Revolutionising the world of Open-Source with Web3

Title - Revolutionising the world of Open-Source with Web3

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Description

Many great software in history were born from the open source movement, so in the next era of more emphasis on collaboration, or in other words, what can Web3 bring to the open source industry? Some of the views in the article may be controversial, but the purpose of publishing this article is to provide you with a direction for thinking.

foreword

“The tokenization of Web3 may provide a business model for open source contributors. The correlation between the two does exist, but the form is worth exploring”

Will Web3 make the future of open source better? Many opinions have mentioned that Web3 and encryption technology can solve a series of problems such as data monopoly and algorithm control, but I think that exploring this problem needs to think more fundamentally:

Open source: Many of the computer software and other products we use today are derived from open source. Open source provides many basic components for many of the products we use. These components are like bricks for building a house.

In this article, we talk about the relationship between Web3 and open source, maybe it will inspire you.

The rise of open source

First of all, when it comes to the connection between open source and Web3, you need to understand the following points:

What? Open source and how will open source affect our daily lives? How? How did the open source trend come about? Why? What is the mechanism that allows open source to continue to iterate? From the perspective of public goods, why should we empower open source? What is its importance? Understanding the above questions will help you understand how today’s Web3 is riding on the east wind of open source, continuing to iterate the open source model in various ways, helping the decentralized community get more economic incentives, and consolidating the overall decentralized community. Growth and Inclusion.

The impact of open source Open source, as the name suggests, the source code is public and can be seen by anyone in a public mode. If you want to read, download or optimize or use according to your own use, you can directly find Linux (mainstream classic open source operating system)

For example: To a certain extent, the open source model can be understood as Wikipedia, but in this article, we are not talking about editing entries together, but we are all working together to write valuable software. What’s even more interesting is that the useful and trustworthy thing about open source is that you can “fork” a project, that is, you can rewrite the source code to suit your needs. As a result, many open source projects evolve into a dominant tool in a field because people don’t get nervous or feel limited because the software they depend on is a monopoly.

In a recent Forrester report, 96% of companies felt “open source is very important to the business and a mission critical” and 98% plan to increase or maintain their strategy on open source over the next year. There are also reports that Linux is the preferred choice for modern server operating systems. With 96.3% of the top 1 million web servers running Linux, open source is basically a key part of many widely used technologies we see today.

Open source becomes the trend Want to understand in more detail what is the nature of the open source drive that drives it? Two books are highly recommended:

This part of “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” or “The Penguin of Kos” mainly includes two points:

The cost of writing software continues to decrease The cost of publishing information online approaches zero Technologies such as Git or Wikis (both of which allow multiple people to work in parallel) further reduce coordination costs.

This means that different groups of people can come together and produce software of the same level or even better than the closed-source versions created and sold by traditional companies. But why do you all do it? Usually because they think it’s fun, or because they’re users of the software themselves and don’t want to pay, or because they can make a living doing it.

To sum it up: the trend to power open source has just begun, and has been going on for decades before, and I don’t think it’s a flash in the pan.

Why should we make open source better? In most cases , independent open source developers are paid really little compared to the value created, or compared to the money tech giants can make in “traditional” tech jobs . And open source projects don’t get enough resources compared to the value they can provide. Thus. When problems arise , the general public can feel the power of open source…

Tell a story: The Heartbleed Bug a few years ago leaked encrypted user data on tens of millions of servers. The Heartbleed Bug allows anyone on the Internet to read the system’s protected memory, attackers can eavesdrop on communications at will, and steal data directly from service providers by impersonating service providers and users, data on 4.5 million patients in US hospital systems and records were stolen.

Last year’s “Log4j2” vulnerability, many technology giants have been recruited. The following cartoon is funny, but also terrifying, and it’s very accurate.

Will Web3 make the future of open source better? That said: open source, while great value, struggles to maintain its own little light and heat in many critical projects due to its nature as a public good.

Web3 and Service Model

There are indeed viable business models in open source, and there are many multi-billion dollar companies built on open source projects. A typical example is Red Hat.

Red Hat sells services to enterprises that want to use Linux. Specifically, enterprise customers pay a fee to get an on-demand, advanced SaaS-like product with security and privacy features, rather than using the open source version directly . Hat can help enterprises customize Linux services. Red Hat was acquired by IBM for $34 billion in 2019, with annual revenue reaching billions of dollars.

However, the problem with these centralized business models is that these business models actually rely on many decentralized counterparts. What makes Linux so valuable is that there are thousands of contributors who can provide stability and integration that other operating systems cannot.

If Red Hat tried to produce Linux itself with its own employees, it would probably fail. It’s the same way that Wikipedia entries are better than centralized encyclopedias like Encyclopedia Britannica: Peer Production trumps hierarchies when it comes to creating certain types of goods, and that’s where our argument for Web3 lies today.

Many Linux developers live off modest donations (from Red Hat and others like it), but Red Hat can add a layer directly on top of it and generate billions of dollars in revenue per year. It seems a little strange. So why don’t all these Linux developers build their own enterprise layer and use the profits to fund everyone’s work?

To answer this question, we need to consider the steps that the Linux community must take to achieve this goal:

Develop some sales/marketing teams to handle corporate clients Find developers who are willing to work on enterprise services by giving them high subsidies If these developers end up creating a multi-billion dollar company, they can figure out a way to reward each person proportionally based on their contribution. Note that these are essentially coordination costs, and coordination costs are not low, and coordination is what the corporate model is good at. Therefore, a separate company can be formed to do these things. However, the major challenge of allocating equity to Linux development contributors around the world is that equity allocation is very difficult to balance, so it is only possible to maintain this decentralized and open relationship with developers, going around back again…

But what if there were more flexible ways to coordinate digital ownership? This is what Web3 wants to do, imagine we do the same steps as above, but coordinated by tokens .

Create a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization), Aside from using Tokens for ownership and governance, many elements of DAOs look similar to some traditional organizations. Use these tokens and the cash flow created by the DAO to pay developers and sales/marketing teams. Tokens are also used to reward contributors to open source versions. Link the income of the enterprise version directly to the Token, so that everyone can get the success of the whole project in proportion (open source + service model) Of course, there are still some problems with the current Web3, and it still needs to be iterated , but these things can be done now for those who are willing to become pioneers. There are tools to create DAOs with one click, there are ways to tie revenue directly to governance tokens, and there are systems that reward contributors based on a community-determined level of contribution. About Me

I am Founder of Block Buidlers, a community which aims to train & bring more developers in Web3. In the past years, I have contributed to various communities through content and events. I have also helped multiple startups with community development, developer relations, program management, GTM & product growth strategies. My sole aim is always to "help the developers"!

Here is the link to my Twitter and LinkedIn

Web3-Conf-India / Proposal-2022

Revolutionising the world of Open-Source with Web3 #190