KubeCon Recap, Part 2: On Capitalism

I'm a bit behind in my KubeCon recaps; I've been neck-deep in grant writing again¹. So I haven't actually even gotten to watch most of the talks that I wanted to yet—however, there are two that I've seen so far² that I've really enjoyed; and as the title of this post indicates, I'm going to make the whole thing extra cheery for the holiday season by tying everything back to capitalism.

Bring the Joy Back to Deployments!

The first video I wanted to share is a talk by my good friend Elizabeth Ponce, a former Airbnb colleague, and one of her friends, Murriel McCabe from Google³. The content of the talk itself is an entry-level introduction to deploying your stuff to prod, and what tools are out there to help. They talk about things like Helm⁴ and Argo and Jenkins, and just try to provide an overview of the "deployments" landscape.

But that's not why I'm writing about it here. The thing I loved so much about this talk is the pure joy that Elizabeth and Murriel have up on stage; they're just so happy to be talking about computers, and they want you to be happy about computers too!

I think it's so easy to forget this joy, because we all⁵work in soul-sucking corporate environments and all we see day in and day out is how computers aren't fun anymore. But computers are supposed to be fun! Writing programs is like magic, and you're all &$^%ing wizards! You get to make literal impossibilities a reality, and make people happier, or improve their lives a little bit, or make some art, or whatever it is you want!

But the resounding narrative these days⁶ is that capitalism came along and ruined computers, and while that feels like a bit of an extreme stance to me, it does seem like there's a grain of truth in there somewhere. Which actually takes me to the next talk that I wanted to highlight:

Reimagining OSS Licensing and Commercialization with Fair Source

Ok look, wow, I went from "computers are fun" to "software licenses" and I'm imagining you're getting some whiplash right now, but hang in there for a sec. This talk, by Adam Jacob from System Initiative⁷, wasn't teeeechnically at KubeCon proper but at one of the co-located events that happened before hand, which I skipped almost all of because they sounded boring. But now I'm sorta wishing I hadn't, lol.

ANYWAYS. Adam starts off this talk by noting that not only are we all wizards and programming computers is like magic⁸, but software is the first resource ever in the history of humanity that is infinite. He compared this to a loaf of bread. If I bake some bread and then give away a bunch of slices of bread to other people, then I have no bread left and I am sad because carbs are the best food group. But if I make some software, and I give it away, I still have all the software. Software isn't (or doesn't have to be) zero-sum.

Adam shows how this premise forms the "philosophical" premise of the Free Software movement, and then draws a line from that through open source and finally "fair source"⁹. Fair source is, to some extent, re-introducing scarcity into an infinite resource.

I'll be honest—at this point, I was expected (and Adam even hints at) a full-on ideological screed about how "Fair source bad, Free software good", but this isn't what we get. Instead, we get a much more nuanced view, which is that "we live in a capitalism, and sometimes to survive in a capitalism, you have to do a capitalism".

To tie this all back to my work at ACRL: I think I started off the business with the idea that "if I made good stuff and gave it away for free, people would give me money for it," and I've now spent the last year and a half grappling with the naivety of that mindset. Even in the grant proposals I wrote last year, I talked about how my products would be open source, and the biggest bit of feedback I got from the grant reviewers was "giving things away is not a business plan."

I think this has really hit home for me in the last 6 months or so; I'm now in a state where I'm trying to figure out how to make a viable business model out of ACRL and actually have paying customers, without betraying my goals of openness, transparency, and trying to chart a different path through the tech industry. I have some ideas here, some of which are making their way into my current grant proposal, but I think for right now we'll just have to see how they play out.

Hope you all are having a great holiday season! As always, thanks for reading,

~drmorr

1. For some reason, all the grant proposals are due around the holidays. It's like Santa came along and was like, "You know what's even worse than a bag of coal? A grant proposal due two days after Christmas!".

2. When I was first writing this, I typoed "far" as "fart" and while I could have just silently backspaced over it and let it slide, I didn’t, because I'm 12 and I felt the need to share with you all.

3. Fun fact, they actually met at KubeCon 2023 and were like "Let's do a talk!" and threw this out into the conference proposal void on a whim, and what a delight that it was accepted!

4. Gross.

5. I mean, well, most of us, I guess.

6. At least on Mastodon, which I admit, might be a biased sample.

7. Who, btw, also created Chef, a thing you may have heard of.

8. OK he didn't actually say this part, but I had to make the segue work somehow.

9. If you're not familiar, "fair source" is a more recent trend where businesses allow you to look at their source code, but you're not actually allowed to do much of anything with it; specifically, you're not allowed to re-package it and sell it for money. This is very similar to how patents work, for example.