Episode 96: Chad Whitacre and how Sentry is giving $150k to their OSS Dependencies

Guest Chad Whitacre Panelists Eric Berry | Justin Dorfman | Richard
Littauer Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! The podcast where
we talk about sustaining open source for the long haul. Today, we
have the fabulous Chad Whitacre, who was one of the Sustain
conference organizers in the first year and is currently a Senior
Software Engineer on the Open Source team at Sentry, where he helps
Sentry’s engineers and users collaborate to make Sentry even better
than it already is. He is also the Founder of Gratipay, also known
as Gittip. Chad takes us through his journey as we learn more about
how he helped fund the first Sustain, and more about Gittip,
Gratipay, Sentry, and what they’re doing to fund the open source
projects that we depend on at Sentry. Go ahead and download this
episode now to find out more cool stuff from Chad! [00:03:08] Chad
fills us in how he first got involved with the idea of funding open
source, what Gittip did, and gives a shout-out to Liberapay.
[00:05:46] We learn a little bit about Gratipay, what it was like
shutting it down, and a blog post that he wrote about it that you
can check out. [00:08:31] Chad talks about his job at Sentry and
what he does on a day-to-day basis. [00:12:57] We learn more about
the Business Source License and risk mitigation. [00:16:47] Richard
mentions a previous episode with Toby Langel to check out where he
talks about the graph of what’s open source and what isn’t open
source. [00:17:46] Chad explains what Sentry is doing to give the
money back to people. [00:21:09] We hear how Chad made a list of
open source projects Sentry uses. He also shares the origin story
for Back Your Stack, and he tells us about his use of
raw.githack.com. [00:26:33] Chad shares a story that starts at the
beginning of 2020, and Duane O’Brien from Indeed contacting
somebody at Sentry before he started and offering a grant, and what
we learn what happened with the money. [00:29:22] Find out how
Sentry donated $150,000 to open source! [00:33:11] Find out where
you can follow Chad online. Quotes [00:10:53] “We have a great
customer support team, but a lot of times there’s an anti-pattern,
which is that I contact customer support and unfortunately their
hands are tied, and so they say "I’ll let our product team know,
but no promises." Or "I’ll let you know, if this ever ends up on
the roadmap." That’s shutting the door in someone’s face -
unfortunately we put customer support in that position to have to
do that.” [00:11:45] “So one of the big projects this year has been
tracking triage time, meaning somebody creates an issue in our
GitHub issues, and asking - does anybody ever answer that?”
[00:12:22] “Sentry is as open source as we can make it.” [00:18:43]
“We just gave $150,000 roughly into the open source community.”
[00:27:39] “The wider picture, the thing that we’re talking about,
one of the big things obviously for sustaining is: companies need
to fund open source.” [00:27:49] “We need to figure out how to have
companies fund open source because companies are the ones that
benefit from it, companies are the ones that have the money. We
just need to figure out the mechanics.” [00:31:45] “It takes time
to change systems.” Spotlight [00:34:11] Justin’s spotlight is the
Sky Map App for Android. [00:34:48] Eric's spotlight is the artwork
on Sentry. [00:35:56] Richard’s spotlight is timeanddate.com.
[00:36:41] Chad’s spotlight is Glimesh.tv. Links SustainOSS
(https://sustainoss.org/) SustainOSS Twitter
(https://twitter.com/SustainOSS?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor)
SustainOSS Discourse (https://discourse.sustainoss.org/) Chad
Whitacre Twitter
(https://twitter.com/chadwhitacre_?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor)
Chad Whitacre Website (https://chadwhitacre.com/) Chad Whitacre
Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/chadwhitacre) Sentry
(https://sentry.io/welcome/) The End of Gratipay by Chad Whitacre
(https://gratipay.news/the-end-cbfba8f50981) Friends Roastery
Twitter (https://twitter.com/friendsroastery?lang=en) Liberapay
(https://en.liberapay.com/) Sentry-GitHub
(https://github.com/getsentry/sentry) Business Source License 1.1
(MariaDB) (https://mariadb.com/bsl11/) Sustain Podcast-Episode
76-Tobie Langel on what people mean when they say “Open Source”
(https://podcast.sustainoss.org/76) Raw.githack.com
(https://raw.githack.com/) Sentry’s Fundable Dependencies
(https://raw.githack.com/getsentry/deps/fy2022/fundable.html) What
is the right amount to give away?-SustainOSS Discourse
(https://discourse.sustainoss.org/t/what-is-the-right-amount-to-give-away/849)
Sky Map
(https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.stardroid)
timeanddate.com (https://www.timeanddate.com/) Glimesh
(https://glimesh.tv/) Credits Produced by Richard Littauer
(https://www.burntfen.com/) Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree
Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at
Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Special Guest:
Chad Whitacre.