Scott Chacon: Yeah, I mean, there’s always – I’m curious how they do it. I wish I could speak a little bit more intelligently on this particular tool, but… There’s always this issue of “What strengths and weaknesses are you choosing between a centralized version control system and a decentralized version control system?” So there’s obviously a lot of things – we’ve all moved to decentralized version control; that was the whole thing in 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008, is sort of this rise of decentralized version control systems. But with it, I think, comes more by default, by definition almost, more forking, and more merge conflict problems. Because you can keep things sort of separated from each other. That’s how the systems are designed, to have some advantages. But the disadvantages are they’re not in sync all the time. You can’t have merge conflicts with Google Docs. It’s a perfect separate comparison, is you can’t have – people are editing the same file simultaneously, which makes it really difficult to go off on a tangent and test something out, and see if it works… And yes, the power of that is that you can experiment in a way that is completely freeing. You don’t need to worry about what trunk is, or whatever, if this is mergeable. Anything – I can do my experiment, I can test it out, I can see if it works. I might have merge conflicts later, because lots of people can do this, because lots of people can do this, but it allows you to do that. Google Docs - you can’t have merge conflicts; you can mark that up as a win, but on the other hand, it’s very difficult to experiment, to sort of fork it and do something different and say “What if it was like this?”

And so I find that very, very interesting. What is a good combination of these things where you can go more down one route or another route, depending on kind of what your needs are, and what the feature is, or what the project is you’re trying to do? And I don’t think there’s a great answer. I think everybody kind of has the ways that they like to work, or whatever… But anytime you go more towards one, you go more away from the other. You always have this sort of balance of strengths and weaknesses with decentralized versus centralized sort of concepts.

Matthew Hodgson: I hope nobody is listening to this, hoping that we’re gonna be geeky about HTTP versus CoAP, or JSON vs CBOR, or “What is the ratchet we use in our end-to-end encryption?” But no, it’s an excellent question, and I’m very happy to talk about what we’re missing as a species… Let me answer as a story, which is about two years into Matrix. It was kind of working; we’ve got hundreds of servers out there, and probably hundreds of thousands of users on the network… And we were trying to figure out where it would go from there. Honestly, we started to see some level of abuse popping up on the network. We started to see our first spam, we started to see people being unpleasant to one another.

As we started to introduce the end-to-end encryption, it became obvious that an open secure decentralized encrypted communication network that anybody can participate in without any restrictions whatsoever can encourage some pretty colorful (to say the least) behavior from the human species. And if this thing continued to scale - as it has since; we’ve got like 15 million addressable users on it now - you’re gonna end up with a massive global community that just keeps growing. And if we do the right thing, it should be bigger than email.

And just like email, it’s got massive abuse with spam, and all the various different flavors of spam that you see. Likewise, in Matrix we could disintegrate into an absolute firestorm of spam abuse, and everything in between. It was literally almost a light bulb going on - or almost a light bulb going off - that we thought that we were building a decentralized communication network. And we built one, and we realized that actually the problem that we have to solve has nothing whatsoever to do with decentralized communication, and absolutely everything to do with decentralized reputation. Going and giving users the ability to empower users to basically tune out the stuff they don’t wanna see.

It might be that they don’t wanna see porn, it might be that they don’t wanna see political content, it might not be spam, it might be illegal stuff that they don’t wanna see… Or if they might want to discover alternatively the best open source content, or the best tech content, or whatever it might happen to be. And that is an entirely separate problem in its own right, which has first of all nothing to do with Matrix.

It’s a problem that permeates society in general. It’s a problem that we see all over the internet and the web today. It’s a problem that is biting Facebook monumentally on the ass, because they just haven’t ever spent the time to figure out how to ethically and sustainably let their users choose what to see; instead, they algorithmically choose the optimal information that will addict them to come back and watch more ads… And it was this horrible realization that basically the success of Matrix is contingent on solving the problem of global communities, which is the problem of empowering people to basically control the filtering algorithms that select what they can see.

[23:53] Now, it’s probably not the answer you were expecting, but in terms of where I see the problem with large, global communities - it’s because they rip to shreds, both in real life and online, if they end up being fed propaganda and disinformation designed to addict them, designed to keep engagement at the cost of the individuals… And people don’t see it coming.

People have finally wised up to it in Facebook and Twitter, to some extent, in the last couple of years, but we were panicking about this 4-5 years ago, before the Cambridge Analytica stuff, saying “Oh my god, if we don’t go and figure out a way to stop…” Well, you know, it’s even just gonna be total chaos and explode, or it will get taken over by nasty folk and be considered a dark web, kind of bad reputation, where Matrix is the place you could go if you wanna find bad stuff, which obviously is gonna impact its ability to go mainstream, not to mention just make the world a worse place…

So we’ve been spending an awful lot of time thinking about solving the small problem of disinformation, abuse, propaganda and fake news on the internet… Because if we don’t, the project fails.

Drew DeVault: Sourcehut is much more distributed and decentralized. The promise of Git is decentralized version control, and Sourcehut kind of embraces that. You know the old cathedral and the bazaar metaphor; Eric Raymond is a character, we don’t need to open that can of worms… But the metaphor, I think, is very good. I think that GitHub is kind of built around the cathedral analogy, where you have the repository with the pull requests and the issues, and you go there to GitHub to interact with it. But Sourcehut is much closer to the bazaar, because we use email for sending patches, so you don’t go to the website and click Send Pull Request; you send an email with the code, and Git comes with built-in tools, because it was designed for this workflow, to facilitate collaboration over email.

And so personally - I mean, I am the founder of Sourcehut, and I designed it from the ground up, and I actually rarely look at it, because it’s designed to integrate with all kinds of other tools. So the main way that I work on Sourcehut, or with projects that use Sourcehut, is through my mail client, through IRC, things like this, because it’s designed to interoperate and decentralize.

Adam Wiggins: Yeah, so most of the credit for putting that deal together goes to my colleague, James Lindenbaum, as well as Byron Sebastian, who we’d hired as an outside CEO, and great guy, that I now count as a friend… So they put the deal together while I was sort of heads down in product development. But really, what happened was once we started to have this buzz that came with both the sticky product that was expanding in the Ruby community, and also just making waves broadly in the developer world, and at the same time, you had – as you said, all those trends were really just on the up and up and up. Cloud was becoming a very, very hot space, and we had seemed… We weren’t getting into this business because we thought we were starting a cloud company, but indeed, people would lump us as one of the seminal sort of cloud companies. Something similar for - not necessarily Ruby as much, but maybe kind of startups, and companies practicing agile development, and developer tools, and developer experience, which is a term that I’m not sure if we’ve coined it, but we’ve certainly helped popularize it… And yeah, again, those other companies I mentioned, like GitHub, and Twilio, and New Relic. So there was just this huge lift in the market, and then we had - yeah, the timing was just right that we were a big part of the conversation there.

[56:09] So pretty early in the company, we started getting acquisition offers. And I didn’t really know how to think about those, because I hadn’t ever been – even though I’d been a business owner in the past, I’d never been a venture-backed business owner… And yeah, I just didn’t know how to think about it when, for example, Amazon came knocking, and basically said, “Maybe we’d like to buy you, and how does (I don’t know what they said) 30 million bucks sound?” something like that. And it’s just - I didn’t even know how to think about that, and certainly what would that mean for me, my partners, our investors, our employees… “Should we even think about this seriously? We’ve barely even gotten started on the product development, but boy, that sounds like a lot of money, maybe we should at least talk to them… I don’t know…”

So there was a number of these kinds of opportunities that kind of came across our desks, so to speak, and mostly my colleagues there that I mentioned, would engage with that in good faith, because… I don’t know, I guess you should do that probably.

And one that actually went very far was VMware. So we actually were pretty far in the – I don’t know if it was due diligence, or something like that. I think we had a letter of intent. So we were pretty seriously planning to join VMware. Hopefully, it’s been long enough now. I think the NDA has a statute of limitations or whatever, but the price there was 70 million that they were going to buy us for. And this was two, two-and-a-half years in. So that was just - as you said, even that was a huge multiple. And I did see it as, okay – VMware was a company I really respected, and I liked all the people I met there, I like their brand, even though they are much more pragmatic sort of like infrastructure software. But I saw it as like, okay, as we had gotten further and further in this business, and especially once we went all-in on the platform, where the deployment side was important, there was this huge component of infrastructure… And a lot of that was about things like virtual machines, and Zen instances, and stuff like that. And I said, “This isn’t really what I got in it for, and we need to build this expertise on our team”, and we were indeed doing that, and hiring people, and just learned it ourselves as we went, and so forth… But I just saw that as being potentially a really good fit, in the sense that they had that expertise, and we could be the ones that were on the developer experience, application focus, in touch with these kinds of current cutting edge application development practices, like decentralized revision control, and so forth.

So it seemed like a really good fit… And oh, by the way, everyone involved would get rich out of this, right? Obviously, of course, you think about yourself, but also all of our employees, many of whom were – this would be really life-changing for them. Also, the investors who had believed in us. Also Y Combinator, which at the time was an unproven thing.

So I wanted to find a good home for the business to continue what I was doing, and indeed, the way that we thought about it a little bit is – it’s not that different from taking venture capital. You’re getting another source of funding that comes with it, and of course, all sources of funding comes with strings attached. This will come with some strings attached, but it also comes with some real strategic benefits.

So we were pretty far in that discussion, and I think I was ambivalent about it. I didn’t know what to expect from it. I saw a lot of ways it could go wrong, and most of all, I was not done at all building the product. I had way more to say, particularly around what we were calling the polyglot platform, being able to deploy languages other than Ruby, and so forth. So I was really trepidatious about that being interrupted by something like an acquisition like this. But I also saw all the benefits that potentially were there.

[59:49] So that was a VMware deal… And that was eventually interrupted by one of our investors, Steve Anderson, who basically came to our office one day and pulled us into a room and basically said, “You know what? I think this is too cheap.” And we’re looking at him like “He’s crazy, because –” I mean, $70 million… I couldn’t even fathom that number. I don’t know, maybe – again, maybe Silicon Valley these days is just full of like eye-popping numbers if you’ve been around in that, but I’m just some kid from Los Angeles, I’ve started a lot of businesses, but most of them I’m lucky if they get into the millions in ARR, at best. And so just these eye-popping numbers, and him saying “No, there’s more potential here. You’ve gotta hold out” was quite striking. But he was really passionate about it, he made a good case for it, and we basically put together a new financing round that would let us let us continue independently.

Preston Van Loon: Yeah, sure. So Ethereum is a blockchain, and really the key features of Ethereum is that it’s not only a place that has its own currency, it has its own token or however you wanna say it; it’s run in this distributed fashion all across the world on thousands or hundreds of thousands of machines… And like Raul was saying, it’s a really different paradigm where in traditional computer science you have everything run in your control and you really understand it, and here we’re in this totally different network. So Ethereum’s key feature is that it’s an application platform, so not only are we agreeing - all these anonymous actors are agreeing on the state of the distributed ledger, but they’re also agreeing on the state of the world after executing pieces of arbitrary code. With that, you’re able to deploy what we call these decentralized applications (dapps), which - you can’t really do this in any other place where you have this truly trustless environment that you can build these types of applications.

Feross Aboukhadijeh: So I was thinking of different things I could do, and one of the things I was really curious about was could I do computation using WebGL, or workers, to do useful work on people’s browsers? Sort of use it as a distributed computer. So I looked into that, and the browser wasn’t really quite fast enough, so I then discovered WebRTC, which lets you do peer-to-peer connections between browsers… And the idea that I had was “Why don’t we connect a bunch of sites together and build something kind of like a torrent network, where the resources for a site can come from the other people on the site? And we can reduce the cost of running a site.”

So I ran with that idea for a little bit, and tried to make a company out of it, but I learned a ton about how not to do a company, I guess… One of the big problems we had was just being too focused on building stuff, writing code, and not really talking to customers and seeing if there were people who would ever wanna buy this stuff… So a little bit of time went by there, and we didn’t really have any customers, but we spent about a year just building a bunch of really cool technology, learning all about WebRTC and making some cool demos… And in the end we got acquired by Yahoo!, which was a good outcome for us, because we didn’t have any customers, and we worked on this thing for about a year… So it was a really exciting outcome, where we got to go and just basically join the video team at Yahoo! And made a little bit of cash, obviously.

And that’s actually what enabled me to spend a lot of time on open source later, and not worry about having a job. I could just fully devote myself for years just working on stuff and giving it away, and not having to be worried about making ends meet.

Anyway, getting back on track - so right about when that happened, I gave this talk at RealtimeConf, and I was talking about WebRTC, and how cool it is, and what you could build with it… And at the very end of that talk I mentioned the idea for WebTorrent, because I knew that Yahoo! was gonna have the technology we had worked on, and my concern was that some of the ideas of connecting everybody’s browsers together and making a really amazing peer-to-peer network that can decentralize, control things - that was a cool idea, and I didn’t want it to die with this acquisition.

So I was like “What if we rebuilt PeerCDN, basically?” Rebuild it from scratch, but instead of saving money on bandwidth, we made a goal of decentralization, and we made it match the BitTorrent protocol as much as possible, because we know that already works, and that has a lot of users, and there’s all this content on there, and there’s a big community of people… So we could just make this – basically, bring the BitTorrent protocol and put it into the browser. It was just an idea that I thought would be cool to work on, and I wanted to start working on it… So I threw in a slide at the very end of the talk, the last one minute or 30 seconds, and I said “I have this idea to make BitTorrent on the web. Here’s what it would do. If you think this is a cool idea, come talk to me.” I threw it out there, this thing that would – I wanted people to come, I wanted to find collaborators.

[20:16] But one of the people in the audience misunderstood what I said, and I did have a GitHub repo up with a readme in it, that just said what the project would do one day… And he tweeted it, and he had quite a few followers who clicked through this link and said “Dude, there’s no code here. What is this project?” So then he messaged me and was like “Dude, I thought you had code. What did I tweet this out to all my followers? There’s nothing here.” And I was like “Dude, you could have looked at the readme, man. It was clear that it was just an idea.” [laughs] So this guy basically launched WebTorrent for me, before

there was actually any code.

I think it was a good thing that he did that, because I don’t know if I would have built it otherwise. It was just this idea – it wasn’t clear whether people would wanna use it, or anything like that. But because of the reaction - all the people who started opening issues and saying “This is a cool idea. I really think you should do this”, I got really motivated, and I really wanted to actually build it at that point.

Feross Aboukhadijeh: Smaller sites like Vimeo actually charge you if you upload over a certain amount per month, because they don’t have the giant business that subsidizes the YouTube business. The smaller guys really can’t compete with that. So this stuff is not free; it’s just that it seems free because it’s being subsidized by Google. So yeah, there’s that aspect of it, where I think “Okay, this actually levels the playing field so smaller players can actually do the same thing, not worry about the bandwidth cost too much”, but then it also kind of decentralizes the control as well. It’s a lot harder to take down content if it’s in a torrent form, because you have to shut down all the different people who have it, and prevent them from sharing it.

The interesting thing is, with normal websites you can mirror things. If I see something and I like it, I can save it to my computer and I can reupload it later, and kind of get around censorship that way. But the link changes; the original link is gonna be broken, and you’re gonna have to find the content at different locations. Peer-to-peer systems that use content addressing, which is what torrents use - it’s really nice because the link itself is basically a hash of the content, meaning that the link is the description of the content, so as long as somebody somewhere in the world has the content, they can send it to you and you’ll be able to say, “Oh yeah, this is the content. This matches what I was expecting, because I have the hash.” So when I get the content from them, I can hash it and I can see and compare it to the hash I already had, and say “Alright, this is exactly what I was expecting”, so I don’t have to trust the person sending it to me. If that person goes away, but someone else has the content, they’re also just as capable of giving me it, and I’m happy to receive from anybody. The link that I’m using to describe it is actually based on the content, not on the location of where it exists. It’s really powerful.

Joseph Jacks: I think that’s absolutely true. One of the things that we’re – I think we’ll be talking about it a little bit more as we share our perspectives and views of the world and different things that we believe in, but we think that business model innovation is a really critical topic in the world of commercial open source company building.

If it’s possible to build on what you’re saying around ICO-able, VC-fundable and just generally open source or general company funding dynamics, we think that there’s maybe 3-4 reasonably well-understood and implemented business models for commercial open source software companies, and you could sort of categorize them as – you know, maybe one is the Red Hat business model, where you don’t have any intellectual property that you’re holding back; you’re just selling support services and subscriptions, and there isn’t any proprietary code that you’re holding back through closed source license-based mechanisms where people have to sign a contract and get access to a key and then use the proprietary features.

Then there’s the open core model, which – I think we don’t really quite yet have an industry agreement on in terms of what that actually means, but… I wrote a little blog post about this a few months back, just defining open core, what that really means… Sort of a spectrum, it’s not really a binary thing. And then what some of the trade-offs are between different approaches.

We think open core is another model under the business model, and maybe a third one is hardware-based distribution… Like a kind of Sourcefire, or Snort, the IP intrusion detection project, of for example Cumulus Networks, the custom Linux-based network operating system that Cumulus goes and distributes through white box switch vendors like Super Micro and others. That’s more of like a hardware-based distribution model. Those are maybe three.

A fourth that we’re starting to see emerge – but again, I think we really strongly believe that there needs to be even more business model innovation even broader than these four. A fourth is potentially the sort of like decentralized, network-based, supply-demand dynamics between consumption and the products of a given open source project’s primitives, either over a network, or over a storage service, or what have you… So there’s one storage network that is sort of based on a decentralized model called STORJ. They made some announcements a couple months back (or a month back) around partnering with different storage-oriented open source projects for that sort of decentralized, developer-oriented business model, so that you can have more of a fractional alignment of the compensation between the developer consuming a service and the author of the project producing the service on the network.

[20:12] That’s also very interesting, but we really deeply believe there’s definitely gonna be more business model innovation, but there SHOULD be more business model innovation… And I think the main reason that causes us to have a strong conviction here is that we really believe open source software creates or generates many orders of magnitude more value than any constituent can capture, and that includes cloud providers. So if cloud providers are building a really differentiated service, like RDS for Postgres, or MySQL, or other open source databases… But then you also have the vendor ecosystem behind those projects directly building perhaps competitive cloud services, or competitive products…

We just believe that open source software is so widely deployed and so widely permeates the world in so many different environments, and it’s free to use, so the friction is basically zero in terms of the distribution cost of the code and the project itself. It’s actually impossible to calculate this precisely, but we just believe there’s sort of a fundamental math constant that you can model potentially that will say “Open source software will always generate and create orders and orders of magnitude more value than any constituent in any of those dimensions can capture.” Cloud providers, commercial open source companies like Elastic, like Cloudera, like many others… And then even including the creators. This is a more controversial topic. Even including the authors, that they can capture.

So we just think those four business models, if you could categorize them in a way that we have industry agreement, are necessary but not sufficient. We should encourage and we should try to move towards just more business models in general.

At OSS Capital we tend to be of the inclination that we’re not opinionated around a given business model engineerically, and sort of say “Oh, this is the one that works.” It tends to be more contextual, it tends to be more project-specific in many cases… But we just know for sure that there’s a lot of innovation that needs to happen here, and we’re gonna be very supportive of that.

Gavin Wood: [07:53] Okay, so Ethereum is programmable money. Bitcoin is money, more or less, on the internet; “magic internet money”, as it’s sometimes called. Ethereum is programmable money. It’s doing the same thing, it’s still magic internet money, but this money can have particular software attached to it, particular conditions or particular logic. It can even storage attached to it, so the money can remember some sort of history, can remember what happened to itself, and it can do different things depending on that memory. So that’s really what we’re talking about with Ethereum.

Now, it could also be described as a decentralized application platform, it could be described as a smart contract platform, but at the end of the day, probably the thing that makes most sense to people is the notion that it’s money that can have program software installed actually in it.

Chris Beams: [01:24:04.19] Yeah, for sure. And some percentage are actually out and out scams, right? I think a lot of people are too quick to say “Oh, it’s just all scams”, or something like that. Mostly, the things that you run into, I think it’s still safe to say, are actually well-intentioned people saying “Hey, I’ve got a bright idea. I’ve got some sort of notion of a kind of economics that I can add into this application, that I can sort of tokenize it, and that I can build a legitimate way to fund the development of this project. People will hold this token and pay for using the application with the token” or whatever different kind of model.

So there’s hours and hours that we could talk about on all of those models, right? But what Bisq is doing is something if not unique, very unusual, by comparison, to this kind of norm that we’ve been seeing in this space. Basically, one thing that makes it unusual is that Bisq is working, running software. We’ve actually built the system, it’s out there, it works, people use it, and people are happy to pay to use it.

When people initiate a trade, both on the maker side and the taker side (both counterparties), they pay a fee into Bisq, in Bitcoin; that fee goes to the arbitrators today. I’m one of those arbitrators, the founder of Bisq is one of the arbitrators. So people are willing to pay to use this application in this network, because it’s valuable to them to be able to trade. Same reason people pay a fee on a centralized exchange.

So that works to a degree, in terms of economically incentivizing the development of the application. That can help pay the bills and so on, if you will, but it doesn’t scale very well with regard to getting that JavaFX UI person to come and contribute that chart implementation, or fix that bug, or whatever it is. That’s where this idea of a DAO comes in.

What we’re up to here and what we’re rolling out is a token; we added a token into the sort of larger Bisq system, and that token is actually something based on Bitcoin. This is something that is not a new idea, but not a lot of people do - it’s called a colored coin. What that means is that each BSQ token (we actually call the token Bisq as well, but its ticker symbol would be BSQ) is actually backed by a small fraction of a Bitcoin, a thousand Satoshis, where a Satoshi is one one-hundred-millionth of a Bitcoin. So 1,000 of those, which is a very, very small amount of Bitcoin, actually backs this coin.
What this means is that – and before I get too much into the details of what BSQ is, what can you do with it? Well, we haven’t launched it yet, and I can get into the details of the roadmap later, but when it’s fully functional, what people will be able to do is buy BSQ, trade for BSQ on the Bisq exchange - so they might trade Bitcoin for it - and with that BSQ they’ll be able to pay their trading fees at a lower rate than they would pay for it in Bitcoin. So it’ll be a cost-savings to them, they’ll be able to do more trades more cheaply when they pay for them in BSQ.

[01:28:04.27] Okay, so what? What good does that do? Well, on the other side, and getting back to the original question you asked, we wanna bring people in, have more people contribute, we wanna fully decentralized the operation and maintenance and development of the whole network and the application and so on. So this is the second role of the BSQ token.

The first role is that you can pay to use the application with it, so it’s a kind of access token in that way. The second utility that it has is that you can be paid in it for the work that you do for Bisq or on Bisq. Somebody comes along and implements the chart that we were just talking about - they would at the end of that month period issue what we call a compensation request, and fundamentally that’s gonna be a document saying “Hey, I did this work.” It might be a link to a pull request, or one or more pull requests or commits, something like that that says “Hey, I contributed a chart and it’s merged. That took me this much time, and this is my market rates, what I usually get paid.” Again, just sort of thinking in the units of currency that we denominate our lives in, “Hey, this was $1,000 worth of work for me”, and then they would look at what the market price of BSQ is, and they would issue a compensation request for that amount of BSQ.

What happens is then DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) votes on his compensation request and anybody else’s requests that were issued during that period, and they’re voting in the affirmative or negative - “Yes, we’re going to pay for that work”, “No, we’re not.” And people don’t have any guarantee.

Juan Benet: Yeah. First of all thank you very much for having me, this was a really exciting discussion. There is a lot of stuff to talk about. The project is really, really big. I want to give first of all one huge shout out to the entire IPFS community that is building this up. This is not really my project anymore, this is a project that everyone owns. It’s a huge, large project with lots of people contributing, lots of people making it happen and lots of ideas. I get to sit here and represent other people, but there are some amazing contributions from all sorts of people around the world. With that, our open source community is super open. There is open source and then there’s open-open source. We are like open-open source - you can come in and file bug reports and all that kind of stuff, but also tell us what you would like to see, what features you would love to have, if anything needs more documentation. Come and hang out on IRC, come and contribute on GitHub. IPFS will become what you make of it. It’s a big call to people out there to come join us and help remake the web in a much better and decentralized way. Everyone’s welcome and we definitely look forward to the project growing and so on.

Max Howell: Yeah, probably .plist, because that’s – I don’t know… It would have been JSON, I expect. But it’s difficult to add things… Like, what if you want to make a module where you only want the files with a Windows extension for the Windows platform, and things like that? It’s really hard to describe that kind of behavior in JSON, but with Swift it’s easy - you do a “hash if Windows”, and then you add to an array…

[01:00:04.19] Programmers like to program, is my opinion on the matter. We like code, we write code, we want the power of code even if that results in some danger, with a real language.

That is decentralized. I’m very pleased to see centralized – I wish Homebrew had been decentralized to a certain extent in the first place, but it is now, with taps. Because it makes it easy for people to just push out their packages without having to conform to some system. For example CocoaPods, which is the most popular iOS packet manager currently - when I contribute to another CocoaPod, I have to ping them for like a week or so for them to push an update, so that I can actually use it without messing around in my Podfile. It shouldn’t be like that. I should be able to just make the changes, use my fork very easily, and then have it ready to go into the main fork.

That’s what GitHub is about, it’s about this decentralized open source community. These things should be all over the place, and if I think that somebody is doing something wrong, I should be able to easily fork it and use it. Or if I’m in a company and I need to make a change but I can’t release it, I can just use my private fork of the thing easily etc. I believe that’s how these things should be, for language packet managers at least.

I feel that it’s a pretty good base, and the people that are now working on it, they’re great, they’re really very good, and I think they’ll do a great job. Probably better than me, because I just couldn’t figure out how to navigate Apple. I couldn’t figure it out.

Bruce Schneier: Email is decentralized. Now, I can send an email to anybody, regardless of what they’re using, which is different than like a Facebook message. SMS is decentralized. Web pages are decentralized. Decentralization is great. And Solid is a vision of decentralized data… The idea being - right now your data is siloed. Fitbit has your health data, and your phone has your location data, and someone else has your photographs… And on and on and on. Wouldn’t it be great if all your data was in one place and you got to decide? And then you can do things with your data that you couldn’t do otherwise. I don’t know, my airline has a lot of my data in this Frequent Flier program. So does the hotel program I like. They don’t actually want my data, they just want access to it.

My data was in my - and the term Solid uses is “pod”. I have control over it, I can see who accesses it, I can give permissions… If my address changes, I change it in my pod and it propagates everywhere… I had to download an app - because I’m going to Spain - to type in my health information, to get a QR code, so when I land in Spain I can show it and get into the country… So I’m entering my data, again and again and again. That doesn’t make sense. And once this app has – I don’t even know what they’re gonna do with it. I have no idea what Spain is gonna do with my data. For all I know, they’re gonna sell it to Cambridge Analytica. They could. Who knows. And this is a way of thinking about data that puts people in control. It’s a way that actually solves the problems that GDPR tried to solve.

So yeah, I’m involved, and I think it’s a big deal, I think it’s really important, and I think it’s valuable. The fact that it’s Tim Berners-Lee - it could conceivably change the world; he has a track record for doing that… So yeah, I’m super-excited about it.

Yotam Mann: Yeah, this was really for Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst the purpose of the project; the age of this, exactly what you’re describing, Daniel - this is coming. And they wanted to kind of control that story and offer a version of how this could go. So they have a whole mechanism for how things that are created with this - they’re free and they’re able to be used, but the ownership is actually through a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization). That’s their version of how this rights management could go. But I think that those are the most relevant questions when you think about these types of generative models.

Our version of this and how we have been producing and thinking about the future models that we produce is really full transparency, full attribution, and also when we get to it being able to pay the artists back that went into this model.

I have some frustration with a lot of the way that machine learning stuff goes, where it’s not fully attributed datasets, or a lot of scraped datasets, and things like that… So we are trying to kind of do the hard tech in the opposite direction. All the datasets that we have are open source, or we hired our friends or musicians that we know to create a dataset that is fully licensed for this purpose of creating a generative model… And then I think when people are able to en-masse create their own generative models, then there is a really big opportunity for creating value for those institutions, like getting paid for the generative use of or the licensing of that generator. So that’s kind of how I see that potential future.

Preethi Kasireddy: Yeah, sure. That’s a great question. I’ll be honest, one of the things that I’m always excited by are problems that are not figured out, and blockchain is definitely one of them in the sense that there is this amazing technology that got created, but the actual applications and use cases have yet to be created, and there’s so much room for creativity and innovation. I’d say that’s one of the main reasons why I’m so attracted to this industry… Because I naturally have the entrepreneurial spirit, I wanna solve unsolved problems, and that’s one of the reasons why I’m gravitating to it. But at a more fundamental level, I think the technology itself is super interesting.

I think earlier you were saying how blockchain is interesting as a digital currency… I’d go a little bit further than that and say I actually don’t get excited by digital currency per se, because digital currency is just one application of the blockchain. There’s so many other applications that I think have potential that haven’t been created yet, and I’m more excited about those applications. In my opinion, it’s really hard for the current currency system in any nation – for example, take the U.S. For cryptocurrency or digital currency to replace fiat currency, that would take a lot. The government has a really tight control over the monetary policy and I just don’t see what benefits digital currencies provide today that would make people switch over, that would make the government friendly to this, and so forth… Because in the end, what digital currency is - it’s completely decentralized, completely open, completely censorship-resistant, which is not something any government really wants.

So for me, I’m more excited by what else blockchain enables. At a fundamental level, blockchain is a decentralized technology where it’s maintaining a ledger of transactions or basically state changes, and the state changes are cryptographically secure because they are maintained by something called the consensus process. This consensus process in Bitcoin or Ethereum is called proof of work, where a bunch of miners are there and they run a bunch of complex computations to validate these transactions, and they get paid for validating this blockchain. So the entire chain is decentralized, it’s trustless, because there’s no need to trust any central party to maintain this database or this ledger, and then it’s completely censorship-resistant because you can’t have really any central authority trying to censor it… And it’s completely secure, because it’s cryptographically secure. So with those primitives you can do just so much on top, and that’s kind of what I’m excited by.

Paul Frazee: You know, the web being weird is a good thing; it makes it more exciting, more fun, and when you open up the web to being (I think) what it was supposed to be, which is like these comments that everybody can contribute to, and not just like pictures and stories and videos and things like that, but the actual code that makes up these applications we use, you’re gonna get something that I think is more exciting, and also fits people’s needs a little bit better… Because when you’re using Facebook, you’re giving up control over all your data, you’re giving up control over to the community and the moderation policies; you’re locked into whatever Facebook thinks Facebook has to be.

If you decentralize the web and move it into kind of a peer-to-peer design, suddenly all the application logic is getting moved into the client, and you can just write these applications however you like, and you can work with other people and share the changes you make, and just kind of like let the community drive how all of these social applications work… And I think that’s really important right now. I mean, we’re messing around with how we’re supposed to deal with social media now, with Twitter and Facebook, and all these controversies about misinformation, or harassment, and things like that, and I just don’t think that the way that we’re doing things now is really responding to the needs that people have… So let’s just take all that control over the applications and start pushing it right back into the users’ hands, so that they could be more fun and more exciting and more responsive to everybody, instead of being this one-size-fits-all that sometimes doesn’t work out that great.

Daniel Whitenack: So when I was looking up how I might go about implementing some federated learning, I was curious as to the state of the various frameworks and tools that you can use to actually achieve this process… I was pleasantly surprised with – of course, I haven’t run a real experiment with millions of devices; maybe that is in my future, it’d definitely be a fun experimenting… But it looks like, for example, one of these frameworks is TensorFlow Federated. TensorFlow has an open source framework for doing this computation on decentralized data, and some of what you have to do to your model to enable that is kind of wrap some of your model definitions in classes and helper functions that are provided by the TensorFlow Federated Framework… But you do get to sort of preserve your Keras model which you love. You have your Keras model and you kind of wrap things around it to use it in this federated way, which seems like a nice approach. You don’t have to throw out everything that you did with Keras that you love. You can kind of wrap it and use it from there.

There’s a bunch of other organizations, large organizations that are really contributing to open source frameworks. Intel has their open federated learning framework, and Facebook was involved in PySyft and PyGrid, which I mentioned before… PyGrid was the methodology that I talked through before. And then there’s some other ones too, like Flower, which is a friendly federated learning framework, which is nice, and lots of F’s in there… [laughs]

Max Ogden: That’s a good question. Mathias was the obvious choice for me. I had never met him actually, but I published a lot of Node.js modules. I was aware of him, because he was also publishing a lot of modules to npm. I felt the npm community was really cool because there were a lot of people trying to produce reusable software, and also produce efficient streaming software for writing data infrastructure. Mathias had a file-sharing startup that we joke now that he was basically doing everything that we were doing now, except doing it in like a centralized way. He’s just been working on the same user experience, sharing a bunch of files in a browser, but now we’re doing it in a way that’s decentralized. I just knew he was awesome, and I actually just DMed him on Twitter, and was like, “Hey, I don’t know if you have a job right now, but I just got this grant, and I can hire people to work on these problems. Are you interested?”

He still had a job, but he was in Denmark, so even though it was a full-time job, it’s a Denmark full-time job, so it’s like a part-time job in America. [laughter]

[39:49] So he just said, “Yeah, cool, I’ll work part-time.” He eventually quit his job, and has been working full-time for a year-and-a-half, or two years now. Clarissa is the next person that we hired, and she’s awesome. She was working at a startup that got bought; they were trying to build a GitHub for data, but then they got bought, and it got turned into an enterprise thing that she didn’t want to work on anymore. She just found our project because we were out there and we were at open source conferences. That’s the way I found Mathias; I was involved in open source, I was involved in the community. I’ve been going to open source conferences since I was 19, so I just had a lot of time invested in the community.

If I was going to underscore one thing, if you’re a coder that wants to go down the path of supporting yourself through grants, it’s really important that you go to as many community events as possible, both to meet funders, but to meet coworkers, and expose yourself to different ideas. And the intersectional thing that Nadia mentioned - I think that’s huge. Having an interdisciplinary view of… You should be able to tell people what communities your software affects. Not just in a utopic way, but in a concrete way. For us, because we spent so many years figuring it out, our key focus area is science, journalism, and government. We think those are three really cool areas and there’s actually a lot of funding to invest in better solutions.

Everybody knows journalism is trying to reinvent itself, because nobody’s buying papers anymore. The government has had a lot of innovation lately because of Code for America and healthcare.gov being such a disaster, and there’s this US digital service now. And science is what we’ve been working on, mostly. So I think that science, journalism, and government are three really interesting areas that if you’re a programmer, there’s tons of exciting and challenging problems. They’re also the foundations of our society that we should all support anyway.

Going to work at a startup, getting people to engage with advertising more doesn’t have the same moral imperative as fixing the way people are informed about what’s happening in their community, or fixing local government, or making scientific results more available in the long-term, things like that.

We do definitely play a little bit. It’s not coercive, but the reason my team… We don’t have that many people, by the way. We just went from three to five, and we have a couple part-time contractors. So we’re not a huge team, but I think the reason that we’re able to get… I think everybody on our team is super world-class, and the reason we’re able to get world-class people is because we give people a huge degree of freedom. People are basically their own bosses, if they want to be, but I also try to support them as much as I can. Everything you get to do is open source, and there’s a direct impact of your work, because we’re essentially working directly for a specific community. In our case, it’s been mostly scientists, so it’s meaningful. It’s not just like you show up to work, and you get stock options and compensation, and you work on a backlog of issues.

I feel everybody on our team is more like… I encourage people to have their own projects that they’re passionate about, that they can be the owners of, which also helps in a remote working context, because if you have your own projects that you’re the owner of, then you don’t have to sync up with other people to work on it. Then we also have team-level projects that we all try to collaborate on. I think that we basically use the grant money to hire a bunch of really smart people, and… Well, not smart, but passionate, and invested people into the problem, and then just pay them… Almost Bell Labs-style - incentivize them to work on a set of problems that are pretty high-level, and contribute to the ecosystem.

[44:16] I view it as we’re just a bunch of people really getting paid to try to explore the future of how scientific data is shared. If we were running ourselves like a startup, we would try to have everything be branded under our name, and have everything be productized, or strategically open source things, and strategically closed source things, but for us I feel everybody on our team is acting like an individual, and sometimes we work together on bigger projects. But really, we just try to get the best people working in this space, because otherwise they won’t be incentivized to work on these problems. They’ll go and get funding from elsewhere, a.k.a. get a job and go to work on some other problem that’s not supporting the scientists.

Pieter Hintjens: Right. This has actually been a long process. I’ve been working for years to make myself redundant. I’m the gatekeeper of the community, I’m the benevolent dictator for life - haha! - and for a long time I had to feed the community; I had to put a lot of effort and quite a lot of money into it. I got the money back, I got good business from being the ZeroMQ guru, but it was a big upfront investment, and it was a continual investment in keeping things straight, and keeping problems away from the community that were potentially very dangerous.

So it was a very deliberate thing over the last few years to make myself less important. I was always a contributor and I love writing code, but I didn’t want to be the person making the decisions, like “When do we make a release?” or “Do we merge this patch?” or “Is this person a valid contributor?” I wanted these decisions to be made by the group, in a decentralized, autonomous, reliable, robust fashion. That succeeded, and that’s kind of the core of our process, the C4 process.

We still have, of course, dependencies for things like domain names, trademarks, and ultimately the deciding voice when there is a real conflict or a real issue. I’m very lucky to have the time to do this, but I’m also very lucky to have a group of contributors who are absolutely amazingly good. The level of the people who’ve come to… We have these hackathons once a year in Brussels - before this huge open source meetup called FOSDEM we had these hackathons for a few days. The people who come there are just awesome, they are amazing. One of them is my friend Doron, who is an Israeli - he’s a bit younger than me and has more hair than me, and smiles more than me, but he’s been using our process, he’s been using ZeroMQ, he’s the author of the Windows NetMQ library which he’s rewritten three or four times. The man is a fantastic developer. I’ve seen him work with people, I’ve seen him basically as a younger version of myself, so I’m like “Okay Doron, you idolize me, I’m gonna give you the baton”, and he’s like “My god, what do I do with that?” I’m like “Okay, basically I’m going to pass you the domain names and I will tell the ZeroMQ community that I’ve chosen you as my successor. They can argue, they can bitch, but they won’t, they trust me. It’s a good decision.” And it comes down to actually this very interesting situation where we have no foundations and we have no committees, and we have no centralized infrastructure. We have one guy who owns a few domain names, he owns essentially ZeroMQ.org, and pays for that, and has the consensus agreement of the community that he is the guy in charge, and that’s it. It’s a very lightweight baton to pass on. Imagine that there was a foundation with a board - we would be in years of argument.

Brian Ketelsen: I think so, too. It was funny, I did a live class yesterday for Gopher Academy that was “How to make your first pll request on a Go project”, and it was a fun class to do, because I know a lot of people are intimidated, especially in the corporate world, where they don’t do a lot of open source work. A lot of big corporate customers that we have are still in Subversion or even other version control systems, so Git is new and the concept of pull requests is new.

So it was a fun class to give, but one of the things that I found to be almost painfully ironic was the fact that Git is this gigantic, decentralized version control system that is a hundred percent centralized, or maybe 99% centralized at GitHub now. The irony behind that, it kind of hit me funny.

Jerod Santo: I beat you to it. Okay, final thoughts on GitHub… A lot of this I think is kind of wait and see, our prognostication of what might happen, our fears, our desires. It’s compelling; integrated products are compelling. I think there’s an ideological tug of war here, because Git is distributed version control, and we’ve moved a lot of our stuff to one centralized for-profit company, and now here’s a whole other area which was on a different for-profit company, and now it’s like “Well, maybe GitHub will be a decentralized platform”, and that usually ends up bad.

Pia Mancini: I think that the way we think about collectives - we see them as new human and economic unions; we see the collective as the new economic unit that exists in the world and the community. And the community doesn’t fit the assumptions that the financial system has of how organizations operate. Our system thinks of organizations as corporations. Whether they are for-profit or non-profit, it doesn’t matter… But corporations are hierarchical organizations, they have a president, they have a command and control structure of sorts, they are anchored in a territory you have to be incorporated somewhere… And the associations of the internet generation are not incorporated anywhere in the world.

We really set out to serve that community, we really set out to serve associations of the internet generation, and we define how open collectives are and should operate. Open collectives are very fluid structures, they are bottom-up, they have core contributors, end contributors, they’re transparent by design, they operate in the open, and they need a way to get funding without necessarily having their own legal entity or their bank account, because they don’t want to have a president, they don’t want to have equity. That’s not how they operate.

I think that we really hit a very difficult problem, and the need for Open Collective became very clear for us. We keep seeing different examples and different collectives from different spaces joining, that are not only open source. We discovered the most acute challenges that they face, we’re trying to solve them, and the challenges that we face as a company, as an organization, and we set out to solve them, as well.

I think we’re in a really good place at the moment, where we’ve figured out what we’re doing, we’ve figured out who we’re doing it for, we’ve figured out the problems that we face or the challenges that we face, and what we need to focus on now is how do we scale and how do we grow.

So that’s where we are at, and we are facing – I don’t wanna say a decision, because we already made it, because it’s who we are, but we decided that we wanna grow in a horizontal way or a decentralized way. We do not wanna grow as a classical company that just grows a lot of engineers, or is growing in hiring and staffing. What we want to do is to build Open Collective in a way that anyone can contribute to it, and that different services can be built on Open Collective for the collectives, and that collectives can sell projects, products or services to each other.

We just wanna be the infrastructure on top of which this whole economy for collectives takes place and develops, but we don’t necessarily wanna develop all of it ourselves. On the contrary, we really wanna be the foundation, the plumbing, and enable anyone to start building on top of it…

[28:03] So we think of ourselves a little bit as a browser, that essentially abstracts that operating system, and you operate just on that level. And we want Open Collective to be the browser for all of the collectives, the interactions, and their growth and how they thrive, and to take place without worrying about the government, the operating system, the fiscal sponsorship, the money etc.

Alex Sexton: As you do. A serious question… The web, kind of like when we talk about app stores and we talk about – what else; we’ve even talked about it on the show… We definitely talked about app stores, but either way, we talked about if you go and you put your app in the app store, you’re using a centralized Apple control thing, and the way to win that back is to use the decentralized app store, which is the web.

[00:27:59.12\] So we often refer to the fact that you can choose any server as long as you can get an IP address, like all the different things… There’s no single internet server, and then you have to upload everything to the internet server, and then they can turn things on or off.

Certainly, there are states involved, and censorship and things like that, but I don’t think that’s really what we’re talking.

Adam Stacoviak: Has there been any thought – that’s just totally a tangent, so forgive me… But has anybody, or have you put any thought into this idea of the traits and attributes, that feature set (I suppose) that GitHub offers, in a decentralized way, where you don’t have to have this kind of repository where it’s controlled by a large corporation, in this case? …previously ran by tried and true hackers, that sold their company to Microsoft… Which isn’t a bad thing; there’s nothing against that, it’s a choice everybody makes, so there’s trade-offs… But the point is that I can recall a day when GitHub was ran by - and I’m sure it is; geez, I’m saying negative things here… GitHub’s great. It’s hard work. I’m not trying to shame anybody here, but it is now owned by a corporation and not by three hackers who got together for beers anymore. It’s grown, it’s changed…