Open Source Everything With Joseph Jacks  ## Metadata - Author: [[David King]] - Full Title: Open Source Everything With Joseph Jacks - Category: #articles - Document Note: --- tags: - #OpenSource - #VentureCapital - #SoftwareLicensing Author: Joseph Jacks Source: Open Source Everything Reference: [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDWGlFHLcUk) date created: 2024-09-14 14:30 --- # Title: Open Source Everything with Joseph Jacks ## Table of Contents: - [Summary](#-summary) - [Main Content](#-main-content) - [The Start of Open Source](#the-start-of-open-source) - [The Role of Free Software](#the-role-of-free-software) - [Challenges in the Open Source Ecosystem](#challenges-in-the-open-source-ecosystem) - [Future of Open Source](#future-of-open-source) - [Open Source and Venture Capital](#open-source-and-venture-capital) - [Notes](#-notes) - [Paraphrase](#-paraphrase) - [Newsletter](#-newsletter) - [Action Items](#-action-items) - [Hypotheses](#-hypotheses) - [Future Research](#-future-research) - [Accessibility Assessment](#-accessibility-assessment) - [Learning Styles Assessment](#-learning-styles-assessment) - [Logical Validity](#-logical-validity) - [SEO Evaluation](#-seo-evaluation) - [Conclusion](#-conclusion) ## 📝 Summary: Joseph Jacks shares his views on open-source software, free software movements, and the transition into open-source business models. He critiques the use of "open source" by venture capitalists, examines the history of free software, and envisions the future of open source extending beyond software into physical things like toasters or neural networks. The interview provides a deep dive into the ideological debates within the open-source community and the impact on venture capitalism. ## 📖 Main Content: ### The Start of Open Source: - Joseph Jacks started OSS Capital in 2018, driven by his frustration with how "open source" was used incorrectly in the tech world. He points to ideological purists like Richard Stallman, who laid the groundwork for free software but held a strong opposition to proprietary models. ### The Role of Free Software: - The GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation were critical in laying the foundation of modern open source. Stallman’s concept of "copyleft" and the GPL license were philosophical innovations. However, the free software movement remained niche until the rise of the internet and companies like Red Hat. ### Challenges in the Open Source Ecosystem: - Jacks discusses the challenges of modern open source: balancing pragmatic business approaches with staying true to open-source principles. He highlights the tension between free software purists and those in the open-source rebranding movement. ### Future of Open Source: - Open source will increasingly move beyond software, potentially into areas like neural networks and physical devices. He sees a future where all things—from toasters to space travel—are powered by open-source principles. ### Open Source and Venture Capital: - While open source is eating software, venture capital funding in the space has surged. Jacks believes this could be a double-edged sword, as overfunding risks diluting the open-source ethos. ## 🗒️ Notes: - Free software was ideologically driven, with Stallman believing proprietary software was morally wrong. - The rise of the internet made open source more practical and scalable. - OSS Capital focuses on supporting commercial open-source companies that adhere to open-source principles but provide paid services or proprietary add-ons. - Jacks is highly critical of companies labeling themselves as open-source when they don't adhere to the Four Freedoms. - There is growing interest in applying open-source principles to physical products, neural networks, and even space travel. ## 🗣️ Paraphrase: 1. **Original:** "The free software movement was largely ideological for the first 15 years, led by Stallman, who believed that proprietary software was morally wrong and evil." **Paraphrase:** For the first decade and a half, Stallman’s free software movement was fueled by strong ideological beliefs, viewing proprietary software as both unethical and harmful. 2. **Original:** "I believe that over time, open source will go beyond software to include hardware, neural networks, and even space travel. It’s just a matter of time." **Paraphrase:** Jacks envisions a future where open-source principles extend beyond software, impacting everything from hardware and AI to space exploration, predicting this is an inevitable progression. ## 📰 Newsletter: 🌟 **Latest WordPress Updates!** In this issue, we cover how the open-source model is shaping web development and startups. Plus, exciting community highlights, new WordPress plugins, and a look at Joseph Jacks’ bold vision of open-source expansion into hardware and AI. Don’t miss out on how open source is eating software and growing faster than ever! [Read more!](#) ## ✅ Action Items: 1. Examine how OSS Capital's mission aligns with my role as a Developer Advocate. Highlight the importance of contributor engagement and sustainable funding for open-source projects. 2. Evaluate the parallels between Jacks' vision of expanding open-source principles beyond software and my goal of fostering transparency and inclusivity in open-source ecosystems. ## 🧪 Hypotheses: - Open-source principles could be applied to physical devices and manufacturing industries, allowing users to modify hardware. - The ideological differences between free software and open source will continue to create friction within the tech community, but the pragmatic approach will dominate. ## 🔮 Future Research: 1. How open-source principles can be applied to the development of neural networks and machine learning models. 2. The economic impact of open-source software on traditional business models, particularly in industries like healthcare and finance. ## 📊 Accessibility Assessment: - **Screen Reader Compatibility:** Needs improved use of semantic HTML and alt-text for diagrams. - **Keyboard Navigation:** Article navigation is accessible, but some interactive elements require keyboard optimization. - **Contrast and Readability:** Increase contrast for better readability for visually impaired users. ## 🧠 Learning Styles Assessment: - **Visual Learners:** The content could be enhanced with flowcharts outlining the development of open-source movements. - **Aural Learners:** Provide an audio version of the interview for better engagement. - **Logical Learners:** The article includes well-defined arguments, but more data charts could improve understanding. ## ✅ Logical Validity: The arguments presented are logically sound, particularly the breakdown of open-source principles and venture capital's role. However, there is a **Hasty Generalization** when claiming that open-source will inevitably take over physical devices; this needs more evidence or case studies. ## 🔍 SEO Evaluation: - **Keywords:** Effective use of terms like "open source," "free software," and "venture capital." - **Title Optimization:** "Open Source Everything" captures the essence while being SEO-friendly. - **Content Length:** The content is long but detailed, ideal for users looking for in-depth material. - **Internal Links:** Increase the use of internal links for better site navigation. ## 🎯 Conclusion: Joseph Jacks offers a fascinating look into the world of open source, arguing that its principles will extend beyond software. His vision of open-source space travel may seem far-fetched, but it’s grounded in the same philosophy that gave rise to Linux and modern web development. The future may be open in more ways than one. Short Summary for [Open Source Everything with Joseph Jacks](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDWGlFHLcUk) by [Merlin](https://merlin.foyer.work/) Title: The Origins of Open Source Capital with Joseph Jacks [00:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDWGlFHLcUk&t=5) Started OSIS Capital in 2018 after blogging about open source startups. [02:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDWGlFHLcUk&t=137) Open source grants unalienable rights to source code, spearheaded by Richard Stallman. [06:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDWGlFHLcUk&t=406) Open Source community and Red Hat's business model [09:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDWGlFHLcUk&t=5 - Document Tags: [[coss]] [[joseph jacks]] - Summary: In this conversation I had the chance to meet Joseph Jacks and learn about OSSCapital a venture capital firm that believes "open source is eating software itself faster than software is eating the world." OSS Capital: https://oss.capital Joseph Jacks https://twitter.com/JosephJacks_ DK SOCIAL Nostr: npub1kuy0wwf0tzzqvgfv8zpw0vaupkds3430jhapwrgfjyn7ecnhpe0qj9kdj8 Twitter: https://twitter.com/dksf LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/curiousdk/ - URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDWGlFHLcUk so I've I've like been following your tweets a bit and your story about open source software and open source software capital and I don't know you know besides what I've seen in the tweets I'd love to sort of hear it from from you because you've started this Venture firm was it 2018 I think and yeah I'd love to hear just kind of the story of how you decided that this was this was the focus you wanted to give was that something you'd been doing before 2018 and sort of how did you decide to focus on this as a venture capital kind of vertical so I started osis capital in September 2018 after blogging about open source startups for a few years I was obsessed in a very unhealthy way with open source companies yeah and I am a I'm a bit weird uh of a person sort of linguistically uh precise and uh sensitive uh sometimes so um I uh I I I I frankly just got very annoyed with the way uh Venture capitalists were um sort of uh using the phrase open source in a harmful way or sort of uh inappropriate ways um sort of saying you know this is an open source company or this is some open source business model and so forth and while that might actually sound on the surface a little weird and crazy uh I can unpack it a little bit because that's actually the origin story behind it it was a fan Perfect story it's kind of like why I started to do this uh but that's like one of the main ones um and I can kind of talk about some of the others as well but like you know the the main one was really this just like linguistic annoyance sort of like semantic maybe semantic enough you know sort of what that uh what the hell do other people think this means it actually doesn't mean that it doesn't mean what they think it means and that's a sort of like a poker tell that they have no idea what they're talking about right and um not that I do right I'm just yeah I'm less maybe I'm less wrong I'm not a huge fan of the less wrong like uh blog uh by the way I think there's a lot of good content on it but I think uh the underpinnings are actually quite flawed that's completely different you can have it some other time right I would prefer to not have that conversation sure but uh uh so uh open source means something really specific it means that you are granting a set of um sort of almost like an unalienable rights to a piece of source code uh kind of in the same way that the Declaration of Independence in the United States gives people the right uh uh uh to have you know freedom of speech types of fundamental rights yes and um you know it's like a really critical important thing uh obviously this guy Richard stallman kind of um you know came up with it after being really pissed off about Unix and Microsoft right in the early 80s at uh of all things the MIT CCL Lab at the time which is where you know object-oriented programming was invented and public key cryptography was invented and a lot of those things uh came out of mitc cell and the uh 60s 70s and 80s one of them was free software um and so Richard stallman in his pissed off angst against Unix and Microsoft said you know what the [ \_\_ ] are these people doing copywriting sources yeah that's [ \_\_ ] evil I'm gonna create something called copy left right yeah copyright and his Brilliance he came up with you know obviously uh the gnu uh tool chain which is a huge part of Linux uh obviously emacs which is kind of you know for the people who are the you know RMS uh uh sort of uh uh you know maybe not zealots but sort of Mega fans and sort of more purists about different uh sort of things programming related um you know they're sort of uh maybe maybe they default to emacs uh over vim and other editors but let's just say um you know Richard was the founding father of Open Source and it was overly ideologically motivated in the beginning for the first 15 years in particular from 1983 to 1998 and that period of time uh frankly free software was like really Fringe and sort of like a hobbyist type of movement and people were sort of more um you know ideologically and sort of philosophically attracted to that movement and there was a lot of it if I recall it was kind of on like discs diskette trading and stuff right like there weren't a lot of Networks trading I don't even think Usenet was around I think it was like pre-usenet right uh if I'm not mistaken is there any hint from any of his writing that kind of indicates why he became a zealot or sort of how he came to the conclusion that this pissed off I think I think being frustrated and angry is a really valid and Powerful motivating you know sort of pissed off at what of course oh no so he was like specifically uh like so like I said Unix and Microsoft um uh we're we're sort of becoming dominant mm-hmm uh I don't know if it was explicitly Bill Gates but like sort of the public letter to hobbyists that bill wrote in 1973 which was a decade before Richard um came up with free software he was probably thinking about it for a good part of that decade I imagine um but it was pretty clear that like Microsoft was on the ascent ascendance and Unix was obviously the dominant operating system very proprietary yep and um my uh take is that Richard was pissed off and was like you know [ \_\_ ] this yeah here's a solution yep right and his solution was copy left as far as the license framework so he really kind of invented a few fundamental things like these are these are fundamental things that he came up with um you know the the sort of uh not the kernel that was Linus that sort of you know the the good new parts of of Linux um uh a lot of user space things and then um obviously the the free software uh uh Manifesto and then the license model the the the the the Jeep the GPL you know he he invented the GPL and then he invented um you know this sort of philosophy this this kind of like uh Church of thought yeah and um you know really kind of like a cult you know it's kind of a cult um uh his you know sort of mechanism for doing that was both linguistic philosophical architectural you know sort of like very interdisciplinary across all these different sort of spectrums and um as most brilliant things are uh it it was sort of relegated in obscurity in terms of sort of the very you know Niche hacker Community because it didn't quite have the sort of like um sort of uh layer of abstraction to kind of properly distribute it equally across all of humanity until the internet happened and so the internet happened and there were some more huge software companies starting to sprout up um and um uh Red Hat was one of them and red hat was really this kind of shining example of weight you can actually build a huge business on this notion of giving everything away for free yeah yeah that's pretty impressive right yeah um so that company went from you know zero in 1993 interesting factoid March 26th or 27th I think I have to double check this is the 30th year anniversary of Red Hats founding oh wow I'm hugely honored and privileged to be good friends with uh one of the main founders of red hat this gentleman by the name of Bob Young who lives in uh New York in different places and he's just a fantastic awesome human being okay anyways um I'll kind of get back to some of the history but you know free software uh was very ideologically motivated and Richard feel feels that um you know he's still alive so I can't speak think about in the past tense he's still living and breathing on this um on this Earth um but he uh you know he um uh uh he he believes that proprietary software is morally wrong and evil okay so if you use or are used he came up with this really cute word called the use people who use proprietary software are not users of the software right yeah meaning the software is controlling you yep you are not controlling the software yeah because you can't see the source code and you can't change the source code and so on and so forth which is kind of like an elitist perspective to have because vast majority of people aren't great programmers so there's all kinds of flaws in this argument uh it's brilliant as Richard is he has a lot of kind of cognitive flaws in in his his overall philosophy but let's just kind of speed up a little bit so in 1998 a group of people Christine Peterson Larry Augustin Bruce parents a handful of others came up with the term open source um uh and the term open source was coined to basically sort of untangle all of the sort of philosophical elements uh that were sort of very ideologically motivated for free and just make open source more pragmatic you know or sort of make free software more pragmatic and so it was a rebranding exercise let's change the name from free software let's call it open source and while then transition was happening were there other things that were like it sounds like the stallman thing was a very extreme view yes and then the there's probably something in the middle and I wonder if like in the rebranding were there also some more moderate ideas that were being surfaced or was it purely like I'm not an expert at all this stuff but I understand there's like GPL and canoe stuff and then there's like the MIT licenses and then there's different amounts of like restrictive or unrestrictive was any of that coming to to head with the introduction of that open source term S I know you really only had um [Applause] the GPL license um you know uh uh and the MIT license um for that first period of time you know from 83 to the late 90s got it I think Apache is surfaced somewhere in there as well like Apache softer Foundation may have been founded in the 90s I'm not 100 sure I'm gonna google it now it was the Apache software Foundation create another guy who helped start it his name is Brian bellendorf oh yeah 99 okay so that's much later much much later so I'd actually say there are really only two licenses that were sort of like implementing these ideas uh the GPL and then the MIT license um and you were talking about the Rebrand that happened was was any of that Rebrand part of like uh centrism and ideology from where Solomon was or that that wasn't really part of the Rebrand I think it was a little bit different I think those two things are slightly sort of disconnected so um there was really this kind of ground swelling of interest in taking these ideas and sort of democratizing them further but the problem that a handful of very smart people recognized and this is written down in history and very well documented so I'm not holding [ \_\_ ] out of my ass here um to Grass I can bleep any of this out by the way to get a little bit uh it's all right exploited for uh on not not a huge amount of sleep so mistake last night so but you know I I would say you know the um uh uh the group of people that came together that really wanted to Rebrand free software and call it open source and then you know um Carry forward kind of a new a new Banner if you will and you flag um uh we're really motivated by the rise of the internet and the rise of sort of the appreciation that this approach to Building Technology is fundamentally better and is fundamentally um you know good for the world and it produces higher quality software it speeds the rate of innovation uh you know and Eric Raymond's kind of uh words all bugs are shallow uh uh with a lot of eyeballs on them you know sunlight is the best it's affected and so on and so forth right and so um those ideas were sort of like taken to Heart by a handful of really kind of pivotal instrumental people uh Tim O'Reilly Larry Augustin Bruce perrins Christine Peterson you know these are some pretty awesome people uh that are actually all still alive um uh and doing awesome things Bruce parents actually an early uh partner of ours at Oz's capital uh and Larry Augustin uh uh is is also one of our partners at osis capital and um uh I've never met Christine Peterson or Tim O'Reilly but um you know there there's some there's some people that we do know that were part of that that that that sort of uh that critical pivotal turning point in the history of Open Source and so they branded it as open source and then I don't really think we saw like a a fractioning of like you know there's the free software people and then there's the open source people I think that they've always been like you know that's why you see this acronyms you know let's just blend the worlds together we don't want to be so divisive as to say the free software people are like lesser than and the open source people are more than you know that's all kind of [ \_\_ ] um but frankly you know I think we have seen a pretty significant chunk of the technology industry really sort of like settle on it's open source yeah open source Works um we understand open source and it's open source you kind of have to peel back the layers of the onion a little bit in the tech industry to sort of identify the people who are like actually no it's free software free software right and and so that that kind of like um uh Dynamics is still there um I I would say the free software ecosystem and Community is the loud minority right um whereas the um the open source Community is really the normal volume vast majority and is that kind of where you identify yourself because your your entity is OSS Capital not OSS capital it's a very good question I am actually extremely uh very much so in the free software camp and I don't know if I should even really say that uh to loudly but is it just too political of uh no that's who I am I think it is a little political frankly but like I think both both approaches have huge merits and there's there's really a ton of value and understanding the underpinnings of both things um and it's like really really critical and profound stuff right um but I would say we would not be here without Richard Stillman we would not be here without his Brilliance and what he invented and and you know maybe some would say arguably discovered [Music] um yeah but um I would I would I would have to say that you know we're standing on the shoulders of this guy who came up with this stuff and the Four Freedoms right like the Four Freedoms are very fundamental like you know I I would put them up there with uh I don't want to get him I don't want to get myself in trouble I would put them up there with like you know some some Physics level you know uh loss so things like gravity here energy and stuff I I would put them I would put them close to certain things like that yeah well and can you can you outline the four uh so the Four Freedoms are basically Freedom zero one two and three so Richard started at zero like all good computer scientists and um it's basically the free the freedom to um uh see uh I always find this kind of interesting my own interpretation is a little bit different than the explicit Association that Richard sort of tied for software too um uh uh source code uh with right so like these ideas are very much sort of source code oriented I actually believe the Four Freedoms are much more sort of um a sort of substrate independent is is one way of thinking about it or sort of like um abstraction agnostic almost sounds like a little um uh redundant um I think that you could apply the principles of the Four Freedoms to source code to atoms uh to um you know designs of all kinds to data I think you can apply them to neural network weights for example which is a popular yeah conversation we're having these days and um a lot of other things but basically the fourth items freedoms are um the freedom to do what you want with the technology at any time the freedom to change the technology uh at any time and and uh freedom to uh see and read the design and the implementation details in an entirety of the technology at any time and then also the freedom to distribute and um share you know that technology at any time um uh in its original form or even with your own um changes and modification and modifications um those are the Four Freedoms basically and you know people have different interpretations people have like sort of like this is only about source code and like I I personally when I learned about open source and I'm a programmer I'm a pretty technical person right um I don't code a lot but I you know I I invest in open source projects yeah yeah I read the code and I play with projects and I'm pretty you know uh incentivized to do that so I don't make stupid decisions with uh yeah yeah for sure but um you know I would I would say that um you know the um uh the the Four Freedoms are very much Transcendent Beyond source code and actually applicable to many other things in in life in in the world so I'm trying to imagine like what what are those like like with the design of a toaster refrigerator a car those should also have the Four Freedoms absolutely and how how would that look like if we were to just really try to chase an example like if a toaster were to have those Four Freedoms there's still it still needs to be made of atoms so somebody has to be responsible like made and distributed to my house because I don't want to be in the toaster making business um or you know even spend my time making a toaster so like is there a model for how we should think about you know enabling toasters with the Four Freedoms while incentivizing somebody to build it and ship it and sell it to me and kind of determine a good market price for that your example sounds crazy today it's going it's going to sound very familiar and valid and interesting probably within the next 50 years oh yeah I actually suspect I'm more on your side with that than not meaning like I squint and it feels like that to me but I don't spend enough time to have any hypothesis around how that would play out so I wonder if you could give a little more color to like speculating intensely all I really spend most of my time on is software okay because I'm a software person yep I definitely do see a world where this thing is all open source um we say this thing you mean a mobile phone you mean an Apple iPhone I was holding up the iPhone and uh you know right spinning it around for the camera yeah just listening to this over audio um I see a world where all physical things uh are imbued with the same rights as source code and in terms of Licensing yeah um we haven't yet invented licenses that can accommodate for that though so what I mean by that is if you look at the parlance of free software and open source licenses they've all been tailor-made and designed primarily by lawyers to implement um these rights specifically for software source code that is computer programming language based symbolic systems that distill you know natural you know bucket snore form right you know translation English and instruction sets down to uh what the computer can understand as um you know as a set of uh you know um you know behavior and actions that need to occur uh with you know transistors going uh you know and doing you know bit flipping operations um in the world of physical things it looks a little bit different um uh the substrates for computing are different the design mechanics are different um you know the way you can actually make things malleable and modify and change them is quite different so we have to actually take the fundamental principles of these Four Freedoms right going back to and Implement a new set of licenses basically that encapsulate those freedoms and apply can apply them to different domains the the most interesting domain that I'm thinking quite a lot about is applying these Four Freedoms to um neural network weights and the neurons data as you train the neural networks um you know large amounts of data and my friend of all ravacon tweeted about this um uh a few days ago we need a copy left in a license for uh for data and for the data that gets trained inside of neural networks um I think he's right and it's a big ambitious project and my partner Heather Meeker is making some progress on it and I've been collaborating with her a little bit but we have so many projects that we're working on and so we're like inching forward and making a little bit of progress every day on this but this is like a big area of Interest yeah I'm trying to get a mental model for like where we are today and take One Step Beyond so um you know I think you I think you had this tweet uh the other day where you said what should be open source that is not and I I replied to it I said space travel I was actually not joking at all what I what I'm saying is like you're saying maybe the toaster example is 50 years out so I'd say maybe the space travel example is actually here 100 years I don't I don't really have a hypothesis on time frame sure but I'm trying to say like how can we look as far forward yes like the most ridiculous thing that like is least likely to be open or the last Bastion of closed Source sure maybe that kind of thing and so can we try to understand what that might look like and then back it off and so I think the toaster is closer than that like by a long shot and the toaster is still far compared to maybe like a you know an open source protocol or a pure software thing but like you're trying to paint a little bit of the picture it doesn't have to even get to the toaster but like a little bit further than where we are like what are the next kind of dominoes to to Tumble I really love the responses to this tweet I put out and I'm gonna just like look at this yeah share some of your favorites I'd love to talk about it yeah scan through them and tell you some of my favorites I like the question a lot someone responded with money and I was like Oh you mean uh I mean you mean Adam coin because we have Bitcoin but do we have Adam coin um that's trying to be cute uh someone said ISO standards and then then I was like oh how about that icon uh the uh I can the um the standard body for anybody for the web doing uh uh you know uh domain spaces and uh all the tlds and all that jazz um uh that's not my idea by the way that was my friend Paul simenski's idea who's the head of Corp Dev for uh uh automatic the WordPress company yep I would say a few other ones that are super interesting that jumped out on this thread are standard legal contracts that's a good one someone said SQL sql's already open source okay people said open EI um right that's a good one and that's one my understanding is that open AI was intended to be much more open than it has trended toward is that right I think I've seen some headlines that Elon Musk is starting uh open AI competitor that's yeah yeah supposed to be more in line with the original it's even funnier than that David uh Elon tweeted the other day he was like I named openai because it was supposed to be open source AI right and Sam in his capitalist you know like uh crazed uh intensity uh did a 180 and made everything proprietary or like I mean they still open source a lot of stuff but like the foundation models are all proprietary because Sam's like we're going to be existentially wiped out and we have to hold this stuff back and it's scary kind of believes that too so it's a very nuanced conversation one thing that I find very fascinating is like elon's like a genius but he changes his mind in public frequently which I find very cool actually yeah a lot of people criticize him for that and like beat him up and um I mean look people are people have the right to change their minds right like oh yeah what's what's what's the problem I think it's actually more valuable uh to reserve the right to change your mind than to say I'm only going to speak on this once I have the final answer because yes the process itself is valuable for like forming Discovery and getting more feedback on it that's actually why I called my YouTube channel curious DK because it's like basically I'm like I don't know I'm a student of everything I don't really I don't really know anything so tell me what you know I'm curious about let's talk about it right but I don't I approaches saying I have all the answers I feel the same um yeah I just pasted the uh the tweet that Elon did um uh this is in the let me pull up the chat here February 17th at 1 36 a.m Pacific Time uh-huh yep I wonder what he was doing then um uh he said opening I was created as an open source parentheses which is why I named it quote unquote open right Ai and parentheses non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google but now it has become a closed Source Max profit-seeking company effectively controlled by Microsoft new paragraph or in a sentence not what I intended at all and then this tweet has 13 million views 12 000 retweets 150 000 likes I mean everything Elon tweets has a shitload of responses because he has 130 million twin followers but anyways um I found it very cool and fascinating that he said that I mean he was like one of the I don't know probably one of the first five people that founded openai because like there's like there's like 20 founders of open AI right right yeah it's like I found an opening eyes yeah Hoffman it was like all these people all right I think Elon was actually like the the guy who actually did like name it like he named it and his tweet um here you know illustrates that so I was like support stability in my response and um right uh I think he actually may have met uh imod recently by the time you published that that that this this podcast that should be that'll be done public information maybe it doesn't matter but I think he's a fan of of stability and I think he's a fan of like stable diffusion and all the open source models that are coming you know when I say open source I mean kind of in-air quotes we haven't yet figured out how to actually open source the Foundation models because the licenses are actually ethical use meaning you can't generate child porn and like revenge porn like illegal horrible things you can't do with image gen models in particular the generative image gen models have these constraints the language models may or may not um literally last week John lacun's team at Facebook meta released llama which is a 60 plus billion parameter model and you know uh going up against Chachi PT and someone torrented the weights oh I'm gonna put a pull request in the in the repo and said um yeah you know you can fill out this form and wait for our approval or you can just download the way it's on bittor and here's the one and it's a 200 gigabyte file so like people are downloading this thing like left and right it's got tons of C AIDS out there and everything so anyways it's actually quite illegal um I don't meaning because it's it's it's Facebook proprietary data that somebody put out there well no someone trained someone trained this this this uh no not someone Facebook trains the model yeah not a ton of data not just Facebook data but like uh you know a lot of the internet and stuff and um yeah but basically made the capital investment to do the thing to own the output and they wanted to give it away because um the Llama paper has this open source license applied to it so it's a con it's like a copy left license but it's only for non-commercial use which technically really not an open source license and um but it's only meant for researchers and um so you would say so you would say an open source license has to be available kind of without any restrictions or well open source means again going back to something I said in a very early parts of this conversation open source means something very specific you cannot change the definition period I'm sorry yeah disagree with me okay um you're not allowed to change the definition of Open Source I'm sorry that's not that's not okay a lot of people disagree with me most VCS think I'm totally crazy and they very strongly disagree with me a lot of Founders disagree with me actually um the challenge right now we have in the industry is uh we're starting to sort of use the term open source or open and sort of fuzzy happy interchangeable kind of ways it's like oh it's open it's fine right and it's not actually open source and this is extremely toxic and damaging in my opinion um that is not the same as saying proprietary software is evil I use proprietary software all the time I am an iPhone user again I'm for the people who are only listening I'm holding up my iPhone the most proprietary consumer product ever invented right you know I am a fan of a lot of proprietary technology I own a Tesla right I like the elon's cars I'm a big fan of Elon Springs very proprietary technology right um except for his gesture of open sourcing the access of the charging stations which is a source gesture but not really um you know I'm not saying that proprietary suffers bad but open source is is a very specific thing it means something specific and so when you say I'm going to open source my technology you have to actually do it um and frankly even though I'm an early investor instability I'm a big fan of what emot is doing I'm a huge fan of of the um the movement towards truly open source you know AI frankly quite friendly to being blunt and direct about it it doesn't exist right now right now it doesn't exist yes um you know some people meaning it well we don't have open source licenses for neural network weights that's what does not yet exist um what people are doing today is they're sort of saying okay here's MIT or Apache or BSD you know they're very permissive open source lessons not necessarily copy left intents like GPL or agpl or something but something more permissive like a a middle ground of of um of uh open source rights like um MIT or Apache and they just like put that on the hugging face card repo and or the GitHub repo and call and call it a day um that's actually not applied to the waste it's applied to the pytorch model that you wrote in Python and it's applied to some scaffolding and some you know some serialization things and whatever um it is not applied to the weights that get computed after you train the model and you generate that and you put it up there so and we're entering a domain that is unchartered and is Reviving The Church Turing thesis that computation can be found in many forms of substrate modality and people do not yet have critical thought applied in the domain of how do we actually permissively license this new computational paradigm um that is you know sort of uh utilizing neural networking based um you know Computing principles um and you know that it's a very interesting kind of conversation right I I wonder like that there's something that you had mentioned in the kind of the bittorrenting of the thing that uh kind of launches into another whole line of kind of reasoning that I've been trying to do recently and I wonder if sort of how you think about this so you know you know I've been I don't know if you know but I've been sort of obsessed with this master stuff and sort of yeah me too right after that okay um and have you did you run into nostrocket yet no well yes the other day yes sustainability funding thing right yeah so it's it's kind of yeah it's it's you know it's very raw I think I think I just saw it yesterday or something we actually talked about it on the news thing that I haven't even published yet probably gonna publish it after this um but the uh but the idea of effectively like creating a share of something so that you can either get like future value on it or you can get sets today which are you know like just basically like payment right and once you start doing something with a share something with future value you start to wonder around like how would that future value be captured and it's kind of a broader question around I mean I've asked you know my friend Max Webster who runs a Bitcoin Centric uh Venture Capital firm um it's kind of similar to questions which are like I mean we can all be excited about open source and historically we've seen some models of value capture but like presumably that needs to change and evolve as like the software evolves and the licenses evolve and even just like the way a business gets created and the way value gets created and and captured evolved so you know I wonder like a little bit broadly but how do you see those changes in value capture because as an allocator you need to both like find this thing in the future and then you need to know how to sort of help it nurture it but then how to where are the parts that like value just is going to end up being captured and how do you sort of play you know it seems like a little bit of a dance right oh boy you're going all the way getting too spicy I've tweeted about this in the past and you know what completely unfiltered for you today and just keep giving you the straight up you know Raw directly from the you know you know Unix sockets right yeah uh unfiltered um I don't think anything in the world has any actual intrinsic value except life itself and that includes Bitcoin period uh that belief is very unevenly distributed I think it's like me and like maybe a couple thousand people believe that uh in terms of like you know that's that's ground truth fact I wonder the the idea that's physics well it's it's it's some it's not pure physics there's physics involved in it but I wonder like how do you come to the conclusion that life is the things I'm gonna go back to you Harari for a second you've all has written about this I don't remember which passage chapter book I'm sure it comes from but he's recited it a lot and I believe it's actually very true the only um way in mechanism in which value accrues um in our reality is by telling each other uh stories and getting more and more of our Collective uh you know sort of uh human um you know uh uh group to believe said stories yeah is this the fictions part yeah a Ferrari yeah yeah uh that's basically it you know the beginning shells were the representation of value a little later on paper currency was the representation of value uh uh a little past that we had um uh products and services and markets and then maybe past that we had things like um you know the Industrial Age and then now we're starting to uh imbue uh strings of numbers and hashes with value that's a little freaking weird okay hashes and strings of numbers have value really okay so um uh none of those things are true those are all lies um I like to say I've tweeted this a few times this is really controversial stuff I'm finally getting a chance to like have a chance you're the beneficiary yeah conversation um uh the biggest lie and by biggest I'm referring to the measure in Quantum of qualitative uh you know sort of stuff that you can attach to that abstract word big um and then lie meaning more in a binary sense it's just factually untrue um in the technology industry is that proprietary software has any value why is it big today the whole the whole software industry technology industry is worth about five trillion dollars I have a trillion dollars of that is just software spent just software spent software every year these are numbers from Gardner and Forester by the way you can go fact check me sure uh uh a thousand billion yeah trillion dollars every year companies mostly companies Enterprises and software that is proprietary and the mechanism to purchase that is through a software license proprietary software license that's a trillion dollars in um basically lies that are that are interchanged between companies and other companies I.E humans and other humans through all these abstractions we've created by the way the abstraction called the corporation that's another thing uh that is essentially a lie that evil uh points to as well it's a useful lie it's a useful abstraction that allows us to coordinate trade and yeah more efficiently uh but but it's a lot but it's a lie actually it's a lie um and that's my philosophy so I believe over a long enough period of time open source does in fact I don't really love this term eat but I use it a lot and so I'd probably continue using it open source eats everything literally everything Elite all of software it'll eat all of Hardware it'll eat all of Industries in all kinds of places yep it's going to take many many many many decades honestly maybe a century so yeah the most near-term thing that I can tell is like not batshit crazy level aggressive risk to actually convince institutions and wealthy people to give me money to manage to Capital allocate it as you said which is what I do for my job yeah is open source eating software open source is eating software faster than software's in the world this guy Mark Andreessen who I think is super brilliant and it's made a lot of contributions but I think it's like a really toxic person I will say that publicly I think this is the first time I've said that publicly I've never treated that uh but when you publish this I will not ask you to edit it apps you can keep um and I've met him and you know he has a really useful narrative to draft off of and it's actually it also happens to be a correct uh uh narrative which is that um software scene in the world you wrote Our New York Times op-ed I think in 2008 or 2009 I can't remember exactly what to popularize this idea like you know software is transforming all these industries Agriculture and health biology and you know transportation and you know hospitality and all these different Industries are getting transformed by software right but he really didn't emphasize or highlight is that it was largely getting transformed by proprietary software open source software proprietary software so Facebook and Airbnb and Twitter and so on and so forth yeah add infinity um what is interesting to me and I think is actually more profound is the area under the curve of Open Source eating software itself is expanding more rapidly then the area under the curve of software eating everything because the area under the curve of software heating everything is already pretty freaking gargantuan which huge yeah it's like this it's like a huge ass wave so just from a lot of large numbers were already well recognized on that tracks 10 trillion dollars of software eating a lot of Industries has already been materialized in terms of market cap measurable value capture value capture over the last 30 years or so exactly 40 or 50 years if we're counting when Oracle was founded for you 50 years um open source eating software is younger more vibrant interesting and a lot smaller that's a lot smaller okay so open source seating software today by my measure and I maniacally measure this so I think I'm right it could be off by a little few percentages but I think I'm pretty accurate here is less than 500 billion dollars and that's like Revenue turnovers and not counting crypto not counting crypto but the 500 billion is that that's revenue of the companies that okay okay yeah bouncing the aggregate market cap of about a thousand companies that are commercial open source companies I call them cost companies people call them open core companies people who are less linguistically obsessed with that decision call them open source companies I think that term is oxymoronic because it's impossible to open source a company unless you share the bank statements of the company with everyone no company does that and even if you did that the company technically isn't open source because we don't have a license to go and say apply this license to your company and now you are technically open source like a c plus program licensed under MIT is different than a proprietary C plus program right that doesn't work but I'm overly pedantic and weird so let's just call them open source companies to make things simple okay 500 billion dollars 100 billion of public companies 400 billion of private companies frankly the 400 billion is probably overvalued because of all the insane valuations that happened in the last five years in particular so let's cut it in half let's do a markdown of 200 billion shall we okay so it's 200 billion in the private markets and call it you know what actually it's probably more like 60 billion in the public markets so 260 bucks it's a very small category right but the interesting thing is this was a 10 billion dollar category a decade ago decade and change ago it grew by 26 times at a minimum maybe 50 times in the last decade and there's been 30 IPOs of Open Source companies cost companies again that's the Linguistics here semantics uh of companies that didn't even exist roughly a decade ago [ \_\_ ] get lab hashicorp Confluence Cloudera hortonworks you know all this happened in the last like five or six years it's pretty it's pretty crazy so you know the interesting thing that I see is open sources eating software faster than soft receiving the world is happening mostly at the infrastructure software level which is like developer tools databases middleware um lower levels of the stack Idaho says Capital I've invested in open source alternatives to Applications which I think are very interesting as well so that's higher up the stack those are applications and for example we've invested in open source Alternatives I call them Transformers uh uh because alternative is a bit of a diminutive sort of almost um kind of pejorative or a dismissive characterization those companies can transform the existing categories uh to things like notion air table Bloomberg terminal uh the Unreal Engine from epic or Unity um calendly a long list these are applications these aren't like Dev tools or like lower level you know things and they're actually making a lot of progress these communities are growing really quickly and there's a huge ground swelling of developer interest and that developer interest you can translate it into you know um the sort of like physics that allows you to sort of almost you know kind of gravitate the technology in the right areas of the industry to where you can have the absolute lowest customer acquisition cost and transport markets unbelievably efficiently um I believe these companies have raised and have actually been over funded by VCS to the tune of probably a factor of three or four uh more than they should have raised do you think the the open source software companies have been over funded yes yes is that because I I I I've been pretty loud about it and I think I've contributed to some of that but I'm a small player and I'm just like one person but um there's been 30 billion dollars in Venture Capital invested in commercial open source companies in the last three years I started osis Capital five years ago that the commercial opens maybe five percent of the money open source companies since the founding of red hat right since there already that has happened in the last three years you've mentioned a bunch of these application layer companies when I said not including crypto when I was sizing the what is the value capture open source eating software faster than software's eating the world yeah if we take 250 billion of the software companies like I mentioned public and private and then we add in the total market cap of all the layer one token kryptos like cardano and ethereum and Bitcoin and salon and all the other ones some of which I think are more open source than others by the way we can have that conversation as a separate conversation that's actually quite nuanced it's about today 600 billion dollars 550 to 600 billion dollars because prices are very compressed [Music] actually it's maybe close to a trillion dollars I'm a little off about a trillion dollars that's marketing app of all of yes um that's the market cap of of all of the open sources eating software faster than software's in the world but it's not quite software because remember one person responded to my tweet of what should be open source but isn't yet with money mm-hmm open source can in fact actually eat money but money wasn't previously a software product like Oracle where you're disrupting Oracle with [ \_\_ ] database or with Sandra or with mySQL right money is a figment of our imagination wow okay that's a bit of a bigger thing a little bigger we're talking about tens of trillions of dollars in terms of you know the aggregate value of what we constitute and what we consider to be money and if you look at the derivatives Market maybe it's in the High tens of trillions yeah or maybe even north of a hundred trillion dollars but it's not software it's just another story we've told ourselves about what is the abstraction in which we can imbue value used to be shells used to be paper currencies used to be you know these other things and now it's a hash so so you've mentioned money now a couple times you mentioned Bitcoin and I'm curious what your take is on that like do you see Bitcoin as the new open source money or do you think there's some flaws that you the issues you would take with I think it was a ton of flaws with Bitcoin I think I think the paper is interesting and the algorithms are interesting I think there are enormous improvements to be made you know Satoshi said publicly that things like smart contracts are interesting and that either would require a new additional system or could be built on top of the Bitcoin uh uh framework and and code base itself very early on this is in you know 2010 2010 2011. way before vitalik wrote the first lines of code for ethereum wage um uh I think that something like um so my explicit answer to your question is I think something like Bitcoin or ethereum will become the dominant form of money uh over the next 50 years all of humans and when you say like when you say like do you mean you expect some of these improvements and you expect something new to emerge here or you think that these existing systems may get upgraded in one way or another to support such a belief both but do you believe there are going to be multiple new monies or do you believe there will be one new money yes and is that a yes you believe there are multiple I believe all of the things that you just said are true and they can be true at the same time how does that work I don't understand how that works varying degrees of success here's the thing about change um the world is extremely heterogeneous and evolutionary and any questions like this that come from and I know you're not asking it like this because you're very smart um the industry The Narrative the broader kind of um kind of hive mind that is the internet and all these different communities like web3 and all the divisiveness and politics people ask what is the one is it this one is it that one the answer is all the above because the world is so huge and um I think in the future there's going to be a plurality in many digital currencies I do not think there will ever be one true so frankly as much as I love Jack Dorsey I love the guy he is wrong Bitcoin is not the one true gospel currency uh frankly um there is a huge amount of money to be made taking that point of view and you will succeed I think using taking the point of view that there's going to be some plurality no taking Jack's point of view okay or taking you know um CEO of microstrategy uh yeah Michael Saylor who used to be uh you know a physicist and a rocket scientist at MIT and it was a enterprise software guy yeah building business intelligence software yep got into crypto um Michael and Jack and others who have the the Diamond dies laser eyes whatever laser laser eyes laser eyes Diamond hands yeah Diamond hands um uh what other body parts can we purpose for crypto um I guess um my point of view is in the future there's going to be probably many very successful digital currencies with cryptographic guarantees and and properties similar to ethereum and and uh Bitcoin um but I've written a little bit about this in the past um I don't actually see The Primitives today that will allow the 100 plus trillion dollars of existing Fiat infrastructure to gradually migrate in a sort of um let's meet the people where they are today and incrementally allow for change as opposed to are you coming on this train or not and you need to leave everything behind and you know what you're crazy if you don't that is not realistic I'm sorry but could it be that the the foundations no yes yes but the reason free software frankly failed and would not have ushered in the success we see um is because it needed to be more pragmatic and approachable and that's why a group of very smart people said we need to Rebrand this and call it open source and retain the core principles the Four Freedoms physics fundamental level principles yeah um but make it more accessible for people make it more approachable for people we do not have that today with crypto we do not have that today with crypto full stop period we do not period I'm Sorry by the way I'm like a huge fan I'm a massive fan I'm older I've got a bunch of wallets I've got a bunch of API tools I play with the software a lot we are so far from anything even remotely coming close to mainstream not even close what do you think do you think the way to get it mainstream is to build something new that's more accessible versus upgrading the existing stuff yes probably both probably we can upgrade and do a lot of good change and but here's the problem there's so much like deeply rooted ideological friction preventing ethereum and Bitcoin those two projects specifically from materializing the right set of pragmatic abstractions that will allow the current inertia full industry and ecosystem of Fiat to move in a gradual way I forget who said this but Evolution not Revolution is better to make massive change in certain areas sometimes you need the revolution sometimes you need to rip the Band-Aid off and like do do hardcore [ \_\_ ] but like in this case because the LIE we've been telling for centuries on end about Fiat so much inertia and so much deeply intertwingled stuff across every possible part of our society in the tech industry and all these other things we need an evolutionary path forward ethereum and Bitcoin are not the answer Unfortunately they could be they could be if they got refactored in a big way but here's the big thing honestly it's not even a technology issue the ideology of both of those ecosystems holding it back and I find it frustrating I want both of them to win I'm not making it I'm not making a criticism of this is the way it is and we can't fix it I want both of them to win I'm huge fan do not misinterpret me is the ideological friction is what's holding it back that's it and do you think that the ideological friction is a feature that will never evolve like is it you feel like it's been consistent the last say 10 you know 14 years yeah yeah yeah I think it's possible to change it's just really hard I mean really really hard imagine how many people you'd have to convince also I was at uh East Denver very briefly um a couple weeks back East Denver is a 25 000 person conference I founded kubecon today kubecon is a 25 000 person conference okay UConn was the first kubernetes Community Conference I was very lucky to attach myself to kubernetes I didn't scale kubecon it was donated to the Linux foundation and the Linux Foundation did an unbelievably phenomenal job and credit to Chris anachek my friend there and Chip zamlin and others who are unbelievably incredible people and they did all the work but I came up with the idea and I branded it and I organized the first two events by the way kubernetes and ethereum are a year apart kubernetes was founded in uh June 2014 and ethereum came out exactly a year later something like that a year apart they're basically found around the same time frame if you get 20 different ethereum people experts respected maybe even vitalik and a bunch of others in a room and you ask them what their definition of ethereum is you're gonna get 20 different answers and then here's the other thing you're gonna get like 20 different answers on a spectrum of philosophical intensity and ideological intensity right that's the problem that's the problem so you're saying there's no consensus that's what I'm saying and so it in in a sense then it sounds like it's not a concern about the accessibility as much as it's a concern about consensus being the core I don't think we need consensus to make evolutionary change possible but the fact that we have zero consensus got it so you know moving moving away from kind of purely the cryptocurrency stuff I mentioned Noster and you said that you're also a big fan and I've I'm a fan of Noster yeah I wonder like what is it about Noster that really grabs you the big thing that Noster does for me is it inverts the conventional client server Paradigm and it gives the client the full control that the server used to have that is profound and [ \_\_ ] awesome and it's going to change everything if it works and it is as interesting this is a great segue David it is as interesting I'm going to go as far as saying this as the creation of Bitcoin I agree it is as interesting okay that is like whoa that's a big deal holy [ \_\_ ] everybody needs to pay attention everybody needs to pay attention Okay um I believe it's that big of a deal uh I spent probably the upwards of 10 hours in the early days of Noster wrapping my mind around it and talking to people and you know stuck with Naval a lot about it and just this is profound stuff imagine imagine a world on the internet where you only had one username and it was Secure and you didn't have to go and switch between 50 different apps and get your data locked in and all this I mean oh my God this is nirvana and it'll oh oh here's the beautiful thing here's the beautiful thing it allows for evolutionary change not revolutionary change so you can slot it into the existing architecture of the internet without needing to go and say please rewrite your application on ethereum using our smart contract erc49532 and you'll need to have this particular tool chain and your gatsbys are going to be cost prohibitive but just trust us it's going to work out okay mm-hmm like I'm sorry that's untenable for 99.99 of Internet services small and large VCS don't seem to care by the way they plowed 75 billion dollars into one of the companies they don't seem to care hmm how's that working out for you so far I'm waiting I'm waiting 75 billion dollars is a lot of cash that's I think roughly the amount that VCS have invested in all crypto companies students Inception um so yeah I think Master is profound and very very very exciting right is it an ecosystem that you already have beliefs around how you might invest within kind of an open source perspective I already have what does that look like I can't talk about a couple I've made that are undisclosed but three of our portfolio companies that we have already invested in have already started to make very significant progress uh integrating Noster into their services and into their open source uh applications one I can mention publicly is umbral u m b r e l yep which is a self-hosted self-sovereign sort of data management um system and lets you run all of your personal data and all of your personal information on like a Raspberry Pi type device or a small server and they actually integrated an officer so that when you boot up a pie it starts its own Master relay and uh it's really cool actually yeah it actually works really well so that's that's one uh I invested and led the the first seed round of umbrella uh almost two years ago and um they're doing really well uh the other one is space Drive which is a virtual distributed file system I haven't seen that how does that work it's based on a paper that came out of UC Berkeley uh proposing a virtual distributed file system that basically allows you to access files over a kind of virtual file Discovery Network and um it's kind of like Dropbox but agnostic to where you store the files so does it take a similar uh approach that Noster does with the relays or is there some other kind of architecture that it it appears I think it does but they're they're integrating it in a few other ways I can't I can't talk intelligently about it unfortunately but they're they're they're they're huge fans of of Noster yeah because I think the media hosting on Noster is kind of an open question there's one that's pretty common called noster.build and a lot of it is kind of free for now but you could imagine that there could be a lot of different media hosting services that helps or that I think it's mostly not going to be a feature of the relays okay definitely so you know maybe that's why I'm curious if to learn more about that maybe we can do it in a follow-up but I'm curious um as you know I think we know a bit about relays and there's like Fast developing ecosystem and we know a lot about clients that's a fast evolving ecosystem but like what should a media server look like and are they going to be like you know thousands of them and is that going to be a very decentralized thing and how did like the middleware pieces like I think media servers like the first obvious one yeah no I mean frankly you can look at anything uh and nostrilify it probably right is there anything that you think uh is there anything that you think is like ripe to be done now in Noster that nobody's really approaching it or like what would you sort of if you wanted to say requests for startups do you have sort of a favorite concept I think Noster is going to be hard to invest in directly um and uh um I'm considering donating to it but I think it already has a lot of donation support and Jack donated 14 Bitcoin early on like a few hundred thousand dollars and it's been a bunch of other pylons maybe maybe I should donate you know some of our Capital to the nostril Community but like I tend to think Noster is like a protocol like kind of like SMTP or HTTP you know so yeah for sure it definitely is yeah and you can't really invest in it directly because it's not you know startup it's not a it's not a company it's not it's not a it's it's not a database or anything right but it will be integrated and adopted by Developers um widely and become a very dominant um part of the tool chain for how you build you know frankly uh truly distributed and decentralized applications yep um without a token yeah yeah I look at it more as like a blockchain like a blockchain without a token but but it's actually it doesn't have the features of a blockchain right like the no I'm familiar I'm familiar with that oh it doesn't have Merkle trees aren't in there you don't have cryptographic guarantees I I understand all that it's not a distributed Ledger um but it does give you without being a peer-to-peer uh Network itself it does give you elements of decentralization and really frankly some of the most critical and you know sort of like evolutionary and accessible elements of how you build a decentralized system effectively without all the baggage of rewrite your app on ethereum please right which I I find extremely exciting and it goes back to a lot of the conversations we had in this Con in this in this this chat um evolution is vastly superior to Revolution as an approach if you want to make massive scale change happen in a pragmatic way and that's why I'm such a big fan of monster yeah I sort of take I mean I I think I feel the same kind of instinct that you offer here but I would say it a little bit differently which is um I think you need a revolutionary New Foundation but you could do evolutionary things on top of that revolutionary Foundation so in order to attract and support a normie you know some user who doesn't really care about the technology I think you need to meet people where they are people where they are and you just have a login and password with an email and blah blah blah you haven't really won anything so yeah I'm excited about the new foundation and then let's build all kinds of things that make it easy to use and then doesn't really compromise on the principles underlying it yeah totally I agree that's a really good way of saying it cool um I noticed uh I you know I know that the you know fiatr and uh and will uh kasaran from uh you know the developer behind Thomas um they're so probably the most uh talked about kind of thinkers in the space of Builders and Nostra let's say and um and they both you know came from uh working on bitcoin core at one point in the past and so there's a bit of a Bitcoin ethos to the development working in master yeah by the way I think that could be a problem yeah I was going to ask you about that because I it sounds like you're more bought into Noster less convinced on bitcoin and I wonder sort of how do you have two problems with Nostra today one is it's ideological connectivity or tentacles back to bitcoin just like you articulated theaters and will from Thomas the most widely adopted non-ster client by the way the puns in this community Nostradamus nostril if there's a client called nostril I think yeah this is fantastic and being built a relay called booger because endless endless amounts of fun I love it yeah um that's a problem why is it a problem because nostril needs to be its own thing it needs to stand on its own legs and it shouldn't be like hey we're part of this other community build your own community that's one problem the other problem is technical it's more technical I think the specification in the design is too tightly um tailored to wanted to be a Twitter alternative and it should be more General it should be more uh application agnostic which by the way we're kind of already seeing in a lot of clients I mean Jack has been banging on Thomas for um a GitHub alternative right and he put a he put a bounty out and one of our Founders actually built the first implementation this guy Pierre Richardson who lives in the Canary Islands he's so cool amazing founder he's the founder of cal.com by the way huge shout out to Pierre Pierre's amazing I love Pierre very much and um uh his startup cal.com is an open source alternative to calendly which is a calendar scheduling after doing extremely well with another seat around Alexis zahani and the founder of Reddit did the Siri day uh they're doing great I would say um that's a problem right don't tie Noster to Twitter too much like let's kill Twitter let's do open source alternative to Twitter decentralized Twitter like no Noster is a general fundamental notes and other stuff transmitted over relays for I would say data and other stuff transmitted over relays um uh duster you know um notes implies kind of question holding it to the Twitter it's just a note it's just like a a carrier it's just a box that carries data yes but it's it's that term notes is I think too narrow should be just data any data okay I think and but that breaks the pun so we can't change it so the name the name we can't change the name the name is too good so and so the it's too tied to Twitter because like let's say you wanted to build a master based Google or email or you know um Dropbox or you know Zoom or you know whatever like build all software using this new client server paradigm it's a fundamentally new client server Paradigm that should be the slogan but isn't isn't that what we're doing like it just turns out that the Twitter cloning is like a easy obvious first use case it's so cute it's just too cute it's too cute it's like oh there's this like Bitcoin Community Connection point and then there's the Twitter thing and Jack's like the big voice and he created Twitter and it's just it's too cute I think maybe slightly holding it back from being more generally awesome and I think opening up a chance for someone else to come in and say here's a better Noster that is basically the same idea it's called something else I'm trying to play on puns maybe Google releases something like that like grpc like fundamental right you came from Google so you know what grpc is something more general purpose it's not tied to any particular application because it's right now people are having fun and it's cute and I think that that's cool it looks like a toy and it's interesting and it could be the thing it could be the dominant thing um but I also think it could potentially be good that it's like Jack waving this flag after having created Twitter after having scaled the company and he still has his Twitter stake by the way after Elon bought it Jack maintained a pretty big Twitter stick so jack is not out of Twitter most people don't quite fully realize this he has not sold his entire Twitter stick but what is what is the implication there the implication is actually quite interesting um if Elon actually does turn around Twitter which everyone thinks it's going straight into the ground but if Elon does turn around Twitter and Elon I think people kind of fail to remember this Elon kinda has a good track record turning [ \_\_ ] around he kind of has a good track record doing that like with cars and with rockets and with payments companies and a few other things like he's not you know um uh some random person okay so it sounds like you're you're bullish on I'm not foolish foolish okay I'm saying people are too dismissive people are too dismissive all right it's not necessarily bullish I'm not necessarily bullish but I think people are too dismissive okay so you know with Noster one of the big challenges is that relays incur a cost to operate and there's you know storage bandwidth yeah and when it's small it works as a hobbyist thing and curiosity and stuff but it some amount of scale that doesn't work to achieve some amount of scale to uh you know break in a sense but when it breaks how do you imagine that should get fixed I think there's a lot of different extrinsic incentive systems that can be designed and implemented to solve for that that are either Fiat or crypto ideally both ideally a spectrum of both the same time for the reasons we talked about earlier around evolutionary change as opposed to revolutionary binary change and I also think that um yeah I mean quality of service guarantees for internet services is Extreme I mean you work at Google this is extremely difficult stuff um it it is it is incredibly complex to maintain five nines or six nines for a server you want to maintain one nine not that hard two nines it's a little harder three nines okay you're gonna start getting paid right four nines you're gonna really start getting paid five nines you can really demand a boatload of money for five nights six nines now you're Google seven nines you're definitely Google okay so so I think reliability of Internet services can be charged at a premium and can be made quite lucrative for the people who are able to do that but again I think Noster presents such a profoundly interesting shift in the architecture of the internet as to basically open up space of disintermediation for up-and-coming isps essentially and server operators to disaggregate quality of service away from Google and Facebook and all the big internet companies uh and actually provide infrastructure alternatives that are potentially as appealing as open source is to closed Source but at the quality of service level on the internet that's really exciting yeah that's really exciting cool you know I know we're getting near the end of the time we sort of allocated to hang out uh but I I wanted to get one one last thing which is a little bit you know a little bit of like the philosophy of how these spaces could be invested in or should be invested in and just um because I think that's sort of your your day-to-day is kind of on the investing in Venture side in commercial open source um and so when we think about you mentioned things like Cal cal.com which is a website that um I presume is using open source software to operate it's all open source yep and so is the model that we should look for going forward and I don't know the model of how Cal works but is it something is like the automatic WordPress model the likely kind of evolutionary winner and now we're going to just see that happen you know dozens of years of times yes I think we're going to see dozens or hundreds of automatics automatic is basically a 10 billion dollar company I think they can be a 20 billion dollar company um we're going to see a lot of those and they're going to be based on core open source technologies that they build products and services around for different types of customers most common business model is you have the open source core and then you have customers who are like Enterprises or individuals or individuals too that's also very common and you have these pain points and you're really annoyed and you're like ah I wish it did this I wish it did this and you're like those those requirements they're really convenience features and they make my life easier They Don't Really necessarily need to be open source I would love to pay for them build them charge me money for that software make the software proprietary no problem that's a really great business model or you could take the software and offer it up as a cloud service on a Noster based Network and um monetize it that way and deliver higher quality of service and better experience and people pay you money for it the core technology 99 of the core technology frankly the whole thing is open source so you can do whatever you want with it you control the data you can create the customizations you want you're you're in control of the technology stack that is Sovereign Computing at its best and I do believe we're going to see you know automatic is really Next Generation Red Hat red Hat's kind of lost its way it's got swallowed by ibms a lot of there's a lot of messy stuff there I think automatic is next generation is we're going to see a hundred companies as big as automatic in all parts of the stack and I think we can already point to some of them grafana hashicorp maybe [ \_\_ ] although they did this weird license change that was unnecessary but they're still effectively open source like we're gonna see huge number of companies like that and I think it's going to make the world a lot better and it's going to be really cool and we're going to see probably open source version of SpaceX going back to your space travel example David you know uh maybe it's going to be maybe it's going to be SpaceX who knows I personally I personally think I'll end with this I'll end with this yeah personally think Elon thinks from first principles in fact I don't think that kind of kind of I think I know he does what do we really know though in life we don't really know anything so I think I know that he thinks from first principles and in the world of bits the way of thinking from first principles is called open source in the world of atoms the world of thinking from first principles is called physics okay Elon is such a huge physics nerd and he realizes that open source is fundamental ground truth the best way of Building Technology in the world of bits right so I personally believe that he's gonna open source a great deal of the stuff he's doing uh over over time it's probably gonna take some time yeah but I I I'm hopeful and optimistic I hope I'm right I could be wrong but I hope I'm right well good well that's a that's a great uh inspirational kind of future looking uh message to deliver and to share so thanks for sharing that it's my pleasure thank you for having me yeah thanks for coming, Open Source Everything With Joseph Jacks, David King, 01j7sq5pxeee1jpenk9zs07xeq.