Monetizing Open Source via the Decentralized Cloud Stack - Tom Trowbridge

folks next up we have tom from fluence coming to talk to us about monetizing open source via the decentralized cloud stack tom we're so happy to have you here today how are you great thanks so much for having me really uh thrilled to be here you hear me okay see me okay everything's great take it away awesome cool i'm gonna i'm gonna share my screen here so let's uh we'll get started great you got that got it cool listen um thanks thanks everyone uh thrilled to be here um here to um you know talk about fluence which is an open application platform and we're um you know we do a couple of things but we're really the open source monetization is something that we think we can greatly enhance and it's funny we just got off a call with one of the big open source foundations just literally five minutes ago and they were happy to hear that we didn't say open source is broken because you know there's still a terrific amount of companies out there and a lot of people who have been quite successful in monetizing open source and so what we think we can do is enhance it and significantly grow the open source marketplace and actually inspire a huge amount of new entrants into the open source community and so it's obviously you know the blockchain communities is a core open source um element but it goes far beyond the blockchain community and we think you know 40 million developers i think have our in the open source community but we think we can expand it far beyond that so let me let me explain a little bit how i think we can do that um first what is an open application platform it's where applications can safely build in each other share data users and no have no risk of the access being disabled and so there really i don't think is an open application platform of any scale right now and so this is somewhat of a new term i think we have to explain a little bit about what the benefits of that are and trust me we'll get to open source modernization shortly um so why does this matter well what what does an open application platform what are the benefits of it well first it's freedom and so the peer-to-peer network makes it impossible for access to be disabled so there isn't a central point of failure there isn't an arbiter there isn't a government that can shut you off that's that's kind of a really kind of core freedom point which i think resonates with a lot of people in this community second speed um an open application platform um because you can actually especially using our language aquamarine you can compose applications from existing code and build far far faster and so you can use create applications from other live applications and that is i think an innovation which itself will generate a terrific amount of innovation and there are no need there's no need to build or integrate all these complex back end core technology and so you can just add features and i'll get into this more detail later and then rewards and this comes the open source monetization part here an economic layer that tracks software usage and so the way we i'm going to get to kind of the key piece here you'll hear me say a couple times the way we think you actually can grow the open source community and monet and by monetizing it is not by charging for it necessarily it's not by donations it's not by um it's not by uh grants it's by sharing revenue with hosts and so the whole model of fluence is around a peer-to-peer hosting model where software that's hosted is hosted by the is initially offered by the core author hosts agree to a particular split of their revenue with that author and so anything that's on fluent the user just sees the hosting cost as they would a normal normal application but some of that goes to the actual author and that's i think a key piece we'll get into more detail on so how does it work you need a distributed compute protocol so you have trustless hosting you've got to have that you have to have a programming language that simplifies composition and most importantly allows you to work with live applications that's critical and doesn't really exist now and then you thirdly use blockchain based economic layer and that tracks software usage and enables compensation based on that usage and that's also key because you want people to be have the incentive to write code that's useful and is used and then to be compensated that way and you also want people using it to only have to pay when their applications are used and so that is a very symmetric incentive combination which we think is important but really you've got to have all three of these pieces and there's plenty of people who build compute protocols and there's plenty of blockchains out there but you've got to have all these three things together in order to really create a comprehensive solution that ties everything together and so what is another way to think about this you know let's talk about d5 and d5 is obviously one of the most um compelling success stories in our universe um you know over the past year and we've seen the explosion we've seen the explosion in um in use and in value and in products and companies and you know we take a step back so philosophically what's driven that it's really driven by composability and so everything in this you know decentralized finance space it created like legos and building blocks and people can easily stack them on top of each other copy one break it off take a piece use it somewhere else and that composability makes innovation so much easier because you can just add features fork them or fork fork up forker protocol fork an application add some new features and in a week a month you know even faster you can have a brand new application that you didn't have to spend a year developing and that composability there's no greater um evidence of the innovation that composability creates than our d5 ecosystem and so what fluence is trying to do is to create that same level composability but for the whole web and that's a little hard to wrap your head around but let's think about what the defy on chain legos really are assets nfts stable coins obviously dexes are a critical piece of that so if we think about what that is for the web it's oracle's databases data processing and backends and so our goal here is to create and make those off-chain legos on fluence as interoperable and as composable as all the pieces of the d5 ecosystem the d5 stack and that is actually not as hard as it seems given everything on this right hand side is open source and so when and if those things that aren't you know can easily be built and when there's incentive to build them because there's economics behind it it makes it even easier and so we envision this world of very composable applications that's hard to even really conceptualize the way you know traditional people in finance could never conceptualize defy you know you know two years ago let alone longer so let's talk about exactly how this will work so i talked about composability so think about you know a couple of um key services down at the bottom we may call them modules you can call them anything you want but um open source web api infrastructure services and databases and a couple developers one developer could easily use those and quickly put together a white label chat app and you know actually in our launch on i think was november 6 we actually did this pretty much in real time and create a chat app in you know 20 minutes 30 minutes something along those lines it's that easy to do when you have these components that you can just wrap together easily so say someone creates a white label chat app easy to do it's got a handful of users represented on the right hand side fine nothing so special about that but it's it's done well guess what because on fluence you can then fork that app and just add a little feature to it and so someone decides to add stickers and you've got like a messenger clone a new ui someone else decides you know what i like that chat app but i want to add stories well guess what they're sort of like an instagram type application with new ui on the left each one of those has its own it generates its own user base its own user ecosystem and so now you've got and by the way those didn't have to rebuild the whole thing they just added a feature to new ui well guess what some new developers can come along and say great i love that messenger one but i want to add a much fancier ui and someone says you know what i like that but i want to add stickers to it as well and now you have two more applications brand new uis um which slightly different features but different markets different applica different users of interested in them and you have now more users and so each one of these applications can be created incredibly quickly just focus on a couple new features and a new ui and target entirely different market and guess what they're all interoperable they all the users all share are all shared and if you go all the way back down those open source kind of components at the bottom databases and for services web api we started with well guess what those authors are rewarded all the way down at the bottom of the stack all the way down the bottom of this chain because the use of their code is tracked via blockchain and as all the stuff is hostile influence a share of all this stuff works and so what is likely to happen here is let's just say that the the white label chatbot has couple at people that use it messenger is a couple and then a ton use the fancy messenger up top the sort of slack one or a ton of people use one well guess what it only takes one of those to be used significantly for a lot of hosting to be required right to support those users and then from some of that all that hosting revenue some of it flow all the way down to those core components at the bottom and that is what's so great here is it this innovation is so quick and so easy that people could just experiment very quickly very easily they don't lose much time effort or money and it's just like constantly trying and one hits big well guess what everyone wins in this ecosystem and that that's the real idea here and so how does this work i sort of talked about this a couple times but there's a picture of it so then customers are paying for the usage they're paying for the hosting and there's a license fee that then is goes to the author an important piece of this is it's not a donation it's not a grant and it's determined in advance and it's executed via blockchain based on use and so this is all determined in advance it can't be you know you can't host can't say you know i'm not going to pay that actually because it's it's smart contract driven and so it's part of the whole kind of stack here and that kind of is a that's a very critical piece of making sure that everybody is rewarded as as intended um and so you know what does fluence really enable here you know i've talked about this before but you can obviously innovate quickly it's also scalable and i think this is really important you know when you're building an application i think people here probably recognize that the infrastructure you need for 100 users is different than 10 000 which is different than a million which is different than 20 million and if you're building this on a open system like fluence your infrastructure use scales with um with what you need because the hosting providers scale with what you need and your open source code stack scales with what you need so you don't have to go and rebuild infrastructure throughout your um throughout your your your sort of life cycle which is is obviously kind of the the the winner's curse if you will which is every kind of inflection point of growth you know developers are back at work recoding rebuilding everything to to meet the increased demand which is you know incredibly inefficient use of resources given you know most of that has already been done before by somebody and is available um and frankly what is is more usable is if that extra if that effort was instead spent on enhancing the experience the tools the user interface um and kind of the the um uh the features and so that's kind of what this is all designed to to enhance and it's also secure you know given its distributed peer-to-peer network um if one host wants to cut you off well guess what you can easily switch to another host and that is a very important point especially given this era of of d platforming and even even shadow banning which i think is something that's not nearly talked about enough um and so you know fluence really revolutionizes the way applications are built and the other thing is really important here is it only takes a couple innovators to really demonstrate how easy this is to do and what a success it is because all it takes is a couple people to innovate build an application which is widely used and right there you've got users and you will then have revenue flowing down to kind of the people that author those core components being used and so that's a really exciting thing it's not as if you need to you're building an ebay here where you have to have a whole bunch of buyers and a whole bunch of sellers in order for it to be a success we think we'll end up having that level of scale but that this you don't have to you don't have to wait for that to happen because anyone could build something very attractive on this pretty soon and be a big success for everybody um you know another way to look at this is we separate authorship from runtime and i don't think that's i think that's relatively standard in open source of course um but i'll just mention it because it's a little different here um because of the hosting revenue but you know if you are a developer and you want to create code you create these applications you publish and once you publish that's out there it's gone you know same thing in as is in the existing world if you want to publish an upgrade you can do that that's a different piece of code it's a different license there or sorry as a different um different permission is out there and it's a user decision to upgrade because once you publish your first um your your code as long as there are hosts who will host it other applications can use it and so as long as economic to host that it will get hosted you want to publish something else with more features or fixes bugs you know people may upgrade to it may not up to them and so that is you as an author are very separated then from the code which is out there and that's not unusual obviously in this open source space but it's this if you go to the run time you know you're as an author you can't disable it you know and because you can't disable it everyone out there is then very all the other all the developers all the applications can build with confidence on top of it because they know they won't be disabled they know it can't be turned off so that's not that dissimilar from some clouds today difference obviously being the hosting revenue is shared with the author and so we think that will keep the author very involved publishing upgrades doing bug fixes etc and actually reward them for their ongoing involvement and engagement um you know eric raymond wrote a terrific book years ago about the cathedral and the bizarre and it's worth kind of pulling that analogy here because we all know that in software development the cathedral model has had challenges and there's obviously places where it's worked um but everybody i think in this conference everybody in our blockchain world recognizes that the cathedral model of a closed ecosystem um with a centralized authority with top-down hierarchy is really inefficient and there's actually reasons for that that actually transcend just software but the larger the team is the complexity increases dramatically as the communication overhead increases actually sort of math reasons why kind of complex systems ultimately collapse whether they're political software developing or anything else and so what everyone here obviously has recognized um what works incredibly well is the bizarre and so the bizarre we all know here has generated a huge amount of innovation as independent autonomous developers collaborate and build with little overhead and you know there's this is sort of almost embarrassing to put programs here because everyone here knows them um but that has led to a you know huge um innovation and uh you know really kind of benefited society ultimately to have this level of collaboration and so if you think about this type of um collaboration and the ability to to have that collaboration and that um openness that's existed for software but why not have that exist a level higher in applications and so that is really what fluence does it has the bizarre model not just for software development which works which works well and we can enhance by monetization potentially but it's this open a peer-to-peer network combined with off marine that allows applications to be forked and allows applications to be innovative and i use the word be innovated you know as quickly as easily as open source code can be so i mean this is a bit of a mind change because everyone's used to their code being published and then people tweaking enhancing moving on that's that's a kind of mental model everyone's comfortable with we haven't yet gotten as comfortable with people saying here's my application and there it is and oh boy someone just took it and added some features and new ui i don't even no one even recognizes it anymore and now they're generated ton of users for it but i'm still going to benefit from it a little bit for sure and so that is what we really want to enable here is this bizarre model this collaboration this forking of applications and when you can do that you innovate so much faster this goes back to the d5 where this is sort of what dfi did because d5 is a bit of a of a hybrid between obviously um code and applications and they're they're obviously applications but this is that but taking it way out of out of out of i'm taking it further away from just being blockchain based finance based to everything so imagine if you could take you know your i don't know your mail app your flight app your travel whatever it is and sometimes you know i like that but i think this should be a little bit different change those you know cop change those components to it slightly new ui and there you go and that is where we think this whole world ultimately evolves and by the way it kind of has to because if it doesn't we all are subject to the domination of the large tech monopolies and their developer ecosystems are enormous their resources are effectively unlimited and so how can we you know compete with those that level of company the only way is through the global developer universe and that's exactly what fluence enables is it enables the whole world to come together and just look and innovate off of applications collaborate build in an open ecosystem in a way that's never before been possible and that is really i think necessary in order to return the web to its initial roots which was a decentralized um platform for information and um to be shared openly without kind of gateways arbiters um you know kind of limits and bottlenecks and choke points and i think that's once we get to this application development forking which which were effectively there we really enable that to happen and i think that is pretty much the only way that we can um move beyond where we are right now if you even think everyone obviously takes facebook as the as the um poster child for squashing of companies and then the the sort of the um uh ecosystem is littered with with companies that facebook and others have shut down and have have not been able to compete but even more recently you've seen amazon be able to just kick off you know an application off its servers and you saw parlor be kicked off and you may not like parlors politics or their users and very for very legitimate reasons but you saw amazon in a very um arbitrary fashion just take them off gone their business they're not up yet right and lyft apparently spends 14 cents per ride i think it's either aws or azure um because it's too hard too complex and too expensive and too uncertain to move their stacks somewhere else it's crazy that right now those several hosting companies dominate to that level and this met this concept influence of a peer-to-peer hosting model with everything open and shared and composable is pretty much the only way we have to prevent these companies whether they be the hosting companies whether they be the social networks from really continuing to dominate our entire world and dominate even further so where do we where do we stand we were founded in 2017 um we published a number of um d-web surveys we've reached out to hundreds almost thousands of developers over time and so really work to build um our ties and ecosystem that way we've raised seven million dollars we launched our compute network on november 12th um and the aqua marine scripting language is live and we're launching this blockchain economic layer in mid this year and so you know that is i'm going to be very exciting but you can you can check us out right now we're on fluence.network and you know as you can tell i've used the word innovation many times in this talk but the idea here is to empower the next wave of internet innovation um and we obviously look um you know you mentioned the um um the goal they mentioned tim burnsley earlier but the goal of the web is to serve humanity and we kind of use this quote here because we don't even know exactly what can be innovated on top of us going forward we just know if we provide the right tools and the right platform they'll be terrific um terrific products as a result and so we want to be able to enable the the ecosystem to build such things that we cannot ourselves imagine and so i think this is we're directly aligned with with um you know tim's tim's original um concept here so find us at um influence.network and um and influence uh fluence project and we have you know we've had a couple of um you know exciting bounties here and we look forward to engaging with as many of you going forward as possible so thanks very much uh thanks very much for your time [Music] tom that was awesome thank you so much we appreciate you great thank you yeah sorry if again you could be with us today but we are so happy to have you