Back in February, our own Luis Villa spoke at RedMonk’s Monkigras conference in London. This year’s topic was one very near and dear to our hearts: sustaining craft

1. Friction, Sustainability,
and Open Source
The standard story about free and open source software is about sharing. As an old professor of mine used to say, if you wrap the entire world in internet and spin it,
software comes out.
And that’s not a terrible story! Certainly it has made my professional career a fun one, because like many of you, through that sharing, I’ve made a network of friends
around the world. And maybe even built some useful software.
But today I want to use a different lens to look at the open source story: friction. What do I mean by friction? In our context by friction I mean the rough edges of our
systems - the little things that make our systems work slightly less efficiently; that make our systems slightly more painful to use. This friction is all over - we see it in the
manual cars that required more work than modern cars; we see it in old printing presses that have imperfection and difficulty in their printing. And of course we see it in
software.

2. So why am I an expert in friction? This is how I normally dress when I’m going into battle. I used to be a software QA guy, and now I’m a corporate lawyer - I write contracts.
So I’m an expert in causing in friction.
Wait, did I say that out loud? I mean, I’m an expert in identifying and fixing friction.

3. Besides destroying value through QA and contracts, I also recently co-founded a company that is trying to make open source more sustainable by directly supporting and
empowering maintainers.
The company is called Tidelift, and since of course the best Redmonk talks are less about companies and more about beer, I won’t mention my company again until near
the very end. (We’ll get to the beer before that.) But hopefully that mention will be interesting enough for you to grab me (or my co-workers Jeremy and Ben) for a talk
today or tomorrow :)

4. 4
Frictionless Software, Friction-full People
P A R T O N E
P A R T T W O
Low Friction Beginnings
Lurking Friction
(Luddites: A Digression)P A R T T H R E E
P A R T F O U R Models for the New World
So how are we going to talk about friction?
First we’ll talk about how FOSS erased a bunch of friction - and created a ton of value.
Then we’ll talk about how there is plenty of friction remaining in open source - and that friction is arguably getting worse.
We’ll then take a little historical detour - what happens when removing friction removes people as well? And then those people fight back? (hint: history is written by the
winners.)
Finally, we’ll talk about some options we might see going forward.

5. S E C T I O N 1
Low Friction:
The Beginning of
the FOSS Story
So I’ve defined friction, but I think it’ll be more obvious if we get down to talking about some examples.
Here’s an obvious source of friction in building systems, historically: enterprise software sales and licensing.

6. 6
original
low-friction FOSS:
CVS, IRC, licensing
L O W F R I C T I O N
The breakthrough technological innovation of open source was the no-friction, no-cost license: it transformed what had been a high-friction barrier (paying for things!
Negotiating contracts!) into something smooth as silk.
We also had collaboration technologies that were radically better than what closed-source had at the time: CVS, IRC, mailing lists. Participating was, for a time, much lower
friction than it was at proprietary companies. (Now every company has IRC and CVS, they just call it Slack and GitHub.)

7. 7
lose friction, gain the world!
L O W F R I C T I O N
This lack of friction has made FOSS a lubricant for the rest of the industry.
You all know the story - no-cost building blocks at the bottom of the stack have, in essence, allowed the rest of us to innovate without friction at the top of the stack.

8. 8
(also: lose friction,
lose a business model)
L O W F R I C T I O N
Of course the other part of this lack of friction is that the money slips through all our fingers - the traditional tool of selling software doesn’t work.
Much of my legal career has been spent counseling companies who figured this out too late: they made it very easy to give away all their value, and then called me when
they wanted to corral that value again. It wasn’t much fun in part because there weren’t great answers to their questions - the basic default rules of open source make
software slip out regardless of how hard we try to keep it in.

9. S E C T I O N 2
Friction:
Not Entirely Gone
Of course, the lack of friction isn’t perfect. In particular, there’s three big sources of friction that I think are worth talking about when we talk about sustainability.

10. 10
1. Frictionless software
is hard
R E M A I N I N G F R I C T I O N S
The first source of friction is that writing good software, with all the edges rounded off, is simply hard.
FOSS is at its best when we use building blocks without really thinking too much about the details. npm and docker are almost the platonic ideals of this - download gigs
of code from the internet, and it’ll almost definitely work!
Except when it doesn’t. From leftpad’s disappearance, to openssl’s security problems, to “oh, we’re getting acquired, we have to pay the lawyers how much to read
licenses”: there are still plenty of sources of friction, many of them inherent to the nature of large codebases.

11. 11
2. Frictionless software at scale
is harder
R E M A I N I N G F R I C T I O N S
The second source of friction is that we’re writing software at a huge scale. Earlier today we heard Charity Majors talk about how software monitoring at scale is hard; I’ll
suggest here that everything we are doing is harder because the scope of what we’re doing keeps growing.

12. 12 R E M A I N I N G F R I C T I O N S
libraries.io is a Tidelift project; it tracks 2M packages over 30+ package ecosystems. And the number shows no signs of stabilizing. So if we want to remain productive, we
must reduce friction. Friction was painful when our programs had 15 dependencies, a mess at 150, and insane at 1500.
At this scope, every single rough edge - particularly long term support and API stability - can cause a lot of pain.

13. 13
(Trends are not all bad!)
R E M A I N I N G F R I C T I O N S
On the other hand, the trend in friction isn’t all bad.

14. This is what GitHub said in 2015 - about 20% of GitHub repositories had readable license information.

15. This is what our (not quite apples-to-apples) numbers show now: closer to 80% of packages have license information than 20. (Though definitely lots of problems with that
80%!) People did this for a lot of reasons: some pride, some learning.
There was also the invisible hand of the software market: if every company that cares about licensing submits some patches, these little frictions often get smoothed out.
Of course, it isn’t clear if this is happening for harder problems, and it certainly isn’t clear who is actually doing the work.

16. 16
3. Frictionless people?
R E M A I N I N G F R I C T I O N S
Which brings us to the final big source of friction: people.

17. S E C T I O N 3
Creating the Frictionless
Human
And to talk about people, I want to quickly hop on a train to Nottingham and take a look at a story of human friction from a stitch over 200 years ago.

18. 18
Fake news, c. 1811
L U D D I T E S 1 0 1
Luddites, under their (maybe mythical) leader Ned Ludd, were stockingers in the Nottingham area c. 1800. And they went around smashing so-called “stocking frames” -
an early tech of the industrial revolution.
Because they went around smashing new machines, we’ve been bequeathed the general usage of Luddite: they hated technology.
Reality: they hated losing control of their lives because of technology. Let me explain that a bit.

19. 19 L U D D I T E S 1 0 1
Real beer, c. 1811
The stockingers were skilled craftspeople, and like a lot of skilled craftspeople, they had it pretty good! They had deep relationships with their suppliers and buyers, and a
fair amount of flexibility - if they wanted to kick back and have a beer on occasion, or hang out with their kids, they could choose to do so. Or if they wanted to make more,
they could do that too - just put in a few more hours.
This was a life many of them loved - and this lifestyle is what they were angry about losing.

20. 20
Labor’s perspective:
friction is autonomy
L U D D I T E S 1 0 1
To put it another way: what looked like friction to the people who bought stockings from stockingers and sold them in town (maybe the supply of stockings will be slightly
unreliable! Maybe I can’t plan!) looked a lot to the stockingers like self-control. It looked like autonomy, it looked like self-employment. And that was threatened by jobs in
factories, on time-clocks and machinery controlled by bosses (which they hadn’t previously had).

21. 21
Boss’s perspective:
friction is cost
L U D D I T E S 1 0 1
Of course, to the former buyers in a free market who would now become bosses of controlled labor, having predictable hours and predictable outputs looked great.
And they may not even have been wrong, not as we normally think of the term - after all, the cost of clothing dropped and (eventually) the quality went up as well.
But those were in the far future, and the pain to a quality lifestyle was immediate. So the stockingers protested. They couldn’t assault their bosses (usually), and labor
organizing was literally punishable by death, so they smashed the machines that were not just ruining their livelihood but ruining their lives.

22. 22
3. Frictionless people !
L U D D I T E S 1 0 1
So that’s the core of the Luddite story. A system that wants to reduce friction: going from people who live by their own rhythms and patterns, and therefore aren’t
predictable/don’t run smoothly, to people who are as close to cogs in the machine as we can get them?
That story should probably sound familiar: it’s our modern open source sustainability story, as we push (for very good reasons!) to make the system ever more predictable,
ever more reliable, in a very real sense ever less human.

23. S E C T I O N 4
So, um, now what?
To be clear, friction is not the only way to think about the sustainability problem. But it is a lens I’ve found helpful as I think about what comes next. What are our potential
solutions to the sustainability problem?

24. 24
What Would Ned Ludd Do?
N O W W H A T
One solution, of course, is to insist on doing nothing about friction. We can argue that we technologists, as neo-stockingers, like frictions, because what is a friction to an
enterprise is to us the ability to not worry about every single detail of the stuff we release as open source.

25. 25
What Would Ned Ludd Do?
N O W W H A T
I submit that we don’t actually have the choice to do nothing.
The Luddites became a historical footnote because the value to society of a frictionless industrial machine outweighed the benefits of an artisanal lifestyle.
The same is likely to happen here: our technology will inevitably get more complex, and the demands of our users will only increase. To balance that out, we’re going to
need to continue to reduce friction, in ways that might make open source seem less like fun and more like our day jobs.

26. 26
What Would
Ned Ludd’s
Employers Do?
N O W W H A T
So if standing still isn’t a solution, what is? Historically, the answer is to turn people into some very meticulously engineered cogs in a very large machine.
As developers, our normal instinct, of course, is that we can’t become cogs: CODE IS AN ART!
I would like to think this is true, but I suspect it isn’t. In particular, lots and lots of stuff around code, it turns out, definitely isn’t art. And the commercial pressures that drive
adoption of open source will continue to grow. So unless we do something, large users of code will likely continue to grind down our rough edges - usually without much
thought for the developers involved.

27. 27
If we want to change course…
N O W W H A T
So that’s the challenge for FOSS sustainability: how do we keep reducing friction for users while not letting self-control slip through the fingers of maintainers?

28. 28
Patronage:
embracing low friction?
N O W W H A T
One option for developer control is to accept that we can no longer use the frictions of licensing to force people to pay us, and beg - I mean seek patronage - instead.
Patreon has had some very interesting wins, and OpenCollective is of course terrific. I’m ex-Mozilla and ex-Wikipedia, so I love the idea of people giving to something they
support without strings attached.
However, the track record here isn’t great, especially at scale. This will be most successful where the recipient of patronage can point to specific frictions that are hard to
quantify and tackle, but important. Linux Foundation’s approach to the rough edges of open source governance is an obvious example of success here.

29. 29
Bounties:
ad hoc friction
removal
N O W W H A T
Another way to think about making money in a low-friction world is to identify specific pain points, and take money to fix them. In FOSS, we call them bounties - payments to fix specific
problems or add specific features. They are another perennial solution to open source sustainability.
But they (1) they tend not to scale well (lots of hidden costs); (2) they tend not to address the small frictions that impact us at scale (like security audits in deep parts of the stack like openssl,
or collective license problems) and (3) because both demand and supply are spiky, it is hard to convince people to quit their jobs over it, or rely on it for supply.

30. 30
Deliberate frictions:
licensing, tokens
N O W W H A T
Of course, when many of you think “friction” you think “ALL CAPS TEXT.” So one dimension of experimentation we’re going to see is deliberate reintroduction of financial friction in an
attempt to raise money.
⁃ Licensing: AGPL, License Zero
⁃ Coins! (which can overlap with bounties)
Because these reintroduce friction, I suspect they’ll fail - though I welcome the experimentation; it is entirely possible that someone will find the right balance of additional value added with
new friction added (as Linus did with the GPL and the Linux kernel).

31. 31
Support enterprises?
N O W W H A T
It is notable when we’re thinking about sustainability that enterprise support has been the longest-serving model in FOSS: it reduces friction for enterprises by rounding off
the rough edges (licensing, support, long-term maintenance) while reducing friction for developers by, well, employing some of them - nothing reduces the barrier to
participation like getting paid!
Traditionally, though, it hasn’t scaled: the number of developers employed has been low, and the amount of software covered has been spotty (openssl has been shipped
by Red Hat for decades, and yet…)

32. 32
Support enterprises!
(and developers)
N O W W H A T
I promised exactly one slide worth of product pitch, and here it is.
At Tidelift, we want to make it easy - low-friction - for developers to get paid for doing basic maintenance of the projects they love, and we want to make it easy and
valuable for companies to pay them for that maintenance. And we want to do this at a big, ambitious scale, so that as open source grows, we grow with it.
Just as Etsy supports a large group of artisans, we want to do the same; but this time, paired with an ecosystem-wide subscription model that makes income more stable
and predictable, and less tied to the whims of specific patrons.
If that sounds interesting, we’re all here to chat. I’ll also post a survey URL at the end - we’re asking for just a few minutes to help inform our attempt to build a more
sustainable ecosystem for everyone.

33. S E C T I O N
Wrapping up
Besides “Tidelift sounds fascinating, please, say more”, I would say I have three key takeaways from this talk.

34. 1.
Don’t throw the baby out with the
bathwater:
keep frictions low
Many of us here are trying to build systems that are more sustainable. It’s important as we do that to understand what made the system great in the first place, and make
sure we don’t break it.
Specific to our space, I hope I’ve convinced you that part of what made open source good in the first place was a lack of friction. It will be tempting to reintroduce friction
to any new, sustainable open source, because friction can help people get paid. But I highly suspect any workable solution will accept and embrace FOSS’s ability to flow
around barriers.

35. 2.
Removing friction for yourself
may impose costs on others
All too often in open source, we simply make it someone else’s problem - “I’m taking pull requests.” In the next 20 years of open source, let’s put developers at the
center and not do that again.

36. 3.
Experiment, experiment,
experiment
It took hundreds of years for modern capitalism to reach its current form. It would be odd if all the rules of open source set down in the late 90s were infallible; carved into
stone tablets. So I’m excited to see how we can keep pushing the boundaries to figure out what’s next for open source.

37. luis@tidelift.com /
@luis_in_brief

38. Licensed photos:
Sebastian Alvarez, irc + irssi rocks, CC BY-SA 2
Elliott Brown, Caution Ice on the car park, CC BY 2
aisletwentytwo, Alec - Mr. Money Bags, CC BY 2
Legal text image from lu.is/?p=2237
English history images in the public domain via Wikimedia Commons