Name: The economics of open source by C J Silverio | JSConf EU 2019
Uploaded: 2020-03-28T18:20:14.000Z
Duration: 37 min 43 s
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So, I'm going to talk about economics of package management, and more specifically in open

It's - I'm going to tell you a story about who owns the JavaScript language commons,

how we got into this situation with the JavaScript language commons is by someone, and why we

This is a story about money, ownership, and control, as much as it is about JavaScript.

I'm going to tell you the version of the story I know how to tell.

I'm one human being with imperfect knowledge as a point of view, so this story is not the

only story anyone could tell about it - not by a long way.

I could tell you a good version of one slice of this story because I was part of it.

I was at its heart, because, until last year, I was CTO of NPM Inc.

This gives me an expertise on the topic few people in the world have.

It also comes with a point of view, and I'm going to invite you to keep my point of view

I bet you didn't know you were part of this story.

You will know why you're part of it, and you will know why your participation matters when

It's a story about money, people who have money, and people who make money from open-source

software are not the people who - it's the story of an accidental decision that you made

without knowing about it, and one that I made consciously, and how that decision working

So it's a story about ownership, control, and their consequences.

It's also a story about power: who has it, how much of it you have, and what you can

A story kind of starts with Yahoo back in its glory days in the mid-2000s.

JavaScript was the heart of a lot of JavaScript activity back then.

It employed a lot of thought leaders like Douglas Crockford, if it was pushing state

It might not have had a good business plan but it did have a good tech stack.

It had a package manager called YPM and it did neat things.

About at the same time all this was happening, and, you know, action and Yahoo, JavaScript

was itself kind of taking off, and in an interesting way, thanks to things like jQuery, and browser

makers deciding to adhere to a common spec for once.

Server-side JavaScript was starting to be a big topic, and it was here in 2009, ten

years ago, where Dahl announced node.js and that turned out to be the JavaScript platform

Now, the early Node community was a happening place.

It swept up a whole bunch of interesting people from systems programming and web programming,

and people who really enjoyed being at a bleeding edge ecosystem where a whole lot of stuff

Several of the people involved early on figured out earlier on that package management would

be a pretty great thing, and there were a bunch of package managers, plural, being written

One of these people was a Yahoo employee.

He quit his job so that he could write something inspired by the Yahoo package manager but

for node.js, and this particular programmer was clever in a couple of really useful ways.

For one thing, he got really super involved with Node, and this let him work on the Node

side implementation and his package manager at the same time.

He could make installer work right, and he really championed the common JS implementation

He did other stuff to beat other package managers, going around to other managers to support

pull requests of his rather than the other one.

His was good enough and useful enough, the right solution, supported well enough so that

it won, so that the node package manager, or npm, was put along with node rather than

Official status granted by the Node Project continues to today.

Right about this time, bought Node from Dahl for a paltry amount of money.

You notice we're already in interesting economic territory.

The man who invented node.js, the tool used by everyone in this room, and millions of

people daily to develop JavaScript, made a few tens of thousands of dollars from it.

Whoever is making money from Node today, it's not its inventor.

He did at least make a living after selling it, because he was hired, which is pretty

good, and the joint also hired the programmer who made Node's package manager, but, important

He retained ownership of the npm domain name and source code.

He didn't turn it all over to it Joyen the way the Node source had been.

This decision matters later, so, in the it.

The open source doesn't mean open ownership or control, it means you get to read the source

And the ability to read part of the source from something doesn't mean you can change

It doesn't give you any control over it, what it does, or what it .... The story moved forward,

you've probably heard this part before, 2012, Dahl leaves the npm project.

Right up about here is where all of you start appearing on the scene, or some of you anyway.

If you can write a tool in JavaScript, you will.

So you started writing JavaScript with Node, and you liked it.

Meanwhile, people like me, who are kind of mixed about JavaScript - don't tell anyone!

- I figured out that Node was handy for writing I/O multiplexing services and thought this

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The economics of open source by C J Silverio | JSConf EU 2019

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