Thread by @owocki

I gave a talk at @coinfund_io last night about the why *Blockchain* offers a new hope for the Open Source Sustainability Movement. 🙌

Take cover; this thread contains knowledge bombs! 💣 /1

The impact of open source is clear. 👊

A 2015 study measured the yearly value amounted to $387 billion and would take more than 2 million person years to develop.. 💰✊

Thats 27x the market cap of ETH /2

People work on Open Source for many reasons; both intrinsic & extrinsic. The motivations for working on OSS vary by size type of project. 💪 /3

There is a problem - Black swan events continue to consume our digital infrastructure. ⬛️🐦

Take the #Heartbleed bug. OpenSSL the web’s encryption. But the OpenSSL foundation was operating on a budget of less than $2k in donations and < a $1m in contract rev. 📉 /4

If you launch a new OSS project, you’re likely to get kudos when you first start the project. But when the novelty wears off + user start to feel entitled, things can go south for a maintainer. This leads to burnout. 🔥✌️ /5

This is part of why 65% of OSS projects have a Truck Factor of 2. Truck Factor = The # of ppl who need to get hit by a truck for a project to disappear. 🚚🚚

Take that in for a sec. Most projects that power our 21st century digital infrastructure have almost no redundancy! /6

So how do we change this? How do we fund OSS sustainably? 🤔 /7

We tried asking Cloud Hosting Platforms, who are massive consumers of OSS, nicely to pay their fair share. That didnt work. ☁️ /8

Open Source today is funded mostly by
1. Self funding
2. Employers
3. Consulting
4. Donations

:sad_trombone: 🎼
/9

I think we can do better. We should be able to find funding for 21st century digital infrastructure that:

1. compensates well
2. has an impact / keeps developers coding
3. aligns with our values / avoids “capture” by employers.

🙌
/10

At this point in the conversation, many say “I agree with all of this, but why waste our breath? what’s going to change? i dont have any hope we can change!”. 😿

/11

What’s changed? We have a new design space to play with. 👉 Open Source + Blockchain. 👈

1. We can program our values into our money. 💻
2. Blockchain could do for finance what the internet did for information. 💸
3. There’s $100bn+ blockchain market cap chasing devs. 💰=> 🤓

All we need to do is build crypto-economic incentives to contribute to & maintain OSS! And to retain the contributors & maintainers that we do have. 🤝

It’s a funnel optimization problem 📈

/12

@getgitcoin is working on this. We’re building a double sided market that connects Funders to Coders & Visa Versa. And we’ve got ‘fresh pow’ on both sides of the market ready to be deployed. 🖖

Others working in this space: @opencollective @oscoin

/13

This isnt just theory. It works in practice. In the last 15 months, we’ve deployed $1mm ish to OSS. 📈

gitcoin.co/results

/ 14

Let’s explore this design space a bit further. 🗺 What models are we excited about at @getgitcoin ?

/15

First, it’s worth stating what the status quo is. Self funding or finding a benevolent billionaire + corporation to sponsor you. 😏

Word up to @ConsensysMesh — they have been the ultimate backers for @GetGitcoin to date.

But not all billionaires are such benevolent.

/16

(queue dramatic pause).

/ 17

I’m excited about @MolochDAO — Modeled after Moloch the rationalist God of Coordination failure; this DAO is a donation based grant-making DAO that aims to fund OSS. 👹

/ 18

Such Excite for MicroDonations. @VitalikButerin proposed an idea that could fund wallets $2mm ++ / year, employing dozens of developers full time in the space. 🙌

/ 19

I am in a working group for “Block Issuance Funding” on Ethereum. Which would issue funds to devs over time as new blocks are minted.🔔

We’ve got some governance problems to figure out to make it work. t.me/joinchat/DwEd_…
/ 20

Very excited about @codefundio , which provides passive, recurring revenue to OSS devs via non-tracking contextual ads. 🔥

/ 21

@GetGitcoin Grants is a Decentralized Patreon that creates recurring funding for OSS projects. We’ve raised $110k for OSS in Q1, and are matching $50k of donations via @glenweyl + @vitalikbuterin’s CLR Mechanism. 🚀

/ 22

Shameless plug alert: There’s still time to get your donations matched. Together, we can reduce ETH 2.0 time to market + reduce the probability of another black swan event like the DAO hack! Contribute at gitcoin.co/grants today. 😋

/ 23

From the Free Software Foundation, to the Linux v. MSFT battles of the 90s, to the OSS Money movement, the fight for a open internet continues!

I believe that the Bitcoin & Ethereum communities are homesteaders in a new front in our increasingly digital lives! 🗺

/ 24

The world would surely look better if open source, sustainable, even profitable.

Join the conversation at SustainOSS.org today. 🌳

/f