Changelog Interviews

This week we’re talking about the recent falling out between Elastic and AWS around the relicensing of Elasticsearch and Kibana. Like many in the community, we have been watching this very closely. Here’s the tldr for context. On January 21st, Elastic posted a blog post sharing their concerns with Amazon/AWS misleading and confusing the community, saying “They have been doing things that we think are just NOT OK since 2015 and it has only gotten worse.” This lead them to relicense Elasticsearch and Kibana with a dual license, a proprietary license and the Sever Side Public License (SSPL). AWS responded two days later stating that they are “stepping up for a truly open source Elasticsearch,” and shared their plans to create and maintain forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana based on the latest ALv2-licensed codebases. There’s a ton of detail and nuance beneath the surface, so we invited a handful of folks on the show to share their perspective. On today’s show you’ll hear from: Adam Jacob (co-founder and board member of Chef), Heather Meeker (open-source lawyer and the author of the SSPL license), Manish Jain (founder and CTO at Dgraph Labs), Paul Dix (co-founder and CTO at InfluxDB), VM (Vicky) Brasseur (open source & free software business strategist), and Markus Stenqvist (everyday web dev from Sweden). Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 3 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Linode – Get $100 in free credit to get started on Linode – Linode is our cloud of choice and the home of Changelog.com. Head to linode.com/changelog OR text CHANGELOG to 474747 to get instant access to that $100 in free credit. Retool – Retool makes it super simple to build back-office apps in hours, not days. The tool is is built by engineers, explicitly for engineers. Learn more and try it for free at retool.com/changelog Render – Get $100 in free credit to give Render a try! Plus they’re going to assign a world-class engineer to your account to provide guidance and answer any questions. Render is built for modern applications and offers everything you need out-of-the-box — one-click scaling, zero-downtime deploys, built-in SSL, private networking, managed databases, secrets and config management, persistent block storage, and Infrastructure-as-Code. Send an email to changelog@render.com to get your free credits. Grafana Cloud – Grafana Cloud is our dashboard of choice – Grafana is the open and composable observability and data visualization platform. Visualize metrics, logs, and traces from multiple sources like Prometheus, Loki, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, Postgres and many more. Featuring:Adam Jacob – Website, GitHub, XHeather Meeker – Website, XManish R Jain – Website, GitHub, XPaul Dix – GitHub, XVM (Vicky) Brasseur – Website, GitHub, XMarkus – Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Amazon: NOT OK - why we had to change Elastic licensing Stepping up for a truly open source Elasticsearch The SSPL is Not an Open Source License MongoDB transitions to Server Side Public License (SSPL) for MongoDB Community Server Elastic Changes Licences for Elasticsearch and Kibana: AWS Forks Both Truly Doubling Down on Open Source Read the Open Source Definition OR the annotated version of the Open Source Definition Keeping Open Source Open – Open Distro for Elasticsearch The Commons Clause Initial thoughts on MongoDB’s new Server Side Public License SSPL Re-Takes the Stage in 2021 Server Side Public License (SSPL) SSPL approval process on the OSI mailing list February 2019 License-Review Summary Dgraph InfluxDB The Changelog #353: The war for the soul of open source with Adam Jacob The Changelog #424: You can FINALLY use JSHint for evil with Mike Pennisi The Changelog #371: Re-licensing Sentry with David Cramer The Changelog #322: There and back again (Dgraph’s tale) with Manish Jain Adam Jacob Adam Jacob is the co-founder and board member of Chef and talked with us back in July 2019 on The Changelog #353 about “The war for the soul of open source,” and the title of the episode could not have been more prophetic. We pulled a segment from that episode where we talk about business models and how they correlate to open source business models, and how from Adam’s perspective…the AWS’s, the Azure’s and the Google Clouds of the world provide a humongous marketing funnel for open source businesses like Mongo and Elastic. At the time of this conversation with Adam, Elastic was worth 1.5 Billion dollars and “killing it.” Adam Jacob at OSCON 2019 “The war for the soul of open source!” Heather Meeker Heather Meeker is a well respected open-source lawyer and specialist in open source software licensing and strategy. She wrote the book Open Source for Business which serves as a practical guide to open source software licensing. She is also well known for her work on the Commons Claus license which gained a lot of attention with the dust up it caused when Redis Labs’ transitioned their modules to use the license. Side note here, Redis Labs’ has since transitioned away from the Apache2 plus Commons Clause licensing due to undesired confusion in favor of the Redis Source Available License (RSAL) — which we might cover in a future episode as we chase this saga of not-quite-open source yet permissive licensing for commercial open source companies. The whole reason for this conversation with Heather is because she’s the open-source lawyer who wrote The Server Side Public License (SSPL). We wanted to understand the design and intention of the license. SSPL Re-Takes the Stage in 2021 In this Tweet, Heather Meeker said “Congratulations to Elastic on its new license!” Manish Jain Manish Jain is the founder and CTO at Dgraph Labs. We talked with Manish a little over two years ago on episode #322 about their challenges with licensing and re-licensing Dgraph — so, we thought it would fitting to get him on this episode. The Changelog #322: There and back again (Dgraph’s tale) with Manish Jain Graph databases 101 Paul Dix Paul Dix is the co-founder and CTO at InfluxData and shared his perspective on running an open source business, how InfluxData is innovating their commercial offering while having a permissive MIT licensed version of InfluxDB. Paul also shares his thoughts on the stand off between Elastic and AWS and why he’s long on Mongo and short on Elastic. Paul shared a few links to Twitter threads he started: https://twitter.com/pauldix/status/1352604892754542594 https://twitter.com/pauldix/status/1352615503366381570 https://twitter.com/pauldix/status/1352727425717825536 VM (Vicky) Brasseur VM (Vicky) Brasseur has been in free and open source software for 30 years and has been working with startups and enterprises doing open source & free software business strategy for quite a while now. We used Vicky’s post titled “Elasticsearch and Kibana are now business risks” as a reference on this situation. We even quoted her post a few times in our conversation on this episode with with Heather Meeker. Elasticsearch and Kibana are now business risks Markus Stenqvist Markus Stenqvist self-describes as “a normal everyday web developer from Sweden.” AWS gives open source the middle finger Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week we’re talking about open source industrial machines. We’re joined by Marcin Jakubowski from Open Source Ecology where they’re developing open source industrial machines that can be made for a fraction of commercial costs, and they’re sharing their designs online for free. The goal is to create an efficient open source economy that increases innovation through open collaboration. We talk about what it takes to build a civilization from scratch, the Open Building Institute and their Eco-Building Toolkit, the right to repair movement, DIY maker culture, and how Marcin plans to build 10,000 micro factories worldwide where anyone can come and make. Join the discussionChangelog++ members get a bonus 2 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!Sponsors:Linode – Get $100 in free credit to get started on Linode – Linode is our cloud of choice and the home of Changelog.com. Head to linode.com/changelog OR text CHANGELOG to 474747 to get instant access to that $100 in free credit. Retool – Retool makes it super simple to build back-office apps in hours, not days. The tool is is built by engineers, explicitly for engineers. Learn more and try it for free at retool.com/changelog Render – Get $100 in free credit to give Render a try! Plus they’re going to assign a world-class engineer to your account to provide guidance and answer any questions. Render is built for modern applications and offers everything you need out-of-the-box — one-click scaling, zero-downtime deploys, built-in SSL, private networking, managed databases, secrets and config management, persistent block storage, and Infrastructure-as-Code. Send an email to changelog@render.com to get your free credits. LaunchDarkly – Test in production! Deploy code at any time, even if a feature isn’t ready to be released to your users. Wrap code in feature flags to get the safety to test new features and infrastructure in prod without impacting the wrong end users. Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com. Featuring:Marcin Jakubowski – Website, LinkedIn, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes:Special thanks to Josh Fong for requesting this episode back in July 2020. Marcin’s TED Talk OpenSourceEcology.org Open Building Institute Kickstarter From this post on Vice/Motherboard — Kyle Schwarting is a farmer by trade, and a hacker by necessity. His farm, about 20 minutes outside the city limits of Lincoln, Nebraska, is full of tractors and agricultural equipment, which he picks up in various states of repair from fellow farmers, fixes up, and resells. “I would say what I’m doing is hacking,” Schwarting tells me, gesturing to a Windows laptop and a USB-to-tractor cable he Frankensteined himself. Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week we’re talking with Gregory Kurtzer about Rocky Linux. Greg is the founder of the CentOS project, which recently shifted its strategy and has the Linux community scrambling. Rocky Linux aims to continue where the CentOS project left off — to provide a free and open source community-driven enterprise grade Linux operating system. We discuss the history of the CentOS project, how it fell under Red Hat’s control, the recent shift in Red Hat’s strategy with CentOS, and how Rocky Linux is designed to be 100% bug-for-bug compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 3 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Linode – Get $100 in free credit to get started on Linode – Linode is our cloud of choice and the home of Changelog.com. Head to linode.com/changelog OR text CHANGELOG to 474747 to get instant access to that $100 in free credit. LaunchDarkly – Test in production! Deploy code at any time, even if a feature isn’t ready to be released to your users. Wrap code in feature flags to get the safety to test new features and infrastructure in prod without impacting the wrong end users. Render – Get $100 in free credit to give Render a try! Plus they’re going to assign a world-class engineer to your account to provide guidance and answer any questions. Render is built for modern applications and offers everything you need out-of-the-box — one-click scaling, zero-downtime deploys, built-in SSL, private networking, managed databases, secrets and config management, persistent block storage, and Infrastructure-as-Code. Send an email to changelog@render.com to get your free credits. Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com. Featuring:Gregory M. Kurtzer – Website, GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Greg on The Changelog #336 Rocky Linux website Get Involved The Register on the Rocky Linux launch Regarding the name “Rocky Linux” - The new project’s name is a tribute to CentOS co-founder Rocky McGaugh. “He is no longer with us, so as a H/T to him, who never got to see the success that CentOS came to be, I introduce to you… Rocky Linux,” said Kurtzer. Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch and JS Party panelist Amal Hussein join Jerod to discuss the state of the web platform! We opine on why it’s so important and unique, where it stands today, what modern web development looks like, and where the whole thing is headed in 2021 and beyond. Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 4 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Linode – Get $100 in free credit to get started on Linode – Linode is our cloud of choice and the home of Changelog.com. Head to linode.com/changelog OR text CHANGELOG to 474747 to get instant access to that $100 in free credit. LaunchDarkly – Test in production! Deploy code at any time, even if a feature isn’t ready to be released to your users. Wrap code in feature flags to get the safety to test new features and infrastructure in prod without impacting the wrong end users. Render – Get $100 in free credit to give Render a try! Plus they’re going to assign a world-class engineer to your account to provide guidance and answer any questions. Render is built for modern applications and offers everything you need out-of-the-box — one-click scaling, zero-downtime deploys, built-in SSL, private networking, managed databases, secrets and config management, persistent block storage, and Infrastructure-as-Code. Send an email to changelog@render.com to get your free credits. Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com. Featuring:Guillermo Rauch – Website, GitHub, XAmal Hussein – GitHub, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Guillermo on The Changelog #213 Guillermo on JS Party #122 Web Vitals Next.js Nuxt.js SvelteKit Temporal AssemblyKit Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

It’s the end of 2020 and on this year’s “State of the log” episode Adam and Jerod carry on the tradition of looking back at our favorite moments of the year – we talk through our most popular episodes, our personal favorites and must listen episodes, top posts from Changelog Posts, and what we have in the works for 2021 and beyond. Join the discussionChangelog++ members get a bonus 2 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!Sponsors:New Relic – Observability made simple. New Relic One is an observability platform built to help engineers create more perfect software — Telemetry Data Platform, Full-Stack Observability, Applied Intelligence. Get one (1) user and 100GB per month, totally free. Forever. DigitalOcean – Get apps to market faster. Build, deploy, and scale apps quickly using a simple, fully managed solution. DigitalOcean handles the infrastructure, app runtimes and dependencies, so that you can push code to production in just a few clicks. Try it free with $100 credit at do.co/changelog. Equinix – Get $500 in free credit to play with plus a rad t-shirt at info.equinixmetal.com/changelog. Equinix Metal is built from the ground up to empower developers with low-latency, high performance infrastructure anywhere. Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com. Featuring:Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes:The Changelog’s most popular episodes of 2020: Good tech debt featuring Jon Thornton The ONE thing every dev should know with Jessica Kerr The 10x developer myth with William Nichols What’s so exciting about Postgres with Craig Kerstiens Meet Algo, your personal VPN in the cloud featuring Dan Guido Jerod’s personal favorites of 2020: Laws for hackers to live by with Dave Kerr Engineer to manager and back again with Lauren Tan Must listen: The developer’s guide to content creation with Stephanie Morillo Adam’s personal favorites of 2020: Designing and building HEY with Jonas Downey It’s OK to make money from your open source with Zeno Rocha Must listen: Securing the web with Josh Aas, Shipping work that matters with Ryan Singer, Leading GitHub to a $7.5 billion acquisition with Jason Warner Top Changelog posts of 2020: Monoliths are the future (Kelsey Hightower) Slaying Changelog’s compilation beast (Owen Bickford) Git is simply too hard (Mislav Marohnic) There’s a good reason why experienced devs say “it depends” so often (Jerod Santo) Other links mentioned: Backstage #10: YouTube made me do it with Owen Bickford The Changelog #362: Machine powered refactoring with AST’s featuring Amal Hussein The Changelog #420: The Kollected Kode Vicious with George Neville-Neil Founders Talk #60: Leading data-driven software teams and products featuring Travis Kimmel Let’s set up a free, personal VPN in the cloud with Algo VPN 4 sources of endless content ideas 💡 by Stephanie Morillo Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Today we welcome Mike Pennisi into our Maintainer Spotlight. This is a special flavor of The Changelog where we go deep into a maintainer’s story. Mike is the maintainer of JSHint which, since its creation in 2011, was encumbered by a license that made it very hard for legally-conscious teams to use the project. The license was the widely-used MIT Expat license, but it included one additional clause: “The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.” Because of this clause, many teams could not use JSHint. Today’s episode with Mike covers the full gamut of JSHint’s journey and how non-free licensing can poison the well of free software. Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 3 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Retool – Retool makes it super simple to build back-office apps in hours, not days. The tool is is built by engineers, explicitly for engineers. Learn more and try it for free at retool.com/changelog DigitalOcean – Get apps to market faster. Build, deploy, and scale apps quickly using a simple, fully managed solution. DigitalOcean handles the infrastructure, app runtimes and dependencies, so that you can push code to production in just a few clicks. Try it free with $100 credit at do.co/changelog. Equinix – Get $500 in free credit to play with plus a rad t-shirt at info.equinixmetal.com/changelog. Equinix Metal is built from the ground up to empower developers with low-latency, high performance infrastructure anywhere. New Relic – Observability made simple. New Relic One is an observability platform built to help engineers create more perfect software — Telemetry Data Platform, Full-Stack Observability, Applied Intelligence. Get one (1) user and 100GB per month, totally free. Forever. Featuring:Mike Pennisi – Website, GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: You May Finally Use JSHint for Evil 2020 Relicensing JSHint: Watching the Ship Sink JSHint: Dug In JSHint: Asking Nicely JSHint: Wrestling it Free Karen Sandler from the FSC on The Changelog Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

What do you do when you make a living typing on a keyboard, but you can no longer do that for more than a few minutes at a time? Switch careers?! Not Josh Comeau. He decided to learn from others who have come before him and develop his own solution for coding without his hands. Spoiler Alert: he uses weird noises and some fancy eye tracking tech. On this episode Josh tells us all about the fascinating system he developed, how it changed his perspective on work & life, and where he’s going from here. Plus we mix in some CSS & JS chat along the way. Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 4 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Linode – Get $100 in free credit to get started on Linode – Linode is our cloud of choice and the home of Changelog.com. Head to linode.com/changelog OR text CHANGELOG to 474747 to get instant access to that $100 in free credit. Retool – Retool makes it super simple to build back-office apps in hours, not days. The tool is is built by engineers, explicitly for engineers. Learn more and try it for free at retool.com/changelog New Relic – Observability made simple. New Relic One is an observability platform built to help engineers create more perfect software. Get one (1) user and 100GB per month, totally free. Forever. Equinix – Get $500 in free credit to play with plus a rad t-shirt at info.equinixmetal.com/changelog. Equinix Metal is built from the ground up to empower developers with low-latency, high performance infrastructure anywhere. Featuring:Josh Comeau – Website, GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Josh on hands-free coding Jerod on his RSI battle The Mindbody Prescription Talon Software CSS for JavaScript Developers Tobii Eye Tracker 5 Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Gergely Orosz joined Adam for a conversation about his journey as a software engineer. Gergely recently stepped down from his role as Engineering Manager at Uber to pursue his next big thing. But, that next big thing isn’t quite clear to him yet. So, in the meantime, he has been using this break to write a few books and blog more so he can share what he’s learned along the way. He’s also validating some startup ideas he has on platform engineering. His first book is available to read now — it’s called The Tech Resume Inside Out and offers a practical guide to writing a tech resume written by the people who do the resume screening. Both topics gave us quite a bit to talk about. Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 3 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Retool – Retool makes it super simple to build back-office apps in hours, not days. The tool is is built by engineers, explicitly for engineers. Learn more and try it for free at retool.com/changelog DigitalOcean – Get apps to market faster. Build, deploy, and scale apps quickly using a simple, fully managed solution. DigitalOcean handles the infrastructure, app runtimes and dependencies, so that you can push code to production in just a few clicks. Try it free with $100 credit at do.co/changelog. New Relic – Observability made simple. New Relic One is an observability platform built to help engineers create more perfect software. Get one (1) user and 100GB per month, totally free. Forever. Equinix – Equinix Metal is built from the ground up to empower developers with low-latency, high performance infrastructure anywhere. Get $500 in free credit to play with plus a rad t-shirt at info.equinixmetal.com/changelog Featuring:Gergely Orosz – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Gergely’s tweet about the pod we did with Spotify about Backstage Gergely’s blog Book #1: The Tech Resume Inside Out Book #2: The Software Engineer’s Guidebook My Unforgettable Uber Ride Gergely’s Indie Hackers post: 14 days, $14K in sales, 1,000 customers and what worked for me Things I’ve learned transitioning from engineer to engineering manager The Changelog #415: Spotify’s open platform for shipping at scale with Jim Haughwout and Stefan Ålund Spotify’s open platform for building developer portals Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

We have a BIG show for you today. We’re talking about the future of the Mac. Coming off of Apple’s “One more thing.” event to launch the Apple M1 chip and M1 powered Macs, we have a two part show giving you the perspective of Apple as well as a Mac app developer on the future of the Mac. Part 1 features Tim Triemstra from Apple. Tim is the Product Marketing Manager for Developer Technologies. He’s been at Apple for 15 years and the team he manages is responsible for developer tools and technologies including Xcode, Swift Playgrounds, the Swift language, and UNIX tools. Part 2 features Ken Case from The Omni Group. Ken is the Founder and CEO of The Omni Group and they’re well known for their Omni Productivity Suite including OmniFocus, OmniPlan, OmniGraffle, and OmniOutliner – all of which are developed for iOS & Mac. Join the discussionChangelog++ members get a bonus 1 minute at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!Sponsors:Linode – Get $100 in free credit to get started on Linode – our cloud of choice and the home of Changelog.com. Head to linode.com/changelog New Relic – Observability made simple. New Relic One is an observability platform built to help engineers create more perfect software. Get one (1) user and 100GB per month, totally free. Forever. Equinix – Equinix Metal is built from the ground up to empower developers with low-latency, high performance infrastructure anywhere. Get $500 in free credit to play with plus a rad t-shirt at info.equinixmetal.com/changelog LaunchDarkly – Power experimentation at any scale. Fast and reliable feature management for the modern enterprise. Featuring:Tim Triemstra – LinkedIn, XKen Case – Website, GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Apple’s “One more thing” event Apple’s M1 chip macOS Big Sur Rene Ritchie - M1 Benchmarks & Experience — MacBook Pro, Air, Mac mini! The Omni Group Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

We’re joined by George Neville-Neil, aka Kode Vicious. Writing as Kode Vicious for ACMs Queue magazine, George Neville-Neil has spent the last 15+ years sharing incisive advice and fierce insights for everyone who codes, works with code, or works with coders. These columns have been among the most popular items published in ACMs Queue magazine and it was only a matter of time for a book to emerge from his work. His book, The Kollected Kode Vicious, is a compilation of the most popular items he’s published over the years, plus a few extras you can only find in the book. We cover all the details in this episode. Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 3 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Linode – Get $100 in free credit to get started on Linode – our cloud of choice and the home of Changelog.com. Head to linode.com/changelog Retool – Retool makes it super simple to build back-office apps in hours, not days. The tool is is built by engineers, explicitly for engineers. Learn more and try it for free at retool.com/changelog Equinix – Equinix Metal is built from the ground up to empower developers with low-latency, high performance infrastructure anywhere. Get $500 in free credit to play with plus a rad t-shirt at info.equinixmetal.com/changelog LaunchDarkly – Power experimentation at any scale. Fast and reliable feature management for the modern enterprise. Featuring:George Neville-Neil – GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Kode Vicious on ACM Queue (Book) The Kollected Kode Vicious Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!