# Panel Talk - Public Goods and Open Source: Why They Matter More Than Ever

- Channel: [ETHCluj Meetup](https://streameth.org/ethcluj-meetup)
- Date: 2025-10-09
- Duration: 53:31
- Topics: Public Goods, open source, ethereum, ethcluj, ethereum for everyone, conference
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-96GXTPjue-s
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96GXTPjue-s

## Description

Public goods and open source tools, from Ethereum clients to shared libraries, underpin every Web3 project. In this panel Alina Latinina, Anna Kaic, Marc Vlad, Noah Jelich & Ovidiu Damian discuss why businesses must invest in these communal foundations, how teams can contribute sustainably, and strategies for balancing open source ideals with commercial success. This panel talk offers practical tips on funding models, collaboration tactics, and real world examples of projects thriving through sharing resources.

## Transcript

This is the first panel I'm ever doing in my life. So, I'm very excited to talk about public goods. So, thank you for coming. Oh, I like your hat. Very nice hat. Um, but first of all, I would like to introduce the rock stars here. Actually, you will introduce yourself. Maybe you can start me. Mark, can can you tell us about yourself? >> So, hello everyone. I'm Mark Deayo. Uh I've been promoting uh open source softwares since 2016 promoting Linux uh in uh on refurbished computers when I was um in university and lately I work with Defi Scan which is a fully MIT licensed projects that uh bring transparency in the level of decentralization of D5 protocols. >> Nice. Hello, I'm Alina and I'm with Web3 Privacy Now and Women in Privacy. Both projects that are open source and run primarily on public good funding and donations. So, I have a lot to say about this topic. >> Hello, I'm Damian. Uh, I'm from Kluj, so it's nice to talk while being home. Uh, and first of all, sorry if my voice sounds weird. I caught a cold. And and second of all um I'm a programmer for pi squared and um what I'm doing in this panel is the fact that I'm passionate about using open source and developing open source and I've developed in the past open source protocol for data tokenization and at pi squared we also aim for our infrastructure to be to be open source as well and that's what we're building towards. >> Okay. Uh hi I'm Noah. I'm a security researcher uh and uh developer including of course Rust as you can tell and uh I've spent a few years doing audits with a ton of audits and uh a lot of fuzzing and stuff like that but generally you know a broad generalist. Thank you. >> Oh I have a mic very special. Um, I think we can maybe start uh with uh Oh, sorry. I am Anna. I've been uh in web3 since 2021. Been helping public good projects get funding. So, uh I think it'll be an interesting discussion. Very nice to be here with you. And um first I think Alina maybe I would be interested to ask you. I will ask a question for everyone and then you can jam in. Let's be super relaxed. So do you have some uh thoughts regarding why should startups and businesses care about public goods and open source like you said your project runs on public good funding. So >> yeah so when you go for funding that is VC you usually it usually comes with strings attached and the strings attached are mainly benefiting profit side of things but how does the good stuff get funded stuff that doesn't make money. So for example, privacy um not a lot of VCs invest into privacy protocols or privacy products because it doesn't necessarily bring much revenue. So that's where it primarily runs on public funding. >> Very nice. Anyone else like why should they? So to to add on that like I think your reason is is obviously a very good and noble one but I think there's one more reason to care about um public goods and public funding that's I'd say um more egoistic and what I mean by this is it's a phenomenon that I'm seeing a lot when it comes to for example my colleagues that are coming into web 3 but they are primarily web two developers. Whenever they get a task or to build something that's web 3 related they start thinking from scratch how it should be done but I see all my other colleagues that are web 3 native to say so their first instinct is let me find something that's already public and open source and start from there. It's something that's very good to have and you should care about it as a startup because it makes your life so much easier as you've probably heard it and will hear it at lots of if conferences around panels. Why reinvent the wheel when you can just get it from GitHub. Uh so that's one very important reason why you should care about both uh getting publicly funded and creating open source software. >> Okay. to start it spicy this early. I must disagree. I think in general all of developers uh in the world use is even as a as a primary import from you know npm. I don't think people are writing stuff from scratch uh that much. I I don't think that's a problem. I think the bigger issue is is the general support for wellused libraries. Like come on, we have a ton of developers. we have a massive speculative market full of startups getting created uh with often too limited resources for what they're actually trying to manage and execute uh which is what actually leads to hacks. You know if this was all done at a very very slow pace with very high focus as some companies do it like let's say some core development teams there would be no hacks. uh but the rush the usage of libraries which are undermaintained is what actually leads to it no matter the space. So I I think the the important part is really the maintenance of you know the the usual public good and open source meme is the whole pile of stuff the XKCD right the XKCD for everything in this case the the little guy living in his mother's basement or whatever with uh with no money left uh maintaining that one critical library that the entire world depends on or whatever. Like there's a ton of examples like this like just to drop some like obscure stuff with EVM. So uh like the red black uh tree library is really used a lot and it is minimally maintained. It's got like no funding and some random donations and it is the core of major order books and it is often also outside of the audit scope because they are not paying for an external dependency. although that's only maintained by volunteers. So like there's there's situations like this that I faced where you know there there's going to be these little bits of open source stuff that should get more attention either either because we care about doing good and enabling development or because we want to get serious just from let's as you mentioned a selfish perspective as a as a security engineer I I don't care let's say if it's good for the general community. I care if the company I'm working for is going to get hacked and if I allow a library to that if I allow the usage of an underfunded and undermaintained library that is a massive liability that has a real cost right within you know I I mean I I I do love a publicly good approach but often with CEOs you just need to talk the capitalism and there's a cost to using an unmaintained library and it's real so Nice. We just went through all the questions I had. So just actually no, but I think Alena, you wanted to say something. >> I was just going to add to you mic drop. >> Okay. Awesome. Well, um, you skimmed through a lot of topics and I think we should, uh, focus on some of the things you already touched upon because I think also the, uh, others have some valuable insights. So, but you gave an example of public goods uh uh but I would like to ask the others as well since we are talking maybe to people who are just new to the ecosystem maybe to give some new um some other examples of public goods that you know people use and maybe they don't even know it's a public good. So, what what is your favorite example you would like to enhance? Maybe whoever would like to start. I think Chromium would be a good example for the for the newbies in the room even though I don't see a lot of newbies here. Uh may maybe git also um yeah Linux overall uh let's keep some example for I mean I'm just going to go for shameless shilling privacy packed by web3 privacy now. Nice. Okay, very good. Um, oh, sorry, you had >> um video. >> Yeah, like something that's sure they are a private company, but the product in itself is open source. So, I'll give it as an example that everybody uses a lot is MetaMask. It's pretty pretty straightforward and it's it's at the core of mostly all or close to a lot of activity in web 3 that's happening. So, it's very important Nice. >> Well, we found one good thing about MetaMask. >> I can go into lots of bad things, but let's uh we we need this panel to be ended in about 30 something minutes. So, let's uh let's u not go there. >> Um I think for the next thing, we can touch upon something that is very important for public goods. where you talked about the funding before, but I want to hear from the rest of you. Um, like can do you think that public goods can realistically thrive uh without like dedic dedicated funding and should they just rely on you know donations or somebody giving money to the team to actually thrive or are there any other ways uh that you have in mind? Um, yeah. I think >> donations don't work. This is my hot take, but for somebody to donate money publicly is like you need to have an emotional factor to it, you need to have some kind of shilling factor to it being like a badge being like, "Yes, I donated." This is just human nature. And um, this is why public goods funding is so important. >> Yeah, I've been I've been a maintainer, a lead maintainer of um of a let's say browser extension for the last three years that has about 1,500 users. Uh it's it's a sort of LinkedIn specific ad blocker. I I was going through a very tough time in my life at some point. Um and uh and yeah, I think I received a grand total of let's say 500 euro of donations in that time and that's >> that large only because I set my donation page to a bigger default amount. So I was not allowing anything below say $20, you know. So yeah, on the other I I think grant programs are a better venue for funding in general because I I'm also a co-creator of a little Rust of course library for uh for coverage in Wom which was a problem let's say a year and a half ago a massive problem and um and I got to give a shout out to Barto Barikosski who who co-created it with me um and like For that we got some good grant money, some really good grant money from protocols that were let's say affected by by the need for testing. So >> they just need users. But going back to the question with the donations and public good funding, if you have money that you want to put into something good, for a personal donation to a project, you need to have an emotional connection with it. But what if you just want to well allocate this percentage to something good, but you don't know where to go? So you can go to public goods and just be like hey here's my money allocate it like you see fit because you did the research you know the teams all of that and it's also about also the perception that the community will get when you do something like this. So when you choose to fund something that is a public good and it will generate you know benefits for everyone. Um so I think this uh yeah the perception is not used enough like the benefit of uh doing such uh such a donation or yeah such a contribution is not publicized enough. So um but something that it's connected to this I haven't heard a lot from Mark and I see you I see you down there. Um, do you think uh, and this is obviously for everybody else as well, but do you think that Ethereum based projects can effectively balance being open- source on one side and being commercially viable on the other side? >> Well, we see a lot of um, BSL license already in various D5 protocols. uh where you see this business approach with exclusive right for I think it's four years or something like this and then you have the obligation to go through a more permissive license >> um and at defan we deal with such projects uh notably liquidity forks sorry for the chill um so so yeah there is there is room to to balance around here um although I really think donations are very important especially when it comes for a lot of people and it it creates this neutrality that most open source uh projects really want to achieve at least impartiality maybe it's a better word >> right >> also uh you can always balance you can have one arm that is nonprofit which leads the you know alignment of the organization and apply for public goods funding and then have a prof like a forprofit arm that sells for example merch or provides um some services where you can actually make some revenue and keep it running because honestly public goods is stuff and uh choosing that life is not for everyone. So if you can do both at the same time that's how you can balance things out. Absolutely. I think there is someone from cantina maybe here spare bit canina I think they have a very interesting model as well where they have this marketplace of auditors but they also help like public good projects just because auditing is so expensive so this is exactly what you're what you're saying yeah yeah anyone else you no >> I mean I I could add like I I find it very interesting because I also went to let's say purely open source conferences this a lot and as a complete let's say contrast uh like here we're talking about how to keep a public good alive through monetization but then as soon as something gets like I I think there's a lot of this like underdog psychology actually just as I'm seeing more and more of it um because like when you have something legitimately a bit successful uh then suddenly you start having this battle between open source contributors who put a lot of work into this only for it to become a let's say a core slash premium model of funding a platform or a tool where where the actual open source contributors get kicked out by the business people. So it's I think there's a lot that society has to learn about this like midphase because between the extremes of like purely capitalistic purely profit driven and like purely let's say communist approach >> or what is something that I discovered is um maybe opening for profit arm. So for example in women in web privacy we're run on public goods and donations but we also have a marketing arm that does you know marketing work for privacy companies and that's how we actually keep our contributors paid from money of the marketing arm because then I I feel awful that they're just doing so much work and we cannot like give them money for it. So what we can do is provide them work and basically like give them experience employ them for a short amount of time. So maybe that is that could also be a strategy but I I'll report on a couple of months >> also reporting these things and I think it's very important >> don't even get me started on Q reports >> but we need to inspire more projects to do similar things so absolutely yes um and uh actually another um question that I'm reading questions here so I don't forget anything um but there is Um, so what do you think and maybe your video I can ask you, put you in the spotlight, but what do you think could be strategies that small teams or you know independent developers could use to sustainably contribute to open source because they probably have a lot of work. So why would they choose or yeah to contribute to open source and how what do you think? So I I'd say so the the question is a very good one and uh but basically the problem with with contributing to open source is that you have to make sure that your contributions are good ones in order to actually be effective and your time to actually get uh rewarded to say so. But at the same time if you are able to make good actually good contributions um then you will have lots of ways in which you can get rewarded for it. the easiest way so let's say you're a beginner I would say that the easiest way in which you can contribute to something that someone needs usually open source is by going to hackathons for example at e if events and there's going to be many companies that that will have challenges for the hackers so that they can contribute and there's a chance you can win a prize of some hundreds hundreds of dollars or something like that which will help you and then you can maintain it for a few weeks or months or so on Um and then if you get to be a top-notch developer for example then you can access different grants from protocols for example for example um one example that comes to my mind right now is the fact that as as far as I know there's lots of uh top-notch people in Solana currently looking at actually making and offering verifiable history on the Solana chain because that's that's that's an issue currently for for Salana. So if you get to the point where you can actually sit at the table and bring relevant ideas to people that have been scratching their heads towards solving uh real in usage protocol idea for quite a while and you implement it, there's a good chance that you get into the you get to the grant level where you can get some uh thousands or tens of thousands of dollars or even more and that could be helpful. So that's I'd say the most uh the most uh the most straightforward way of doing it. But I I will capitalize on what I've initially said which is make sure you it might sound a bit bad but may make sure you know your worth before trying to do it like don't jump direct if you're a junior developer don't jump directly in trying to solve Solana's biggest existential problem since it was uh created. You can start with smaller things like hackathons. so on. >> Yeah. Right. And also I think um just my two cents it's also the building in public part or when you're just starting out and just being able to go out there and say okay I will contribute here because it will generate something good for the community. Um I can do a small task and then I can talk about it and then I can continue building my reputation. This way is a benefit you will get. Maybe you will not get paid for it, but this will make you more known and better connected with the ecosystem. >> AB: Absolutely. And even at the colder level to say so, it's not just that it gets you more connected. It's simply the fact that maybe at some point you're going to look for a job in your CV, you will link your GitHub. If someone opens up your GitHub and they see lots of green dots with lots of contributions to lots of repositories, that's lots of bonus points for you. >> Absolutely. Yeah. Anyone else? I mean maybe like Mark notion mentioned you just contributed because you want to do something good >> right >> also that yeah >> it feels good so let's do something good I think it's a valid point yes I think Mark wanted to say something >> just to add because um oid made a very exhaust exhaustive list um I would recommend any new contributor to just start where they know where to start uh there is a lot of things that we need from devs that we don't have in blockchain chain and distributed engineering notably in front ends. We lack more front ends. So if there are actors or people listening to this somehow go and just uh share some uh nice front ends and new UI for the people that would be an advice for the new ones. >> Absolutely. Yeah. And I think you can keep the mic because I know um you've been involved into funding and so on. So right now we talked about the builders and building public goods and contributing to public goods. But on the other side we also have entrepreneurs and uh investors. Um why do you think they should um you know support public goods? What can they get back from it besides feeling good because hey I supported a public good. Maybe we can start with you Mark and then if anyone else has anything to add. um I can take back some some some points we made um like contributing to the the greater good uh having a better reputation. I would say it's also about the the garden in which you want to live in, right? You can extract all the flowers and everything, but you still need to to think about it on a on a longer time frame. And um if an investor or a project doesn't have these kind of considerations, what's their real goal? Um I'm not in crypto to extract money. Uh I'm here to design better systems, economical systems where uh what is good is better funded. um maybe reducing inequalities, but let's not go too deep in political terms. And and yeah, I think it's just uh it's part of the ethos. If you don't invest for the public good, you're probably not in the right place. >> I like that you mentioned the ethos and um I think we just come from this idea where you need to get something out of something in order to do it. But what if you just feel aligned with doing good and you don't really even have a second, you know, uh um in Italian is second, but you know, something behind the scenes, second goal. Yeah. Be with doing that. >> Um anyone else would like to add something motive? >> H >> ulterior motive. >> Interior motive. That's >> from a bit of the evil side. You can also well well there's a bit of money laundering but there's also you can invest into a project >> teeny tiny bit >> just a tiny bit but you can also invest into a project and see how it performs. So without actually seeking for revenue but using it as a bit of a testing ground whether to hire people or just to see if there's a potential profitable model to extract from it in the future or to rebuild a new project with that model. This is just yeah a thought, not a not a to-do list. >> No, no, it's absolutely a valid thought. Yes. And uh I think it connects well with the next question and uh I think Noah, I will put you on the spotlight for this one. I feel like we are going over the biggest question regarding uh public goods uh uh funding and supporting and so on. Uh but one of it um is how like how can we encourage uh or how can the web3 community encourage uh more collaboration and less competition and think that less competition is more important um when uh supporting or yeah around public goods in general >> um around public goods. Okay. In general, competition is within capitalism going to be a major part of everything. >> Yeah. >> Within public goods, the problem is not really so much competition on an ideological level as it is, you know, the we have 14 standards. Let's make a new unifying standards. Now we have 15 standards. >> Correct? >> Uh sort of situation. And I I feel like the solution here is really getting the key people into one room cuz there are not that many people in the space in general. Like there's a when I when I started working as a security register, the ETH security group on Telegram had 300 members. Now it has a few thousand but like half of those are now spam bots because it's a big group and still it's a very small place and you know the let's say thousand auditors could more or less get together into a room and work on stuff together. We could share stuff. We could potentially share some standards and we could reach some sort of mutual consensus theoretically but that's not going to happen. It's a it's more of a business area. But for a public good, I'm suppose that you could find key actors within a certain let's say public good style and that there you could achieve a lot more efficiency like for example a recent wave is uh more privacy preserving uh proofof work protocols like as a rebirth and there are several of them and uh I've I've recently enjoyed watching some on these chats and it's just a flame war between them because it's just a market dynamics sort of approach instead of really looking at the ideology behind it which is shared. At the end of the day you just need one to function well and if you're looking at you know at from a different approach it could potentially work. It's a I think connecting people in person so it's not a dehumanizing online discussion and so that it's a real connection and you know just getting people to actually talk and chat about their real ideals but it needs to be real. it needs to be in person and that's actually I think that web three privacy now is great in that because they are inviting a lot of people and organizing little events and talks and sometimes these talks are good sometimes they're bad sometimes they're on or off topic but I think in general they bring key people together into room and it's like I've met a ton of people I would wouldn't know otherwise honestly >> so yeah people and places I I really like what you said and and um a lot of words come to to mind to answer the question. I think we lack celebration of uh you know the the projects the people who are dedicated and really uh achieve uh the objective of the public good and and we should find something here to gather the community or or key leaders or something to build reputation of people that are really aligned. Um but then I think um uh something tipped me a bit regarding the the competition of it. Um I think we also need to call them out and uh we have we need better standards. You spoke about proof of work mining is completely out of my comfort zone and I'm very sad to hear there is so little protocol performing here uh that are not as resistant and privacy focused. Um I'm personally from DeFi and uh the key leaders are not really aligned to the DeFi punk ethos we we read recently about from the EF and um I'm I'm a bit um upset for the the lack of standards we have in DeFi for the moment and work actively in this in this regard. But yeah, I'd say better better standards um would kill bad competition would who sometimes is way more noisy and effective at gathering the key metrics and um a kind of celebration council for the the best public good public gooders or contributors and projects. >> I I think a thing is that like the whole crypto space doesn't have a Linux store. You know, Linus is a strong strong personality and he says this is going to be this way and he does control a major flow of how stuff happens. Here we have like a some key faces, some key leaders but it's it feels a bit more fragmented >> in terms of approach. you know, >> Vitalik is not speaking about uh about DeFi much, but he's he's a key figure for the blockchain engineering space. Completely agree with you. >> Yeah. So, we have all of these like little offshoots and it's I I really do believe that a pure committee cannot cannot effectively lead. There's always going to be massive dissolution. You need to at some point have a charismatic leader pulling forward in a certain direction. That's what's worked for, you know, everything historically. >> The sad reality of public goods is that if you don't have a strong enough influencer persona, you're just not going to make it. Also, on the competition, this is a bit of a call to action to everyone here and anyone watching. There's a huge problem uh in the sense of public goods not well the teams are quite small and applying for grants and applying for public goods is a pain in the ass. It takes so much work, it takes so much effort, it takes so much time and usually the public goods teams are very small and very focused and usually have also another job. And if there is people who can help fill out grants and that can help fill out those applications for public goods or even create databases of you know like I know there's a telegram grantfire thing that you can sign up for for like uh new updates on grants and then just having a database of how to apply and applying to you know multiple ones at once. Maybe that would maybe ease the competition because right now the projects that are succeeding are the ones that have the resources to fill out all of that paperwork and bureaucracy. For sure. For sure. And um we we actually started an experiment at General Magic by creating an AI agent because it's not only the writing a grant uh it's also researching the opportunities. Yeah, you will go out there. I just had a talk about that. like you will see 50 million here and 15,000 here and at the end of the day you you as a public good you cannot take funding from wherever because it has strings attached even though it's web three funding so we tried this small experiment by creating an AI agent it's called granulf it looks like Gandalf um and you can ask him you can give a brief on what you're working on and it will help you you know pair your project with different opportunities and this is already yeah helping you go through the grants pipeline a little bit because as you said writing a grant is just a pain. Yes, it's very long. So, sorry no you wanted to add something or video >> just pure agreement. Yes. Yes. I I I was also working in an NGO before and these were like EU projects and stuff like that and Yes. Yes. The ones that succeed are the ones that manage to get the full-time person. >> Yeah. that managed to fund the sort of uh burndown for a full-time person to have a few months to write grants before they need to subside of those grants more or less >> and also maybe faster grants. For example, UNICEF takes on the average of eight months to review and deliver it. >> Absolutely. um we had um a system um at General Magic where um we would write the grant and do the whole process and then ask for a percentage. So this would be good. I mean it's a huge risk for those who do it because it depends on the winnings like if you win you get funding otherwise you did work for nothing but um at the end of the day when you believe in what you're doing taking a couple of projects that you're going to help in this way I mean it's doing good for the community itself. So um but uh let's get back to the questions and solving the biggest um problems right now regarding public goods. Um we are going to talk about security. So maybe you would like uh to be on the spotlight for this one again. Um how do open source practices enhance security and trustworthiness for end users and um consumers? I I see you getting ready to to to to become to pick on me on this and I I would like you to because you're an auditor. That's your job. Uh uh so the the it's it's a two-sided blade if you want to call it. So having an open source having an open source uh code can be helpful in detecting bugs and avoiding getting hacked and so on. But for that you got to manage it well. And the first step towards that is to have different incentives for people that actually get into reading your code to report bugs rather than exploit them. So basically bug bounty program programs and so on. Sure you might have even if you don't have a bug bounty program um you might have some um well-intended people that will come by and say hey you've got this bug and just help you solve it. That's like a I'd say that won't be the majority of cases especially if it's very good money involved. Uh so that's that's one thing and a second one that I've found generally very helpful and this was generally the way this was generally the way um in multiple web free companies in which I've worked the way the way of thought was we will open source the things we do after we after we have the main or core product of that code audited because then you at least know you have like a general core that's not exploitable so everyone loses all their money and so on. >> That's very good. And actually there is one more question that maybe uh so you can collaborate on two different questions. Maybe Noah can answer the next one. Um what like uh everybody's welcome of course but what practical advice would you give for exactly what you said for projects that are starting as closed code and then they want to start being open source like some practical advice from your experience whoever would like to join >> make sure you don't you know expose your API keys on GitHub makes sense Yes, >> the whole mantra. >> There's been some >> Very good. Anything else? >> So, the the code was close source and then you open it, right? >> Correct. Yes. >> Well, do do audits before, I'd say. Otherwise, you're just going to get surprised and you don't want to be surprised. Well, it depends what you're doing. The answer here was was great. like the more open you are, the more eyes you have on the on the on your code, the more resilience you can become. So, um yeah, hire people before doing that. Um I've done about half a year of like runtime of blackbox fuzzing closed or open source does not make a major difference. It's just the readability of code. If you can like the the old meme right if you can read assembly you can read anything and uh if there is a sufficient economic incentive for someone to spend let's say two weeks manually or machine like combination and reverse engineering whatever assembly you have there and fuzzing until they map up the entire logic of your API it's going to happen so uh I don't think security by obscurity works I mean it does, but more so in obscuring the security accidents and thus achieving security theater than in practical security. Banks generally and a lot of institutions eat a lot of losses and just have insurance and that's okay. They they have a certain loss percentage that's acceptable for them. But these systems where let's say we achieved the scalability of hacking to a much higher degree uh I don't think they can generally afford it. Also you know insurance for more or less any of these companies is negligible and more or less impossible to get due to due to the market dynamics. Right. So um yeah I I think before like you shouldn't consider closed source as some safety net you should just consider as less useful eyes and a higher barrier to entry to a hack. So at the point where you are not really hackable for a major amount where you can lose less than a million nobody's going to bother. But as soon as you become a target you should very much bother. And there's a lot of cases where you know companies haven't um >> sorry I just have a question. What is blackbox fuzzing? Because the image I have in my head is very peculiar. >> Oh um so white box and blackbox uh white box means you know the code you know the execution paths a bit more. Blackbox means uh you don't know what's going on actually. That's it. And fuzzing is a technique where you're providing fairly random input. Uh, and when you say random, people think it's easy, but no, you actually need to write the fuzzers and write the generators for the random input because it needs to make sense. Otherwise, you're going to be doing the equivalent of an LLM, but with worse architecture, like the equivalent of training an LLM, just to be clear. So, yeah, that's it. Do do not believe in obscurity. It It means nothing. It's just theater. >> Like hiding dust under a carpet. Maybe nobody sees it, so it's not there. Sounds like that at least a little bit. Um but I think we could uh close in a positive note. Uh I would like to um ask you with yeah about some projects or examples you have of noncore um yeah Ethereum projects that has benefited from embracing the open-source approach and then uh we have around four minutes left so maybe you can share your examples maybe uh Alina if you want to start or Mark and then we go here and then we can open the stage for a couple of questions. So, it's a it's chill time, I guess. Um uh if you're not open source and trying to get fundings in the the Ethereum space, it's not going to happen. Uh I'm proud of my MI MIT license and uh there is no oh reaction here. And um and yeah, it's it's great to be fully permissive to have people who are able to to even steal from us to do better, right? And um uh with this kind of mentality, we just empower everybody in the space and this is what public goods are for. Yeah. >> Pass. It's completely valid. You can pass. Maybe a video. You have some example, >> some comments. >> I I Yeah, I see him. He's ready. >> People People come for the for the panels just for the flame wars. Yes. Uh yeah, MIT. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. I I'll give you I'll give you the proper flamy answer. This does not reflect even my own opinions. This is a meme. MIT is just a propped up supporter of capitalist theft from the academic system and the labor of free minds in the creation of betterment of society. I would never use the MIT license for I'm just supporting a nameless organization that will steal everything that I have created and my own creativity. Instead, use a viral license. >> Sorry, a second. Wish I >> use a viral license. >> Okay. >> I don't know. I don't know. I I I think it's it's good to accept people stealing from you if it empowers them and the overall people like in my case, >> you will own nothing and you will be truly free. >> Well, here when it when you speak the the public would um to whom I'm referring so Defi Scan is is an analytic an analytics dashboard. So, it's just like, okay, we have we have a scanner, a little um a little uh code that's that runs a script and analyze for centralized permissions. But, uh yeah, I wouldn't I I wouldn't be mad if someone makes a lot of money out of the script or the dashboard. I think u I'm pretty confident I wouldn't pretty confident, but I understand your your your critiques and um and yeah, they're legit. Uh some people can definitely be really hurt by having their work stolen uh through open source uh bad bad licensing and they're being used for private use cases here. Um again at the end of the day if people are using more decentralized tech I'm happy. Okay fair. So, I've got one example of an open- source project that I find extremely useful. It's not directly web free, but I'm not sure I'll ever get the chance in a panel to highlight it if I don't do it here. Like, it doesn't fit anywhere else better than in a public goods uh in a public goods panel. So, I'll do it because I really think it's useful for lots of people. So there's a a public GitHub repository called win tech util which is made from which is made by a guy and fully open source and with lots of contributions. I've actually donated to that one that is basically an open-source repository with the aim of actually getting rid of all the garbage that Windows comes with. >> Oh. So if you have a Windows laptop or computer, you can debloat it. Delete one drive, delete Microsoft Copilot, delete whatever whatever you hate about Windows. Any bloat you it helps with different optimizations with it helps to mass install uh different programs like browsers uh other open- source programs and so on. It's free. It's fully open source. It's it's uh from what I've read around the code and so on, but that was pretty quick. It's kind of secure. So, it's absolutely amazing. That's the that's the level at which uh I aspire to build open source. If I build open source, it's one of the best open source things I I've been using and I'm using it so often. I can hear the passion in your voice because you were so happy to tell this and uh I think I didn't know about it and now more people know about it and uh yeah it's going to be helpful for everyone which is the whole point of yeah the public goods uh world. So thank you for sharing it. I will try it out. Um and now we are a bit over time. >> Yeah. >> Oops. Thank you for Anna and the panelist for an amazing conversation and deep for let's give them all a big hand and remember open source is like a community sport >> they might disagree so now we have all the questions has come in from the public yes you cannot leave the stage yet I'm very sorry so first off is there any page resource where we can track or discover such public projects we can contribute to or donate to. >> Well, there's Octant Drips network. Um, I don't know why I'm ringing like this, but I would say giveth as well just for donations so you can help projects all the time. Give it. Um, absolutely. >> Gitcoin There are a lot of >> yes places >> lot of places where you can scan them but uh other repos like especially outside of crypto to be honest I have a bit of a blank here and I'm a bit ashamed of this. You could go on the Linux Linux Foundation and and check for their partners as well. >> Python >> Python uh yeah so the next one would be from Roxanna. How can projects and teams contribute, advocate, na navigate the politics of public goods funding which isn't issue just web free but has become a massive bottleneck in funding open-source initiative in our industry. I >> I would say you need you need resources. I I say you need human resources. You need a clear visions and good writers. uh it's it's been difficult to navigate the politics of DeFi in EVM space personally and uh it wouldn't have it wouldn't have been possible without boots on the ground and humans interaction. So um yeah that that's an additional cost or a good network that you need to have. >> It also helps to have a diverse team. So having someone who is a tech person then having a marketeteer then having someone who's good at running events so you can do multiple things at once as a small team and uh be creative about it do smart activations and get more traction um so it it equalizes with the teams that have bigger budget or bigger bigger resources. So what is your opinion? A good security approach a combination of competition competitions formal security reviews later on back bounties. >> Shift left. Shift left. >> Yeah. Shift uh your security posture to an earlier step in development. You should have a security engineer at the design step and your CEO should be read from getting slapped somewhere within the first two weeks of design. Um because once you're developing it's a lot harder to change and you're going to get only incremental changes. So you should be architecting and designing and checking for logic and security at design steps not at the development steps. um all of these further steps. So internal audit, yes, and having a security engineer on your team, uh external audit, um competition and bug bounty are later steps, but these mean nothing if you already are settled within an architecture which was badly designed from the start. And I had 140 audits. And of those 140 audits, I've seen this case dozens of times where it was just dead on arrival because they didn't do it right, you know. So just shift left. You should have a security engineer reviewing your actual design, not your code. That's a very good way to look at it. Anyone else has a OB? No. So the next one would be force on retroactic public good funding >> happening every time I turn on the mic. Uh thoughts on retroactive public goods funding? Hell yeah. Hell yeah. because um I mean like I mentioned before there's a huge um you know problem in the fact that people have to take their time and teams have to take their time to fill out grant applications and apply for things and then you know like navigate that entire process and sometimes uh you build stuff and then you you know you can then proceed to do that. It depends on your resources or you just don't realize what you're building is public goods until you finished and you're like, "Oh, wait. That's actually public goods. I can apply for grants or funding." And I think uh Gitcoin does retroactive um funding a couple of more as well. >> Optimism as well. I think >> it's my sorry we love optimism. Sorry. No, I I think it's it's great to have retroactive public good funding. It's um it's super important to have clear metrics on which you you base these um these actions, but uh love what the the Super Chain did here. And um I I hope we see more big private companies and even states consider these kind of things in the future. Any perspective from YouTube? No. So the next one will be how can we motivate for profit organizations to donate to public goods projects they use depend on. I I think Alina tackled the question a little bit before with this kind of nonprofit missions but combined with for-profit arms um who are mixing the same teams. Um it's also like making them accountable a bit for what they what they're working on which for profits need to be a bit more precise at let's say but they all have um at some point interest fiscality wise or just u social reputation wise to to to go into this kind of fields of donating. So go harder, good connections, even stuff. And um Alina, I think you can add more to this. >> Well, it all comes down to communications as well. So um if if the you know for-profit organization doesn't know that you need money, but you just have the donate button, it's one thing. If you say donate for Figma subscription to keep this running, it might actually have a bit more of an effect. So with women in privacy fundraising, we were literally asking for specific things like could you donate €350 so we can have Versal account for a year and then people were a bit more receptive rather than being like please donate here and uh go no um yeah communication and um kind of good marketing I guess and human factor as well. Well, I think this is amazing answers from all the panelists and thank you so