While "public good" might actually be neither public nor good, open source technical and social concepts are clear, stable and useful for citizens. Also, they have less vulnerabilities to "social games," Ethereum's founder shared in his new blog post.
Ethereum's (ETH) Vitalik Buterin praises open source over public goods concept
In his yesterday's essay dubbed "We should talk less about public goods funding and more about open source funding," Vitalik Buterin yet again addresses the problems of resource allocation toward "public good" and "open source" workloads.
He admits that in the majority of situations the concept of public good is often utilized as part of marketing narratives instead of providing something really valuable for everyone.
Also, there is a always a risk of falling into "social desirability bias," which might lead to funding what sounds good, rather than what is good.
By contrast, the term "open source" has a clear and well-agreed definition that stood for decades, Buterin admits. Comparing the lists of some open source and public goods concepts, he noticed that "real" public goods like clean air or street lightning has a lot in common with open source.
Long road to open source in Web3 and beyond
For instance, a publicly available R&D contributed to clean air globally, and so on. As such, switching resources to such projects looks like a smart move to the Ethereum (ETH) creator:
It feels like shifting focus from "public goods" to "open source" is actually the best thing to do. Open source should not mean "it's equally virtuous to build whatever as long as it's open source"; it should be about building and open-sourcing things that are maximally valuable to humanity
As covered by U.Today previously, Vitalik Buterin frequently discusses the benefits of open source in his essays on society and technology.
A year ago, amid the global AI frenzy, he called for making brain-computer interfaces open-source to prevent them from being centralized.
Alex DovbnyaThis might be yet another step in moving decentralized values beyond cryptocurrency, Ethereum (ETH) co-founder added.
Vladislav Sopov
Dan Burgin