• Even demoed VMware at hobbyist fair for my LUG in 1998 before anyone had heard of virtual machines.
• Run a computer inside a computer? What is this black magic?!?!?

• https://www.soapboxracer.org
• Saturday Aug. 16th

• This is a photo from a Break Neck Betties bout.
• Her name is Darth Maully

• Honestly, Puppet and Ansible by themselves are just ways to write more consistent shell scripts.
• Their true value today comes from the content library that's been built up on top of that.
• In a world with no waffle mix, what's the use of a waffle maker? And that'd be a sad, sad world
• These are toolboxes more than standalone solutions on their own.
• Nobody buys a tool to just have the tool but for what you can do with it
  • You don't just hang it on the wall and show it off, except for some weird saw art or something

• Platforms: Windows, iPhone, Firefox, Puppet, Ansible, Netflix, Steam
• The big companies who understand this concept invest VAST amounts of money into supporting and enabling their content ecosystems
• web browsers would not be big business today if the internet of random shit didn't exist.
  • the "browser wars" would never have happened
• Microsoft needed applications for its platform. Out of the box, it really only let you write simple text docs and play solitaire. Adding applications like QuickBooks to do your accounting is what made it the juggernaut it is today.
• The iphone exploded in popularity, not for being a good phone (it wasn't really) but because the app store was the first time it became almost trivial for any mainstream developer to distribute their apps. People today complain about annoying and inconsistent review processes, but most of them never had to deal with physical media supply chains or breaking into big-box sales.
  • If I wanted to build and sell an application in 1995, I would have to front the cash myself to press a bunch of CDROMs, print a user manual (that was a thing then), stuff them in boxes, send them out through distribution chains, and hope somebody bought enough to at least break even.
  • The ecosystem existed, but it was a relatively high bar.
  • By 2005, I could sell over the Internet, but distribution and promotion was still my problem.
  • But in 2008, all that changed. All I needed to do was poke a few buttons in xcode and schlupp it off to the app store.
  • Not really a fan of the walled garden approach but Apple created an ecosystem accessible to both developers and users, and that's made them a whole wad of cash.
• We can learn from these stories because the same dynamics apply to free and open source software.
• Even Linux itself has the same story. It became popular, not for being good, but because it unlocked an immense ecosystem of hobbyist programmers who built stuff for it.

• Sure I tune in for the product announcements, but WWDC is not really about Apple!
  • It's in the name; World Wide DEVELOPER Conference
• reInvent is not about AWS -- Kubecon is not about Kubernetes
• Yes, there are themes, but the conferences are all about their ecosystem -- what you can build -- seeing what people have created -- get you excited to create something ON THEIR PLATFORM
• You'll go to one of these conferences and you'll find a billion dollar company in a booth right next to two people working out of their garage.
  • Hi, it me.
• And the most fun part about it is the collaboration that happens.
  • You built that cool thing?
  • Awesome, I built this cool thing, we could plug them together!
  • I ran into Jeremy at OSS Summit last year and now we're building our CI solution on top of Dagger.
• Toy companies have it figured out, Legos, Erector Set, Lincoln Logs, etc.

These platforms are viable BECAUSE people like you and me build things on them!

• All you need to grow a garden is just soil, water, seeds, and time, right?
• Turns out it's more complicated than that.
• Not all plants have the same nourishment needs.
• This is my house, it's a flat mound about two feet tall overgrown with succulents.
• When we moved in, I needed to do some terraforming for drainage purposes and had a big pile of dirt left over, so I built this mound and planted a bunch of pretty plants.
• They looked really beautiful for a while and then they died. So I tried again and they died again. More water, more fertilizer, they died again.
• Ultimately I realized something; and the more seasoned gardeners probably already know what I'm going to say.
• I wasn't taking into account what the plants actually needed. Succulents get waterlogged and drown if there's too much water, and too much fertilizer stresses the plant to the point it dies.
• The soil here is very thick -- almost clay -- and doesn't drain well.
• So I hollowed out the mound and filled it with light quick draining potting soil, with drainage slots and suddenly it took off.

This is how communities work. You can't just throw money at them. You need to understand how and why they work. You need to know their incentives. And you need to show up where they are and feed their needs. Let them lead.

• The company I worked for wasn't doing those things for our community
  • a community that depended on the content ecosystem!
• So a friend and I made plans to build a company to actually do right.
  • And then they saved me some time and fired me lol 😂

• Test pipelines are all but impossible.
• Very much feels like a rug pull
• No appreciation or recognition
• Felt like being exploited -- no longer equal partners

• besides money...
• Autonomy
• Sense of belonging and appreciation
• Accomplishment and recognition

These appeal to the hierarchy of needs.

Foreshadowing: we are still a business and we plan on making money ethically by keeping these community values first where they belong.

Yes, Slack is problematic. We're looking for an alternative that's acceptable for community members who need to participate from work networks that block Matrix and IRC and such.

Hashicorp, Redis, Chef, MySQL, now Puppet... Just like a hike in the woods, OSS success takes planning ahead

• Lots of companies are in this process right now!
• But weirdly enough, Microsoft and Steve Ballmer got it.
• GitHub and Figma, even Slack understand that the ecosystem is central to your value

• Your community users are your customers
• The value they get is a healthy and engaging community
• but the value you get is a solid foundation for everything else

• The phrase "capture market space" is often synonymous with "deny space to others"
• At Puppet, inc, the closest I was able to get to this was getting the developer kit on the release checklist.
• But community and ecosystem impact should have been part of every major planning meeting.
• Because again, without users and content, the "product" is nothing.
• And as it turns out, this omission showed in all the products that failed to achieve significant adoption.
• Puppet was the only thing we built that was community & ecosystem first, and it's also the only thing we introduced successfully.

• We are building a system leveraging GitHub Sponsors to automatically share a portion of our profits with all contributors to the codebase.
• There are a ton of details to be worked out
• And it's probably not going to be more than beer/fun money. But it's something.
• We may have done the lion's share of the forking, but we're not trying to crowd out the space
• There are options besides us for OpenVox support

• When someone says "but your GUI is just repackaged Foreman..."
  • "yeah, it is. That's the standard. Why reinvent just to slap a label on it?"
• The "prisoner's dilemma" is a dirty cop tactic and why they separate people arrested together
  • Your best outcome (by far) is if you both hold strong.
  • But if one of you confesses and not the other, then the one who confesses has the better outcome.
  • So if you don't trust each other or have a way to communicate, you're best off confessing.
• In this context, it means that the first one to build a thing incurs the cost, but everyone gets the benefit.
• And that's true. It's sort of the opposite of the "first mover's advantage"
• But it's also the benefit we're selling.
• You get the benefits others have contributed as well as the ones you've paid for.

• The island of Madeira is where modern capitalism sprang into being in the 1400's
  • without the social expectations of how trade & barter worked, slavery became the norm.
  • "labor" was just a number in the books
  • Lumber and sugarcane were raw resources to exploit
  • Nobody was there to frown at them
  • It was the first time that labor, land, and money were all commoditized at the same time and it was wildly efficient.
  • As long as you didn't care about the side effects like health and happiness and sustainability
  • Sugar exports skyrocketed and investors back in Portugal made a lot of money.
  • Until the lumber ran out. Then it crashed.
  • So they did what captitalism has now made commonplace.
  • They abandoned that husk of an island and moved on to the next victim.
  • And they will not stop until the world is sucked dry.
• You see that in tech communities today.
  • When the insatiable hunger for profits outstrips what is being produced, they just begin to turn the thumbscrews.
  • Cory Doctorow calls this enshittification.
  • And when they get to the point where they can squeeze no more blood, then it's all simply cast aside and they move on to the next big thing.
  • And you're left to pick up whatever pieces you can and hopefully migrate to something else that can solve your problems.
• And this means that there's stupid competition because they're all vying to have it all.
• This stomping competition just to one-up them is super wasteful. For example, Puppet should never have built Bolt. It's very good now, but it took an immense amount of work to get there. And when it failed to out-compete Ansible, Puppet more or less gave up on it.
• Rebuilding connections with other communities, Ansible, Foreman, etc.
• Mark your calendars for my talk next year where I report on how successful this plan is