Episode 198: FOSSY 2023 With Aaron Wolf  ## Metadata - Author: [[Sustain]] - Full Title: Episode 198: FOSSY 2023 With Aaron Wolf - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/8e1d1043-542f-4f41-aba2-18148fdcfe9d ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Challenges and Persistence Over Ten Years** - The project faced early delays due to lack of programming skills and legal complications. - Despite ups and downs over ten years, Snowdrift remains debt-free with a small dedicated team. Transcript: Speaker 1 So here we are 10 years later and it's still not working. It happens. So we didn't have a system like it working for itself so that we could get funding. Yeah. And the first few months were like me bugging my friend being like, so are you going to put that thing on the page? They said, do how am I busy, you know, on the weekend with like family, something or other? I'll get to it this other time. And we ended up where we put together this prototype and it was mostly some text and some whatever bootstrap style, you know, like generic sort of website with a button, click the button, You get the thing, whatever, but fake money, just, you know, as a prototype so people could see how it works. And I didn't feel like it was presented quite well enough. And I, but I started getting just going around. I went to, I moved to Portland actually in 2013. The same week that I was here was what this conference, Fosse is kind of replacing a little bit was OSCON big conference. Yeah. And I had like culture shock because I was not a programmer. My background is I'm a music teacher. I do other things. I've been sort of politically active interest in economics. Speaker 2 You're not the only music teacher here today. You know that? Speaker 1 Well, you know, I've actually found more interest in some of the music stuff that I talk about with other people in tech conferences than anyway. That's a whole other story. But yes, it ties in because actually one of the things that set me up for this is that I went to the public library and was like looking at all the different music books for figuring out the Best books for my students. And I was really pissed off because there was lots of kind of mediocre junk. Yep. You go to the bookstore and it was like, literally there's Alfred music published two books with different pictures on the cover with like different titles that was the exact same content. It's like flooding the market says naive person at this bookstore is like, I don't know. They're just looking at books. This one looks good. Yeah. So you can fill up the books, help with your stuff. Yeah. And it's all totally all rights reserved. Yeah. Stricted. So I could just add another book to the other 10,000 books that already exist. I just get lost in the mix. If I like spent a huge amount of time writing a book. But what I really would like to do is take the best thing from that book and the best thing from this book and take this book that was almost good and fixed that part that was confusing. Yeah. And make it better for the world. Sure. And there's no way. There's no method for that. That's not how the copyright system works. That's the way that the open source development is like it is how open source works. Not how publishing works. So people in software understand that. Yes. The people in music education, they're all doing it actually. Like in reality, musicians go to the concert, they listen to somebody else. They're like, wow, that's awesome. They're inspired. They go and do something else that sounds sort of like that thing. That's creativity. That's like everything's a remix. But when it comes to the actual publishing stuff and developing things, like there's not the open source process, there's no open source guitar method where all the guitar teachers In the world can all help make it the best. Like the wiki book for guitar is pretty junky and like I could spend a whole bunch of time working on it, but you know, I'm curious. So OK, so so hang on. The whole point to skip. OK, great. All this stuff is when we ran into obstacles upon obstacles, upon different things, with trying to use open source free software stuff, talk about ideals and ethics and run the whole Thing as a co-op because that's how it should be. If you're going to have this type of platform, I have these complaints about that what happens with the adventure capital investment. Yep. I could go on about the details about it, but after some number of years, well, I guess I'd say this in the first year, we got something like a thousand two thousand people sign up on a mailing List, people interested. I had the experience of going to like some conference and having somebody be like, Hey, what do you do? Oh, I'm working on something to help with funding for free software. Oh, what do you mean? What sort of thing like snow drift? Yeah, cool. And I was like, yeah. And I was like, you you're the guy with snow drift. Like I've heard all these things. But at one point, we ran a fundraising campaign, like a Kickstarter-eats style thing. And we got up to like the number two or something on the front page of Hacker News on somebody's blog post, everything for like, you know, a few hours. And so like we got a lot of attention, a lot of interest, but very little of it turned into enough money to like fund a team to work on really building it well. And we ended up running that campaign without even a good mailing list. Because I was like, I don't want to use MailChimp or whatever. And these things, because that's all proprietary stuff. We were trying to figure out how to use the right tools and my friend wasn't putting it all into place. And it's all new to me. And so we had tons of potential, tons of momentum. I had a kid, life goes on. We had ups and downs. Like it's a long story, 10 years of this. And somehow, because we didn't take the venture capital thing and I didn't spend all my life savings, the project's not broke. The project has no debts, ([Time 0:05:08](https://share.snipd.com/snip/cce0d33c-8936-4164-b51e-bc3ea5190ae3)) - **Music Teaching and Open Source Parallels** - Aaron is a music teacher, not a programmer, yet he sees parallels between music education and open source processes. - He laments copyright limits in music publishing, contrasting it with collaborative software development. Transcript: Speaker 1 Big conference. Yeah. And I had like culture shock because I was not a programmer. My background is I'm a music teacher. I do other things. I've been sort of politically active interest in economics. Speaker 2 You're not the only music teacher here today. You know that? Speaker 1 Well, you know, I've actually found more interest in some of the music stuff that I talk about with other people in tech conferences than anyway. That's a whole other story. But yes, it ties in because actually one of the things that set me up for this is that I went to the public library and was like looking at all the different music books for figuring out the Best books for my students. And I was really pissed off because there was lots of kind of mediocre junk. Yep. You go to the bookstore and it was like, literally there's Alfred music published two books with different pictures on the cover with like different titles that was the exact same content. It's like flooding the market says naive person at this bookstore is like, I don't know. They're just looking at books. This one looks good. Yeah. So you can fill up the books, help with your stuff. Yeah. And it's all totally all rights reserved. Yeah. Stricted. So I could just add another book to the other 10,000 books that already exist. I just get lost in the mix. If I like spent a huge amount of time writing a book. But what I really would like to do is take the best thing from that book and the best thing from this book and take this book that was almost good and fixed that part that was confusing. Yeah. And make it better for the world. Sure. And there's no way. There's no method for that. That's not how the copyright system works. That's the way that the open source development is like it is how open source works. Not how publishing works. So people in software understand that. Yes. The people in music education, they're all doing it actually. Like in reality, musicians go to the concert, they listen to somebody else. They're like, wow, that's awesome. They're inspired. ([Time 0:06:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e2b2f713-7ccc-427a-825d-44f3d8f399c2)) - **Avoid VC to Preserve Values** - Avoid venture capital if you want to preserve project values and sustainability. - Pursue steady growth with no debt and maintain focus over time despite limited resources. Transcript: Speaker 1 But if we're not doing the venture capital thing and we're not independently wealthy, then it takes time. The world needs what we're working on just as much as it needed 10 years ago. Yep. I still don't know. Well, I would say this. This last couple of months, we started the first actual charges. So it's a big milestone thing. Great. And you're the first person outside of the team that I've even mentioned it to because what we did ([Time 0:12:25](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bf05e570-90e9-4323-8fd9-6a7578c85f83)) - **Unexpected Early Patronage Growth** - Ten years later, 156 patrons pledged funds to Snowdrift despite no big announcement or promotion. - This shows strong intrinsic support and the willingness of early adopters to contribute. Transcript: Speaker 1 Needs what we're working on just as much as it needed 10 years ago. Yep. I still don't know. Well, I would say this. This last couple of months, we started the first actual charges. So it's a big milestone thing. Great. And you're the first person outside of the team that I've even mentioned it to because what we did is we sent some test emails to the people who've been pledging the longest saying you're Actually now up at $5 or something. That's at 15 cents a month of whatever all this time is added up and we're going to charge it, but I want to make sure you're okay with that since it's been such a crazy long time. And here's the status. Yep. And as this dilemma of do I go ahead and make a big announcement to people when I'm not really ready for all the attention and there's tons of bugs on the website or do we wait until we get It really nice and polished and then make a big announcement to people with getting a polish takes for a long, long time. Yeah. That's a tough question. Short of it though is 156 people out of some 2000 or something who got interested 156 people somehow made a real pledge to Snowdrift itself as the first project, even though we never went And announced to anybody, ([Time 0:12:31](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5bd8270e-76c4-4017-a88c-3a0c841161a0)) - **Crowdfunding Landscape in 2013** - There were about 760 crowdfunding platforms in 2013, many unrelated to free software. - Most founders of similar platforms abandon efforts due to competition or lack of collaboration. Transcript: Speaker 1 Back in 2013, yes. We did a review of every single crowdfunding platform we could find so that we knew what the space was. Yeah. I don't like the trend of people just saying, I have an idea. I'm just going to go make it without seeing if there's somebody already working on it who needs their help. Speaker 2 There are a lot of people in the space and a lot of them have come and gone now. Well, I've seen a lot of them come and go. Yeah. Speaker 1 And so the thing is each time I had tons of experience with somebody else who I found out and started a thing and I contacted them and said, Hey, we're already working on something in that Direction. Would you come help us? Yeah. And most of the time, the answer was, Oh, I already bought a web domain. So I'm going to just keep going. Yeah. And then after a few months, they disappear. Anyway, the point is we have this part on our website where we summarized the, honestly, this is not even an exaggeration. I made a database when in 2013, there were something like 760 crowdfunding sites that's a lot and more than I expected. We actually reviewed every single one of them. Some of them I don't even want to think about because they ([Time 0:14:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d809600a-d733-47d4-9328-e834e6269cec)) - **Open Collective’s Advantage** - Open Collective is the closest platform to Snowdrift but targets a different niche with better legal and payment infrastructure. - Snowdrift struggled with legal and payment hurdles that Open Collective successfully manages. Transcript: Speaker 1 Not related to free software, but we highlighted the ones that were closest to what we were doing. And that got the most attention. So each time that Patreon, which even in this case, talk about age, they started after we had started. Yep. But of course they got the venture capital funding. So they had the resources and they went and zoomed and got started. Each time they do something that pisses off people, suddenly we get a bunch of people saying, Hey, check out this web page, this wiki page on Snowdrift, where they summarize all the alternatives. Cool. Cause we have this page. You keep that updated and we have been working on keeping it absolutely updated. Yeah. And the closest thing that I would say to what we're doing is open collective. Yep. Which I think is surprisingly amazing in terms of how they've managed to keep a certain ethic and certain ideas and they are fitting a different niche in the sense that what they're solving, Speaker 2 They're putting it in their niche. They almost got to what you did with their back-your-stack and quadratic funding. Yeah. Speaker 1 You can talk about that with you in detail, but the just about at IC with them is they're solving the stuff that we struggled with. Yeah. Speaker 2 We didn't have the legal designers. And it's not just that. Speaker 1 So I mean, the fact is a project can go to open collective. Yes. And they automatically don't have to worry about a bunch of stuff with handling money and legal stuff. Yeah. That stuff hurt us. Yeah. Like it delayed us to have to deal with that. Yeah. Still dealing with it. Yeah. They do a good ([Time 0:14:59](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ef8802aa-612b-4017-ac24-1846496bfe3b)) - **VC Funding vs. Bootstrapping** - Open Collective succeeded with millions in venture capital, while Snowdrift remains bootstrapped and cautious of VC influence. - Aaron questions whether Open Collective will eventually transition successfully to community ownership. Transcript: Speaker 1 Of the other people. Cool. Anyway, there's people who are connected with open collective who supported us early on before, from collective use and existed. But the whole reason open collective exists as Snowdrift. I co-op is still struggling is because they got some few million dollars in venture capital investment. And the question in my mind is whether they will succeed at the exit to community. Because I don't know we will see. Yeah. Speaker 2 There are hearts in the right place. So yes, absolutely. Yeah. Pia is great. Speaker 1 Most people in this space I see as not having that sort of bigger picture view. Yeah. Speaker 2 They see it as Chad White Acre does. He's amazing at century. He ran Git Tip, ([Time 0:16:48](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a756ee98-8aab-461e-8e4b-75e1bcaafcb8)) - **Public Goods and Coordination Dilemma** - The core dilemma of public goods funding is collective coordination, not individual generosity. - Snowdrift aims to solve who will "shovel the snow" by encouraging mutual contributions. Transcript: Speaker 2 Take turn the snow drift into a glass year. Speaker 1 It actually, the core point of it is that the snow drift is blocking the road. That's like the public goods dilemma game theory thing. The question is who's going to shovel the snow? Speaker 2 I understand the snowball sort of thing, whatever we've not. Me and my back hurts, but yeah, good luck. Speaker 1 Well, that's the point is like maybe you would say you'll shovel a little bit for if everybody else will do their part. Sure. That's the whole point. That's not what's happening right now. That's good. Speaker 2 Good luck. Thank you so much. Listeners. I hope you have enjoyed this podcast. Speaker 1 If you're curious about Fosse where these ([Time 0:18:34](https://share.snipd.com/snip/68f381b7-b120-4ae2-add1-ef27179b88f5))