Nadia Eghbal

Thanks for the links. I read those and some more from your blog. I've also been to a Chad Whitacre talk about Sentry's OSS approach at a conference this year.

I don't think we're disagreeing at all. I quoted Adam to drive the point that tech shops that value collaboration will tend to prefer OSI-approved licenses. That doesn't seem to be the case for Sentry:

[Sentry is] single-source. That is, [the Company behind it] are the authors and maintainers of the software, and [does] not expect the community to provide us with contributions. We still allow it, and are thankful, but we consider it our duty to develop our software. At the other end of the "single-source" spectrum is SQLite which is closed to collaboration but is dedicated to public domain and requests a fee for "Warranty": https://sqlite.org/copyright.html

It does seem like Sentry wants control over distribution, but by the way of license? Adam proposes something similar (and I guess that's the reason he's okay with "Fair Source", like a few others too who want to unchain the idea and go beyond OSI / Open Source [0]):

[Sentry wants] to allow people to self-host our software. > I also respect Adam, but last I understood it the model they were going after sounded pretty similar to trademark protection (which doesnt work).

A counter example: The Android Open Source Project is OSS, and is firmly gate-kept by Google via trademark and other collaborative arrangements like the Open Handset Alliance and Linaro.…

Nadia left her job in venture capital last May and started work on a thesis. What is not venture backable in tech right now, that tech absolutely cannot do without?

Projects that had present, not future, value. Were actively used by Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Netflix, even governments. Directly responsible for tech’s rapid rise, as Mark Suster once explained but they hadn’t captured the financial value they deserved.

Capturing of financial value for these projects is extremely important yet isn't realised and can have devastating effects. Remember heartbleed?

I encourage you to speak with a maintainer heart to heart of any moderately successful opensource project to tell it like it is. Here's a 4min clip from the PythonAU keynote delivered by Russell Keith Magee that does exactly that.

https://youtu.be/0t85TyH-h04

It's a never ending stream of notifications that contain abuse and demands for unpaid work with occasional moments of the highest of highs (ie someone sending you a thankyou postcard via snail mail or asking how they can help you out)

Open-source keeps burning out brilliant software engineers. For the longest time opensource has been talked about user freedoms but has been mums the word to "at what cost"? Production is still expensive and the cost is too high.

0) https://youtu.be/VS6IpvTWwkQ

1) https://www.fordfoundation.org/library/reports-and-studies/roads-and-bridges-the-unseen-labor-behind-our-digital-infrastructure/

2)…

Great work and writeup at Ghost. I bookmarked it as an example to give to others wanting to do business and good things at same time. Far as ideas for reinvestment, two things come to mind:

1. Build more tools that solve people's problems created by others vendors. As in, move sideways a bit diversifying your operation. Even better if the tools/apps complement each other where you can increase benefit per customer while cross-selling. Although not endorsing them (not a customer), Zoho seems like a good example of this where they keep developing additional products that might benefit their customers on top of their original ones. Enough FOSS-oriented non-profits doing that in enough sectors can stop a lot of lock-in and abusive practices over time via the alternatives they provide.

2. Invest in maintenance or security improvements of dependencies, esp libraries or infrastructure. These are often treated as externalities leading to a lot of problems we see like in report below [1]. Ghost could deliver its good products/services on top of taking some responsibility for infrastructure it depends on. People buying Ghost get the immediate value plus knowledge they're supporting those things as well.

Just some ideas for you. Keep up the great work over there and good luck to you all! :)

[1] https://medium.com/@nayafia/how-i-stumbled-upon-the-internet-s-biggest-blind-spot-b9aa23618c58

This is an excellent article. Also brings to mind some of the writing that Nadia Eghbal has been doing recently about open source (https://medium.com/@nayafia).

Not being an asshole is obviously the right basic mindset. But if you're a maintainer of open source, there are a number of other considerations to keep in mind. You really want your project to be as accessible as possible.

People talk sometimes disparagingly about "drive-by pull requests", but these are good things! Your core contributors can only do so much, and you're likely to get only so many people capable of making core-level contributions. You want to take advantage of the long tail as much as possible.

This is especially true when you consider the pool of potential contributors is often much wider than seasoned open source contributors. You'll get people who have never squashed commits before, or never even submitted a pull request. A welcoming mindset is the first step. But you need to be thinking hard about how difficult it is for a new contributor to onboard onto your project.

I know it's a lot of work for maintainers who are already stretched thin. If this is a topic that interests you and you want to chat, feel free to email me. I'd love to help figure out how to make this easier for more maintainers.

http://sens.org/. Humans need more lifespan, badly.

I’d have said AI safety, but it’s already on your list. Excellent.

I’d also have said basic income. Good to know you’re on it.

Meta-research. Academic publishing is obsolete, and knowledge should not be paywalled. How many researchers already make use of https://www.reddit.com/r/scholar or http://sci-hub.io/?

Bacteriophages. Antibiotics are running out, while phages have been tested by the Soviets, and are available as an over-the-counter treatment in certain countries.

Open-source infrastructure. How many ‘unicorns’ were only possible because of years of prior volunteer work? See @nayafia’s recent post: https://medium.com/@nayafia/how-i-stumbled-upon-the-internet-s-biggest-blind-spot-b9aa23618c58

Feynman’s and Drexler’s molecular nanotechnology. Smalley muddied the waters, and the National Research Council dropped the ball. We can do better than just nanoelectronics.

See also “Ask PG: What Is The Most Frighteningly Ambitious Idea You Have Been Pitched On?”, paying attention to the Yudkowsky Ambition scale: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4509934