner source earlier. I want to expand on that a little more on what you mean by cultural relativism [00:37:30] there. Academic,

Claude Warren, Jr. (37:33):
Well, actually I really talked about cultural relativism in terms of cross-cultural teams. So if you have a multicultural or cross-cultural team, you should be aware of the thinking behind cultural relativism. And I think I start all of my talks talking about my family because both my parents went to Northwestern and they both studied [00:38:00] cultural relativism. My father was an anthropologist, my mother became a historian, but I was raised in a family that really thought about cultural relativism. So I kind of grew up in that environment. And what drove at home for me was the very first time I was working on a team, we were trying to figure out how this project had gotten in the ditch off [00:38:30] the road into the ditch, how to get it back out of the ditch, how to keep it from going back into the ditch. And we had developers and managers from two different cultures working for a customer who was in a third culture.

(38:43):
And so you had managers who said things like, we need to have this feature done by this date. And developers who said, okay, so what the manager heard was, ah, they'll have it done by that date. And what the developer meant [00:39:00] was, I heard your request. And so there's this complete disconnect and needless to say, things ended up in the weeds and off into the ditch. So in cultural relativism, which you want to look at is what is it that you think and say that is based upon the culture that you are raised in and how does that differ from what somebody else might experience? And just sort of be aware of things that can really trip you up.

(39:30):
[00:39:30] I can't remember which country it is now, but there is an eastern European country where nodding your head up and down means no and shaking your head back and forth means yes. So if you go with head nodding suggestions from people, then you're going to be misunderstood. I've been told that in Australia a while back, now it's probably not so much anymore, but the thumbs up symbol [00:40:00] was obscene was considered to be obscene. So there are all these things that you have to be aware of or you want to be aware of and when you encounter a problem, so if your delivery is behind and things aren't getting done, then it may be you should stop and think about is there potentially cultural problems, cultural issues that I need to think about [00:40:30] in terms of how do I make myself understood and how do I understand what other people are saying?

(40:36):
And the talk really goes into how you can do that or the sorts of things you sort of need to look for as clues that there's a problem and then step back and ask the questions. And you really need to set the level, the expectation that you are allowed. Anybody [00:41:00] is allowed to ask what might be considered a rude question. And the reason for that is that I don't know. I know that something's gone wrong and I want to ask a question, but what I'm going to ask is considered rude in your culture, but I'm just simply trying to find out what has happened. And so when I ask that question, we can start with, well, that's a rude question, and then maybe talk about how [00:41:30] can we ask these types of questions and understand how we can share the information we need to share.

Jonathan Bennett (41:38):
I want to jump in. A quick example happened, I think this was just yesterday in a developer chat that I'm a part of and one guy checked in and then another fellow said, Hey, why are you ignoring me? Maybe check your telegram. And a third developer says, whoa, whoa, whoa. Why? So accusatory a better way would be and then fills it out. And then the guy says, I apologize for the tone. [00:42:00] English isn't my first language. I've been trying to reach him for about a month. I hope I didn't inadvertently offend. And I think part of this is wrapped up with not everybody speaks English as a first language. Absolutely. And it is difficult, particularly over just text to get some of those shades of meaning when it's not your first language. I remember being in Mexico years and years ago and trying to tell a joke that I thought was hilarious and really offending the guy that I was with. So I stopped and explained [00:42:30] what I was. I was trying to make a pun. Don't try to make puns in languages that are not your first language unless you're yako. It's just not going to go well.

Claude Warren, Jr. (42:39):
Yeah, humor doesn't seem to translate very well across mediums and cultures if for

Doc Searls (42:53):
Humor, you need irony. And irony has two meanings at once. So you may get it wrong in two ways, right?

Jonathan Bennett (43:00):
[00:43:00] Yeah, that's the truth. So how do we, in our projects, and maybe even more broadly, how do we get to the point to where we're allowed to have misunderstandings without worrying about getting canceled, canceled as the kids say,

Claude Warren, Jr. (43:18):
Right? Yeah, cancel culture is an interesting topic [00:43:30] you have to do. I think you have to do it by sitting down at the initiation of the project and saying, look, there aren't any rules about what you can and cannot say. If you are offended by something somebody says, then you need to speak up and say, that offends me and explain why. And we'll work through how we can have this discussion [00:44:00] without the offense and basically set that baseline and make it okay. It has to be okay to ask the improper question. And sometimes the answer to a proper question will sound improper. So it can go both ways. It's not just the question. And I think you just basically have to start at the beginning and then when you bring people into the team, as new people come in, you have to enculturate them. They [00:44:30] have to learn this culture. And it can be very difficult. It is not easy, but it's well worthwhile because when you get a little ways down the road, you'll have many fewer issues that arise from misunderstandings and a lot of the failures that you get arise because of a misunderstanding [00:45:00] that it could have been cleared up much earlier. So I think it's just important to make it safe to ask the improper question. There are no improper questions. It's like there's no stupid questions. I

Jonathan Bennett (45:19):
Know some people that really pushed the line on that thought that they're no stupid.

Claude Warren, Jr. (45:22):
Yeah, so do I. Yeah. And talking about cancel culture, [00:45:30] my brother points out that cancel culture is simply the old mechanism of you used to vote with your feet, right? You wouldn't go to the store anymore. You wouldn't go to that store anymore because of something that happened. And so you would vote with your feet and you would go elsewhere. The problem is that we now live in an electronic society, and so when I vote with my feet and lots of people vote with their feet, it is evident right away. It's [00:46:00] not evident over a period of time. And so you get this idea, well, everybody's canceled me. Well, it just happens quicker. It would've happened in the traditional sense, it just would've taken months.

Doc Searls (46:12):
We're still learning to be digital. I want to go a little farther on this topic, but first we have to take a brief break, so we'll be back right after this. So I'm wondering, on this thread, there's so many different kinds of open source projects [00:46:30] and I've known a number of them, and in fact, GitHub is full of them where it's really hard to get it going. You have one guy or one person has a great idea, put something out there, it's new, it's terrific, but nobody jumps on because everybody's busy, whatever the reason is. And then there's that stage where you're growing and it's still early and you're trying to hold it together. And then that may involve [00:47:00] people from everywhere. Of course that goes, the cultural factor comes in here as well. And then you have something where it's really big and then often there, or sometimes there are breakdowns there. There's one piece of news, I'll close the tab on where the alpha maintainer on some important project just quit saying basically he had enough, he's out and a lot of other people are going to have to scramble and pick up where it left off. And it's an important project. So I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about that that are either related, the cultural issue [00:47:30] or just to geek culture in general, and how do you shepherd these things forward? Clearly some work better than others.

Claude Warren, Jr. (47:41):
I hadn't really thought about how do you shepherd different development styles, which I think might

Doc Searls (47:49):
Berb talking. It might be the wrong verb because I think it's more like a herd moving and then something else.

Claude Warren, Jr. (47:56):
The herd over there, [00:48:00] I mean we're basically, we're coming back to the concept of risk in the open source. And so if you have a benevolent dictator for life and he gets hit by the IT bus, then you're in trouble. And I think my experience is that if you want your project to survive, and actually [00:48:30] I think this is true in businesses, any business that you're in, I've known a lot of people in my career that have been very protective of what they know and they're not willing to share it because they think that that gives them, it protects their employment when in fact, if they shared that knowledge out and other people were able to do it, then they could be promoted up and do something different. You can move up the chain if you can leave your old job behind, if you can't leave, if you're stuck in that job because nobody else can [00:49:00] do it, you're not going to get promoted.

(49:02):
And so there's that idea of how you look at it that way. And I think if you're going to be the benevolent dictator for life, then you really need to make sure that there are lots of people that understand what it is that your vision is and how to go about maintaining that. If you get hit by the bus, and there are a couple of measures for this. There's [00:49:30] a group called Chaos that does various measurements and there's the bus factor. So if you have one person working on the project, you have a bus factor of one. There's some other factors. There's the thing, the pony factor and some other that talk about how well distributed knowledge is across the software that you're working on. And this is one of the things that I think the OPOs need to look at are the people that are looking at in the coffee house, that are working in the coffee [00:50:00] house or that are present in the coffee house. The things that they need to look at are how stable is this project? And really consider, is it stable enough that we can go ahead and use it or do we need to apply? Can we get people in there to help, maybe help work it out? And if it is a case of they're not interested, then maybe it's time to go find another project that can replace it.

(50:27):
Speed up [00:50:30] the evolution that occurs in projects where some of them die because all the people that are interested are left because they couldn't contribute. So I think there's a number of things that will happen, and I think that it is a case of, as the owner of the project need to make sure that there are others that can take up the mantle if you want to put it down.

Jonathan Bennett (50:54):
So there's one other thing that you talked about in your coffee house talk that [00:51:00] I've been following for a long time. That's the idea of protest wear. This sort of all got started with, I think it was colors and faker, some N P M repositories where the developer put in the logout, put a political message, and it actually ended up breaking a whole bunch of websites. And little known fact, I'm pretty sure I actually coined the term protest wear and it got popular when one of the guys that launched a protest wear update [00:51:30] used it in their GitHub repo. But as near as I could tell, I'm the first one that did that on a hackaday call way back in the day. But I want to get your thoughts on this idea of protest work because it's really interesting and we very much, I'm sure we all agree that developers should be able to take political stances if they want to. But then there's the question of, well, how much of that belongs in the code? And I'm kind of the opinion that we're still trying to figure that out. [00:52:00] What level of this is appropriate and what is not.

Claude Warren, Jr. (52:06):
I think that in some ethical sense, if you have an open source project and you decide that you want to put some kind of a protest out in that project that you have in some sense violated the agreement that you have with your users, [00:52:30] you're saying depending on your license, but if you look at the Apache license, you can use the software for anything. You want to build nuclear bombs with it, the Apache's not going to stop you. Other people might Apache's not. And so you're allowed to do evil things, right? That's part of the deal. There are people that you're going to consider evil. I will point out that evil is a cultural perspective, [00:53:00] so you have that problem as well. So I think that first off, you have this problem with the violation, potentially the violation of the license that you've agreed to and that your users understand. I think for most part, I agree with many of the protests. I don't agree with the way that they've gone about it, [00:53:30] and I'm not sure that I have any good answers for any other way to do it. But it doesn't seem fair to the users who were using your project in good faith and trying to live up to the license, trying to do the right thing to do this and destroy them as well. The collateral damage is just too large.

Jonathan Bennett (53:56):
So I'm reminded of, I think it's [00:54:00] Vim for years and years now. When you started up them for the first time, there was a little line in there about, Hey, if you want to, you can go donate to this good cause. And I think we would probably most of us agree that adding that sort of a thing is acceptable. I, I don't think anybody really had a problem with the author of Vim who just recently passed away, but adding a little plug for a charity, I don't think anybody really had a problem with that. But you can see [00:54:30] that as being on the same spectrum in a way as someone saying, okay, my software when you run it is going to give you a log output with my manifesto. I don't know. I still am of the opinion that we're still trying to figure out what is acceptable and obviously breaking things as a result of this is not acceptable. Like you say, that is actually a violation of the license. That's a big problem. But what about log output that says, Hey, I support side X or side Y in [00:55:00] this thing going on across the country.

Claude Warren, Jr. (55:04):
I think that without spending a whole lot of time thinking about all of the possible permutations, I think that in the case where you do something that doesn't break the system, you want to put a message up on the screen, you want to put stuff in the log, you want to do some of the things that isn't going to break the way the users are using the project, then that's acceptable. [00:55:30] And you may run into the cancel culture. People are going to vote with their feet. If you say, I am completely against this thing and other people are for that thing, then maybe they're going to stop using your project. So it can cut both ways. I can see why people want to put political statements out there. I want to put this idea that let's go help somebody [00:56:00] else, I think is this great altruistic idea. And I don't have any problems with that. And I think that that's fine as long as you don't hurt anybody else. I think that's the line. I find that to be the line in most things in life. As long as you're not hurting somebody else, I'm okay with it. No harm, no foul.

Doc Searls (56:23):
So we're down to the close of the show, Claude. So quick one, if you can answer [00:56:30] it quickly. Are there any questions you'd like us to have asked that we haven't asked and you could answer in a hurry?

Claude Warren, Jr. (56:38):
No, I have one that's really long answers, but we didn't get to talk about Bloom filter, so we'll have to that in.

Doc Searls (56:45):
Oh boy. Well, we'll have to have you back for that one. We do have guests back. So our closing question always is, what is your favorite text editor and scripting language?

Claude Warren, Jr. (57:00):
[00:57:00] Favorite text editor And to use vi, to be honest, I used to use amax, but I use VI these days and scripting language. I don't have one. I am the backend guy. I don't do scripting.

Doc Searls (57:20):
If you don't need one, you don't have, I can't. Well, it's been great having you on the show, Claude. I'm sorry we got off to a late start our [00:57:30] podcast and other listeners and viewers are not going to know that, but except that we're telling them. But I thank our live audience for bearing with us in the meantime. Again, it's been great to have you on the show. I'll have to have you back. Thank you.

Claude Warren, Jr. (57:48):
Thanks for inviting me. Yeah,

Doc Searls (57:51):
So Jonathan, and quickly, because we're almost out of time for real,

Jonathan Bennett (57:55):
What did they, oh, that was fun though. So definitely asking the right [00:58:00] questions and as open source is trying to grow up and we're wrestling with more and more of these issues of developer burnout and projects being hosted or developed by one guy who knows all the secrets and all of those things, starting to ask these questions, how do we make this more sustainable? And I definitely approve of that. I appreciate the thoughts there that you're not going to have one solution that's right for every project. I think if you lose sight of that truism, [00:58:30] you can really cause some damage. Trying to fit every project into the same mold is going to destroy some of 'em. So leaving that wiggle room for different people to have different ideas and to accept that that's okay, I think is super important.

Doc Searls (58:44):
So before we close, the back channel says great guest. So there's a nice little summary there. So it's good to have that. Absolutely. So, and next week, oh boy, I don't have it up as usual. We have somebody, [00:59:00] oh, next week scheduled anyway, is our own Aaron Newcombe as a guest, one of our other co-hosts as our guest, hopefully with Sean Powers as the co-host. We'll have to profile him too at some point. Anyway, so it's great having you here. Come back next week. I'm Doc Searls. This is Floss Weekly. See you then.

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