Kevin Owocki ~ Open Source Sustainability

[Music] Jil Colorado that's right my name is Kevin Waukee I am let's see I am a co-founder of the git coin project which is focused on open source sustainability and that's what my talk is about today I would not be here if it were not for consensus first of all who has been backing get coin for the last year and a half very happy to have access to their network of talented mentors in entrepreneurs and also the support of the boulder blockchain community of which I am a coordinator and Michael Greene who's over there so it's a real pleasure to be at the intersection of the global blockchain community and the Colorado blockchain community here today so I'm here to give a talk about open source software open source software is the basis of every technical project that I've ever worked on both as an entrepreneur and as a student and I think that open source creates lots of lots of value for the world and that there's not enough value captured by the software developers who are actually delivering the work that powers the world's economy and get coins mission our reason for being our North Star is to write that wrong to make open-source sustainability when I talk about open source software I'm talking about software where the source code has been released publicly to the internet and usually that also means that there's stipulations in the license that there will be royalty-free risk redistribution of the program for anyone who downloads and uses the program and then also that modifications to the software will retain the original software license that was put out there and the reason one of the reasons why we're so passionate about open source software at git coin is that it's just eaten though it's eaten in the world ninety-six percent of applications use open source software according to a recent ZDNet survey and on average 8080 sorry 57 percent of code that's in software repositories across the world has been from open source software including from all of these companies many of which are brands that you know recognize and use every day four hundred billion dollars of value are created by open source software every year and for the eath heads in the crowd that's about 3.5 billion eath which is significantly higher than the the the amount of beef that will ever ever exist and it's all available online for free which is just really incredible to me that we have this Commons that we can use to build our modern Internet infrastructure that's all just available you can pull it down with a git clone off of off of github and it didn't used to be this way I'm actually when I first got started in startups I was the youngest kid on the project and now it's fun to be in the blockchain space where I'm in my mid-30s and there's a bunch of people in their early 20s and mid 20s and if you're that age then you might not remember what it was like in the 90s when Microsoft and closed-source software dominated it's really incredible to have inherited this rich history of the legacy of Linus Torvalds and Eric Raymond and Richard Stallman all the people who are battling Microsoft in the 90s in fighting for our rights as software technologists have set us up for where we are today in open source software and the blockchain so I want to talk about what motivates us to work on open source and how that informs open source sustainability people work on open source because for intrinsic reasons so maybe it's a personal hobby of yours to write Python code or to write a games emulator for your Raspberry Pi maybe you enjoy learning how to build open source software and you enjoy the fun culture that's associated with sharing and hobbyists online there's also extrinsic reasons why you should contribute to open source software there's a lot of peer recognition that comes from being associated with a really mainstream project a lot of people I know are really proud when they get a PR into a major project like a major Python project there's career advancement that comes along with that peer recognition and there's also increasingly financial rewards from being associated with open source software but there's this problem in open source that 65% of open source projects have a truck factor of 2 or less and so a truck factor basically means like the number of people that would have to get hit by a truck for the project to be to be dead so it's this is just another way of saying that most open source projects that four hundred billion dollars per year in economic value that's created have a truck factor of less than two which means that they have only to maintain errs and so when I think about why this is I think about the lifecycle of open source software contributor maintainer 'he's so if you first contribute to open source software and you put it out there maybe you submit it to hacker news or it gets an upvote or two on reddit then you're gonna get a lot of comments that are along the lines of this is so cool thank you so much for your work you're providing a lot of value to me well then increasingly as you go into actually supporting a production use case with their users then the conversation becomes a little bit more like this second speech bubble which is this is cool but can you make it do X Y or Z for me and then as you go on and you get to have more and more experience in open source software you get wider distribution you're inevitably gonna get people who feel entitled to your work in open source software they're gonna say things to you like why haven't you fixed this bug it's active for six months and it's things like this that lead to contributor burnout remember most open source software contributors are not even paid for their work they're doing it as a hobby and they might have corporate support but that doesn't mean that your problem is their problem open source software is put out there for you to draw on but it's up to you to make it work for your use case and so I think that this contributor funnel would get a whole lot better if we can manage the time that is spent on open source software as a contributor and also the burnout that's associated with with with this open source contributor lifecycle and so get coin is increasingly trying to be data-driven and market driven about how we solve this problem the question that we're asking is how do we fund all our projects what an unfortunate acronym fondle is but it's really important that we find funding for our projects and open source software and get coins mission is to explore the cartography of the possibilities in the intersection of blockchain and open source software so if you think about this from first principles the way I think about this is that we value open source software that much is clear the penetration that open source software has achieved in the world is just huge and then I think about what blockchain can offer to this problem and that's that we have programmable money now that can be on immutable blockchain architectures if we can program our values into our money can we not create a system such that open source software actually creates value and delivers it back to the people who are creative who are delivering that value in the first place and so I think that from first principles there should be funding for open source software in in blockchain and then I think that there one of the reasons why blockchain is a 10x better place to start a company like get coin is that there's actually funding available for open source software in the blockchain space and so this is like a white whale that software developers have been chasing since the beginning of open source software but what's changed to the punctuated equilibrium that the blockchain provide is that there's a hundred billion to nine hundred billion depending on whether you're in 2018 or 2019 and market cap for software development a sorry a market cap for blockchain and everyone in these block chains needs software developers there's too much capital chasing too few developers and there's also this increasing tailwind in which all the block chains save for a few are built open-source and everything is built with a remote first culture get coins team for example I'm in Colorado Vivek is in Texas we've got contributors on the East Coast the West Coast we've got one in Brazil we've got one in India and we've got one in Japan work is increasingly done in remote ways so the construction of get coin is as a double sided market that connects you a funder to open-source superheroes coders who can turn around bounties or a basically open source software we provide a double-sided market that has a mechanism inside of that double-sided market that allows you to transfer value between the two and so the mechanism of get coin software product is to is to allow these these funders and coders to do bounties together to do grants together to do advertisements to each other and then in addition to in the middle the sort of like mechanisms that we've built we're starting to accrue liquidity on both sides of the market into our platform so on the funding side of things we have money from the ECF in the etherion foundation and consensus grants that needs to be deployed to open source software and for them we're a more efficient way of deploying that open source software for the developer community that wants to work on software that aligns with their values and has an impact on the world and also gets paid that's a reason to join get coin and to follow along the issue explore to see what issues are available in open source software this is the way that we think about the product that we're working on so if you take a random sample of a hundred thousand users of open source software which is everyone in this room only let's call it point 1 or 0.01% are actually going to contribute back to open-source software because it just requires a lot of brainpower and it's hard to give a when you're not getting anything out of it and then even less people are gonna be maintainer x' of open-source software and so what get coin wants to do is provide a crypto economic incentive which is just a fancy way of saying we crypto no economic incentive to accelerate the flow of users becoming contributors of to open-source software and then the contributor is becoming maintainer x' of open source software so we're gonna reduce that truck factor that open source software projects have by accelerating the flow of users of open source becoming maintainer x' of open source and i told you at the beginning our mission is to grow and sustain open source software this is how we're gonna do it the engineering meats treats this like an optimization problem how do we get more and more people to contribute and maintained open sort a maintain open source software five minutes okay get coins results thus far we've deployed about 800 K in capital to some of the top projects in the space almost three thousand transactions and this is what our mesh network of human beings looks like so in this 3d graph visualization that I coded up which is all based off real get coin data each node in the network is a user that has contributed to the network and each Edge is a transaction that's happened between those those users so you can start to see that there's this community this that that's forming and they're all connected to each other in this what I'm calling mesh network of jobs or mesh network of human beings so I want to bring home my presentation by talking about the latest project that we're working on to to uh to bring open source sustainability to the world so git coin grants is basically a decentralized patreon which provides recurring revenue for open source projects using EIP one 3:37 which is the lead standard the standard for subscriptions on the blockchain and basically what we're doing is we're taking get coin grants and we're pairing it up with a mechanism called constrained capitalism constrained capital liberal radicalism which is basically just this economic theory that Glenn while in Vitalik are all about for deciding which projects on a platform to match with funding so we've got 25 K in matching available and 50 K in total which will be deployed to about 30 open source projects the way CLR works is that if you have the basically this graph shows the the total amount of funding that can be raised via CLR matching based off of the number of contributors to the grant so if you have one contributor who's who's contributed two hundred seventy-five dollars then your CLR matching will bring you up to five hundred and fifty but if you've had ten contributors that have all contributed in total $275 the exact same amount then you'll have three thousand dollars worth of matching so it's basically a bottoms-up way of figuring out where are the projects that the community really cares about and are willing to put their money where their mouth is with respect to funding open source software and we're doing this live on get coin grants right right now so um I'm very happy to say that in our in our grant seal our matching campaign Prismatic Labs has raised the highest amount in CLR matching 6000 mola dal has 4,500 Eunice WAP has 3,300 and CLR matching and the campaign is ongoing so there's still time to have your contributions to these aetherium 2.0 projects that are going to bring us into serenity by 2:17 which is basically the end of eath denver and you can go to get coin Co slash grants in order to contribute I want to leave you with a parting thought and that's that the world would look much better if open source was sustainable and profitable and I hope that it's a cause that you'll consider consider supporting thank you