A presentation at Seattle Ethereum Meetup - May 2019 in in Seattle, WA, USA by Boris Mann
OPEN SOURCE & GROWING ETHEREUM S E AT T L E E T H E R E U M M E E T U P M AY 2 8 T H , 2 0 1 9
BORIS MANN • 15 years ago, worked on building out the Drupal community, built the first commercial company around Drupal, helped form Drupal Association • Last year, focused on Ethereum community, helping out with the Ethereum Magicians • FISSION - build developer tools using decentralized web tech ✨
W H AT D O E S O P E N S O U R C E M E A N ? The problem with the term open source is that everyone means something different when they use it. Some people just mean licensing. Some people think of a particular community’s set of practices. Others think that it means some kind of fuzzy democracy and mob rule.
DEFINITION OF OPEN SOURCE
COMMONS BASED PEER PRODUCTION Lots of people work on it, everybody benefits from it, and then people can build upon it (even in a revenue generating fashion Ted Leung: Explaining Commons Based Peer Production, er, Open Source (2005)
L I C E N S I N G I N N O VAT I O N • For the first time in 15 years, we’re starting to see licensing innovation again • Cloud providers vs. VC-funded open source • Or: “Tragedy of the Commons” is still a thing • Further reading: https://writing.kemitchell.com/
D ATA E T H I C S • We are starting to see people care about data — specifically, THEIR data • What requires software developers or companies to act in certain ways with data? • From principles (Fair Data Society, Local First Software) to licenses (Cryptographic Autonomy License)
CONTRIBUTING TO ETHEREUM
LET’S KILL THE PHRASE “ N O N T E C H N I C A L”
NON CODE CONTRIBUTIONS • Commons Based Peer Production is a way of working together that is BIGGER than code • GitHub (GitLab!) are still the main center point of many projects • Use Issues and Projects to drive responsibility, asynchronous action • All code projects need non-code help!
W H AT I S E T H E R E U M ? • Ethereum Foundation: Swiss foundation, holds trademark, employs some teams, runs DevCon • Ethereum main-net: aka network ID #1, ticker symbol ETH • Ethereum Stack: a set of standards that define protocols, from EVM to devp2p to JSON-RPC • Ethereum community: everyone!
ETHEREUM GOVERNANCE • Open Source Collaboration: client implementations • Protocol Standards: the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) process • Core Devs Coordination: ACD accepting which standards they agree with / plan to implement • Network Governance: issues the community considers “contentious” • Nodes Running Client Software: ultimate blockchain principle
ETH1X ROADMAP • Nov 2018, Prague: state is growing, other improvements needed, ETH1 is going to be around for a while • Jan 2019, Stanford: first scheduled meeting to discuss improvements • April 2019, Berlin: formation of Working Groups, Alexey Akhunov negotiates with EF on funding
I S TA N B U L 2 0 1 9 T I M I N G • https://en.ethereum.wiki/ roadmap/istanbul • May 17th - Long list of EIPs Proposed — need to be accepted/implemented/ tested • July 19th - Soft Deadline for major client implementations • Aug 14th - Testnet Upgrades • Oct 8th - 11th DevCon Osaka • Oct 16th Istanbul hard fork
CHEESY HARDFORKS • Rough consensus on switch to 6 month hard forks • “Asiago”, April 2020 • “Brie”, October 2020 • Etc.
W AY S T O G E T I N V O LV E D • Ethereum Magicians https://ethereum-magicians.org • EthHub https://community.ethhub.io • ETH Cat Herders https://github.com/ethereum-cat-herders/ PM • Of course code! Geth (Go), Parity (Rust), Trinity (Python), Aleth (C++) etc etc
FISSION.CODES QUESTIONS! @BMANN
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