The success of the free and open source software movement – accentuated by the proliferation of the Linux ecosystem, the open source software driven Web 2.0 and the change of attitude and policies towards open source software from the once opponent Microsoft – certainly has surprised a lot of pundits of the software industry. However the history of the free and open source software 1) History of free and open-source software shows that it has not always been on a victorious ride. The cloud computing powered companies, allowing them providing values to their customers without distributing copies of their proprietary code, took full advantage of the existing open source software and seldom gave anything back to the movement in return. As a result, the sustainability of free and open source software movement is threatened. Fortunately, the rise of the decentralized trust computing technologies such as Blockchain and Hashgraph, provided us the building block to build something called DAO (decentralized autonomous organization)2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_autonomous_organization . Combining DAO and the open source philosophy, let’s call it open source organization, we now have exactly what we need to bring the Yin/Yang balance back to the ownership of software.
This series consists of three parts:
- Part 1 – Yin and Yang: history of open source movement and why it is being threatened.
- Part 2 – Decentralized Computing and Open Source Organization: what is the decentralized computing technology , what is open source organization, and how we can build an open source organization?
- Part 3 – Open Source Organization Examples: real world project such as noia.network, and also hypothetical architectures including decentralized voting platform, that use the open source organization pattern. (to be released…)
Miao is a convert to the vision of a better world where the spread of information, social organization and the way we construct systems, are all enhanced and optimized through decentralization. Having worked in the software industry for more than 10 years, most notably at Skype for 5 years (where he looked after its peer-to-peer network stack), Miao has the knowledge to build decentralized software systems. With the rise of Blockchain, IoT, AI, etc., Miao believes the time is ripe for his vision of a decentralized world to be put further into effect through technologies.