Jan 2, 2019 · 39m · a16z
a16z Podcast | The Changing Culture of Open Source
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of the a16z Podcast, host Sonal Chokshi discusses the changing culture, governance, and sustainability of open source software with Nadia Eghbal and Michael Rogers. The conversation explores how toolchain evolution, inclusive community design, open governance foundations, and shifting contributor motivations are reshaping modern software ecosystems.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. The host holds 23.2% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The host as informed peer 3.6 Guest teaching 3.7 Guest disagreement 2.4 The host pushing back 2.8
speaking balance: gold is the host, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 30:11 Corporate Gifting as Project Dumping
Nadia forcefully rejects the conventional narrative of corporate goodwill, comparing corporate 'gifting' of open source projects to dumping unmaintained code or sending a pet away to a farm upstate.
Hardest push from the host ▶ 35:16 Challenging Idealistic Neutrality DemandsHost directly refuses Michael's framing that developers should only build on open-governance platforms, pointing out that developers routinely have to build on non-neutral platforms out of practical necessity.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 6:04 User Count vs Maintainer DisconnectMichael and Nadia correct common assumptions about project health by demonstrating through empirical research and OpenSSL's Heartbleed bug that user adoption does not lead to maintainer support.
The host holds their own ▶ 31:37 Richard Stallman Terminology InsightsHost establishes clear expertise in open source terminology debates by citing her personal editorial history working with Richard Stallman and explaining his rigid distinction between 'free' and 'libre'.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The host as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The host pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Podcast Overview and Guest Introductions | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Host introduces the episode topic and asks warm-up background questions about how the guests entered open source. Guests describe personal origin stories without friction or challenge. | |
| Case Study: Node.js, io.js, and Open Governance | 3 | 4 | 2 | 1 | Michael explains the history of the io.js fork and how governance restructuring grew committers from 7 to over 90. Host asks brief clarifying questions about Linux Foundation involvement and governance impact. | |
| Open Source Sustainability: Popular vs Healthy Projects | 3 | 5 | 2 | 3 | Host prompts with a provocative question on why end users should care about maintainer counts. Guests educate the host using data and the OpenSSL Heartbleed vulnerability to show zero correlation between popularity and project health. | |
| The GitHub Generation and Lowering Entry Barriers | 4 | 3 | 2 | 2 | Host draws on prior knowledge and past op-eds written with Michael regarding GitHub's impact on open source access. Michael explains how GitHub lowered entry barriers by bypassing legacy cultural acclimation. | |
| Defining Qualities of Healthy Open Source Communities | 4 | 4 | 3 | 5 | Host actively pushes back on the assumption that healthy projects must be 'nice', asking if creative friction is lost. Michael reframes niceness as an essential competitive advantage for attracting modern contributors. | |
| Inverted Gatekeeping and Trust-Based Governance | 3 | 4 | 3 | 4 | Host questions whether inverting gatekeeping and landing commits by default leads to sloppy code quality. Michael rejects the premise, explaining that expanding committer volume maintains high code standards. | |
| Toolchain Evolution: From Subversion to Git | 4 | 4 | 3 | 2 | Host quotes Nadia's past thesis that there is 'no my in open source'. Nadia explains the shift from possessive to associative ownership, while Michael notes his disagreement with Carl Fogel on the ease of forking. | |
| Shifting Contributor Motivations and Modular Architecture | 3 | 4 | 2 | 3 | Host presses on where grand vision comes from if projects are broken into tiny components. Michael explains that older incentive models like ESR's Cathedral and Bazaar are outdated, as modern development favors modular scope. | |
| Corporate-Backed Projects and Open Governance Foundations | 4 | 4 | 3 | 3 | Host highlights corporate contributions like TensorFlow and asks about corporate 'gifting'. Nadia and Michael counter with a cynical take, characterizing corporate open-sourcing as dumping unmaintained projects onto the community. | |
| Terminology Debates, Identity Politics, and Legal Precedents | 5 | 3 | 3 | 2 | Nadia explains her provocative quote about hating the term 'open source'. Host demonstrates direct domain knowledge by sharing her experience editing Richard Stallman and his insistence on using 'libre'. | |
| Institutional Support vs. Decentralized Developer Autonomy | 4 | 4 | 3 | 5 | Michael discusses the Oracle v Google trial and insists on neutral bodies for platforms. Host directly pushes back, calling Michael's requirement idealistic given real-world developer choices. | |
| Future Trends: Distributed Web and Multi-Disciplinary Open Source | 4 | 3 | 2 | 2 | Discussion wraps up with trends in the distributed web and multi-disciplinary open source. Host offers sharp commentary on poor open source user interface design and endorses non-developer involvement. |
Statements from this episode (32)
Chokshi: NPM is the world's largest open source library ecosystem
“And its package manager, NPM, is the largest ecosystem of open source libraries in the world.”
Rogers: Community is the sole unifying force in open source
“The community is like literally the only thing holding these people together, even at the time that they're doing the work.”
Rogers: Node.js user adoption doubles every year
“The users of Node.js are still doubling every year”
Rogers: Node.js expanded core committers from 7 to 90 in 18 months
“And so, I mean, at the point that we, you know, that we had this disagreement, we were down to, you know, maybe a high of seven committers. Today, about a year and a half later, we have 90 committers.”
Rogers: Over 400 people contribute to the broader Node.js ecosystem
“If you look at the website and localizations and everything else, we actually have like over 400 people.”
Rogers: Open-source user count does not correlate with maintainer count
“What Nadia has found and actually, like, demonstrated with real data is that there really is no connection between the number of users and the number of people actually maintaining a project.”
Eghbal: Open-source popularity and project health are separate metrics
“So you can have projects like OpenSSL might be a project that was really, really popular. Lots of people use it, but not actually healthy. Until we separate those things out, then you have the problem of people saying, well, if it's, you know, if no one's main…”
Rogers: Maintainer shortages stem from failing to onboard casual contributors
“It's an opportunity, and it does have value. And the real problem is that, like, you don't have enough people that are maintaining it, and one of the reasons you don't have enough people maintaining it is because you're not leveling up any of these people that…”
Rogers: GitHub eliminated cultural acclimation barriers in open source
“And one of the things that GitHub has done is completely removed all of that cultural acclimation.”
Rogers: GitHub developers actively care about contributing to established projects
“The negative thing that I always hear is that, like, GitHub is just a bunch of people dicking around with their own thing, and they don't care about contributing to projects that are established, right? Which is, like, actually not true.”
Rogers: Unwelcoming popular open source projects fail to attract contributors
“The issue is that the competition for people's attention is really high, and so unless you're a nice place to come and contribute, people don't care. A lot of established contributors that are used to just people showing up because they're a popular project, T…”
Rogers: Node.js website contributors successfully transition into Node core
“One of the things that we've noticed in the Node project is like we broken up things that you can get involved in. So if you just have the skills to work on a website, you can actually work on the Node.js website. And we see people transition from that into co…”
Eghbal: Source code alone does not create an open source project
“Code by itself does not make an open source project. You have to have all these other types of skill sets, and that's, like, one of the biggest issues that I've seen where people don't really understand the value of a healthy community.”
Rogers: 95% of Node.js core commits land without governance body approval
“95% of the commits that we get into core do just land without ever having to go to the CTC, which is the governance body.”
Rogers: Node.js maintains quality with 90 committers reviewing contributions
“The reason why it's not very sloppy is because we dramatically increase the number of committers. So, like, there are, you know, 90 people that can review this.”
Rogers: GitHub has won as the identity manager for code collaboration
“GitHub is a general kind of collaborative platform, and they are essentially the identity manager for collaboration online, particularly code collaboration. They've won that battle.”
Eghbal: Open source practices from the pre-Git era no longer work
“I still, I think that we're just in this sort of like transition period from open source practices that worked in like the nineties or early 2000 or whatever, pre-get life and have to like recognize that some things are just not the same anymore.”
Eghbal: OpenSSL had only one paid maintainer when Heartbleed hit
“There was, like, a very critical bug that was found in OpenSSL, and the question Was, well, why did nobody find this before? And the answer was, because there are, like, two, there's one paid person, and there's, like, 10 volunteers that are working on this.”
Rogers: Forking projects is too costly to replace healthy community governance
“Just the practical reality of forking a project is such a huge overhaul, and you don't necessarily have the right people to do it at any particular time. And what you actually want are the healthy communities that have healthy practices.”
Rogers: Eric S. Raymond's open source developer incentive model is outdated
“Yeah, yeah, so, so the cathedral and the bazaar is, is a very, very old Ericus Raymond essay on, like, basically describing open source, especially early open source, and at one point he does get into, like, the incentives that people have, and the incentives …”
Rogers: Open source leaders value maintainer assistance over individual recognition
“And it's really usually not about recognition and about ego. I mean, all the people that are highly recognizable in modern open source communities Would trade it for three more people to help them merge patches.”
Rogers: GitHub drove modular software design by reducing micro-project overhead
“So I think that one of the things that GitHub solved was they made it very low cost to have a lot of smaller projects, and so what you're seeing is that basically large projects, large applications are assembled out of many, many tiny components.”
Eghbal: Tech giants have replaced academia in funding major software breakthroughs
“You still need people to think about, like, why are we building it this way, or what does the actual system look like? And that role is actually kind of being filled lately by companies like Google or Facebook that have the resources to make big strides the wa…”
Eghbal: Corporate open-source 'gifting' is often just code dumping
“Like, sometimes people go, we're really excited to announce that this is now open source, meaning we don't want to take care of it anymore, so go live over there. We'll give it to the community, except they haven't actually identified anyone in the community w…”
Rogers: Software projects need neutral governance to become industry standards
“Google just gave Kubernetes over to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. And that's like, you know, an up and coming project. It's getting lots of contributors and lots of new adoption. And that was just because, like, for it to be a de facto standard, it ne…”
Eghbal: The term 'open source' has become meaningless
“Oh, I said I hate the term open source, which is admittedly it was a little bit inflammatory to say that. I felt very, I felt this tension coming in as an outsider and talking to some people who strongly believe this one thing is definitely a core value of ope…”
Rogers: Developers choose MIT licenses to opt out of identity politics
“But even that, like, I feel like, you know, people are taking the MIT license. It's a way to say, I'm opting out of these identity politics.”
Rogers: MIT license is now the most popular open source license
“The MIT license. So the MIT is a liberal license, similar to, like, the BSD license. It's now, I think, the most Popular license.”
Rogers: Oracle vs. Google Java lawsuit benefited Node.js
“That's been great for Node.js, though. It's just another reason not to use Java, I guess.”
Rogers: Will not invest in platforms lacking neutral governance bodies
“I'm not going to invest in a platform that is not, like, in a neutral body, right?”