Opening Remarks (Open Source Day) - Berkeley 2024

[Music] welcome hi I'm Raymond Chang you probably read that in the speaker notes very excited here uh to welcome you to open source day which um we're proud to host with funding the commons I'm from an organization uh called open source Observer uh which you'll hear about later today uh measuring the impact of open- source software but I think what really excites me about today is like seeing this in the room like we have folks from traditional free and open source software like Linux and Mozilla we have thought leaders in the web 3 public goods funding space we have folks that work on open source in government we have folks that are investing in open source from the investor ecosystem like a6z and panta um we have such an incredible diverse set of people in this room that I'm super excited to see what kind of conversations we get out of this um so what kind of started today in particular this is a day purely focused on funding of Open Source software and the reason why this came about was because David and I were talking about funding the commons funding the commons has this long history of thinking about how do we change and transform how funding of public goods happens and naturally as a consequence of these prior conferences we talk about open source a lot because it's one of the most prevalent public goods that we think about and I wanted to come back and actually take this systemic view um bring in different parties from all sorts of different Industries and think about this holistically and when we think about funding I think we need to start thinking about this as economic policy in an economic problem because here like these are just some simple stats you I'm sure you guys have seen these things before um you know there's a recent study from Harvard Business School that showed that the value of Open Source software is upwards of8 trillion you know there's fuzzy error bars but it's a big number I'm sure of it and you know some studies from the European Union have shown that even if we just increase contributions by 10% we'd bump the GDP uh of the European Union by half a percentage point so there is clear economic value to open Source software and the pervasiveness now is undeniable 90 plus% of companies use open source somewhere and every company uses open source in the majority of their Stacks somewhere so recent Studies have shown that 70 to 90% of a modern software stack including all of these Silicon Valley unicorns are using open- Source software in their bundle and what actually gets Shi to production the majority of it is stuff that they're getting for free so I want to look at this from a product it lens if productivity is growing fast and that's leading to exponential growth in our economy just anecdotally for me as a developer I know this is true I know that I'm at least 10x more productive today than I was 10 10 or 20 years ago and if if you factor out my skills and the experience that I've gained from the work that I've done it's the programming languages it's the libraries and package dependencies that I have it's the developer tooling that I use these are the things that directly make me more productive and then for the broader economy it is indirectly the software that that we using because if software is eating the world and 70 to 90% of that is open source software then by definition a large major backbone of this productivity transformation in the economy is open source software so I want us to start thinking about this differently we're well past the days of Open Source as hobby developers building stuff in the background and I think it's important that governments are starting to realize that this is digital public infrastructure so they are starting to think about things like how do we secure the supply chain and all of that but that's an important discussion to have but it's so much more than that there are things that we can do to systemically change how we support public goods and actually Advance economic growth and prosperity for for the future compared to the value that it brings free and open source software funding is still nent in my opinion um you know software foundations like Linux and Milla we're on the order now of hundreds of millions of dollars um money that's coming from uh government Tech funds directly into open source um company organized like Fast funds of and direct money that's going into open source software is on the order of tens of millions of dollars um crowdsource donations are growing quickly like GitHub sponsors and open Collective but still on the order of 10 million tens of millions of dollars if you think about the gap between how much we're investing in open source software and how much value we bring it's huge and I'd love to see I think there is still space here to grow and think about what the future systems should look like um funding is growing I think we're at a really unique point in time it's like this the systems that we put in place now the funding flows the incentives the programs the processes that we put in place are going to have Ripple effects for decades and even centuries to come think about like the ways that we think about incentives now in the scientific infrastructure in the institutions that exist and yes we talk about like broken incentives and all sorts of issues in the scientific apparatus but the way that the NSF and the way that these scientific funding agencies were set up in the early 20th century have huge implications on how we do science into the future and I think we're at that point now for open source software these foundations are growing quickly and crypto foundations are increasingly putting a large amount of money into open source software as well um just one example optimism just last year put in $100 million uh predominantly into open source software and they're not the only ones we estimate about a hundred billion dollar sitting in ecosystem treasuries a lot of it is going to go into open source software and so how we think about funding allocation it's not just about growing the P it's about how do we invest in open source software in a Smart Way such that we're making the best effective use of that Capital so that we're going towards the future that we want and and not the future that we don't want so what should we expect today we have like incredible people today like this agenda is a dream come true for me um we have experienced Grant makers from foundations like Linux and Mozilla uh Ryan's here he's going to give our keynote hero of mine we we're going to learn about uh new models of funding like uh from gitcoin and drips and you know uh Juan Ben from protocol Labs is going to talk about Network Funding there's all sorts of new experimentation that we're doing still ear but we're learning about it and we're experimenting as we go you're going to learn about like new models of running businesses um so we are now at a point because of the network effects of software we can are we are at a point now where open core isn't the only way to build software that is profitable we can build businesses entirely open source um and that's really interesting and it's going to change how investors think about investing and public goods oriented companies and you're going to hear about that from some of the investors today um you're going to learn about how we measure impact and how that as a society we can shape over time um from ecosystems and Andrew as well as my my co-founder uh Carl from open source Observer um but I'm most excited about the discussions that we're going to have in the hallway and in the workshops where we should be collaborating together across Industries on how we can most effectively fund um the public goods of the future so that's my Spiel I'm here to get you guys hype um let's find good ways to fund grow the pool of funding towards open source software and public goods and let's figure out how to allocate this money effectively thanks [Music]