Episode 55: André Staltz on Open Source Going to Zero and Developing Below The Poverty Line

Sep 25, 2020

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Panelists

Pia Mancini | Richard Littauer

Guest

André Staltz

Show Notes

Hello and welcome to Sustain! Our special guest today is André Staltz, a self-employed JavaScript wizard from Helsinki, Finland. He’s done a lot of interesting open source work and has been really instrumental in how open source funds individual developers. He tells us about his consulting job and about the great blog post he wrote. We will talk about the cost of software going to zero and what this means. Also, André tells us what he hopes to see in the future for open source. Download this episode now to find out all this and much more!

[00:01:01] André fills us in about what he does, how he got started as a developer, and what kind of work he’s currently doing.

[00:02:22] André tells us how he came to write his fantastic blog post, “Software Below the Poverty Line” and he goes in depth to explain what it means by open source beneath the poverty line.

[00:06:50] Richard wonders if André has done any work looking at how many people in open source actually make money consulting and don’t make money from selling their open source at all.

[00:09:52] Pia asks André how you make the argument of more money going into this ecosystem if the cost is going to zero and he explains.

[00:16:30] André touches on something very important that’s connected with time, which is attention, which he states is something you can monetize.

[00:23:48] Richard wonders if the cost of software is going down so much just because the cost of production is going down so much.

[00:30:35] André tells us what he wants out of his open source work and what he’s interested in.

[00:35:06] Find out where you can locate André on the internet and look at cool stuff he does.

Spotlight

[00:32:33] Pia’s spotlight is Crowdin, an open source solution for localization management.
[00:33:19] Richard’s spotlight is Moxie Marlinspike, who got him into sailing.
[00:34:17] André’s pick is a library called Neon Bindings, which allows you to bridge between Rust and Node.JS.

Credits

Produced by Richard Littauer
Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound
Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at Peachtree Sound

Special Guest: André Staltz.