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Panel episodes are what we do when a guest has a last-minute cancellation or something otherwise catastrophic to our schedule happens. I don’t know about you, listener, but for me it’s always a treat because during the regular show, the panelists are asking questions and trying to get our guests to talk about themselves. So, I think the panel episodes are a great way to kind of get a peek beyond the curtain at who we are and the things that are motivating us and what we’re up to. I like to think that we’re interesting people. Don’t you think we’re interesting people? JOHN: Most certainly. CORALINE: [Laughs] We, for sure, have stuff going on, so I hope you enjoy the episode. Who knows where we’re going to end up going. JOHN: Awesome. I think one of the things we’ll be talking about today is Coraline, you have been very busy lately with a number of interesting open source related projects. So, I’d love to dive into that and hear some more about what's been going on there especially if I didn’t catch all the details on Twitter. CORALINE: I have no idea what you're talking about. [Laughs] Yeah, it’s been a very busy year. The whole thing, I've been doing a lot of work with what's been dubbed the Ethical Source Movement. The whole thing started last year, as an offshoot to the No Tech for ICE thing. But it’s definitely grown in scope to be an international concern rather than just a US policy concern. What really kicked it off for me was, I think it was last July or August, the whole thing with Seth Vargo. He had previously worked for Chef and he’d done some open source work with Chef. He left the company and it became public that Chef had a contract with ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency in the US. And ICE has been doing some terrible stuff in terms of stopping asylum seekers from getting justice, separating families at the border, giving up asylum seeking children to Christian families in the US for adoption, inhumane living conditions, delaying medical care. About 200 people have died in ICE custody over the past couple of years. So, it really is an atrocity that we’re seeing unfolding before us. When Seth Vargo learned that his code was being used in Chef’s contract with ICE, he was very alarmed, and I'm sure we can all understand that feeling. He pulled his code off of GitHub and off of Rubygems and that caused a lot of builds to break around the world, not just the ICE stuff. And Chef scrambled to restore those reposts and restore those gems because it claimed intellectual property ownership. I really sympathize with Seth. I understand what it feels like to have your work used for purposes that you find ethically unpalatable, unconscionable better. I realize that as open source developers, we really have not been equipped with the tools that we need to fulfill our ethical responsibilities as developers and as members of society. And I think that’s a day I'm shamed and I want to [inaudible] we can change that and empower developers around the world to live up to their social responsibilities. And that’s what kicked this whole thing off for me. JACOB: This is leading to a new license for open source, right? Can you tell us a little more about that? CORALINE: Sure. I do want to [inaudible] the license is just one strategy that the open source movement is using to advance our agenda. And it’s very likely the license will fail but in a worst case scenario, the license has really starting to hoard its nest and really got people talking about the ethical responsibility to open source developers. That’s the only thing we accomplished with the license. It’s still a successful project. But you're referring to the Hippocratic License which began its life as an MIT derivative and it prohibits the use of open source software for activities that are in violation of the United Nations Human Rights Declaration. It’s very controversial because the very idea of an open source license that in any way restricts usage is somewhat heretical to the hardliners who believe that software freedom is the ultimate call, whereas I see software freedom only being valuable in so far as its use to promote human freedom. JACOB: I've definitely seen conversations on Twitter along the lines of, “Who is to say what is or isn’t considered ethical?” But that’s not really a very strong concern here because it sounds like it’s being rooted in a pretty solid document. CORALINE: Yeah, there's nothing controversial about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This is a document that was put together in 1948 with broad input from all around the world. This is a standard that basically we as human civilization have agreed is a minimum set of [inaudible] for what rights we have as human beings. There's nothing controversial about it. There's nothing slippery about it. I remember right after the license came out, Bruce Perens, who’s one of the founders of the Open Source Initiative and one of the authors of the Open Source Definition said that ethics change from person to person and place to place. Human rights don’t change. Human rights are not subjective. We have a document that we’re pinned to as the definition of what we mean by ethics. And there's absolutely nothing slippery about it. So, that’s not really a valid argument against the Hippocratic license in general. JOHN: It strikes me that there's a parallel here between the software freedom at any cost camp and the camp of [inaudible] software and of course restricting the harm that can be done to humanity with it. And it’s similar to the paradox of choice where if you're like free speech no matter what, then all sorts of harm can come from free speech no matter what. And that tolerance needs to be limited in some way so that you can’t tolerate the intolerance within that speech. I've noticed some parallels there and I think it applies. CORALINE: I think it’s valuable to understand that when the Open Source Definition was written, who were the people writing it? You have a lot of, what I call the free software foundation hippies, but you also have a strong libertarian presence. And I think the libertarian ethos is really reflected in the license because part of the libertarian platform, at least for the party here in the US, is personal freedom over societal good. And you can argue whether that’s a valid ethical stance or not. But keeping that perspective when you think about software freedom, I think, is instructive because the libertarian perspective is very individualistic. And the truth of the matter is we live as individuals but within societies, and we have to balance our individual freedoms with societal good. And I think that’s what's missing from the open source establishment as it stands today and as it stood over the past 20 years, frankly. JOHN: It seems like the core, and this may be my ignorance of history showing here, but the sort of the formation of OSI and the Open Source Movement, a lot of that happened between the 70's and the 90's. And once that was formed, then the people that formed it has been pretty static over that time and we’ve sort of been just living with that legacy until now. CORALINE: Yeah. I think there’s a problem with open source in general where we have [inaudible] personality and we have benevolent dictators, and these two things really run counter to the principle of meritocracy. And we could certainly argue about, and I have argued one meritocracy is a flawed model anyway. But I don’t understand how people who do believe in meritocracy can reconcile that with the whole individual as a source of power or lionizing certain individuals within the community not based on merit but based on social standing and reputation, and having been at the right place at the right time. I guess for some definitions of merit, maybe that applies. But I think we need to have a balance and what we’re really lacking is a community voice in open source institutions, as an example of the Open Source Initiative. And for those who don’t know, they're the licensing body for open source licenses and they maintain the Open Source Definition. They only open themselves up to public membership in 2012. So for a period of 16 years, or rather 14 years, they were a closed body. And even today with the open memberships, they have about 500 members. And I really doubt that those 500 members are truly reflective of the broader global open source developer community. JOHN: I haven't seen what their membership looks like, but just guessing that it reflects the demographics of the tech market as it’s constituted today which is white male and American. CORALINE: Yep, pretty much. JACOB: And also, the world has changed so much because most people have no idea how much of their life depends on Linux. They’ve never heard of it, but their users and their lives are dependent on open source as much as anyone else’s, even if they don’t “use” it in the way we would have considered 20 years ago. CORALINE: Yeah, 20 years ago, the biggest threat to open source was market domination by Microsoft, and I think that’s really reflected in the Open Source Definition which is all about licensing and all about the experience of developing software collaboratively in the open, which is what I think most people think of open source has today. I don’t think most people care a great deal about licenses as long as they feel like licensing is covered. I don’t think people give a great deal of thought to it. But the Open Source Definition is all about licensing because the original goal of the Open Source Movement was to get the kind of foothold that it enjoys today. So, I think mission accomplished for the first tacit at what open source was trying to get done. But to your point, Jacob, we live in a very different world now. And the military-industrial complex loves open source, Silicon Valley loves open source. We have companies and organizations that are building their business models around open source and that really opens up a lot of ethical questions. I think it’s time for open source to grow up and realize just how much impact it has on human society at large and not ignore what people are doing with open source. JOHN: It’s as if I was formed not to perpetuate open source but to solve the specific problem open source had at the time and because that’s what it’s constituted as, it continues to play that role just like any organization does in society. Like when you create an organization to solve a problem, the organization will perpetuate itself even after the problem is solved and not necessarily change and approach new problems. And so now, we’re at this point of trying to transform this organization to actually address the problems of today and not the problems of 2001. CORALINE: A really, really interesting book by Thomas Kuhn called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He talks about a phenomenon that occurs within the scientific establishment and I think it applies equally well with the open source establishment where you do organize around some problem we solved or some world view or some goal. And you work diligently toward that and that’s a good objective, but then an anomaly comes along. Something that current theories can't explain. Something that the current establishment can't handle. And the important thing -- that’s going to happen. This is the course of human history and the fact that we’re always doing stuff and we’re changing and growing and the culture’s evolving and governments change. The whole situation evolves over time. How we deal with the anomaly is what matters and that’s what determines the future. And Kuhn lays out three possible reactions to a burgeoning revolution in science. The first is procrastination, and this is where the establishment just sort of refuses to deal with the anomaly. Ignores it, hopes it will go away. And I think that’s where we've been for the past 20 years. Ethical concerns are nothing new. We’ve simply been ignoring them for the past 20 years. The second reaction to a revolutionary spirit within a field of endeavor is assimilation, and that’s where the organizations, the institutions, the broader base of participants acknowledge the anomaly and work to accommodate it. So, in this sort of scenario, what we would hopefully see is the OSI reforming and the OSI adapting to the demand of developers today to empower them in their ethical responsibilities. And to be clear, this is the outcome that I'm hoping for. I want peaceful resolution. I want to preserve the well-established institutions that we have but reform them so that they are addressing the concerns that are prevalent in the modern open source world. The third and final possible reaction is revolution. And this is where you burn everything down where you recreate institutions that are equipped to [inaudible] the reality of the situation [inaudible] the ideal that the previous generation was very focused on. And that’s still a distinct possibility. The choice is still out on there. I'm doing my best to be collaborative and to open the door to my peers in the open source establishment, at the OSI and at FSF and at the Software Conservancy extending [inaudible] and saying, “Hey, let’s solve this problem together.” That’s my desired outcome. But failing that, I think revolution is inevitable. JOHN: I've long thought that actually, like extended lifespans would be terrible for scientific advancement. If Einstein were still alive, he would still be lionized as a giant in the field. But he didn’t really like quantum mechanics and probably would have been fighting against quantum interpretations of things for the last hundred years. And so, we’d be behind where we were if he were still here. And I think the same dynamic applies in these other situations. JACOB: How so? I mean, humans don’t live that much longer now than before. JOHN: But I think things are, at least in software and tech, and things are changing a lot faster, so we don’t have to wait a hundred years for someone to hold us back. We can have someone who’s in charge of the FSF for the OSI, like ruling with an iron hand and not allowing new voices in which could keep the OSI running as it has for the next ten years if we don’t manage to find a way to change it. JACOB: Ten years is a lot longer now. JOHN: Yeah. [Chuckles] JACOB: Yeah, got it. CORALINE: How we measure generations is very different in technology than how we measure -- unfortunately, there's not a lot of memory. The software development community doesn’t have a very long memory. We’re constantly reinventing things and we’re constantly solving problems in first principles. I don’t think we do a good job of building on the past and building on past learnings. And that’s a problem that I hope to avoid with the ethical source movement. I do want to learn from the lessons of the people who came before us. You know, honestly, licensing to promote open source was an incredibly brilliant hack. And I think what people are looking for now is the next big hack. And we have to be creative and we have to be collaborative and we have to solve those problems. JOHN: Something just occurred to me when I was thinking about licensing specifically in the Hippocratic License where it’s pinned to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is, were you to take this license to court and litigate whether the software was being used in violation of the license, you would in effect have the court ruling on whether the company was engaged in violations of human rights. And that’s an amazing thing to get on court record. If you’d get a decision that was recorded officially in that sense, I think that would be an amazing sort of check on corporate power if they wanted to avoid that sort of thing. CORALINE: It would. But the problem with litigation is that it’s very expensive. And it’s really weighed against the open source creators. Corporations have very deep pockets and they're going to have better lawyers than you do. One of the goals with the 2.0 version of the license was to try and come up with a way outside of the court system that open source creators could still enforce the license. And so, for the 2.1 version which is what a more [inaudible] legal team I'm on now, we’re going to promote arbitration over litigation. I think that’s something that’s a lot more approachable. It’s certainly a lot less expensive and it also avoids the issue of the providence in the international law in local jurisdictions which is a real sticking point for enforcement. Enforcement is tricky, but consider this - lawyers of big companies like the Amazons and the Microsofts and the Chefs. Lawyers treat licensing very seriously and they will very carefully review the licenses of dependencies for the companies’ products. And if they think there's even a chance of being sued and being smeared publicly, having it be on a public record that they're violating human rights, that’s going to scare the shit out of them and they're going to avoid that software. So, mission accomplished. Unethical license, if it scares people who think their activities might be interpreted as human rights abuses, that’s a fucking victory and I’ll take it. JOHN: Yeah, for sure. And much more cheaply claimed as well. CORALINE: Yeah, definitely. The other thing that adopting a license does for you is it is adding your voice to the course of voices that are saying, “We don’t want you using open source software to harm others.” Even as a token gesture, I think there's tremendous value in that. I think that’s giving creators a chance to speak, whereas before, maybe they were frustrated and there was no one listening, and there wasn’t a vehicle for expressing their ethical feelings. And now, they do have a voice. And even if it’s not sustainable in court, even if it does nothing except give them a voice and give them an opportunity to take a stand, that in itself is still valuable and I would still consider that a win. JOHN: For sure. I can imagine if I was launching a project without this license existing, I would feel somewhat powerless to control who uses, like I might try and put something in the Read Me or try and [inaudible] my own legal ease but I would know that would probably not hold up anywhere. So I’d be like, “Well, I guess you can use it, Amazon.” And so having this sort of very readily available, just, “Here’s the license document. Here’s how to use it. Plop it in there, you're done,” and now I can feel much, much more confident about if nothing else the fact that I always make my stance clear. CORALINE: Yeah, exactly. And I think that the way open source has evolved, and I can't say if this was an original intention, but it’s very focused on adoption and making things palatable to corporations. And again, mission accomplished. Open source is now, to your point, Jacob, a critical part of internet infrastructure. But developers have not been paid attention to. The creators have not been paid attention to, because we’ve rallied behind this ideal of software freedom and really, the Ethical Source Movement is about putting the power back in the hands of creators. I think there's another angle on this beyond human rights violations and that is corporations are benefitting from the free labor of the community. And many corporations don’t give back, and I think they're taking advantage of people. They're taking advantage of people’s goodwill and making billions of dollars on free labor. The ethical source definition, which is at EthicalSource.dev, specifically has a provision that says, “As a creator, you have the right to ask for money from for-profit corporations that are benefitting from your work. They don’t have to pay you, but at least feel empowered to ask for it.” And we have organizations like Tidelift and Open Collective that are making that easier for businesses to give back when they can't commit development time to upstream changes. I think that’s a really important aspect of [inaudible] that doesn’t get talked about very much, the labor aspect and the leverage that we have as creators against those people who are using our labor, our free volunteer labor for profit. JACOB: What's the story in terms of -- well, no one knows precisely what software, I guess I'm guessing, ICE uses in their operations. What’s the story in terms of how would something like that be found out? Is it a question of like a whistleblower or some other kind of litigation? How would that come to light in the first place? CORALINE: It could absolutely be a whistleblower, it could also be a freedom movement from [inaudible]. But again, the deterrence factor is probably the most effective. But there are other options, definitely. I think there are people with ethical senses working for Palantir, working for Amazon, working for Microsoft, working for Salesforce. They aren’t companies full of bad people. They are companies full of people who, because of circumstances, find themselves working for companies that have a different ethical and moral sense than they do. And there are lots of good people trying to change these organizations from inside. I don’t want to alienate them but I think we also need to hold these companies [inaudible] responsible. And I think we have allies within those companies. JOHN: I think we’ve laid the groundwork for what you’ve so far -- actually, perhaps you could fill in a little of the holes with what has been accomplished so far with the Hippocratic License and adoption and usage and discussions and impact on broader community. CORALINE: Sure. I should point out when 1.0 came out, this is last September, it was not a good license. It was not enforceable. It wasn’t yet tied to the UN Declaration of Human Rights. But what it did, what it succeeded at doing was getting a lot of attention from a lot of people and starting those conversations. And license has evolved, I feel very proud of the 2.0 version. I should give a shout out to my friend, Matt Boehm, who actually had the idea for tying it to the Declaration of Human Rights which is, in my opinion, fucking brilliant. We have been doing a lot of work on license itself, but that, like I mentioned in the beginning, is only one program or one project coming out of the Ethical Source Movement. One of the bits of feedback that I got early on and I don’t know if this comes across, but I have been trying very hard, I got some critique on my approach and it was basically that I was very much acting independently and not doing a lot of collaboration. And I took that to heart. I was like, “Yeah, I have been doing stuff on my own. First of all, that’s not sustainable. And second of all, I'm not such a fucking genius that I'm going to get it right. I need other people. I need their ideas. We need to work together to make this a viable movement.” So what I did back in October, November, is I started the Ethical Source working group. We have about 125 members now, and this is open source developers, maintainers, contributors, people at NGOs and non-profits, people who invested in open source, ethicists, key specialists, lawyers, and we’ve also attracted membership from board members on the OSI and the FSF, and the Software Conservancy. So, it’s very much an open movement. We’re open to collaboration. We’re open to anyone with a shared goal. And we have some really amazing projects coming up. The license is only one part of the strategy, and the licenses are going to get us where we need to go. It’s important and it served an important purpose since the conversation started, but there's a lot more work to do. And I'm very happy to have a group of people now who are ideating and collaborating and doing the hard work of making this movement successful. JOHN: I'm curious as about what other prongs of approach here that you have beyond the license. CORALINE: Something that I'm super excited about, and I cannot go into details because we haven't made a public announcement yet, but we are raising money for, we’re recalling the MM Berkeley Ethical Source Scholarship. So, there are lots of organizations out there in the Ruby in Rails community among other communities that are starting to create programs to get more people involved in open source. There's Rails Girls Summer of Code, for example, there’s a Google Summer of Code, Ruby Together has some really neat programs. There are lots of programs like that out there. And what we’re raising money for is we want to give a scholarship to a mentor-apprentice pair in one of these programs to focus on ethical source. So, that would be contributing directly to a project that has an opt-in in ethical source license. We want to show those early career folks that there is a change coming and that they can contribute in a way that lines up with their ethical frameworks. So, I'm super excited about that and that’s an area where we’re focusing a lot of time and attention right now. That’s something that we’re hoping to launch in the spring time. So, there will be announcements forthcoming. We have established a relationship with one of the organizations who’s doing this kind of mentoring program and I'm super excited to see that come to fruition. JOHN: Awesome. I like the approach there that not only does the project that adopts the license get the chance at some labor, but then the people doing the labor get paid for it, also awesome. And like you said, instilling the early career folks with the ideals that this is possible and that there are people caring about this and that this is something that should be part of the normal day-to-day discussion of open source. CORALINE: Yep, absolutely. JOHN: And you also said you're running for the board of the OSI or what was that? CORALINE: Yeah. Earlier this month, I did announce my candidacy for the OSI board. I am super excited about that. As I mentioned in the assimilation scenario, we work to reform our existing institutions to address the new problem that has arisen that maybe they weren't focused on earlier in their life cycle. And the best way to effect change is to do it within the organization, change it from within. And I would love to have the access and the insight of working within the Open Source Initiative to bring those ethical concerns to bear. I think that would be very productive. I think we can make some change maybe more rapidly than trying to change it from the outside. So, I am hopeful that I get elected. I should also point out that a good friend of mine and another activist in the Ethical Source Movement, Tobie Langel, is also running for a board seat. He has not put out his position paper as of this recording but that’s coming very soon. So, there are other people within the movement who have the same idea of getting elected to the board and trying to work within the organization to change it as well. And you can learn more, I’ll put a link in the show notes, to my position statement and for instructions on how to register for membership in the OSI. If you become a member before the end of February, the membership is $40. There's also a sliding scale for students. That opens your way to voting in the board elections which will be taking place in March. So, I'm really appreciative of the support that I've gotten so far, and a lot of it coming from the Ruby community which is, of course, my home community. I'm very hopeful. And again, this is the desired outcome to reform those institutions and I think the best way to do that is to have people on the board who do believe in the mission of ethical source, and do want to see open source evolve and move forward and address the new set of problems that are facing us in 2020. We’ve been talking about me and what I'm trying to do in the open source world to move us forward. But one of the things that occurred to me very early on is that there is definitely a big delta between how open source institutions like the OSI think about open source and how practitioners of open source in the past, ten years say, feel about open source and how they would even define open source. In my opinion, it’s a lot more about the experience of developing collaboratively in the open and developing code that we intend to be used for remixing. So, that’s kind of what open source means to me. But I’d be really curious to hear from you, John, and you, Jacob, what does open source mean to you? Why do you participate in open source? What's in it for you? What do you feel a part of? What does it feel like to you? And what motivates you to continue contributing to the open source? JACOB: This is a good question. These are all good questions. I definitely have the shortest career in software amongst the three of us. So, I really got started probably in about 2013, that’s when I was just beginning to get started. For me, what open source was all about when I was just getting started, it would began and ended with GitHub, and specifically like, what is your GitHub graph, what does it look like, what does it tell the world and for people that are empowered to hire you supposedly about what you can or can't do. And later on, I come to learn what the history of open source was about and how it was much more complex and nuanced and rich than about merely a public facing portfolio. That’s really the concept of you must do this, you have to have software out in the open to prove yourself was really the first strong impression I got with open source. And frankly now that I’m [inaudible] seasoned developer, I don’t know if that’s necessarily true, but I'm definitely an established developer and I still feel that a little bit. JOHN: Interesting. My experience, probably much like Coraline’s, started back in the 90’s as I started getting into coding and Linux was a brand new thing. My primary interaction with open source was trying to understand the license of something I wanted to use and whether it was GPL or not GPL. Because I wanted to care whether it was what they call viral. Like if you adopt the license, then anything that uses your software has to adopt the license. And so, that was sort of my primary limited understanding. I know there's a GPL and there's a bunch of other licenses that are kind of the same. And that was probably how it went for quite a long time. And then I think it’s only been since I joined the Ruby community that I actually considered contributing code-wise to open source because back in the 90’s and the 2000’s, the only open source things I was really aware of were like the Linux Kernel and big projects like that there was in no way qualified to or interested in contributing to. But now there are all these fantastic gems around especially within the Ruby community, such an emphasis on trying to make the projects more welcoming to newcomers and friendlier. [Inaudible] stories of cranky maintainers that scare people away from their projects. I don’t think I was super explicitly aware of being concerned about that, but I would imagine that was at least part of impediment to wanting to be more involved. Even as someone with 20 years of experience at the time, I would have still said, “Well, that’s still something I'm not sure I want to deal with,” or I don’t want to bother figuring out what the weird social rules are around this specific project. And I feel like there's still a little bit of a barrier around that. I think it’s getting better and certain projects are making more efforts to be very explicitly welcoming and have like groomed tasks and issues outstanding that are ready for newcomers so you could get more easily into it. That said, I haven't actually submitted any code to a project. It’s always been sort of on the side of like a thing I might do at some point. But at this point, I don’t spend a lot of my free time coding. I'm doing much other coding-adjacent things. And so at this point, I feel like I'm more likely to do it now than I ever have been. But so far, there hasn’t been one that I wanted to really jump in and use those precious free hours to do. CORALINE: I think a lot of people are in that boat today, John. Their best bet [inaudible] contributions come from supporting packages that they rely on as part of their day jobs. I think companies are a lot more flexible in terms of giving back than maybe they were in the past. But again, that’s not a privilege that everyone has and that’s not a priority for every corporation. But you mentioned something, John, that I think is worth digging into a little bit, and that is how maintainers have changed their relationship with their communities over time. I would even argue with that thinking of the pool of contributors as a community is a relatively recent phenomenon. When I think about the work I did in the early 2010’s around Codes of Conduct, that was kind of the revolutionary idea was the notion that whether you realize it or not, you have a community. And communities have shared values and shared principles, and wouldn’t it be a good idea to write those down. And I think we take for granted that we think of the body of contributors whether they are software developers or people contributing in other ways. They are communities, and there are shared values. But it took us some time to get there. And I doubt that that was something that was predicted by the parents of the Open Source Movement as it started in 1998. JOHN: It strikes me that the word community has been associated with open source almost from the beginning, but I think for at least those first 15 years, what they meant by that was the readership of slash dot was the open source community. [Laughter] JOHN: So, it wasn’t that sort of low-level local ownership of the maintainers or group of maintainers for the larger group of contributors as a separate community and then paying attention to them in that manner. I think that is definitely a big change. You are a big part of that, so thank you. CORALINE: Thank you, John. I appreciate that. JACOB: I think to your point, Coraline, I think the phrase community might be applied a little too liberally in some cases. Because like you said, just because we’re all a group of people that use a piece of software, that doesn’t make us a community. I don’t know all the -- just because we all use Ruby, that’s not what makes it “the Ruby community” a community. It’s how we interact with each other at conferences and on user groups, meet-ups, et cetera, et cetera. And it’s those interactions that constitute a community and make it either a healthy or not healthy community. Simply having a Ruby sticker on your laptop doesn’t make you part of the community. CORALINE: That’s a good point. But not to say that we don’t have communities. Every open source project is not itself a community, but when you look at the larger open source projects even within a Ruby ecosystem, you have strong personalities, you have committed developers and other contributors who believe in the value proposition of a piece of software. And as soon as there are social interactions, that’s evidence that a community is emerging. JACOB: Exactly. CORALINE: I think that ties nicely with the idea of the ethical sources well because we started at a local level, I like that phrasing, with writing down our values and our aspirations in Codes of Conduct. And that’s very community centric. But taking a more global perspective and seeing the work that a community produces around a given project, how it interacts with the rest of the world, how it interacts with other projects, what it’s being remixed into and used for, I think that’s a broader concern. And I think that’s a natural evolution. We’ve made a lot of progress in organizing our communities and caring for our communities, and now we’re examining our place in the larger world. I think [inaudible] into the ethical development of the human being to childhood. JACOB: That’s interesting. JOHN: Certainly a good parallel. Coraline, I think we’ve covered a lot of ground here, not only in the history of how we got to where we are but a number of interesting steps forward that you're certainly contributing to. So, what are some of the things that our listeners could do to help propel this movement forward? CORALINE: I think the best use of people’s time and energy would be to join the Ethical Source working group. You can learn more about the Ethical Source Movement at EthicalSource.dev and there's a link to the working group. It’s free. There's no membership fee, there's no dues or anything like that. You have to just provide a bio and say why you're interested in ethical source and what you can contribute to the conversation. I would love to see membership in the working group grow. The more people who are committing time and energy and thought and passion to the project, the better. The more successful, we’ll be faster. So yeah, I would really encourage people to read the site, look at the resources on ethical source and think about if they have some time, if they can make some kind of commitment to the working group as a vehicle for moving this whole movement forward. JOHN: I want to mention they could also follow the directions to adopt the license on their projects. CORALINE: They absolutely could. JOHN: Excellent. CORALINE: And they will be following in the footsteps of -- recently in the Ruby community, VCR adopted, they’ve [inaudible] the license and that’s a pretty major project. They’ve got about 4700 stars on GitHub and 28 million downloads. So, that is no small accomplishment. My kudos to [inaudible], Rainbolt-Greene, and the other maintainers of VCR who’ve made that decision to adopt that license. I'm very grateful to them. I think they're pioneers and I really appreciate that commitment to the cause. If you want to learn more about the licenses, firstdonoharm.dev. I want to say I really appreciate the conversation we had today. I really appreciate the questions that you asked and I really appreciate the opportunity to talk about this. This is something that is so close to my heart and I see this continuation of the mission that I've been on for 10 years now, to make open source as welcoming and inclusive and diverse and ethical as we possibly can. I believe in open source and I want to see this move forward. I am just so proud of this movement and I'm so happy for the opportunity to speak about the amazing work that we’re doing.