You Can Make Money From Open Source
Summary:
Zeno rocha is the creator of omis shall, a free and open-source bash replacement. He says he doesn’t want to be accountable for commercial support or anything. But some companies are trying to stop him from making money off his project. Zeno: “It’s like you get these extradal things when you switch over”
Transcript:
Speaker 2
He actual ly doesn’t mind making money from ha, open source too. So it was actually the crux of that episode was like, yes, you can make money from open source. And here’s the way zeno rocha has done it and why he fills its ok, as ha, you can do this too if you want to. I
Speaker 1
know i keep thinking about, like, s to monetize omis shall and then i’ll like, i don’t want to be accountable to anyone to do anything in terms of commercial support or anything. Although i’ve been recently getting requests be caue there’rs some companies that are terting, like the security teams are stertind to say that they can’t use omase shall. I don’t know exactly why yet, but they want me to l go through these, like, auditing processes. An like this is starting to feel like a lot of extra work to allow you to use it. So maybe there’s like a corporate version of his product that allows me to least talk to your security team to get it by passed so that you caun install emnmarline. So it’s unfortunate package
Speaker 2
it up and license it, you
Speaker 1
know, ye, maybe, why not? Let’s
Speaker 2
speak to its popularity beaus. You say you don’tlike to say that it’s that popular, but maynt. I mean, if you just look at the raw numbers, you mention the installs or whatever, those numbers represent 19 hundred plus contributors, 300 plus plug hundred, forty plus themes, hundred. 35 thousand stars on get up. 23 thousand almost forks as of this time. So, i mean, massively popular project. Now, on this podcast, it’s like 50 % popular because, or maybe i guess, 66 %, because it’s yours. Adam’s a loyal user. I’m not even a ze shell guy. I just use bash. So maybe till the people who are like me, surely there’s many of us out there, h just happily using bash, or maybe not using bash. What got you into z shell? Why did you like it more, and why was it worth building this project around? It’s
Speaker 1
a good question. At the time, there was an element. And a lot of the ideas that came in for the initial version o ma z shal were from people i knew in the rubion rails community. So even some, like the initial code in omaz shell was probably copied and pasted from their z shell configuration that i had copied a year or two prior to thinking a few people, like rick olson had shared a bunch of things with me, an over the years inowene. Yes, exactly. Ah, so at the time, zeshe versus bash, zesha just hade this like, really awesome auto completion things built into it that i don’t really recall making being really simple to do in bash, or if it even really existed at the time. And so it was really just like, there ware stuff baked into it, with a couple configuration changed, and all of a sudden it was like, oh, i’m auto completing aesage host names. We used part of my plannargon. Part of our business used to be and hosting as well. Andso we had lots of servers, and so i was doing a lot of host names and soh like that at times. And that was just like this really, really helpful little thing that i kind of just got out of the box. And en we started just doing some scripting there. So i think it was just more of it. It wasn’t the default, so there was probablyli this allure of being like, oh, it’s something else. It’s like this default. It’s like you get these extradal things. You switch over, do it like, you know something that other people don’t when you read, like, their documentation, it’s a live, more archaic, so if you figure something out, you fell maybe a little clever, i’m just being honest, sure. And now, a, i see people doing stuff in bash now. There’s a couple evaseven, like o my othere’s like bashe, and a couple o other omy zshel like frameworks. Now, that seem to have a lot of very similar features and function now. Mickwell, maybe side by side they don’t really look that different any more. Now, i think it’s the licensing is like a guess in aspect. And that’s why apple switched over to havse shall be the default a couple of years ago, whicht was like, that was unexpected, a vironic rit
Speaker 2
like that. Ahool, but now you’re the default, exactly.
Speaker 1
So now we’re the default. But a lot at the time, it was just like, there were some cool little features we got with like h auto completion. And just beng be to wire that stuff into get kind at was still new at the time. And so beng able to do some things like show your kit branch in you’re prompt. And sure you could figure how to do that in bashes, will the probems, you’d have to go and figureit out. Yes. That’swhat i love about
Speaker 2
omass hs. (TimeĀ 0:10:32)