Episode 55: André Staltz on Open Source Going to Zero and Developing Below The Poverty Line

Panelists Pia Mancini | Richard Littauer Guest André Staltz Show
Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! Our special guest today is
André Staltz, a self-employed JavaScript wizard from Helsinki,
Finland. He’s done a lot of interesting open source work and has
been really instrumental in how open source funds individual
developers. He tells us about his consulting job and about the
great blog post he wrote. We will talk about the cost of software
going to zero and what this means. Also, André tells us what he
hopes to see in the future for open source. Download this episode
now to find out all this and much more! [00:01:01] André fills us
in about what he does, how he got started as a developer, and what
kind of work he’s currently doing. [00:02:22] André tells us how he
came to write his fantastic blog post, “Software Below the Poverty
Line” and he goes in depth to explain what it means by open source
beneath the poverty line. [00:06:50] Richard wonders if André has
done any work looking at how many people in open source actually
make money consulting and don’t make money from selling their open
source at all. [00:09:52] Pia asks André how you make the argument
of more money going into this ecosystem if the cost is going to
zero and he explains. [00:16:30] André touches on something very
important that’s connected with time, which is attention, which he
states is something you can monetize. [00:23:48] Richard wonders if
the cost of software is going down so much just because the cost of
production is going down so much. [00:30:35] André tells us what he
wants out of his open source work and what he’s interested in.
[00:35:06] Find out where you can locate André on the internet and
look at cool stuff he does. Spotlight [00:32:33] Pia’s spotlight is
Crowdin, an open source solution for localization management.
[00:33:19] Richard’s spotlight is Moxie Marlinspike, who got him
into sailing. [00:34:17] André’s pick is a library called Neon
Bindings, which allows you to bridge between Rust and Node.JS.
Links André Staltz Website (https://staltz.com/) “Software Below
the Poverty Line”-Blog post
(https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html) Crowdin
(https://crowdin.com/) Moxie Marlinspike Website
(https://moxie.org/) Neon Bindings (https://neon-bindings.com/)
Neon Bindings-GitHub (https://github.com/neon-bindings/neon)
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:
André Staltz.