Open Conversations: The Future of Open Source Is Funded (Robert Drost)
Funding the Commons Open Conversations · 2:10
A short fireside segment argues that the value of open source tends to flow to people who are not developing it, leaving maintainers without a regenerative way to fund the expansion phase once users depend on the software. The speaker poses a hypothetical of a million graduating developers, many of whom, he says, would choose open source if they could afford a home and family, and who otherwise join companies that may not share their values. The speaker, who heads a foundation, points to his own foundation's model of holding nothing proprietary and returning much of its funding to open source creation as evidence that, in his view, web3 has found a solution.
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From Funding the Commons Open Conversations, hosted by Funding the Commons.
Transcript
Let's say there's a million software developers graduating from college in a given year. A lot of them would actually go into open source and love this lifestyle if they could in fact afford a home, you know, have a family, have kids, put them through college, you know, have have a life. And so instead, they actually have to kind of join a lot of times these companies that maybe wouldn't align with their values. So I I sort of parted my mind of you know uh fixing open source is making the existing open source work and also charting a new set of options for everybody going into computer science the next generation.
Hi my name is Robert Joss and I'm the head of IGEN Foundation. A lot of the value of the open source gets funneled into somebody who's not developing it and in a sense the licenses of open source say generally that open source should be accessible and growable and other things. So it's not a legal issue, but if we look at open source, this doesn't actually build the regenerative mechanism to allow the open- source and what I would call the legitimate founding team to be able to fund that expansion phase where the bug fixes come in at a very high level and people are now depending on it in very critical ways.
IEN Foundation is supporting the community and the open- source development and the decentralization roadmap for IGEN layer. We found a repeatable successful model for building open-source not holding anything proprietary but having great financial outcomes as well as predominantly a lot of that funding going right back into the open source creation. What we've seen in the space is that the founding software developers and the team of people who contributed have actually had very good financial outcomes. So that tells us it's possible. It tells us in my mind that web 3 has found a solution.
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