US Law Codes was posted to GitHub
Tom posted Toml and other specs to GH and others contributed and implemented it
GitHub ran with a more of an open source culture than a traditional hierarchical organization
Disadvantages: Not-Invented-Here syndrom
At one point the internal products were meant to be productized
But lack of organization meant that nobody took leadership over productization of these internal systems
Did investors resist the open culture of GH?
No because it was working. We built a company that we wanted to work at
Didn't raise money for 4-5 years
It was easy to hire because people wanted to work there, and developers wanted to contribute to a product they used
Heather: OS companies can grow in an organic way
Tom: Yes, GH grew very slowly in the first few years
It can be challenging when commercial incentives step in
RedwoodJS self funded with 10 employees. An example of a larger OSS project look that doesn't have the commercial constraints
GH is rebranding around copilot now that everybody is using LLMs including for code
Change is inevitable, and everything will change with LLMs. It is early days and within 5 years the industry will be radically transformed.
I consider: what are the opportunities and what do we want to consider when developing: what do we want as humans? We don't want to build tools that work against our wishes (see: weapons)
When we created GH, we asked how can we make it easier to collaborate on code and build great software
In 10 years people may not be looking much as code. We will still have ideas but we may be having a conversation with the AI rather than writing code.
Artisinal, "hand written" software
Angel investor for 10 years, now a proper fund with 2 other partners. 150 investments. Co-invest with OSSC.